Today, UJET is launching out of stealth and announcing that they’ve raised over $20m in total (across seed and series A).

I was first introduced to Anand (the CEO & co-founder of UJET) in July 2015 by my friend Kanishk. At that time, I was meeting hundreds of entrepreneurs, just trying to be helpful and give back. At the end of our very first meeting, Anand asked me if I wanted to be an advisor, as he’d heard good things about me from Kanishk – I said that it would be better for us to get to know each other a bit more first.

If I’m totally honest, I didn’t “get” the idea for UJET initially. I haven’t been involved with many enterprise SaaS companies, and I didn’t feel well placed to know if Anand’s idea for UJET would succeed or not. When I heard the initial idea and saw initial prototypes, it seemed like many other solutions out there – I’d heard of things like Talkdesk and whatnot, so I thought that it would be similar to those.

After meeting Anand a few more times and iterating on his pitch deck, I did end up joining as an advisor. What pushed me over the edge is just Anand as a person, his vision, and his technical knowledge. Anand is one of the nicest guys that I’ve ever met, and has is an exceptional entrepreneur.

A few months later, I was catching up with Eli Chen, who was someone that I’d wanted to hire at my previous startup Vungle, and I’d kept in contact with over subsequent years, advising him on his different startups. As he was thinking about his next gig, I suggested introing him to UJET – he resonated with the problem, as he’d recently been working on integrated customer support SDKs at his job as an engineering manager at Netflix. I was really pleased that he was able to join UJET as their CTO. Eli, Anand, Hisun (Anand’s co-founder) and the rest of the team all have great matching personalities, being laid back and at the top of their game in terms of tech expertise.

Today, UJET is launching out of stealth with with some great customers, including consumer apps and some big financial institutions. Anand has realized the first phase of his vision, and you’ll see in the video that I include below that the functionality UJET provides today is very compelling. But I’m even more psyched about their future product road-map and think the company can become much much bigger.

UJET is also announcing their funding today, from top investors including DCM and Resolute VC. Leading the Series A is Kleiner Perkins, with Ted Schlein joining the Board. Ted only makes about 1 investment per year, and has stepped up to be one of the main leaders at KPCB since John Doerr stepped back from day-to-day operations to become Chairman. It’s really exciting news and I can’t wait to see what’s still to come.

https://vimeo.com/216035492