Armed with $400 million for its latest fund announced today, Scale Venture Partners revealed plans to open up its internal software used to help keep its portfolio cloud startups growing.

The Foster City, California-based venture capital firm is showing an early preview of Scale Studio, a software platform it has been using for a couple of years to provide benchmarks and metrics for cloud business software providers.

It will be available in late summer on a free website where other startups can plug in their numbers and see how they’re rating, based on data from Scale’s own current and former portfolio companies, such as Box Inc., Soft Robotics Inc. (pictured) and DocuSign Inc. The platform provides information on measures such as sales and marketing efficiency relative to their revenue level, whether it’s $1 million or $10 million or $100 million, in particular for the companies Scale is focused on: business-to-business software-as-a-service companies.

Scale Studio also provides advice for how to improve the numbers if they’re below set goals or lower than peer companies, or where to spend more in successful areas. One example: the “ScaleVP Magic Number,” which measures the efficiency of customer acquisition. The Studio calculates that ratio and then helps companies decide how quickly to add sales representatives.

It also has metrics for appropriate growth rates at various stages, called “growth persistence,” and something borrowed from baseball called the “Mendoza Line,” that identifies a growth rate at each stage of a SaaS company below which it’s not on a sufficient trajectory. Down the road, the platform will extend beyond metrics and benchmarks to other areas.

“We’ve been talking about Scale as the firm to go to for expertise and know-how on how to scale companies,” partner Ariel Tseitlin said in an interview. “This is helping the community and giving us lift as being recognized as a company that can do this.”

Not least, it should provide a lot of new data — anonymized and aggregated, Tseitlin said — to help hone Scale’s models. “This is a long-term asset we want to be investing in,” he said. “We’re all very quantitative and analytical. Scale Studio is one manifestation of that.”

Future of work

As for the new fund, it’s aimed as the five previous funds were on companies looking to change the future of work. But as Scale sees portfolio companies such as Box and Textio Inc. increasingly turn to AI and machine learning to improve their products, the VC firm is also looking to invest more directly in cloud startups that use AI to make their applications more intelligent from the get-go.

In particular, it’s looking at companies that can identify new swaths of work activity that can be automated while also understanding when people still need to take an active role. For example, in its current portfolio, Textio offers an “augmented” writing platform and Unbabel melds human editing with machine learning in its online translation platform.

Scale partner Andy Vitus said in his own blog post that connected sensors will force a rethinking of computing, requiring data storage, networking and information processing to be reinvented “from the physical dirt up.”

One big driver, he said, is AI. “We believe there will not be another AI winter,” he said. “As an abundance of data meets near-infinite compute, the classical problems of artificial intelligence will be solved one by one.”

That also explains the interest in robotics startups such as Soft Robotics and Locus Robotics Inc., which depend heavily on machine learning in addition to specialized hardware. More than that, they also address Scale’s investing theme of transforming work. As Vitus notes, “Once software is able to comprehend the physical world, the logical next step is to enable systems to take action in the real world.”

Not least, security is another focus, for Tseitlin in particular, because there’s a huge shortage of security engineers, requiring new, more automated approaches. That’s all the more relevant because enterprise chief information security officers are often dealing with 20 or more different providers of security products that they need help managing, but they often don’t get what they want from so-called managed security service providers. Scale recently invested in Expel Inc.’s Series B round to help solve those issues.

Photo: Soft Robotics