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🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:
Ren
✍️ Notes from the Editors
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Relationship intelligence for professionals
Ren is building software that ingests relevant information, such as CRM tools, contacts, and media sources, to provide actionable insights for working professionals. Ren is focused on four relationship-driven verticals: commercial real estate, investment banking, executive search, and venture capital/private equity—professions where relationships are paramount and lead to great opportunity.
For example, an angel investor may happen to miss a LinkedIn post from one of their connections about an investment opportunity, or a positive update for a startup they’re interested in. By using Ren, they would be given that heads up and provided an action, such as sending a congratulatory message or inquiring about an investment opportunity. By leveraging data, technology, and automation, Ren is able to amplify and identify actionable opportunities from existing professional networks.
🔗 Check it out: rensystems.com
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💰 Business Model
Companies that purchase Ren are charged per seat. In addition, Ren also offers an API that customers can use to integrate with their internal tools (like CRM software). The cost for the API is usage-based.
📈 Traction and Fundraising
Started building March 2020
Launched in 2023 after building in stealth and multiple betas
Raised a $3.5 million round led by JLL Spark Global Ventures, ZoomInfo, Camber Creek, and Contour Ventures
Currently used by over 40 enterprises, including Fortune 500 enterprises
📖 Founder Story
 Canay Deniz - CEO |  Lionel Hertig - CTO |
Canay Deniz and Lionel Hertig, co-founders of Ren, met at an analytics startup focused on proactively detecting failures at power plants. Ren started in March 2020, when Deniz decided to fully pursue entrepreneurship. He had spoken with a friend of his who worked in a very relationship-driven profession, and outlined the pain point of trying to keep up with folks in his immediate and secondary network for professional opportunities. Doing this was very manual, but not doing it at all meant potentially missing a real opportunity.
Having worked together at the prior startup, Deniz and Hertig decided to start what became Ren. They realized there was a large addressable market, but wanted to get proof of demand and figure out which types of professionals and enterprises felt this pain point and were willing to pay for it. Though they started building in 2020, they also spent extensive time interviewing customers and narrowing down the specific niche they wanted to focus on, eventually landing on the four verticals mentioned earlier. In 2023, they were ready to take on the market.
💼 Opportunities
🔮 Our Analysis
All of us have networks and extended networks that we can’t realistically keep up with day-to-day. For certain professions, keeping up with a network is a make-or-break task. It separates the good from the great—those who can better maintain their network find more opportunities.
Ren has carved out its lane and identified the ideal customer demographic who particularly feels this pain point. While there are plenty of tools that help with relationship management, Ren goes a step further, having spent years building and tailoring its solution to its users’ specific needs. In these relationship-driven professions, where one singular serendipitous opportunity can make a difference, Ren’s solution shines.
Ren has spent years building and refining in-house machine learning models. At a high-level, it has built its own models that sift through media sources, including both publicly available information and information found through partnerships, along with customer-specific CRM and contacts. Over time, the models have become experts at sifting through large amounts of data and identifying what presents meaningful signals and opportunities rather than noise. Both the in-house knowledge and expertise of its teams and models along with the extensive amount of relevant integrations continue to solidify Ren’s edge over more general relationship management tools.
So far, the early indications and momentum suggest Ren is off to a good start. Aside from having 40 enterprise customers, including Fortune 500 companies, its growth has been organic and through word of mouth. Given that Ren has basically had no real marketing spend and has seen real traction, its next focus is on growth, marketing, and acquiring more customers. Given its organic growth thus far is a sign for optimism, we’re curious to see how successful it is as it starts to invest more time, capital, and resources into growth.
📚 Further reading
Written by Matt Huo
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