Firstmark Leads nextmv's $8M Series A

When we first met Carolyn Mooney and Ryan O’Neil back in the fall of 2019, we immediately knew that this was a special duo, and that nextmv was chasing after a huge opportunity.

Naturally, we wanted to get involved. We were lucky to participate in their pre-seed round as well as their seed round after they finished Y Combinator (YC W20).

One thing we loved about Carolyn and Ryan was their founder-market fit. Both worked together at GrubHub where they ran the Decision Engineering team.

You might be wondering: what is decision engineering?

This is an increasingly important and growing area where key business decisions on resource allocation or profit optimization are made by algorithms, not humans.

The rise of the decision engines is fueled by two trends: an explosive growth of information, and dynamic demand functions that many businesses face today. These two trends are driving businesses to make data-driven decisions faster, and with more precision.

We all experience decision engineering in our daily lives. Companies like Uber and DoorDash use these engines to match passengers to drivers and orders to delivery crews.

Mathematically speaking, these problems are incredibly complex and involve tradeoffs. Today, companies use engineers and data scientists to build sophisticated infrastructure to deal with the complexity.

It is expensive and too difficult to do so in-house.

Enter nextmv — a beautifully designed, developer focused infrastructure for decision engineering.

Carolyn and Ryan have deep expertise in the space and are on the mission to allow companies of all sizes to build world-class decision engineering functions.

With nextmv, businesses across logistics, delivery, marketplaces, scheduling, and other verticals can empower their developers to quickly build scalable cloud-based decision engines.

We were not alone in recognizing the huge opportunity ahead for nextmv. A few days ago, the company announced that Matt Turck from FirstMark led their $8M Series A. We enthusiastically joined the round along with our friends from Dynamo Ventures.

Please read what Matt Turck and TechCrunch wrote about nextmv and the age of decision engineering, and check out this blog post by Carolyn Money, CEO of nextmv.