Announcing Parabola's $24M Series B

I’m incredibly thrilled to announce we’ve raised a $24 million Series B led by OpenView, Matrix, Thrive Capital, and other existing investors participated, and we’re welcoming some fantastic new partners including Flexport, who is also one of our favorite customers. More on the round and what’s next in a minute, but first a note on where we’ve been.

At Parabola, we have a core belief that everyone, particularly the in-the-weeds folks closest to problems, are uniquely capable of being problem solvers and solution builders. For me, this belief arose out of a cognitive dissonance I’ve had all my life about how empowered I’ve always felt working with and programming computers, compared to how disempowered most of my friends and most of my family have felt working with technology.

In the years before Parabola, I consulted for some of the world’s largest CPG, retail, and logistics brands. Across them all, I met remarkably smart, curious, and creative operators stuck doing things manually. They were drowning in spreadsheets, PDFs, and emails so much that they were unable to implement what they knew were the real solutions to doing things a better way.

Parabola was born to help these people leverage technology to solve their problems, their teams’ problems, and ultimately prove that having a STEM background is not required to build things that have massive economic and societal impact.

This vision has taken time to become reality. The mission-critical operators who are our best users are so busy that they need truly world-class tools to be confident in taking the time to change their processes. And companies need to realize the benefits of shifting from siloed operators manually running fractured pieces of a business to holistic teams collaborating together and sharing with their stakeholders.

This is a bold new way of operating. Over the past few years, we’ve been working quietly but relentlessly with forward-looking companies like Sonos, Flexport, Uber Freight, Durex, and Bain to help them realize this dream of operational excellence. We’ve helped their operations teams stop throwing headcount at problems, implement solutions for things that change too regularly for their technical teams to write custom code, and leverage the latest AI models to standardize the inconsistent data they deal with daily. We’ve seen individuals inflect their careers and companies inflect their growth.

Now in 2023, every company (and every operator) needs to pursue operational excellence if they want to participate in the future. And we’re finally ready to bring the power of Parabola to all. So back to the fundraise.

This new investment reinforces the notion that 2023 is the year of the operator. Raising funds in this environment is tough, especially a Series B, but it’s the companies that bring true, tangible ROI that will succeed — and we believe Parabola can and will do so. We can’t wait to show you the new features we’re working on.

We’re so incredibly grateful to Parabola’s entire support system, and I wanted to say a huge thank you:

• To our amazing customers who regularly see the best version of product and company we can be and who remind us daily why this work matters
• To our investors, who have been extremely supportive as we’ve taken our time to build a strong, credible, aligned-with-our-customers foundation and truly believe in our ability to empower non-technical users to leverage automation and AI
• And most importantly, to our team, for their intense customer focus and their commitment to evangelizing our mission in their daily work.

Here’s to the next phase of Parabola’s journey!
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‍We’re excited to officially welcome the following new investors: Immad Akhund (CEO and Founder of Mercury), Jack Altman (CEO and Founder of Lattice), Cristina Cordova (COO at Linear and early Stripe and Notion exec), Twum Djin (Engineering Leader at Stripe), Toby Espinosa (VP at DoorDash), Flexport Ventures, AJ Frank (Senior Director of Product at Meta), Matt Hertz (Co-Founder of Second Marathon), Zack Kanter (Co-Founder and CEO of Stedi), Vlad Magdallin (Co-Founder and CEO of Webflow), Praveer Melwani (CFO of Figma), Otherwise Fund, Kyle Parrish (VP of Sales at Figma), Jeff Raider and Good Friends (Founders of Harry’s, Allbirds, and Warby Parker), Sarah Scharf (VP of Marketing at Vanta), J Zac Stein (Former CPO and President at Lattice), Melissa Tan (Early growth exec at Dropbox and Webflow), and Jen Vaughan (COO at Assembled).