MadKudu lands $18M led by Felicis for its lead scoring platform

Yammer, a kind of social network for enterprises, kicked off the wave when it was founded in 2008, just ahead of a major financial crisis.Something similar is happening now, though the wave has been renamed product-led growth or PLG, and one startup that fits the mold is MadKudu, an eight-year-old, Paris- and New York-based company behind a customer data platform product.Founded by Sam Levan and Francis Brero, who met at a since-acquired predictive marketing platform, they realized more data science was needed to help sales reps sift through thousands of product users to identify who is ready to buy. According to the company, Levan was able to show soon after that growth teams could quickly double their free-to-paid conversion rate, and he got to work on developing proprietary tech that would give other organizations data science superpowers to discover revenue opportunities. He also mentioned a lot of customers whose brands readers will recognize, including Dropbox, Cloudera, Amplitude, Plain, Unity and Miro.Levan also said the traction the company is seeing led to a flurry of term sheets recently that resulted in a new $18 million Series A round involving BGV, Alven, Techstars and numerous individual investors. Levan claims that by analyzing the product usage data of its customers to find patterns in their users activity, MadKudu now has the largest PLG data set in the world.Going forward, Levan said last week, the idea is to use its Series A round to triple its 35-person team by next year including to beef up on customer success and support staff and to invest more time and attention into improving the user experience. That includes spending time on creating educational programs that can help market leaders better understand what PLG is all about and how to fully realize the potential of MadKudus product specifically.We already have the best technology out there, said Levan, without sounding completely obnoxious.