Founder Interview: From SaaS MVP to $15M Series A — Lessons from NovaMetrics

NovaMetrics closed a $15M Series A after 18 months of focused execution. We spoke with CEO and co-founder Priya Kapoor about the company’s early decisions, go-to-market playbook, hiring priorities, and how she prepared the business for institutional rounds while maintaining product velocity.

Background

NovaMetrics builds analytics tooling for manufacturing operations, combining edge data ingestion with a lightweight SaaS analytics layer. The product began as a pilot tool deployed with two manufacturing partners to monitor process deviations and was quickly adopted across additional lines due to demonstrable downtime reductions.

On Finding Product-Market Fit

Priya emphasized the importance of starting with a narrow use case:

"We started with one clear pain: unplanned downtime in medium-sized assembly lines. Solving one problem well built trust; that trust scaled into adjacent use cases."

Her team focused intensely on the first three customers, iterating on installation friction and creating a deployment playbook that reduced time-to-value.

Hiring the First 20 People

Priya’s hiring priorities were pragmatic: two core engineers who owned data ingestion, a product manager, and three customer success leads with manufacturing domain experience. She advised founders to prioritize cross-functional hires early:

• Engineers comfortable with both firmware/adaptors and cloud APIs.
• Customer-facing hires who can translate technical constraints into commercial outcomes.
• A flexible operations hire to coordinate pilots and procurement logistics.

These hires helped NovaMetrics move from a consulting pilot model to a repeatable SaaS deployment within six months.

Sales Motion and Pricing

NovaMetrics adopted a pilot-to-contract model with clear commercial gateways: a paid pilot that converted into an annual contract upon achieving predefined KPIs. Pricing was anchored to value (reduction in downtime and increased throughput) rather than simple per-device fees — a strategy that boosted revenue per customer and aligned incentives.

Preparing for Series A

Preparation was deliberate. Priya outlined three priorities:

1. Document predictable unit economics and repeatable acquisition pathways.
2. Secure reference deployments with measurable outcomes to show prospective Series A investors.
3. Build an internal metrics dashboard showing retention, expansion, and sales cycle length.

She also stressed the importance of aligning the cap table to attract lead investors while retaining sufficient founder runway for growth execution.

Advice for Founders

• Focus on one high-value use case and scale horizontally only after achieving consistent KPIs.
• Be ruthless about product-market clarity; vagueness slows investor conviction.
• Negotiate term sheets with an eye toward long-term alignment, not short-term headline valuation.

Closing Thoughts

NovaMetrics’s journey shows that deep domain knowledge, paired with disciplined productization and a value-aligned pricing model, can accelerate early growth. Priya’s final advice to founders was simple and direct:

"Ship tightly, measure ruthlessly, and hire people who can remove friction for customers."

For founders in hardware-adjacent SaaS, the NovaMetrics playbook offers a replicable blueprint: begin with a measurable operational problem, validate via paid pilots, and scale with a pricing model tied to business outcomes.

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