Serial Entrepreneur, Marco Boerries, Talks Stealth Startups & Building His 4th Company At Disrupt Europe

Marco Boerries is CEO and founder of NumberFour – a startup that’s been operating in stealth for four years. Despite being under the radar, it landed a $38 million Series A, led by Index Ventures, back in June, one of the biggest Series A rounds in Europe in recent years. So how was a startup that’s not doing a lot of shouting about its product and potential able to bag such a big round. Speaking on stage here in Berlin, at Disrupt Europe, Boerries said it’s a measure of the size of the opportunity NumberFour is attacking.

NumberFour is building a platform that will provides productivity, communication, sales, production, procurement, delivery, reservation and financial tools for offline and online small businesses. The whole tech kit and kaboodle, as it were. It’s a massive market – some 200 million+ SMEs globally – and one Boerries argued is largely untapped.

“We have had over the last 30 years enterprise being completely computerised… But if you’re a small business – by which I mean one to 20 people – you don’t have really anyone to turn to. That’s why this market so far is, from our perspective, 80% open,” he said.

“Even if you look at companies like Intuit with QuickBooks… even though they’re by far the dominant leader in the U.S., the coverage of small businesses they have is around 20%. So the way I see it is around 80% of the world’s largest market untapped, and that’s what we’re trying to do. Helping them run their business.”

“This is probably the single biggest un-monetised, un-utilised technology opportunity existing today,” Boerries added. “When you think about this space, there are about a thousand companies that have tried to win the small business space. All of them have not really succeeded.”