Recommendations from Redpoint partner, Jordan Segall
List of recommended startups to join
✨ Hey there this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey. Join our private Slack community here and access $1000s of dollars of product discounts here.
Jordan is a Partner at Redpoint Ventures, whose portfolio includes companies like Snowflake, Stripe, Twilio, OpenAI, Ramp, Hashicorp, ClickHouse, Abridge, Legora, Modal, Mistral, and more. Prior to venture, Jordan studied AI at Stanford and worked in 4 startups across engineering, product, and presales at places like Palantir and C3 AI. Please feel free to reach out to him at jsegall@redpoint.com if you or anyone you know may be a great fit!
Company #1: Serval
What they do: Serval is building the modern AI-Native IT Service Management (ITSM) solution that combines a unified help desk, access management, core ticketing infrastructure, and AI-native workflows. Serval provides a slick next-gen replacement for Jira Service Management or ServiceNow that makes it easy to automate help desk requests with AI workflows that build themselves from natural language prompts, seeing automated ticket volumes of over 80% in customers.
Why am I excited: We led Serval’s $47M Series A this past summer and only a few months later Sequoia led a $75M Series B. The company has everything one looks for in an early stage startup: an incredibly beautiful and well-designed product, a massive market with an old-school incumbent failing to adapt (Servicenow is an almost $200B market cap company!), fantastic customer logos (Mercor, Verkada, Perplexity, Together AI, BILT, etc), and an incredible founding team of long-time Verkada veterans.
Positions: One position of particular note is their Forward Deployed Software Engineer role. Serval is facing a ton of customer demand, and this role will be key in both building product to meet customer needs and interfacing with prospects and leading customer pilots. Sales AEs are another one of great import to the business. For a full list of positions, see their careers page.
Company #2: Railway
What they do: Railway offers a cheaper, faster, easier way to manage and deploy cloud infrastructure compared to the complexity of the hyperscalers.
Why am I excited: I led the Seed round and the Series A round of Railway, so I’m certainly excited by it! The engineering team ranks amongst the top 1% of all startups I’ve ever seen and are truly world class builders - it’s no surprise that the product has garnered over 1.5 million developers to sign up, and the company has over XM deployments per month. Revenue is in the double digits and scaling quickly, all with only a small team of XX people, and they work on really hard problems - such as how they moved entirely off of GCP and built their own data center.
Positions: Railway is looking for strong infrastructure engineers as the platform continues to scale toward 100M deployments a month. It is a great opportunity to work with one of the talented engineering teams I’ve ever seen. For a full list of positions, see their careers page.
Company #3: Motif
What they do: Founded by the former CEO of Autodesk and the former Product CTO of Autodesk, Motif is building the next-gen collaboration platform for the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry. Today, the most widely used solutions in the space like those of Autodesk have failed to adapt to the complexity of modern building design, with many edits taking upwards of 45 minutes to take effect, and involving incredibly slow file transfers and workflows between various tools. Motif is rethinking these workflows from scratch, allowing for real-time collaboration, automatic updates and syncs between the most commonly used AEC tools, and AI based rendering turning ideas, sketches, and models into stunning rendered images.
Why am I excited: At the time of this writing, Autodesk has a market cap of nearly $70B. However, while architecture has changed drastically in recent decades, Autodesk was founded in 1982 and its software has failed to meet modern demands and adapt to the change to cloud computing and the more recent shift of AI. It is time for a new company to emerge built on modern architectures that can leverage today’s principles around real-time collaboration, AI, and automation. We have a term called Founder-Market-Fit in venture, which is why a team is uniquely positioned to win a specific market, and Motif’s founding team has perfect FMF, with the expertise and network needed to take on Autodesk. For more on Motif’s vision from the Founder CEO, framed by his 16 year career and rising to CEO at Autodesk, see here - as he puts it, “The AEC industry is using 20th century tools to design 21st century buildings.”
Positions: One position that Motif is looking for that will be super impactful is that of a Principal Product Designer. Product Design and UX are of the utmost importance for any new design system to succeed, and Motif is looking for a senior design leader with modern design principles (e.g., having designed products like Figma, Notion, etc) to create a truly next-gen collaborative design product for the AEC industry.
Company #4: Vega
What they do: Vega is a next-gen security operations platform that elegantly solves the SIEM cost and complexity problem. Instead of requiring all security telemetry to be centralized in one expensive SIEM system - costing many large organizations tens of millions of dollars - Vega indexes data where it lives and provides a unified, high-performance interface and detection engine across all data sources. This approach delivers complete visibility for detection, investigation, and response while dramatically reducing costs.
Why am I excited: SIEM systems like Splunk are universally disliked by CISOs we engage with at Redpoint. They are one of the largest sources of cost to security organizations while providing little in the way of detections value. Meanwhile, the costs and complexity of applying detections is increasing as the amount of data being leveraged increases and spans more systems than ever before. Vega is completing overhauling how detections work - rather than copying all the data into Splunk, Vega lets organizations leave their data in lower cost systems like S3 and Blob Storage while leveraging AI to improve detection capabilities across these sources.
Positions: Vega recently announced their $65M Series A financing, and one of the most important positions they are looking for is a Head of Growth Marketing. This is an exciting role to accelerate growth for a company that is already attracting Fortune 500 customers and solving an absolutely massive pain point!
Company #5: Fable Security
What they do: Fable is an AI-powered Human Risk Platform that improves employee behaviors to reduce security incidents. The Fable Platform automatically identifies your employees at risk, curates hyper-personalized briefings, and deploys at the most relevant time, enabling employees to make the best security choices everywhere they work. Fable Security is built by the founding team behind Abnormal Security, the leading next-generation cloud email security platform.
Why am I excited: Over 80% of cybersecurity attacks today are identity-related, primarily across phishing, stolen credentials, and brute force attacks - employees have become the #1 attack vector, however tooling to protect employees has failed to adapt to such an increase in risk. The human risk space is an increasingly massive market opportunity that surfaces frequently in our CISO conversations - KnowBe4 was acquired for nearly $5B in 2022 and is a truly disliked product (who reading this has enjoyed taking security awareness trainings from KnowBe4?). To date, tools like KnowBe4 have predominantly been a compliance checkbox, providing little value to truly mitigate improper employee behavior. Fable is changing this from the ground up, identifying and mitigating real attacks within their already impressive customer base, with one customer even saying their employees are asking for more security trainings.
Positions: Fable is scaling their team very quickly, with top priorities being Account Executives and Sales Engineers. The team is incredible, with the founders being 2 of the first 10 employees at Abnormal Security from pre product to $100M+ in revenue, and the rest of the team including early employees at places like Abnormal, Rippling, Palantir, and Expanse.