Congratulating Lexity

We first met Amit Kumar in the summer of 2009. Amit had just left Yahoo! after leading one of the company’s hugely successful internal projects, SearchMonkey, which allowed developers and site owners to use structured data to make Yahoo! search results more useful and drive more relevant traffic to their sites. Amit had become well-known and highly respected for his technical chops at Yahoo!, and he had an idea to start his own company that would democratize web services (initially, advertising) for small businesses. Over time, Amit’s vision changed to providing solutions for an even bigger need for these customers: creating an e-commerce cloud that would provide small businesses with an affordable, effective solution to power the back-end of their e-commerce businesses. The company he wanted to build would become Lexity, now a leading platform for helping small businesses grow.

We got excited about Amit’s vision, and in addition to Om knowing Amit, another Founder in the True portfolio, Jasper Malcolmson, Founder and CEO of Bloomspot (acquired by Groupon), called us to tell us that Amit had been “by far the best engineer and team lead” he had ever worked with. People and relationships are everything to us at True, and we trust those closest to us—our Founders—to lead us to other brilliant and creative entrepreneurs. This was no exception, and after meeting Amit, we knew we had to be involved in his then oversubscribed seed round (which became oversubscribed over the course of one day). True led the round in October 2009, and we were joined in the B round later by our good friends at Spark Capital.

Over the past four years, Lexity has grown from a brilliant yet tangible idea to a product servicing companies like Desk.com/SalesForce.com, TheFind, Olark and Optimizely. Amit built a stellar team, with executives from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Intuit, and he has a deep technical background and a proven track record of conceiving groundbreaking ideas, building highly motivated, effective, cross-functional teams and delivering award-winning products.

Today we are pleased to congratulate Amit and his team as they head back to Yahoo!. Of course we are going to miss Amit at our Founder Camps and True Universities, but we are excited by the possibilities Amit and his team will help create at Yahoo! as they join CEO Marissa Mayer to transform the Internet giant.

Amit and the entire Lexity team: Congratulations!