Crew Capital's Community Newsletter: April '25
April 2025
April’s not quite over yet it’s already starting to feel like summer in NYC! The heat is turning on as we head out to San Francisco for RSA to take part in the annual conference for one of the hottest sectors in tech, cybersecurity. Hot off the press this week in security land was Palo Alto Networks’ announcement to acquire Protect AI, one of the leading AI security companies. Security has historically been one of the most active categories of tech as far as M&A goes. With AI opening up new threat vectors, in addition to AI creating an opportunity to re-create legacy solutions with greater automation, we think there has never been a better time to be a builder or investor in security companies. If you’re at RSA this week, let us know!
Continuing the discussion in cyber, we’re fired up to announce our investment in Quilr, leading the company’s seed round to help accelerate their mission to secure human-related threats in the enterprise. Read more about the company and their incredible founding team below!
This month we brought together our portfolio companies for a hands-on GTM session with Frank Golden, who shared hard-won lessons on scaling sales teams beyond founder-led sales. From pipeline math to early hiring strategy, it was full of practical takeaways for teams building out their sales organization.
Plus, we’re spotlighting Common Paper, a one-of-a-kind platform transforming legal agreements into APIs, simplifying contracts to help businesses close deals faster and more efficiently.
Keep reading on for product updates, hiring news, and more from the Crew.
Recent Investments
This month we congratulated Vidit Arora and the entire Quilr team on coming out of stealth and announcing their seed financing! We’re thrilled to invest in Quilr and their mission to tackle one of the biggest challenges in modern cybersecurity: human error.
Quilr’s AI‑native platform sets a new standard with specialized agents that proactively address human error–driven threats across the enterprise. By seamlessly integrating into existing IT infrastructure and workflows to protect sensitive data, secure identities, and automate incident remediation, Quilr empowers organizations to build a resilient security posture in a rapidly evolving threat landscape.
With an impressive roster of design partners and customers—including Protiviti, Spotnana, UiPath, and leading enterprises in healthcare and financial services—Quilr has also formed a strategic partnership with Hitachi to bring its agentic platform to clients across its global consulting business.
We’re proud to be Quilr’s first investor, leading their seed round and supporting Vidit and the team as they redefine how security teams safeguard against human error–driven threats.
Content from the Crew Collective
Operator Expertise: Frank Golden, founder of Golden Ventures and GTM advisor to dozens of startups, recently led a roundtable session with Crew Capital’s portfolio companies on scaling beyond founder-led sales.
Frank’s no stranger to this stage. He's spent over a decade helping build GTM teams at startups — twice as a founding AE, and twice as a founding sales leader, leading growth efforts at companies like RelateIQ and Airkit (both acquired by Salesforce) as well as Talkdesk (most recently valued at $10B).
We talked through the key challenges startups face at this inflection point — from calculating pipeline coverage to building repeatable sales playbooks and sequencing early sales hires.
👀 Check out the whole recap here!
A short preview:
When scaling a team from one sales representative to multiple, ensuring sufficient pipeline becomes a critical challenge, according to Frank.
“The first question is how much pipeline do you need? A lot of founders don’t pay attention to this,” he said. “That number, every founder should know this cold, is the inverse of your win rate – this is the pipeline coverage you need to hit your goals.” For example, if a company’s quarterly goal is $100,000 and its historical win rate from qualified opportunity to closed deal is 25%, it needs 4x coverage — $400,000 of pipeline — to reliably hit its target.
Want more Crew content? Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube for insights on company building from some of the best founders and operators across the software industry!
Startup Monthly Spotlight
Streamlining Legal Agreements for Modern Businesses!
💡Mission: Common Paper's vision is to transform contracts into APIs, revolutionizing how businesses manage legal agreements with its standardized, digital-first platform. By simplifying the creation, negotiation, and management of contracts, the platform reduces complexity, accelerates transactions, and makes legal processes more accessible and user-friendly.
👨🏽💼Meet the CEO: Jake is a 3X entrepreneur, co-founder & CEO of Common Paper, which created the SAFE for sales and a cutting edge platform that accelerates closing deals and getting paid. Before Common Paper, he co-founded and exited two software companies over the last decade – RJMetrics, which he sold to Magento (later acquired by Adobe), and Stitch, which was acquired by Talend.
🚀What Sets Them Apart: Common Paper disrupts the traditional contract creation process by offering standardized, lawyer-approved templates that simplify and streamline legal documentation. These easy-to-use templates reduce the time, cost, and complexity of drafting and negotiating contracts, making them accessible to businesses of all sizes, especially startups and small companies with limited legal resources. By focusing on usability, integrating with other business tools, and speeding up the time-to-signature, Common Paper enhances efficiency and reduces legal risks. Its approach democratizes access to quality legal contracts, making it a versatile and cost-effective solution across industries.
🔎Discover More: Learn more about Common Paper and learn more startup building lessons from Jake Stein as a repeat founder here. Sign up for free and use their customized agreements.
🤝Need an intro? Reach out to us at sonia@crewcapital.co
What have our start-ups been up to this month?
Reco secured an additional $25M in funding and reached 5X ARR growth! Alongside our friends at boldstart ventures, Insight Partners, and Zeev Ventures, it’s been amazing to watch the Reco team execute over the past few years as they’ve built the category-defining SaaS security platform.
Seal Security has launched Seal Base Images, a new offering that delivers future-proof, vulnerability-free container base images designed to eliminate up to 99% of future vulnerabilities—without the need for manual upgrades.
Lucid Software surpassed $300M ARR, 100M users and recently unveiled an expanded vision as a work acceleration platform to help teams execute faster and with greater clarity, introducing powerful accelerators for agile, cloud, and process initiatives to enhance product development.
Trickest has announced a major update to its Editor, now a full-fledged IDE built for offensive security professionals. The revamped platform introduces a unified CLI, advanced syntax highlighting, a full file tree structure, and smart output filtering—streamlining workflows, eliminating context switching, and boosting visibility across distributed operations.
Job Openings
We're always on the lookout to connect exceptional candidates with our portfolio companies. To learn more, reach out to our Head of Platform, Sonia Damian, at sonia@crewcapital.co. If you want to explore all available job opportunities within our portfolio, please visit our career page.
Integration.App, the AI-powered universal integration layer for SaaS apps, is looking for an Account Executive in Europe & a Customer Solutions Engineer in APAC.
Rilla, the leading AI conversation intelligence software for outside sales, is looking for Software Engineers, Sales Operations Specialists, Account Managers, and AI/ML Engineers based in New York.
Aktos, the operating system that powers the $18B Credit Collections industry, is looking for Senior Full-Stack Engineers (ideally backend leaning with Python), based in LATAM.
Stealth Company, a next-gen market research platform leveraging cutting-edge AI-powered voice capture, is seeking a Senior Full-Stack Engineer, and a Senior Platform Engineer, based in NYC.
Quote of the Month
"When speaking with your teams, aim to bring key messages, ideas, and concepts to life and connect them to the company’s mission. Be prepared to tell the same story, over and over again, because it’s hard to over-communicate the key messages, but it’s very easy to think that one time is sufficient.” - Dave Grow, CEO of Lucid Software, in Fostering a Collaborative Mindset, from Product to People
Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, or YouTube for more company-building insights!
If you're a founder or know any exceptional early-stage B2B SaaS founders who are interested in connecting with us, feel free to reach out to us here.