Profitable SG data startup banked on founders’ previous firm for funds

“We know how many startups fail – you have better odds playing roulette at a casino. If I am going to gamble, I won’t gamble with someone else’s money,” Meiro co-founder Pavel Bulowski tells Tech in Asia on why the data startup didn’t approach investors for funding.

Bulowski and his co-founders, CEO Jana Marlé-Zizková and CTO Vojtech Kurka, also believed that getting an investor on board would not have added value for the Singapore-based firm at that time.

The Meiro team / Photo credit: Meiro

Meiro provides a customer data platform that combines information from multiple online and offline touch points – such as social media channels, websites, and other avenues – to create a centralized database. This is used to build an identity graph that helps Meiro’s clients create a personalized marketing strategy.

The three founders invested about S$1 million (about US$740,000) worth of resources as the company’s initial funds, money they took from Datadriven, the consulting firm they opened in 2015.

“We already had clients from Datadriven and were still getting consultancy revenue from them. We actually knew what [these clients] wanted and created the product. It was not a hard sell,” Marlé-Zizková recalls.

The CEO previously worked with Bulowski at Singapore-based advertising services firm Socialbakers. There, the two learned that the average marketing department typically uses around 40 separate tools to consolidate data, so it was impossible to gain insights from the information. They started Datadriven to solve this issue.

Meiro co-founders Pavel Bulowski (left) and Jana Marlé-Zizková / Photo credit: Meiro

Kurka then joined the team and “became such an obvious technological talent that we figured that he will be the cornerstone of the [company’s] technology,” says Bulowski.

However, their clients at Datadriven had specific needs: They wanted the entire solution to stay on their own servers at their premises and wanted a product that offered a “single view of their customers.”

This was as their BSFI clients from Indonesia and the Philippines had industry specific regulations of the storage of data within the country. In addition, they also wanted control over their confidential and sensitive customer data.

This was unheard of at the time, as software was usually built as a SaaS product, where the software vendor manages the data, and the clients take the information from the vendor’s data center.

So in 2017 the three partnered up to create Meiro, which offers a software to collect, analyze, and activate data in any cloud provider at the customer’s location.

Revenue in focus, not profits

Partnering up for scale

Until the right investor comes along