London based startup Keel raised $6 million in seed funding through the development of a user-friendly platform for building custom operational software aims to grow technology-enabled businesses.
Operations face a huge divide between no-code and ERP solutions. When scrappy ops teams outgrow their native spreadsheets and no-code operations stack, they usually find there is nowhere to go but a big ERP. Building from scratch often isn’t viable, as engineering resources are not prioritized to solve operational problems.
Meanwhile, existing platforms offered by companies such as Oracle, SAP and NetSuite are one-size-fits-all proprietary software with limited options for customization. This all-or-nothing approach requires long and expensive implementation periods. Businesses end with rigid systems and cumbersome tools that limit productivity and prevent teams from responding to new challenges.
Keel found a way to existing tools that work well and those that
Keel was founded in 2022 by Benoit Machefer, Tom Frew and Jon Bretman, who direct experienced the frustration of being underserved by off the shelf software while at Echo (Europe’s fastest growing online pharmacy).
The trio realized that off-the-shelf tools could not solve the challenges presented by the regulated and uncharted pharmacy world. They built tools into its operational stack that allowed them to safely scale 4X within 4 months during the Covid-19 pandemic, up to $80 million income.
After the company’s successful acquisition, they took their enthusiasm for building effective operational tools to the market, and Keel was born.
I spoke with Benoit Machefer, co-founder and CEO, to learn more.
According to Machefer:
“A lot of companies are still working behind a ton of spreadsheets or using off-the-shelf tools that serve them for 80 percent of their use cases.
But further, 20 percent of tasks remain that require you to build a ton of work around technology, which means you spend most of your time fixing tools that keep breaking rather than actually doing the value-added work.”
Machefer provides the example of inventory ordering and inventory management for medications at scale, which was not solved by any of the off-the-shelf options.
“Like all good operations, we started with a bunch of spreadsheets and some app script, but it became clear that it wouldn’t provide the robustness, security and level of integration we needed.
We were looking for a platform we could build on, but it didn’t exist, so the only option was to put together an ops engineering team of backend and frontend developers.”
But most companies can’t afford to build in-house, and most engineers want to focus on customer-facing technology, not internal tools.
“We founded Keel because businesses change, and contemporary companies do must own their own operating software and tools. We see a future where many companies never need a traditional ERP, and instead technically minded operators can be the owners of their ops stack.
“Every day we speak to operators who are frustrated that they cannot access engineering time, and engineers who hate working on ops software not designed for development. Keel can bring ops and engineering together like we haven’t seen before.”
With Keel, operators have the full context of the challenges specific to their business. They pick up Keel, and they able to start to build things and upgrade themselves in the direction of software development, as well as “what are effectively engineering best practices to build very robust and relevant systems that go beyond the legacy ERP.”
The company gained a lot of traction in physical operations, such as inventory management in logistics, shift management and executive payroll.
Early customer HIVED first used the platform to build driver shift management and is now look at adding finance, facilities management and payroll functions, all developed by one ops team member.
According to Murvah Iqbal, CEO of HIVED:
“The best thing about Keel is that a member of our ops team was able to develop the system himself, so the person closest to the problem also owns the solution.”
Furthermore, Machefer emphasizes that Keel does not try to force change management on time-poor teams:
“You don’t necessarily want to all of your team needs to do change management and move away from all the tools they use well.”
Instead, Keel allows customers to adopt consecutivelytackling one pain point at a time, while retaining the third-party software that still works for them, separating them from the restrictive “all-in-one” offering of many ERPs.
The platform offers multiple advantages: it consists of a backend engine, API-first solutions and auto-generated administration tools. It’s open source and has exceptional developer experience, so it’s easy for technical operators to get started and for engineers to provide support later when needed.
Earlybird and LocalGlobe led the funding. Earlybird partner Dr Andre Retterath says:
“We saw something extraordinary in this team and the huge market they are tackling with a customizable solution.
In the end disrupt this market with a more operational-minded product, you need a team WHO have built and scaled ops-centric organizations themselves, which we found in Benoit, Tom, and Jon. We are proud to have supported them since day 1.”
The fundraising helped build and develop the platform centered on user experience. The team now brings Keel to a wider heard from businesses sharing their ambition to avoid the headaches of an ERP implementation in the future