After crossing $100m ARR in 2024, Quantexa has just reached another milestone by closing its Series F at a multi-billion valuation.
What’s been going on in the engine room to make this possible? With almost a thousand employees and many offices around the world, it would be reasonable to call Quantexa a “company” these days, not a “startup”.
But from our perspective at Dawn — as an investor in the company since 2018 — the magic has been Quantexa’s ability to mix and match the best aspects of being a startup and being a big company. Maintaining this balance has required conscious effort, and it’s enabled Quantexa to scale without losing the agility and innovation that defined its early days.
That all sounds very nice in theory, but let’s dig into how this has played out in practice.
Product: Staying scrappy
Quantexa has highly successful, highly profitable core lines of business in financial services. The path of least resistance would be to continue to mine those rich seams and double down on selling multi-million dollar enterprise deals to the world’s top banks. But that would ultimately limit the horizons for Quantexa.
The key to maintaining startup hustle in R&D and Product has, paradoxically, been to introduce controls and a robust product management process. Underpinned by a mature Finance function, these frameworks — far from putting the brakes on innovation — have created the opportunity for continued experimentation and provide a mandate for new initiatives.
Product and GTM teams are empowered to take calculated risks, test new ideas, and bring new solutions to market. New initiatives are treated almost as startup initiatives within Quantexa — and just like startups, they get a certain amount of funding, they know what they need to prove, and they either hit their proof points or don’t make it. All departments know the rules of the game, and this system enables innovation while also preventing sprawl and loss of focus.
Quantexa’s secret has been to foster this culture of controlled innovation and risk-taking, which has become even stronger as the business has matured.
People: Fostering talent
Scaling isn’t just about increasing revenue — it’s about growing, retaining and managing the right team. There are now around a thousand Quantexans. Once you’re well past the “Dunbar number”, how do you keep such a global workforce motivated and treat them fairly and consistently?
Quantexa has been highly intentional in shaping its employer value proposition, creating clear career paths, and fostering professional development. This hasn’t led to a stale corporate culture — on the contrary, the mature structure and framework has been carefully designed to reward “startup behaviours” like entrepreneurial hustle, results, ambition and dedication to the business. As a result, employee attrition and satisfaction rank very favourably compared with the industry average.
Marketing: Elevating the conversation
“Every Moleskine notebook is a book yet to be written and a story waiting to be told.” What a warm feeling.
And just like stationery, there’s no reason that exciting B2B software companies have to be prosaic in their Marketing message. On the journey towards Series F, Quantexa has moved far beyond transactional and purely descriptive marketing, embracing “visionary marketing” driven by a clear positioning strategy. This in turn is aligned to the technology side. Through all this, Quantexa is now established as a thought and category leader in Data, AI, policy and national security.
Vish as CEO has been central to this, cementing his position as an expert in AI, helping Quantexa take a leading role in these conversations in forums such as the UK AI Summit and WEF. While maintaining a sharp focus on revenue generation, Quantexa’s Marketing evolution shows us how it’s possible to stay grounded while elevating the tone and tenor of the message. Ultimately this has led to a compelling narrative that sets Quantexa apart from competitors and positions it as a leader.
From a personal perspective, my experience with Quantexa has been an education in how a company can scale thoughtfully and not lose sight of what made it great in the first place. Quantexa’s inspiring journey has shown me that scaling successfully isn’t about choosing between structure and agility — it’s about making both things work in tandem to maximum effect.
