Just last year, Ardoq raised a $125M Series D led by One Peak and EQT Growth — making history as one of the five largest private funding rounds by a Norwegian tech business.

Lauren Sharman, Head of Platform, One Peak, sat down with Erik Bakstad, Co-Founder & CEO to learn more about Erik’s personal founder journey building Ardoq into a market leading SaaS platform helping companies navigate digital transformation, and what’s next as Ardoq continues to grow its footprint globally.

Watch the video recording here or read the conversation transcript below (edited for clarity).

1. Erik, to start, what initially seeded your interest in digital transformation and what ultimately led you to found Ardoq to solve for this problem space?

I think we discovered it like most problems. We were working in large financial institutions, large telco providers, and we were seeing this constant stream of projects that failed — digital transformation projects that either ran over time, over cost, or had a high-risk profile. That was not what the executives signed up for. And I think that was really the inspiration: trying to solve a pain point that we felt ourselves.

My co-founder worked in the largest bank in Norway, and he noticed this problem when he was put on a project to change one of the largest ledger systems in a bank, which is like performing heart surgery. Every single time, he was trying to figure out if he had the full architecture in place, because you need that in order to make a change. There was always a new system popping up. There was always something they didn’t know about. And so he started basically using Excel spreadsheets to track all these things and realized that that’s very kind of structured data, and you can use it to visualize and gradually create a digital twin of the organization or the architecture you’re trying to change.

He then created a prototype and showed it to me. We were working in the same company at the time, and I had exactly the same problem. So that’s kind of how we got started. And then we spent six months on late nights and weekends coding up a solution. I guess at the time we didn’t have a clue about anything around go-to-market, so we just created a thing we needed ourselves, and that’s how it started.

2. That’s a really interesting founding story. And it’s quite an interesting inflection point for this market. As you know, LeanIX recently got acquired by SAP making Ardoq the only independent enterprise architecture SaaS business of scale globally. Tell us a bit more about why prospective customers use Ardoq and what use cases they typically start with.

Companies transform for different reasons. For example, there might be competitive dynamics requiring them to offer a better user experience for their customers. But the thing you need to know when you’re making any type of change is: where do I start? What do I have? How are things connected? And that’s what people use Ardoq for.

The big difference between Ardoq and a lot of incumbents in the space is that we have a data-driven approach. Before, architects created these massive architectural diagrams and had to maintain thousands and thousands of systems, connections, integrations and so on, and it wasn’t uncommon that you had dedicated rooms where they basically had these massive architectural diagrams on the wall to try to figure out what the impact of any change is. They ended up spending more time maintaining their diagrams than actually advising the business on what the scenarios are and how best to modernize.

That’s why people buy Ardoq. It’s a platform to rapidly help them collect the data from the people that are the experts, you can then visualize the data so you understand the impact, and then you can also analyze it over time and run scenario analysis, and so on. It’s basically a modern data-driven solution — a cloud-based SaaS. It’s both a novel approach but also a modern solution for a space that has been pretty legacy in terms of the providers out there.

3. You’ve mentioned how your enterprise architecture helps an enterprise’s IT structure to achieve its business goals through those various examples. Can you tell us more about your unique graph-based model and how it brings insights to life for businesses?

Yeah, absolutely. Historically, a lot of the platforms in this market have been based on a relational database structure, so we decided to use a graph. The reason for that is a graph has a relationship as a first-class construct. And when you’re making any type of change, you need to understand the impact of those changes, not only the first order impact, but the third and fourth and fifth order impacts.

A typical example is what happens if a server crashes? Well, you know what systems are on that server, but then what are the business processes, and who are the people, and eventually what are the revenue streams that might be impacted?

A graph database is extremely good at being able to predict, and not just predict but analyze those impacts. So that’s the reason we picked it. Another reason is it also allows you to aggregate so you can roll up data. Say that you have a systems landscape of a couple hundred applications, and you want to understand what is the overall cost or risk of one department’s IT portfolio? We can use a graph to roll that information up for instance. So there are a lot of good reasons for using a graph — that’s why we picked this solution. It’s been a really good architectural choice for us.

4. I understand that you’ve always put customer feedback front and center in your product development and launches. Can you tell us a little bit more about Ardoq Labs, your new innovation hub, that brings customers even more front and center?

Being a SaaS solution, one of the big benefits that we have is that we can run multiple experiments at the same time. We can use feature toggling, which means turning on and off different features for different customers. That’s something we’ve done since we started, and what we noticed was if we released early and we launched the solution to a select few customers and then created different versions for different customers, we got a lot of really good feedback that we then brought into the product.

With Ardoq Labs, we’re formalizing that program even more, and we’re launching experiments as quickly as we can to the market to get early feedback. And it’s been really cool now with this wave of AI initiatives where there’s so many different use cases. Ardoq Labs is a testing ground where we don’t make any promises that this will actually make the eventual roadmap, but it allows us to test and really bring the customers into the development process, which they like because they’re techies usually.

So that’s Ardoq Labs, and so far we’ve had a lot of customers that are signing up, and we’re getting a ton of additional input, feedback, and feature requests, and so on. All in all, it’s been very, very positive. I guess the only thing you have to be careful with these things is also to do expectation management, because we don’t want a customer to necessarily drive the roadmap, because we also have a lot of internal ideas we want to execute on.

5. You mentioned AI as a part of these key developments. Can you tell us more about how developments in AI are impacting your product and also benefiting your internal work at Ardoq more broadly?

In the product, there are some very low-hanging fruit that we can use, especially for a couple examples. One thing you have to do when you’re mapping out your current systems landscape is to have descriptions and data about your systems. If you have Salesforce and you are on the technology side, you might not know what that system is. You can generate these descriptions using AI, and you basically reduce a lot of the cumbersome work that you have to do when you’re maintaining these type of landscapes.

Other examples might be in architecture, where there are certain patterns that you want to ensure that you use, that are proven to have certain scalability properties. We can use AI to scan the entire application landscape and find out whether our systems are not adhering to these patterns, which could be a risk. Automating a lot of the analysis is another use case. There’s a lot of those in the product that we’re excited about testing.

In terms of the internal ones, we’re a B2B enterprise software vendor. That means that when we sell, we have to do RFQs and we have to answer RFPs — it’s very time-consuming. So we’re also building up our own internal algorithms for automating a lot of that process, which saves a lot of time for our salespeople. We’re also doing a lot of security questionnaires where we have to answer to different security standards, different frameworks, and so on. A lot of that work can be automated, and that’s why we’re building up our internal competency for doing that. And another example is on the support side, building up essentially a customized LMS for answering questions about best practices. We’re basically feeding it with our knowledge base and building that AI to help our customers. Those are just some things we’re doing with it. It’s early days — you know things are going to go really, really fast here. It’s exciting and a bit scary.

6. Thinking about Ardoq’s evolution — you founded Ardoq in 2013 as Chief Technology Officer. And you were a Chief Product Officer as well before taking on the CEO mandate over the past few years. And speaking of change, a lot has changed in that timeframe. Now you have 170 employees globally across a number of different office locations. How do you maintain Ardoq’s culture that’s made it as strong as it is today, as you bring in so many different people from very different backgrounds?

I think culture in a company is something that changes, and you need to look at it as something that has to be maintained, but also something that is dynamic. Values and principles, however — that’s something that doesn’t change that often.

One way to build a strong culture is to be very direct and clear on what the principles and values are that you want to have in the company, and then articulate them and actually use them actively when you’re making difficult decisions. That’s probably one of the big lessons learned for me.

One of our principles is that we want to be as transparent as possible. But also, sometimes if we can’t talk about something, then let’s be open about that as well, because we basically have smart people working for us and they need context to make their decisions. So that’s just one principle that we’ve set, and I believe that we really live by it. And then culture comes out of that.

I would say in terms of values, our values are that we want to be bold, caring and driven. There’s this kind of dichotomy between being caring and being very driven. You can’t only be on one side of that spectrum, because in that case, you might create a culture where it can be a bit toxic. But at the same time, you can’t only be caring because we’re a high-performing company. We want to be delivering results and to be competitive. I often talk about how we’re more like a professional soccer team than a family. In a family you have to deal with a lot of dysfunction. Sometimes that’s not going to go in a company. So those are a couple of ways that we’ve built our culture.

7. You’ve also built on your growth with some key hires. You recently brought on board a great go-to-market all-female leadership team, with Helen Sutton joining a CRO and Monica Visconti-Patel as CMO. How did you go about selecting your go-to-market leaders and which criteria did you prioritize?

We used a company to help us with the search, but the thing we were very clear about was that we wanted somebody that had done technical product sales before. We have a platform, so it needed to be somebody that had taken a platform to market before. We also wanted somebody that had gone through both a scaling journey, but also had experience from larger companies because we’re selling into very complex organizations — and you have to have that experience. That was some of the criteria we were looking for. On the marketing side, we also wanted somebody that had a performance marketing background. We want to make sure that we’re targeting the right channels and that we get ROI on those investments. That was really important for us, and both Helen and Monica have that in spades, so it’s been really, really fun.

8. That’s great to hear. As we close, do you have any news that you’d like to share, perhaps around product development or expansion plans, or any other closing thoughts for anyone interested in continuing to follow Ardoq’s journey?

Yeah, absolutely. On the product side, we’re practicing continuous deployment, releasing six to ten times a day, and there’s a product newsletter which people can sign up to and follow. We have some really exciting new features coming around as I mentioned, but also this idea of a connected architecture, helping large organizations start maybe in one business division and then use that insight into the next one as they continue mapping their systems architecture. So that’s coming, and that’s basically our 2024 roadmap.

We’re also hiring — so if you want to join a B2B scale-up then we have an Ardoq.com career page. There are a lot of open roles there, especially on the go-to-market side, which is super exciting.

Continue to follow Ardoq’s journey here you can find the latest news and open roles on their site.