What industry trends support the opportunity for Onymos?

Currently, when building an enterprise application, companies will have to leverage the time of many developers for 6 to 9 months in order to build integrations with hundreds of vendors to build the components necessary for that application. Once that application is built, developers then spend 30-50% of their time on maintaining the integrations with the various vendors each time that those APIs or SDKs change. Both the initial application building and the continual maintenance are major time sucks on an engineering team. This prevents them from being innovative on their next customer-facing product, and instead shifts focus to internal builds.

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There are a few “why nows” that we think drive the opportunity for Onymos:

• Digital transformation is necessary - Digital transformation is a term that has been on CEOs and CIOs minds for years. This digital transformation usually comes in the form of tools that allow enterprises to be much more efficient in business processes, allowing a cost reduction
• Engineering resources at legacy organizations are limited - However, to enact such a digital transformation, legacy enterprises need large teams to handle application development, data infrastructure, and other digitizations. These teams are hard to hire and retain, so giving these teams enterprise grade tools to build internal systems will be key to enabling and scaling digital transformation 
• COVID creates immediate needs - COVID has also become an accelerant for digital transformation. Not only in new processes that have to be managed with COVID (i.e. COVID vaccinations), but also in job shortages directly linked to COVID. Businesses have to find innovative ways to reduce costs with limited resources. This leads to immediate “hair on fire” problems that Onymos can solve to break into new customers and grow use cases

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How does Onymos address the problems of digital transformation, engineering resource scarcity and COVID-induced job shortages?

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In order to solve this problem, Onymos has developed Features-as-a-Service - these are general purpose pieces of an application that combine integrations with 1 or more vendors in order to bring a customer a completed solution that they can use to build an application. Onymos is the abstraction layer for application building. Rather than deal with integrations with hundreds of software vendors, Onymos allows customers to focus on building the business value of an application, while Onymos handles the integrations. Onymos then maintains the integrations with the software vendors even as they change/updated their APIs, and remove the customers’ need to maintain those integrations.

The main value prop that Onymos provides is a reduction in time spent by developers in two areas: 1) it reduces the time that it takes for developers to build a new application and they can move on to their next project much quicker, 2) it reduces the 30-50% of time that developers are spending on maintaining applications and allows them to focus their efforts on forward facing projects. In addition to the time spent by developers, customers are also finding quantifiable dollar ROIs in revenue or cost savings that come from the applications that are developed on Onymos. These ROIs are realized because customers are able to build, deploy, and get to market with these new applications quicker than they otherwise would without Onymos.

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Who would benefit most from Onymos’ offering?

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The initial use cases and industries for the product are within pharmacy and retail, where Onymos can provide components that fit needs anywhere from geofencing to character recognition/form intake to access management. However, given the fact that all industries deal with building these same components, we think that Onymos will be useful for industries like financial services and healthcare.

Onymos has already demonstrated that they can work with some of the largest enterprises in the world, like Walmart, CVS, and Albertsons, and we think that this success will continue to extend to the rest of the large retailers and pharmacies as well as large financial service players and healthcare giants, where similar problems of lack of large tech teams to deal with integrations and maintenance exist.

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How does Onymos fit into GPV’s investment profile?

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GPV has invested a few times in what we call the “integration layer” - companies that aggregate and obfuscate the manual work of integrating with a number of different vendors and allow their customers to use them as their single point of failure. We think that these businesses add a huge amount of value to the chain by allowing customers to focus on their business needs rather than integration needs; these businesses are also very sticky because they provide such an integral need.

These integration layers span all industries, from financial services to software to travel to hiring. From older exits like ITA and Apigee, to GPV’s exit in Even Financial, to more recent businesses that GPV has invested in like Onymos, Nowsta, and Strangeworks, examples of this integration layer have proven to be successful time and time again.

We first met Shiva - CEO and founder of Onymos through one of the investors in his Seed round, Ashmeet Sidana. We first spoke with him during that Seed raise, where the company was a bit too early for us as they built out their product. In December 2021, we circled back with Shiva to see where his progress was and were pleasantly surprised to see that not only had he completed the product, he had also launched with three marquee customers. After a few weeks of diligence, we were extremely excited to extend a term sheet and invest in the company!

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