A few months ago, I asked 6 top engineering teams that run on
@namespacelabs one question: "would you invest your own money in the company?"
6 out of 6 said yes.
Four days later, I invested $10m in their Series B.
Here is why👇
1) The best companies in the world use them
SpaceX, Ramp, ElevenLabs, Factory AI, fal, Vanta, Sierra, Framer all run on Namespace.
Many of them joined in the last few months, choosing Namespace over competitors for mainly three reasons:
(a) they were impressed with the attention to details and incredible technical density of the team, (b) they heard about its reliability through other eng teams, and (c) is both meaningfully cheaper *and* higher performance than peers.
2) One of the best reference set we have ever done
We spoke to customers and partners including Cognition, Ramp, Framer, Warp Dev, Amo, Prelude and many more.
Nobody talked about cheap compute. Rather they mentioned: (1) a team that answers immediately, (2) a company that builds what they ask for, and (3) an infrastructure that does not go down.
What we heard specifically (raw quotes):
- "I can't even think of one outage"
- "Probably the easiest vendors I've been working with"
- [in terms of engineering quality]..."there is Namespace, Modal, Cloudflare, and then probably everyone else"
- "Why would you leave for something slower?"
- "They really made a leap forward. This is only the beginning"
- "I don't give 10s... but they are by far the highest out of the pack"
3) An incredible founder and founder-market fit
Hugo Santos (
@20thr) spent 9 years as a Principal Engineer at Google, building the platform Search and YouTube are built with. His problem back then: every new product team needed more and more infra engineers.
In 2021, his friends at Netflix and Snap hit the same wall. So he left and decided to fix the problem for everyone.
Today, he is still personally in customers' Slack channels. His words, not mine: "We would love to be the vendor that we wish we had."
That obsession convinced me.
So in short: I have been asked before: "are any of your investments obvious?". This one was: exceptional team, exceptional product, exceptional references.
So we just tried to give Hugo as much money as we could.
Special thanks to: (1)
@berny_matias for mentioning Namespace to me in the first place, and; (2)
@ianfzmedia from our internal media team for the absolute banger video. This is a great example of what 20VC can do for its founders.
cc.
@HarryStebbings,
@gabe_guerra_