Why We’re Raising, What It Buys, and Who’s Doing the Work

If we’re going to make decisions in the open, we owe you more than an announcement. Last time I told you we’re raising capital in public. This time I want to show you what’s inside that decision: why we’re raising, what the money does, what we’ve built, and who has been doing the work. You should be able to contemplate our reasoning precisely because you can see it.

Why we’re raising, and why now

The short answer: the product is no longer the constraint. Quarus and Platypus are both built, the latest versions are in production, and we’re running demos with interested prospects. What stands between here and pilot clients using Plum products on real engagements isn’t a prototype anymore. It’s people, sales, and the time to do this properly.

The market gives us reason to move now. Data volume has exploded, but decision confidence hasn’t kept up. Industry forecasts from TechSci Research and Global Growth Insights put decision support software at $82.5 billion globally by 2029, growing about 12 percent a year. We call the layer we’re building Strategic Decision Intelligence, a new category incremental to BI and decision intelligence tools, and we believe we’re first to market with a complete system for it. Categories get defined early, or by someone else.

To be plain about where that leaves us: we’re ready for pilot clients, but we’re not yet proving anything at scale. This round is what gets us from one to the other.

What we’ve built

Plum’s two products each deliver value alone and also work well together.

Quarus is the discovery layer. It turns spreadsheets into an interactive 3D “galaxy” where every record, whether a deal, a customer or a project, is an object in space. Position shows how far it sits from the average on the metrics you choose, as well as shape, color, spin and transparency layer. A solid, spinning blue sphere tells a sales manager at a glance that a deal is healthy and has momentum, without reading a single row. A built-in AI assistant helps set up the analysis, reviews the data alongside you, and suggests where to look next.

Platypus is the decision layer, built for consultancies and agencies that advise clients, as well as for analysis and managers to advise executive leaders. It starts from the client’s brief. AI featires draft a customer journey, the consultant or analyst reviews and approves it, and the resulting opportunities are ranked on an interactive compass where you can test scenarios and real-world signals, such as a competitor launching a new loyalty programme. Every AI draft waits for human approval. The reasoning stays visible, and the exported report can be refreshed as the world changes instead of going stale the day after the meeting.

The two connect: signals in Platypus can come from analysis in Quarus, so what you discover feeds what you decide. We’ve also been working to protect the intellectual property behind both.

What the money does

This round funds a runway of nine to twelve months. Here’s how we plan to use it:

• 40% — Product and technology.Keep refining both products and their AI features, and build additional premium features and integrations that let customers grow their use over time.
• 30% — People and marketing.Scale the team for the next phase and get Plum in front of the buyers who feel this problem most.
• 30% — Sales and operations.Run a high-touch sales model: land in one account, expand from there, and support customers properly once they’re in.

The business model behind that is straightforward. We sell to consulting firms, SMEs and mid-market companies, and earn recurring revenue through annual licences with user- and scope-based pricing, plus setup and ongoing support. Consultants matter twice: they’re customers, and they’re a channel. Every firm that adopts Plum can bring it to its own clients.

None of this is exotic. It’s a plan for turning a working product into pilots, and pilots into a repeatable way to sell.

How we got here

A list of milestones can hide the people behind them, so I want to name them. Rachel Rose co-founded Platypus and leads product and customer experience. Samuel Le Flaguais leads development. Maxwell Baylin runs operations, and Max Druker chairs our board. Around them, our advisors cover AI, technology and data (Narayan Sainaney), marketing and data science (Josh Kivenko), brand and strategy (5ve Collective, my own agency), and financial data (Ryan Farley). Eric Grimard, Quarus’s founder, advises the team on our Quarus product as well.

Together our team has built working prototypes of both products, infused AI features into both applications to make them interactive and intuitive, moved the latest versions into production, and done the go-to-market research that tells us with whom we ought to share our offerings.

Our team has also used the products on our own decisions. When it came time to decide how to take Quarus to market, the real question was with what the product should lead? Rachel set a Quarus market and product study up in Platypus as the client and worked it the way she would for anyone else: start from the brief, in this case the customer pain points I’d outlined for her, weigh the opportunities, test the scenarios. The Opportunity Compass weighed those pain points against external marketing intelligence signals, and the result told our design and development team which features to build and improve next, and then which targets ought to be our focus.

That matters to me beyond the answer itself. It’s the test I care about most: does the tool hold up when we’re the client? Here, it did.

What comes next

Showing our reasoning also means showing what we don’t know yet: whether pilots convert the way we expect, how fast this category forms, and how the round fills. On that last point, here’s how the timing works. We’re running a rolling close. The first close is Friday, November 6, and we’ll keep closing with investors after that as they’re ready, rather than shutting the door on a single date. I’ll report on all of it as it happens, including the parts that don’t go our way.

If you want to move early, meet with us directly and come in before the scaled meetings begin. Round terms for early investors are shared in those conversations rather than in public posts. If you’d rather see the product and meet the team first, join the first Plum Forward: Beyond BI session, held virtually on Wednesday, October 14, at 11:00 AM ET. Registration to come next week. A second session follows later in October for anyone who wants more time before deciding. Terms for Plum forward will be shared then. Either way, you can reach me at gary@plumsg.com or plumsg.com/contact.

Decisions made in the open only work if the reasoning is open too. This is ours.

Gary Kivenko

CEO, Plum