Rewst CEO: New Funding Round Means We’ll Be Here Forever

Younger companies have been driving significant innovation in the MSP vendor market over the last few years, and AI and automation is a top theme. Rewst is one of the rising stars. The company announced a $45 million round of funding led by Sapphire Ventures with existing investors Meritech Capital and OpenView last week.

The most recent round brings the total raised in the last 12 months alone to $76 million. For all time, Rewst has raised a total of $104 million.

It's just another milestone in the company’s recent momentum — growth to 900 MSP partners, a total customer increase of 204%, annual recurring revenue growth of 184% for the first half of 2024 measured year over year. With all that success, why the need for additional funding?

“The funding round is important because when an MSP is buying a product, especially an innovative new market entrant into a new category of products like automation platforms, the MSP needs to know whether or not the company is going to be around as a startup, right?” said Rewst founder and CEO Aharon Chernin in a conversation with ChannelE2E. “We’re so heavily funded at this point and we spend such little cash that we’ll be here forever.”

Automation Market for MSPs is Just Beginning

In spite of the big growth Rewst has experienced over the last year and really since its inception in 2020, the company is still in the early adopter stage for the MSP total market. Robotic process automation has been a big category for enterprise organizations, served by giants such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and others.

Such tools allow workers to create automations between different apps — for instance to automate a repetitive manual process between different applications such as Excel and CRM software. Those enterprise RPA tools did not translate well to the SMB and MSP market.

Chernin has brought these capabilities to SMBs and MSPs with Rewst.

MSPs have just begun in their experimentation with technologies such as automation and AI, and yet these are the technologies that will make their businesses more efficient going forward.

“These early adopters are using automation as a competitive edge against their peers,” Chernin said.

How MSPs are Using Rewst: Common Use Cases

MSPs start with Rewst to gain time savings that comes with automation.

“But then they start to realize that it’s not just about time savings," Chernin said. "It’s about providing them an alternative to scale their businesses. Because right now the only way that they can scale their businesses without automation is through hiring. This gives them another option. It’s not a replacement for hiring. It’s just another option for scaling. Then, as they mature further in their understanding of what automation is, it makes them realize that automation also could reduce errors when they’re doing service delivery, and it could increase service delivery speed.”

Rewst offers MSPs hundreds of pre-built automations that are available out of the box. Popular ones include user onboarding and user offboarding and billing reconciliation.

One MSP, Marcus Networking, was able to capture $100,000 in license revenue that had been unbilled because of the manual billing process, according to Rewst.

In addition to the pre-built automations, Rewst also provides an easy way for MSPs to build their own automations. One common use of this capability is to create automations between popular MSP platforms such as PSAs and less common ones used by a small subset of customers, like dentists’ offices.

“In my world the stickiest most valuable automation that I see an MSP deploy is one that fixes a specific problem that only they have or only their customers have. Because you can’t buy a product to fix that,” Chernin said. “That’s why we have so many custom-built automations that the MSPs have built for themselves.”

Rewst Venture Capital Funding Details

Rewst will use the proceeds of the funding round to continue to innovate and improve faster than it already is capable of doing, Chernin said. The company’s newest investor pointed out the productivity gains that MSPs can make by adopting Rewst.

“MSPs and SMBs are facing a number of operational challenges, including recruiting and retaining technical talent, as well as a rise in competition driven by a lack of differentiation," said Casber Wang, partner at Sapphire Ventures and new Rewst board member, in a prepared statement. "Born out of the need to solve these growing pressures, I believe Rewst increases productivity and the bottom line for MSPs with its unique automation and trusted integration platform. I’m excited by the opportunity ahead for Rewst as the company radically improves MSP efficiency and results and am thrilled to partner with Aharon and the team to build a company of consequence.”