Redpoint Ventures Leads Axial’s $6.5M Series A

Today we’re happy to announce that Redpoint Ventures has led a Series A investment in Axial.  New York-based Cove Point Holdings, a private investment company, along with our lead seed investors, First Round Capital and Windcrest Partners, also participated in the round. 

In 2009, we set out to build a product and a company that would transform the M&A and financing process for small and medium-sized private companies.  We knew this market was large, opaque, fragmented, and poorly connected, and that these market characteristics led to enormous costs and missed opportunities for entrepreneurs, their advisors, and the acquirers, lenders and investors who finance the entrepreneurial economy.  Our guiding hypothesis was that the creation of an online network, built with specialized tools expressly for these people and companies, could comprehensively solve these problems.

Since launching a beta in 2009 and v1 in early 2010, the Axial platform has helped over 8,800 private companies, representing over $150B in total revenues, manage and execute financial transactions. These transactions include M&A sales of mature, profitable bootstrapped companies, mezzanine and acquisition-based financing, mid-sized company recapitalizations, and growth-stage equity capital raises. We’ve included some charts below that lay out the increasing diversity and volume of transactions, as well as transactional activity by industry sector.

Transaction Volume
 

We are equally excited about the permanent and growing community of deal professionals connecting and transacting on Axial every month. A single private company usually undergoes a few important financial transactions over its entire life (formation, subsequent financing, sale), but the acquirers, investment firms, M&A advisors, and lenders who finance these companies remain actively engaged as deal professionals year round. This increasingly global network of deal professionals (see below chart for current Member locations), forms the core Member base of Axial.  

More important than our fundraising efforts is the fact that these Members are experiencing enormous success on Axial. Every single month, Members are making over 2,500 intelligent transaction-related connections with one another on the Axial network. These connections are leading to 20-40 new closed transactions, monthly.  Members tell us that every day on Axial is like “the biggest conference of the year in the private markets”. We love to hear that.         

The Internet As a Platform For Relationships

Building this company has led us to spend time thinking about how the internet is reshaping the way in which civilizations and markets connect, interact and transact. In its infancy, the commercial internet was largely an information repository, a platform where users could search for and retrieve information. From there, the internet became an e-commerce engine and a platform primarily to sell consumer products, with titans such as Yahoo, Google and Amazon emerging.

The subsequent major evolution of the internet has led to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other horizontally organized consumer networks and applications. This marked a turning point for the web, demonstrating it as much more than just an information repository or new consumer commerce channel.

These innovative companies cemented the internet’s potential to be a trusted platform for meaningful human relationships and interactions, a place where consumers and business professionals could intelligently create and discover new relationships, efficiently advance and leverage existing relationships, and initiate and complete increasingly complex transactions.

Axial’s vision has always been to build a “platform for the private markets,” a safe and secure network where deal professionals and entrepreneurs can safely and securely convene, interact, and transact. This Series A investment is a milestone on our path to accomplishing this vision in full. Redpoint Ventures and Cove Point Holdings have been following our vision and progress since early days; to now count them as our partners is a big advantage.

A huge thank you to all of our Members who have already given us their trust and support as we work to build a powerful and secure ecosystem where qualified deal professionals can achieve outsized success for themselves and the entrepreneurs they advise and finance. And, as always, thanks to the team of Axialites I get to work with every day for the astonishing amount you have accomplished in a short time.  

This article wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t mention that we’re looking for outstanding people to come and work with us.  And if you’re interested in joining the network, you can request an invite here, or just email me at peter [at] axialmarket [dot] com.