<aside> 💡 Under Embargo until 9:00 AM CET Paris, February 28th, 2023
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Paris, February 28th, 2023: Cycle, the product management platform that connects customer feedback to product delivery workflows, today announces it has raised a $6M seed funding round led by Boldstart with the participation of eFounders, Base Case, The 20VC Fund, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Hummingbird Ventures, and 60 operator angels among which product leaders at Meta, Stripe, Google, and Dropbox. The product, which has been in private beta for the last three years, is now available to the public.
Cycle was founded in 2019 by Mehdi Boudoukhane within eFounders – the startup studio that has launched several successful SaaS companies, including Front, Aircall, and Spendesk – with a mission to reinvent product management from the ground up.
“As a product manager, I always felt frustrated not because I was lacking tools but rather because I was overwhelmed with so many of them. I was thinking to myself: Designers have Figma ; Engineers have GitHub ; Why is it that I’m still getting lost in tabs to get my most basic work done?”
Mehdi Boudoukhane, founder & CEO at Cycle
The idea behind Cycle was born out of Mehdi’s frustrations with the tools that were available to him when he was working as a product manager. His main challenge was that product information tended to be scattered across many different places. He was lacking a single source of truth for all things product so he decided to build one with eFounders.
“Product management is at the core of everything we do at the startup studio eFounders. We love shipping extraordinary products like Front or Spendesk but behind the scenes it's usually a mess. Three years ago, after trying every product management tool out there, we decided to join forces with Mehdi, Cycle's CEO, to end the chaos and build our very own platform. Cycle was born.”
Thibaud Elzière, co-founder of eFounders
To co-create the future of product management, Cycle has brought on some of the world’s best product leaders as business angels: Scott Belsky (Founder at Behance), Shreyas Doshi (ex-Product Lead at Stripe), Kelton Lynn (Director of Product Management at Google), Youcef Es-skouri (Head of Product at Dropbox), Omar Pera (Product Lead at Meta), David Hoang (VP Design at Webflow), Jonathan Widawski (CEO at Maze), Mark Pundsack (ex-VP Product at GitLab), Antoine Martin (Founder at Zenly), Marie Gassée (ex-VP Growth at Confluent), Mary Nelson (CCO at Aircall), Olivia Teich (ex-Product Director at Dropbox), David Apple (ex-Head of Sales & Customer Success at Notion), Eric Wittman (ex-CRO at Figma), Sriram Krishnan (ex-Head of Growth at Tinder), Jeremy Le Van (Founder at Sunrise), Brad Menezes (ex-Director of Product at Datadog), Guy Podjarny (Founder at Snyk), Nick Candito (Co-founder at Flatfile), Romain David (ex-Product Manager at Uber), Kyle Parrish (VP Sales at Figma), and many others.
We’ve entered a new era of software development. As people have easy access to amazing products everywhere in their lives, they now demand much more of the tools they use at work. The bar for user experience has increased and it caused the center of power to shift from the sales org to the product org. Product-led growth has become existential for software companies.