Two years ago, we founded Nextmv. A few months after that, we learned we’d be part of YCombinator’s 2020 winter class — the very beginning of the pandemic. Our history, in short, looks a bit like this:
- Nextmv founded: July 26, 2019
- Preseed funding: October - December 2019
- YCombinator W20: January - April 2020
- Seed funding: March - April 2020
- Series A funding: December 2020
We feel fortunate to celebrate our second anniversary as a company. When we started, it was just me and Ryan O'Neil.
We had a lot to learn — from fundraising to people operations, compensation, and sales. But we lived and breathed decision science. In our time at companies like Grubhub, Lockheed Martin, and Mitre, we saw first hand the need for codified decisions that automate and optimize operations. So we got to work.
We launched our first product in January 2020. In the early days, our customers started out solely on premise and saw our stack as a library for creating custom decision apps with tons of optionality, speed, and integration niceties. This is still possible today. In fact, we created standard engines that allow customers to build on top of common paradigms like the vehicle routing problem (VRP).
These custom decision apps are currently written in Go (we're big fans of binaries) with more language integrations planned for the future. But with our Series A, we wanted to be laser focused on giving more developers access to decision science tooling. What better way than through a simple JSON-in-JSON-out API?
Since then, we flipped the script to focus on Nextmv Cloud. Anyone can sign up for a free account and start routing a fleet of vehicles with our Dispatch app. And there’s more on the way.
But there’s more to reflect on over the last two years.
Some things changed…
Evolving Nextmv Cloud and API 🚀 !
Since launching Nextmv Cloud, we’ve updated our console to give customers understanding and insight into our easy-to-use API (no Golang necessary to get started anymore!). Pictures really are worth 1,000 words.
We've embraced falling down the rabbit hole with a fun new mascot
We always envied our Golang pal the Go Gopher. We leaned into our bunny ear logo pretty early on and started referring to our users as the everybunny. (User personas can be fun!)
Our Zoom boxes multiplied 🐰 🐰 🐰
We are 24 Mvers and counting (plus some kiddos and pets)! We’re always looking for great people to join our team.
And some things stayed the same…
Our mission to make every engineer a decision engineer
Nextmv is built for the many and not just for the few. We make it easy to use standard decision science algorithms like VRP while maintaining flexibility for sophisticated users at our engine layer. We'll dive into how the Nextmv Decision Stack serves our mission in a later post.
Our focus on a distributed, diverse, and transparent culture
We knew from the beginning (even before COVID) that we wanted to build an amazing employer brand where we have a distributed team that values transparency, works to correct the wage gap, and leans into asynchronous work (more on these in a later post!). Great talent comes from every corner of the world. Our hires have helped us realize and expand upon these values in new and creative ways. We love that.
Our decision science DNA
The way we mv decisions with software that makes them repeatable, testable, and observable.. It's ok to fail as long as we have empathy for our users and iterate toward a better tomorrow.
This is just the beginning. At Nextmv, we are building the decision science company. The hub for automating and optimizing decision operations. Thank you to everyone in the community for their support. I can't wait to see all the interesting applications our team and our customers create!
