Exclusive: Utah's Voze raises $12M to expand heavy industry sales software

The intrigue: Heavy industry is a huge segment of the U.S. economy, but it has long been underserved by the tech sector, Voze founder Dan Caffee told Axios.

• That has left a big untapped market for tech developers who understand the norms of those older, more hands-on business cultures, Caffee said.

What they're saying: "You can't really just be an interloper, right?" he said. "If you're going to work with these industries, you need to commit to it and put in the time and the effort to understand them."

Case in point: Voze was born out of Caffee's experience with the trucking industry — where buying and selling large, expensive equipment generally involves face time and relationship-building, and products are inspected in person.

• Tech companies, by contrast, tend to do business remotely, he said — and many don't have enough exposure to other industries to anticipate their needs.
• "When you're designing software for other software guys, who are just calling and making sales, versus people who are out there on the road — that's a very different sales process," Caffee said.

How it works: Because sales teams in heavy industry are so often on the road, tasks like managing schedules, optimizing routes and collecting notes from IRL meetings can gobble up time and resources.

• Voze's platform digitizes and automates a lot of that work, collects sales data and helps manage business communications, Caffee said.

Zoom in: Origin Ventures and Mercury co-led Voze's Series A round, joined by Album VC and Pipeline Capital Partners.

• Album and Pipeline, which were also behind Voze's $3M seed round last year, are both Utah companies.

• Though Origin is based in Chicago, the partner who led the deal is based in Park City.

Between the lines: Both funding rounds leveraged Utah's tightly connected and rapidly -growing network of tech developers and venture capital funds.

• In 2021, Utah VC funds produced more than $4 billion in deal value — more than double the previous year, according to a report by Innosphere Ventures, a nonprofit startup incubator.
• Meanwhile, Provo and Salt Lake were ranked among the fastest-growing job markets in digital services in recent years.
• That's helping startups here gain traction with investors elsewhere, Caffee said.

The bottom line: "Venture capital has noticed Utah," he said. "So in addition to all the funds that we have here, a lot of bigger, prestigious funds from outside the state are anxious to make moves to invest in Utah companies. … In the past five years, it's really just exploded."