Announcing Marloo’s $10M Series Seed

Six months ago we wrote about why we backed Marloo at Day 0 before there was an idea, a name, or a line of code. Today we're announcing that Blackbird is leading Marloo's US$10M Series Seed Extension. 

“Life-changing”

A year ago, Marloo went live. Within eight weeks of writing their first line of code, Hardy Michel and Shakeel Lala launched simultaneously into Australia, New Zealand and the UK. They have grown more than 40% month-on-month for eleven straight months. They are now in seven countries - Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US, Ireland, Canada, South Africa - with more than 650 advisory firms using the product.

The customer love is off the charts. Not a single paid user has churned to a competitor. The sales motion is classic PLG - one adviser signs up for a free trial, loves the product and it goes viral within the org from there. One adviser, 25 years into his career, told them: your product has actually changed my life. 

The last time I heard customers say that about an early version of a product was Halter’s Series B. And this is how that’s going. 

A few weeks ago, Marloo shipped Document Generation which effortlessly turns notes into finished work. Documents that usually take a paraplanner weeks to turn around at hundreds of dollars per document are now produced in minutes. It already accounts for a meaningful share of new revenue. Marloo is no longer an AI note taker, it's quickly becoming the only AI partner a financial adviser will ever need. Both the system of record and the system of work that firms run on.

Customer love earns you the right to build product 

The counter-intuitive thing about product development is that in the beginning, the better your initial product, the more feedback customers will give you and the more your customers will expect from you in return. 

When they see you take action on that feedback quickly and well, the loyalty and love is reinforced, and they give you more feedback. They begin to co-create the product vision with you. You develop a rich pool of insights into the customer and market that becomes unassailable and leads to category leadership over time. 

If your product sucks, you will just hear…nothing. If customers give you feedback and you do not hit the mark again, they just give up. It’s not worth their time to complain into the void. And it is really hard to get better without feedback! When customers disengage from the product development process, it starts a death spiral where you lack the customer insights to build the features to be competitive.

All of the above is especially true in low-NPS software categories. 

In the age of AI, building anything is easy. Knowing what to build, that is hard.

Marloo’s ‘go slow to go fast’ philosophy at the founding of the company ensured that they understood the pain points of the customer innately, and so could build on the right foundations. 

We’ve seen this before, from Canva to Heidi and Halter. Customer love leading to a flywheel of product feedback that yields compounding advantage over time. We believe we’re seeing this unfold at Marloo now, with over 650 firms effectively ‘co-creating’ the best product in the market. And  that is why we’re doubling down in this round.

Empathy at the core

It goes without saying, you can’t fake caring about building a great product for your customers. At the heart of Marloo are the founders’ empathy for financial advisers. They truly believe (and have spent most of their careers) trying to increase access to financial wellbeing. 

The insight that Hardy and Shak realised early was that financial advice isn’t really about money. It’s about the key decisions individuals make that determine the kind of life you can live. 

Can we afford to go through IVF? How many rounds?

My relationship is ending. Will I have to sell the house? What can I afford?

I’ve just inherited some money but I’m not sure what to do with it.

Especially in volatile times (in the macro and micro sense), good financial advice is critical. Yet, advisers spend most of their working hours on compliance-driven administrative workflows rather than on clients, limiting the number and kind of clients they can profitably service. It’s why financial advice remains inaccessible to all but the top 10%. But shouldn’t we all have access to good, regulated advice?  What would it take to enable the average advisor to see thousands of clients a year instead of a hundred or so?

People trust advisers to help them navigate some of the most consequential decisions they will ever make. Advisers are people who deserve good tools to help them do their jobs. But most software in this category is decidedly unloveable. 

Marloo will give advisers the ability to grow their business through AI efficiency and enjoy their jobs more. And if Marloo keeps shipping at the velocity it does, the big crazy outcome is not just a beautiful SaiS business. As the cost barrier to entry lowers to delivering personalised advice, it’ll lead to more advisers helping more clients, which will lead to a massive market expansion in the market for financial advice. 

What’s next?

Obviously, world domination.

If you are an operator who is ready to build or to sell, or fancy yourself an AI Ops gun, then check out their careers page. This is one of the highest quality early stage teams you can join. 

Thank you, Hardy and Shak, for trusting us to be your partner again. We could not be prouder to be on the journey! 

Samantha Wong, on behalf of Blackbird

‍