MRGN

Business intelligence is a wonderful display of colorful charts and graphs, but who is going to interpret those for the average business owner? This lack of sophistication and understanding of data amongst so many is one of the leading points of failure within businesses that do not have formal C-suites, and MRGN is here to solve that.

True business intelligence; not just visualization. MRGN provides predictive insights around your KPIs, hiring plans, financing strategies and more, all premised on your operating plan (which MRGN builds for you as well).

The enterprise space has enjoyed a robust software stack for far too long, so MRGN is targeting a substantially underserved 30M SMB market with a TAM of $26.1B. We sell to founders, management members and bookkeepers, though our platform is built for novice users with little to no finance acumen. Our user registrations have included SaaS ventures, law firms, construction companies, restaurants, food and beverage brands, and financial services firms.

SMBs are experts in their trades, but don't want to deal with the nitty gritty of the business side. MRGN hands them all of the necessary data and insights and translates business mumbo jumbo into plain English. 

We are all efficiency geeks at the intersection of finance and operations (with competencies in UX/UI design and software engineering). We love to solve problems creatively, particularly when they involve increasing efficiency and profitability. 

Our CEO, Yoni Rubin, has spent 15 years as a startup COO, having raised $250M, with one IPO and an uplist to the NYSE.

The MRGN team sports a combined 50 years in business operations, finance, software engineering and UX/UI design, making us best-equipped to tackle such a complex issue.

Prominent Board members include D.G. Hague, who formerly served as the President or CEO of IHOP, 7-Eleven, Safeway and Centerplate, and Bonnie Siegel, who is a US presidential campaign advisor, following a successful exit to Bishop-McCann.

600 small businesses since launch on 1/4/23

MRGN is on a mission to empower those that are data-driven to be data-informed. MRGN is working to democratize and contextualize knowledge and data for those who do not have access to it.

MRGN's mission fits perfectly within Solve's thesis to help underserved SMBs to gain access to the resources that they are unaware of or cannot afford.

MRGN is the only end-to-end machine learning-based business intelligence solution for tech ventures and SMBs. Our ML methodology is not only proprietary, but can be applied to the mid-market and enterprise spaces as well, with full IP protection (forthcoming). Our methodology leverages APIs to multiple data sources, including big data, CRMs, task management systems and other publicly available data, in order to combine that data into digestible contextual intelligence about any given business on the MRGN platform. The Machine Learning engine then uses newly ingested information in order to continuously provide the business with adaptive intelligence. For example, the platform will be able to tell any business how its specific KPIs compare to industry benchmarks, where those KPIs are trending, how its hiring plan fits its growth plans, if its planning to pay new hires the correct market rates and much more.

Today's BI tools stop at visualization, and MRGN picks up where they leave off by providing the meaning behind those charts and graphs. While our first application is within the SMB budgeting space, we intend on expanding to the broader BI space, and then to the enterprise market. For example, Microsoft's Power BI, when coupled with MRGN, will be able to display data visualizations, and then explain to the user what the meaning of those visualizations are.  

We aim to help 1,000 small businesses by the end of May of this year, and 100,000 by the end of 2026. 

We intend on integrating a business/upstart university program into the educational side of the platform, in order to allow SMBs to gain the necessary basics around business creation and perseverance for free.

At out current (early) stage, we are measuring the number of small businesses on the platform. In the future, we will measure the direct business impact that MRGN has on their organizations in an effort to devise a strategy to reduce the 90% attrition rate amongst SMBs. 

Piggy-backing off of my last answer, MRGN aims to flip the 90% SMB attrition rate on its head. Small businesses dissolve, often times, due to lack of motivation, sophistication and/or resources, and MRGN is here to rectify that.

MRGN leverages machine learning to pull data from a variety of sources and contextualize it for small businesses on top of their five-year operating plan. In essence, MRGN is connecting the dots of business intelligence for the SMB owners and providing them with predictive insights about the trajectories of their KPIs, hiring plans, financing plans and more. 

We're an incredibly diverse team and aiming to maintain our wonderful melting pot of a culture. Our team hails from Israel, India, the US and Iran, and we are putting a strong emphasis on the recruitment of more females to the team. We currently have one female on our Board. 

We are a team built on multifaceted perspectives that we could have only amassed through our innate diversity. Without it, we would be bland and uncreative. 

We have three revenue streams planned; the first is a traditional freemium SaaS model. The second channel is through a channel partner program that is intended to stimulate a network effect. The third is an IP play, by which our Contextual Intelligence Engine will be able to score any type of SMB for the purposes of replacing the SIC/NAICS coding systems. We intend on breaking even by Q2 '24 and achieving $130M in revenue by the close of 2026.

Our detailed operating plan can be found here: Financial model

We are currently working two swim-lanes; fundraising and revenue generation. We are in the process of raising $1.25M in order to actuate our go-to-market strategy, and at the same time, we are bootstrapping the platform through to minimal revenue generation, at least.

We raised $200k a year ago, though we have not even burned through even half of it yet. Our team is primarily compensated in equity, and, as business operations professionals, we pride ourselves on our capital conservation methods, while maintaining pique efficiency.