Investment memo: Monocle

Stage: Pre-revenue, in beta.

Thesis

An enterprise promotions operating system.

Promotions and discounts are central to consumer behavior, and commerce. Hate them or love them, big brands spend tons of marketing dollars running promotional campaigns.

How they come up with the promotions, model the potential success, measure and track results, is historic, and done on a whim.

Monocle’s approach is to give back control over promotions to merchants. Monocle helps them manage, analyze and optimize promotional spend so that budget becomes extremely efficient. They do this by ingesting a ton of different signals about each user: store purchase history, store interactions, user demo and contextual data like seasonality to power a proper promotional OS.

The team from monocle is incredibly strong. Noam was an engineering leader at Lyft after they acquired his last company, and literally owned coupon optimization for Lyft.

Mark, Noam's cofounder, worked at Stripe and McKinsey, both times with a focus on pricing. And the two know each other from their days in the israeli army together.

It's hard to build a team, it takes time to hit your groove. So the fact that they know each other so well, and have such strong subject matter expertise, had me excited to come in a bit earlier than normal.

This one is about founder-market fit for me.