On the heels of Justt’s B Round, bringing their funding to a total of $70 million, I am excited to reflect on this investment and the path to hyper-growth.
The Justt & F2 Story
Our investment in Justt is a story of radical focus, teamwork, and ultimately for me — the willingness to throw yourself on a sword for what you believe in.
When the Justt co-founders, Ofir Tahor and Roenen Ben Ami, first came in and presented their chargeback mitigation platform, I was smitten. This seemed like a company with a clear product-market-fit that could scale and become a market leader. However, the excitement from the meeting lasted only a couple of minutes, as soon after, my team members began expressing serious doubts- is this market big enough? is the product too niche?
With two term sheets already on their table, and an investment team with doubts on mine, I knew that if I wanted Justt to be F2’s next portfolio company, I would have to act, and fast.
What came next was three sleepless nights and coffee fueled days of market validation, gathering opinions from industry experts, competitive landscape research, and a ton of front & back channel due diligence. Then came sitting with each F2 investment team member until they were won over by the feedback — a testimony to a team open and willing to listen and adapt.
Ultimately, despite the obstacles, I was ready and willing to do everything in my power to make it happen.
This entire experience taught me the most important lesson for a young professional entering the VC world- when you believe in a company and see something others may not, do not let challenges get in the way and be willing to pound the table to get that deal done.
Now on to what gave me conviction in Justt, and how they have managed to grow and scale so quickly in their first year.
Why Justt
Justt is a solution that addresses one of — if not the — most pressing problem for ecommerce merchants in their payments stack: chargebacks. A chargeback is a charge that is returned to the customer after successfully disputing a purchase, but it turns out over 85% of these chargebacks are illegitimate due to the antiquated system that’s vastly skewed in favor of customers over merchants.
Until today, merchants did not have the time, resources, or skills to dispute chargebacks and treated these huge losses as a cost of doing business, leaving a fortune of their money on the table- $125 billion by some counts.
That is where Justt comes in, providing merchants with the weapon they need to fight unfair chargebacks leveraging deep expertise and smart tools to gather the most compelling evidence and submit it on behalf of merchants. The result is a machine learning solution that is fully hands-off and customizable for any merchant across any industry.
Why Now?
Chargebacks have always been a severe pain point, but they have never been more prevalent than now, as COVID-19 continues to dramatically increase eCommerce growth. With rapid digitalization and more merchants moving online, “friendly fraud” presents a large market of around $125 billion and growing, a market that is still highly fragmented with no dominant player.
Enter Justt: with its success-based fee and its 90% success rate, it is not hard to understand why this company has managed to scale so rapidly.
What is surprising, as well as a testimony to the company’s values and culture, is their ability to go from 0 to over 100 employees mid-pandemic, and in the most competitive landscape of talent we have ever experienced in the tech ecosystem. And if you ever visit the Justt office, you will very quickly realize these aren’t just employees, they are team members who are passionate about their product, and proud of their work.
Why Them?
Founded by two tech industry veterans, Ofir and Roenen, this is a team that is not only technically strong, but has the right outlook, tools, and experience to create and scale an incredible business. Add in their executives from Stripe, Amazon, and Google, and I am hard pressed to think there is anyone else with as deep a level of payments infrastructure know-how quite like this executive team.
The sky’s the limit for Justt as the opportunities in this market are only expanding. With an ARR growing at a record rate of 200% and a headcount that’s increased over 25-fold since January 2021, Justt is positioned to lead the post-transaction services market.
F2 could not be more excited to support and back Justt on this wild and riveting journey to the top.
