Keel, a startup lowering tech barriers with a user-friendly platform for building custom operational software, aimed at growing, tech-enabled businesses, announced €5.5 million in seed funding from leading European investors Earlybird and LocalGlobe.
Operations face a huge gulf between no-code and ERP solutions. When scrappy ops teams outgrow their original spreadsheets and no-code operations stack, they typically find there’s nowhere to go except a behemoth ERP. Building from scratch is often not a viable option, since engineering resources aren’t prioritised to solve operational problems.
Meanwhile, existing platforms offered by companies like Oracle, SAP, and NetSuite are one-size-fits-all proprietary software with limited options for customisation. This all-or-nothing approach requires lengthy and costly implementation periods. Businesses end up with rigid systems and cumbersome tools that limit productivity and prevent teams from reacting to new challenges.
Whilst at Echo (Europe’s fastest-growing online pharmacy) the future founders of Keel, Benoit Machefer, Jon Bretman, and Tom Frew, realised that off-the-shelf tools couldn’t solve the challenges presented by the regulated and uncharted pharmacy world. They self-built tools that enabled them to safely scale 4X in 4 months during the Covid-19 pandemic, to $80 million revenue.
Now CEO of Keel, Benoit Machefer said: “Stock ordering and inventory management for medication at scale wasn’t solved by any off the shelf options. Like all good ops we started with a bunch of spreadsheets and a bit of app script, but it became clear that this wouldn’t offer the robustness, security and level of integration we needed. We looked for a platform that we could build upon but it didn’t exist, so the only option was to assemble an ops engineering team of backend and frontend developers.”
But most companies can’t afford to self-build and most engineers want to focus on customer-facing tech, not internal tools. “We founded Keel because businesses are changing, and contemporary companies need to own their own operations software and tools. We see a future where many companies never need a traditional ERP, and instead technically-minded operators can be the owners of their ops stack,” Machefer explained. “We speak to operators everyday who are frustrated they can’t get access to engineering time, and engineers who hate working on ops software that’s not designed for development. Keel can bring ops and engineering together in a way that we haven’t seen before.”
Keel empowers ops teams by using engineering best practices to help operators become more technical. Early customer HIVED first used the platform to build driver shift management and are now looking at adding finance, facilities management, and payroll functions, all developed by one member of the ops team. Murvah Iqbal, CEO of HIVED, endorses, “using Keel has had a big impact on the development of our internal tools, and I have great confidence in how secure and scalable the system is. The best thing about it is that a member of our ops team has been able to develop the system themselves, so the person closest to the problem also owns the solution.”
Keel allows customers to sequentially adopt, tackling one pain point at a time, while retaining the third-party software that still works for them, separating them from the restrictive “all-in-one” offer of many ERPs. The platform offers multiple advantages: it comprises a backend engine, API-first solutions, and auto-generated admin tools. It’s open-source, and has an exceptional developer experience, so it’s easy for technical operators to get started and for engineers to support when they’re needed later.
The fundraise has helped build and develop the platform, with user experience at its heart. The team is now bringing Keel to a wider audience of businesses who share their ambition to avoid the headaches of an ERP implementation down the line.
Earlybird Partner Dr. Andre Retterath commented: “We saw something extraordinary in this team and the giant market they are tackling with a customisable solution. In order to disrupt this market with a more operationally-minded product, you need a team who built and scaled ops-centric organisations themselves, which we found in Benoit, Tom, and Jon. We are proud to have backed them since day 1.”
