When Edward Chiu was the head of Customer Success and Sales at cloud company DigitalOcean, he built an internal tool that made it easy to manage customers. After receiving positive feedback from many people within the company, he thought it was a no-brainer: he should probably build it for the mass market.
He and his brother Kevin Chiu then co-founded Catalyst, a New York City-based company that develops software that onboards customers and measures how happy they are and if they would recommend it to other people.
"When I showed this tool to other customer success leaders, they said this internal tool is better than what I'm paying $100,000 for software on the market," Chiu, who is CEO of Catalyst, told Business Insider. "Most entrepreneurs, when they come up with an idea, they don't get the opportunity to see if there's social proof...We had the chance to dogfood it."
On Tuesday, Catalyst announced it raised $15 million in a series A round led by venture capital firm Accel. Chiu, who was one of the earliest employees at DigitalOcean, says he's excited about the opportunity to work with Accel, as this year, some of Accel's portfolio companies like PagerDuty, Slack, and CrowdStrike have gone public.
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