Crew Capital's Community Newsletter: Feb '25
February 2025
This month, we’re bringing you an exclusive interview with Rob Bailey, COO and co-founder of CrewAI, a rapidly growing AI agent orchestration platform. We also have a day-in-the-life interview with an engineer at Hook, a Crew portfolio company transforming how businesses run their customer success organizations, leveraging data and AI to improve customer retention and satisfaction. Additionally, we spotlight SEON, the AI-powered anti-fraud and anti-money laundering solution.
Calling all founders, operators, and friends in the NYC startup ecosystem! If you haven’t registered yet, check out our upcoming Happy Hour on Tuesday, March 18th, hosted alongside our friends at Brex. We hope to see you there!
👉🏼 Save your spot here!
Content from the Crew Collective
Founder Insights: Rob Bailey has spent 20+ years building enterprise software unicorns. Now, as Co-founder & COO of CrewAI, he’s shaping how nearly half of the Fortune 500 plans, deploys, and manages collections of AI agents to complete complex workstreams.
Prior to CrewAI, Rob founded BackboneAI, led Kustomer’s enterprise-focused pivot before their $1B acquisition by Facebook, and scaled DataSift into a leading powerhouse for real-time data. He’s also backed a number of startups at the earliest stages which are now collectively worth over $10B.
In a recent conversation, Rob shared his framework for scaling B2B companies, insights on pricing strategies, and lessons learned from investments in companies such as Blockdaemon and Fireblocks.
👀 Check out the whole interview here!
A short preview:
Throughout his career, Rob has consistently employed a tiered pricing model that combines usage metrics with feature differentiation. “There are lots of schools of thought and there’s definitely more than one right answer,” Rob said. “I’ve been doing roughly the same type of pricing for a very long time, which looks like buckets with different price tiers. You typically use a combination of usage metrics and feature differentiation to price discriminate between tiers. That’s what we did at Datasift, that’s what we did at Kustomer, and that’s what we did at BackboneAI.”
Startup Experiences: Hook is helping GTM and revenue teams at leading enterprises take the guesswork out of their day to day with their AI-powered customer success platform. Hook identifies a company’s highest value customers by mapping out risk or upsell opportunities, and provides bespoke recommendations and automated engagements to improve customer satisfaction and retention.
We recently sat down with Nic Parry, Senior Software Engineer at Hook, to discuss the journey that led him to Hook, and what it’s like working at the cutting edge of GTM technology.
👀 Read the entire article!
A short preview:
I think the key thing is to maintain a growth mindset. Things move so quickly and there are often new challenges that just push you outside of your comfort zone. If you don't have a growth mindset, it's going to be like a soul-destroying experience, but if you embrace it as an opportunity to learn and grow, there's just so much you can do at a startup and so much potential to grow.
Startups are also the kind of place where you can't really just stay in your lane. There are going to be some gaps in processes and roles within the company, and if that's something that you identify, you kind of have to lean into that and fill some of those yourself. That, for me, has always been the appeal of places like this.
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Startup Monthly Spotlight
The AI-Powered Fraud Prevention Platform!
💡Mission: SEON Fraud Fighters aims to set a new standard in security and trust with its AI-powered anti-fraud and AML solution. The platform anticipates potential threats and proactively builds defenses using innovative technology to help businesses stay ahead of risk and fraud.
👨🏽💼Meet the CEO: Tamas Kadar, CEO of SEON, co-founded the company with Bence Jendruszak while they were university students. After launching Central Europe's first crypto exchange and encountering significant fraud challenges, they pivoted to create SEON. Today, SEON protects over 5,000 companies worldwide. Tamas also serves as a council member and contributor for the Forbes Technology Council.
🚀What Sets Them Apart: SEON's platform employs advanced algorithms and AI to analyze user behavior and transaction patterns, detecting and preventing fraud with high accuracy and minimal disruption. By leveraging data from across the internet, SEON creates comprehensive digital footprints to differentiate genuine customers from fraudulent ones. Its use of AI and supervised machine learning ensures that SEON's tools continuously adapt to new fraud tactics, unlike traditional methods that rely on static, manual rules.
“We envision a world where online businesses can operate with peace of mind, free from the constant threat of fraud,” says Tamas.
🔎Discover More: Check out our investment thesis, and more on SEON here.
🤝Need an intro? Reach out to us at sonia@crewcapital.co
What have our start-ups been up to this month?
Congratulations to Maik Taro, Maximilian Eber, and the entire Taktile team on their $54M Series B led by Balderton Capital! We’re thrilled to continue supporting Taktile’s mission of empowering credit, fraud, and risk teams within enterprises through their leading AI-powered risk decisioning engine.
SurrealDB has just launched SurrealDB 2.2, bringing significant improvements including enhanced performance for CRUD queries, powerful graph path algorithms for recursive queries, and support for foreign key constraints via record references, offering better data consistency. Along with optimizations for HTTP error reporting, WebSocket performance, and Open Telemetry monitoring, this release takes SurrealDB to the next level, enhancing both stability and functionality.
MaintainX just released CoPilot, an AI-powered assistant that streamlines work orders and generates actionable insights from OEM manuals & work order history. Check out how CoPilot is helping teams reduce downtime and boost productivity here.
Grafana launched Grafana Beyla 2.0, a major release packed with performance and functional improvements. As a vendor-agnostic, zero-code eBPF tool, it simplifies observability with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. The update includes full distributed trace support, a reduced permissions model, and scalable Kubernetes deployments, enhancing metrics collection and protocol support for easier monitoring and tracing.
Chainalysis has integrated automatic token monitoring for Unichain, the new DeFi-focused Ethereum Layer 2 powered by Uniswap Labs. This enables KYT to track ERC-20, 721, and 1155 tokens, offering continuous monitoring and alerts to detect high-risk behaviors and prevent suspicious activities.
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 a Content Marketing Lead, a Growth Marketing Lead, a Sales Engineer 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 Software Engineer with ML experience based in NYC.
Quote of the Month
"When setting goals for your team, try to find the sweet spot between aiming too high and too low. If you set very high goals… everyone is tense, pressure is high, and no one can work properly. It increases stress, attrition goes up, your ‘A players leave,’ your productivity drops and a lot of bad things happen. If you set too low of goals, it gets boring. People are not able to depend on you, as you keep missing your timelines, you’re lowballing everything. Your A players get bored, and they leave. - Rachit Lohani, Chief Product and Technology Officer at e2open, in Setting the Standard for Employee Recruitment and Retention
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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.