Digibee’s Series B Funding – Rodrigo Bernardinelli, Digibee

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstrong tv. You know, it's not often that we get local South Florida people here who can come into our Techstrong studios and do an interview with us.

But, uh, local company reached out to me a week or so ago, and I was thrilled, thrilled to hear about local companies, you know, doing well here as a, I've been here in South Florida 20 years, and I will tell you, when I first came down here with the, uh, exception of maybe Citrix, there wasn't a lot of of tech companies here. Ultimate Software came up and they, they were pretty big out in West and where I think you're from. And then, but recently we've seen an explosion of tech in Miami more than up here in Palm Beach County or Broward.

But nevertheless, south Florida is starting to really percolate now with technology. So here's one of the companies kind of making it happen. I want to introduce you to Mr.

Rodrigo Elli. Bernard Elli. Bernard Elli, excuse me, Bernard Elli.

I knew I was gonna mess that up. Rodrigo Bernard Elli. And he's with a company called D G P.

That's It, Rodrigo. Welcome and thanks for joining us on techstrong tv. Oh, thanks for having me here.

It's a pleasure to have you here. Um, why don't we start off, I, I messed up the name, but it's Bernard Nelly, it's an Italian name, but why don't tell people a little bit about your life story. Alright, so, you know, I don't have that fancy entrepreneurship startup background, so I really came from enterprise software companies.

So my background was working as an as executive from companies like hp, IBM, ca Technologies, and I built my career on that. Mm-hmm. And at some point I decided that it was my time to build the tech Out There Absolutely.

And go after customers. Right. So, so together with two good friends, uh, Peter and Vitor, uh, we built the gb.

So we're all former executives from, from industry, from the tech industries and from the both sides of the counter as vendors and as customer, you know, Vitor, he is a former director for Santander Bank, a major Sure. Spanish bank with operations in Latin America and, and all over the world. So, and, and, and Peter, uh, the CTO and inventor of our platform while we've been working together for the past 15 years, maybe more.

Mm-hmm. Right. So That's great.

I we have a similar thing here. Most of our exec team I've worked with for 15, 20 years. So how long is the GP in business?

Well, We are a six year old in, in business. We just turned six in in June right now. So, and well, the, the fun fact we haven't started building, you know, enterprise infrastructure software that we are building right now.

We started this company to do an organics marketplace. You know, we are there to sell salad. Really?

Tomatoes a great story. Unbelievable. We, we have, uh, we've met this, uh, group of farmers.

Uh, they produce organic food and they want, you know, to break this, uh, relationship this, this, this distribution channel, right? Yeah. So, and making, you know, the consumers closer to the producers.

And then they had the idea, they had the funds, but they didn't know anything about technology. So I came across with those guys and I said, look, this is something that I really can do. So then I, I got back to my good friends, say, look, why don't we just quit our comfortable careers and go and do this project?

Right. Uhhuh. So, and that's how everything started.

So what we did at that time was putting together several different application that was readily available because we want to, to have that marketplace up and running as fast as possible. Sure. So we, we, we, we, we find, we found a open source e-commerce, you know, a SaaS, E R p, uh, an open source wirehouse off the shelf stuff, everything off the shelf and as cheap as possible.

Mm-hmm. And we start building all, uh, uh, you know, the apps around it. And we realized there must be something in the middle, very strong with great architecture that would connect us different pieces of application.

And that was the beginning of our platform just as a piece of architecture. And of course we were doing that, you know, in modern cloud days. So we decided to go top-notch mm-hmm.

Using modern cloud architecture, leveraging what the digital winners like Google, Netflix, and Amazon. They did for own architectures. So we put together this new architecture to build this Mar Organics marketplace.

And that was up and running in less than six months. Everything we're producing we're having, you know, uh, customers in the platform. And then we said, look, if I can do that for organics food, I can do that for any other sort of goods.

So we as entrepreneurs, we went out to the market and tried to sell that whole e-commerce, fully automated Amazon-like, uh, approach that we did and we failed miserably. Right. So we realized that there was so many great people doing e-commerce apps and especially selling to this small and medium business.

And we former executives selling to the enterprise all our lives, you know, so Yeah. Doing so many things at on. So we, uh, like we screwed, so we have to change mm-hmm.

And we start getting connected to the community investors, mentors and people. And, and there was the thing about you should have more focus on the things that we're doing. And I start looking inside and say, look, there is this one thing that we know that every single customer out there in our previous life is struggling with, which is connecting their business application.

And even though this is a very old problem, it is still not solved. Right. These Days, No doubt.

Until the gb. So it, it is, it is still a hard problem to solve. That takes, as Garner says, half of all resources for digital projects go through integrations cuz it is still, you know, some sort of craftmanship work.

So something needs to be done. Right. And even with APIs out there, it was not making the problem any easier.

Yeah. The reality with the explosion of APIs services around the world, oh, you know, uh, uh, IOTs AI stuff and the cloud environment, the problems get more complex. Yeah, sure.

You have to connect now, not hundreds of applications, but you have to connect millions of devices. Right? Right.

Well, not only devices, you've got containers and you've got, you know, well the instances running and, and virtual machines, it, it, it really is millions or it's cost saving. Sagan would say billions and billions. But you know what, as someone, so I've been an entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur for 30 plus years, your story a little different.

Not many people started the salad business and wind up building technology solutions. But your story, here's the, the crux of it. You guys ran into a problem and you said, we need to solve that problem for ourselves.

And you solved that problem for yourself. Maybe that led to you understanding that, well, the, the bigger business plan wasn't really so great, but you solved that problem and then said, wait a second, we're not the only one with this problem. This is a problem that a lot of people have and this solution that we built works for them too.

And that's kind of the sounds like the story of where dgp came from. Exactly. And it start seeing, you know, people building APIs at that time, and the number one issue they had when facing another API said, okay, we have two APIs to connect.

Who gonna code the connection of those APIs? Right. And that's sometimes it's just a backlog, prioritization issues.

But the end of the day, you will need to have a developer, which this day is super hard to find. Mm-hmm. And the developer will have to write code, he'll write, have to dig On the code.

They might be a little script even, but you gotta write, it's not like typing in Word I no doubt. And the whole life cycle of integration, it's a tough thing to deal with. So you have to develop, you have to, to, to assess for security, you have to have quality, you have to deploy anywhere.

You have to run, you have to monitor, you have to operate, you have to evolve that code. And for every single line of code you do it. And integrations in the end of the day, it, it's in the end of the line of any digital projects.

Like people are used to build first the applications. When the time is up, there is no more schedule and you have to deliver the project. You just go there and do the integrations, you know, and guess where problems happens.

Integrations they should Always, Always. Right? Mm-hmm.

So, and we're there say, look, this can be like that. It needs to be easier. We have to find ways to argument at work.

So we start realizing that in integration should not be a full-time job for a developer. Instead, integration needs to be a task for every developer out there, no matter the level of expertise it has. So it's just a task.

Why am I building the new experiences that will generate revenue from our company or building the algorithm that will make the, uh, the company more efficient. Look, I need to be able to build integrations on the fly. Absolutely.

Which as possible. And that's, and that's our vision. We build this platform to become the developer's choice for integration.

We are not targeting our platform for individuals like business users that want to connect APIs and orchestration and don't doing simple stuff. No. We are going after the most complex use cases for enterprises.

The use case that developers needs to handle. And even though if AI and all that stuff, developers are not not going anywhere, they will Be there in spite of what people may be hearing. Come On.

We love developers. Yeah. And developers are the ones that are building those structures.

So we built our technology for them to augment their work. Mm-hmm. So we are in this missions of building the automations need in this, uh, integration lifecycle that will remove this tedious and labros, uh, uh, uh, tasks that developers need to do when they're dealing with integrations.

Right. So, cool. I get it.

Before we jump into the news for people who want to say, Hey, I want to see what he's talking about, what's the website? com. You guys recently announced the funding round.

Oh yeah. That was, you know, I'm super proud about announcing that. So in this tough environment, tough mark that we're in, we did an up round oversubscribe it with a top tier investor, uh, uh, in the United States with Goldman Sachs.

With Goldman. Yeah. So that's fantastic.

We just raised a 60 million 6 0, 6 0 Wow. Raised Congratulations. Yeah.

Thank you so much. In This market. You know, there was a time, like during Covid, we'd get people here on Zoom and they'd say, oh yeah, we just raised 200,000,003.

I I've been raising money since like 1998. Those numbers were just, uh, we all know the fact of the matter is a lot of those raises that money didn't go into new projects. It went into taking out, recapping, taking out previous investors and stuff.

But a 60 million round in today's environment is really fantastic. And I think speaks to what you guys are doing. So for our audience though, our audience are developers and cyber people and cloud people, 60 million sounds big number to them.

What's it mean? What are you guys using, doing with the money? Oh, we're gonna invest a lot on the platform.

So if we build that for developers, what the, the one thing that we have to keep investment as we do is the technology itself. Yeah. Right.

And making it, you know, uh, improving the architecture, improving the automations, we built it and building the, uh, uh, the experiences that will augment developers work. And a big part of that, uh, uh, proceeds as well goes to our US go to market. Right.

So, uh, we are investing hard on getting in this, uh, market, uh, with account for 55% of the whole software market share of the world. Sure. And since we're basically weaning from the incumbents out there mm-hmm.

We're converting the opportunity, we have a better approach. We have a faster to towards developer and so on. Why not coming is straight to this most competitive market with the United States, with the backyard for all of our competitors.

Sure. And win here. I I I hear you.

And starting South Florida. Right? So that's where we're setting ba base.

Well, yeah. Um, so Rodrigo, that brings up, so for our people out there, our listen is out there all over the world, not just us even. How did they get started?

What's the on-ramp look like? Okay. So it's very easy to get started with our platform.

So you don't need to have, you know, eight months or a year of experiencing a specific tool. If you have experience working with j o instructors, that's all you need. Great.

So, uh, we have, we provide, uh, web learning that will take us as much as a couple of days. And after that you are up and running on building enterprise class integrations in a secure fashion scale with all the resilience and observability that enterprise systems needs. So it's easy to get started.

It's something that any developer, even IT professionals can deal with, like in day zero. And instead of, you know, spending months into integration projects, you're gonna start spending, you know, maybe a couple of hours at most. And you're up and running.

You're up and running. Is there like a free trial or something that people can try with or, Uh, the, the, the part of the proceeds is going towards the community. We don't have the free trial right now, but we provide together for our customers environments so they can, they can trial it.

Okay. So there's like a sandbox, It's like sandboxes where we are supporting our customers. That works.

They got into our free training. You know, we don't, we don't charge for training. Uh, so we don't charge for our onboarding services.

So basically we have everything included there. And with the sandbox, uh, usually when we start is by supporting, uh, our customers to delivering their first project. A project that, you know, maybe it's in the backlog and they simply can deliver today due to budget constraints or Absolutely.

Resource constraints. Well, it's resource constraints. What budget and resource are related today.

Right. But it's also priorities. Oh.

Because as you said, a lot of people, excuse me, they focus on building the app and then the integration is like the caboose at the bottom back of the train. But you can't, you can't get the train on the tracks until everything's working, until the integration happens. I, we used to see this, I, I'm come from security background cyber, right.

And so all of the sim I know, you know, security information, uh, system management in order to, like, I had to take in the firewall and the vulnerability and the IDs and threaten, but I had to do, you had to do these one-off integrations. So sometimes there would be like a year wait for the vendor to do the integration. You just want to do them, you need them now.

So I, I, I understand this perfectly. All right. It's digital.

B D I G I T A L b E E. No, not t A L D g, Digi. Excuse me.

com. Com. People can check it out there.

Thank you for coming up. Congratulations. I appreciate, thank you for having me.

All righty. Hey, we're gonna take a break on text on tv. We'll be right back.