Investor Memo

Company Overview

Company Name: Ellis
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Stage: Idea stage

Problem: Enterprise software implementation projects are a bottleneck for innovation. They are expensive, risky, and outdated.

Solution: Autonomous agent for software implementation and migrations.

Market Opportunity: The global systems integration market was $396B in 2022, growing at a 15% CAGR for the next 10 years.

Why Now: Time-based business models are ripe for disruption via a value-based overhaul of compensation. AI enables near-complete automation with multi-modal agents that can analyze code, data models, web pages, files, and more.

Competitive Advantage: Lower pricing, 10x better customer experience, and a SaaS revenue model that disrupts an enormous services industry.

Business Model: B2B2B distribution, software revenue, charging 20% of comparable human-led implementation projects. Key assumption: adding value post-onboarding to build a true SaaS with the 3rd B.

Team: Founder CEO, 3rd time founder (1 exit), ex-EM at Meta.

Pre-Seed Milestone: Signed X LOI with design partners in XX industry.

Fundraising For: X to Y $M, willing to take A to C% dilution pre-seed.

Background

The global digital transformation market, valued at $1.9T in 2022, is projected to reach $8.9T by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 21.1%. For context, the global SaaS market was $195.6B in 2022, expected to hit $720.4B by 2028 (25.89% CAGR). This comparison reveals that for every dollar spent on SaaS, nearly $10 goes towards broader digital transformation efforts, including implementation and integration services.

A recent Gartner study found that board directors rank software enhancement as their second-highest priority among breakthrough technologies, just behind AI. This underscores the strategic importance of software in driving business value.

However, the current macroeconomic climate has intensified scrutiny on software spend. SaaS renewals face longer cycles, and new investments are evaluated against stricter payback periods. Consequently, time-to-value has become a critical factor in winning and retaining business in the SaaS world.

Problem

For innovative startups selling to the enterprise, success requires:

1. Assisting buyers’ transition from source systems to ensure customer success by fully mapping existing systems’ data, features, and use cases to the new implementation.
2. Shortening the payback period by accelerating time to value, ideally to less than a year.
3. Building a positive return on investment business case, ensuring the investment in this initiative outperforms alternative allocations, including risk-free interest.

To tackle these challenges, SaaS startups typically spin up internal professional services and customer success teams. While these teams are essential, they are often under-supported by the technology organization focused on building out the core product’s roadmap.

As they scale, successful SaaS companies develop an ecosystem of external service providers—systems integrators and consultants. Salesforce claims that for every $1 they generate, their partner ecosystem generates $5. This model, however, has inherent conflicts:

• It relies on implementations remaining complex to justify billable hours
• While touting AI and efficiency, the bottom line depends on large, lengthy engagements
• This misalignment of incentives often results in delayed value realization for end customers

The persistence of these traditional models creates a significant opportunity for disruption in the software implementation and migration space, particularly through the application of AI and automation technologies.

Solution

Ellis: A new path for startups, arming innovators with a service to deliver their software faster and cheaper.

1. AI Agent for Product Requirement Intake: Automates the product requirement intake. Enter a few credentials, and our system will document and map all existing systems automatically. Human-in-the-loop workflows guarantee accuracy.
2. Standards-Based Representation: A normalized representation of a business application and associated enterprise architecture. This enables startups to review specs with their customers and centralizes change management for the go-forward system.
3. Automated Deployment: Integrates proven software development operations in cloud infrastructure and robotic process automation, applied to business software.

Our software suite provides the automation, integrated workflows, and lifecycle management needed to thrive in the delivery of the next generation of SaaS.

Market Size and Growth

Large software vendors have massive ecosystems of partners with a billable hours business model. Salesforce alone estimates $817 billion in opportunity for its ecosystem between now and 2026, with roughly 50% in services.

Competitive Landscape

70% of Salesforce implementations are led by one of 132,000 credentialed Salesforce experts. For every dollar Salesforce makes this year, the ecosystem will make $4.96, expected to grow to $6.19 by 2026. We propose to automate a significant portion of this spend.

Ongoing Value

Beyond initial migration and launch, mature SaaS vendors have large integration and implementation industries around them. We propose using the implementation milestone to train power users on using our software definition and change management to manage their software. Imagine GitHub for changing settings for all your SaaS.

Future Opportunities

We envision a third act where our customers’ customers bring us into their future migration projects and introduce us to their next vendor. Software renewals are seeing more scrutiny, and we might offer neutral estimations on the non-software cost of switching, complementing services like Vendr and Sastrify.

Moat

Treating every source and target system as a connector, like MuleSoft, Zapier, Fivetran, or Merge.dev, will give us a compounding advantage. Our unique data set will enable us to train proprietary models highly specialized in specific industries. Once enterprises trust and learn our workflows, we will become the default choice in this emerging space.

Press Release

Ellis Raises $2M Pre-Seed Round to Disrupt Implementation and Migration Industry

San Francisco, CA - Ellis, based in San Francisco, announced today that it has successfully raised a $2 million oversubscribed pre-seed round. The funding will be used to propel Ellis in its mission to disrupt the implementation and migration industry by offering a cutting-edge SaaS platform for vendors to onboard their new customers.

Ellis’s first product tackles the high switching costs faced by software vendors during implementation and migration. Traditional methods are time-consuming, expensive, and risky, often resulting in shelved software improvement initiatives. The Ellis platform leverages AI to streamline and accelerate these processes.

With the global systems integration market projected to reach $396 billion in 2022 and grow at a 15% CAGR for the next decade, Ellis sees a significant market opportunity. Ellis has already helped design partners onboard customers in days, reducing timelines by 50% and driving 80% savings. This funding will accelerate the platform buildout and expand into new areas like CRM, Sales Ops, and Financial Services.

Ellis was founded by Arach Tchoupani, an experienced engineer and entrepreneur with a background at Meta and as co-founder & CTO of Breathe Life. The company aims to revolutionize enterprise innovation by reducing friction with its AI-powered SaaS platform.

For more information, visit www.ellis.io.

Contact:
Ellis Press Relations
Phone: 123-456-7890
Email: press@ellis.io