Kenneth Paqvalén Chief Financial Officer, Matillion

Company

Founded in Cheshire, UK, Matillion solves a critical friction point in established companies accessing the power of the latest cloud data platforms and analytics tools.  As a truly cloud-native data integration solution, Matillion is the only platform designed to leverage all the unique capabilities and services in the major cloud data platforms. Matillion helps a new generation of workers unleash the untapped potential of their data.

Cloud based analytics is an exploding market and Matillion’s growth is in line with this meta shift.  The company has been international by design, serving the mid to enterprise market where the problem they solve is felt most acutely. The quality of their founding team, product and early revenue growth attracted the attention of Tier 1 global investors Battery, Sapphire Ventures and Scale Venture Partners.

Search Background

Significant commercial traction, international market focus and global investors have given Matillion an imperative to grow very quickly which required the founder to surround himself with people who had been on the commensurate journey in similar SaaS contexts.  The UK SaaS market, whilst evolving very quickly, is not yet a sufficiently large executive talent pool to rely upon on their journey to IPO scale.

Therefore, to support Matthew in building his team for scale, he engaged Erevena to draw upon their team across Europe and the US to hire his Chief Financial Officer, Chief Product Officer and Product Marketing team.

Requirements

Peter McCord, Matillion’s Co-Founder had been overseeing the role of CFO but was in the process of transitioning to a part time General Counsel role. Matillion is on a steep growth trajectory and at the time of the search had recently closed their Series-C funding round. They were looking to attract a CFO who would serve the company through its next phase of growth, through their next funding round and see the business scale beyond $100m+ ARR, and to potential IPO.

Result

After a cross border search in both the US and UK, Matillion secured Kenneth Paqvalen, formerly the CFO of MariaDB. Kenneth was CFO of Maria for seven years raising over $100m in venture funding and overseeing exponential international growth.

Subsequent to joining Matillion, Kenneth has been at the heart of successfully securing their $100m Series-D fundraise led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Scale Venture Partners.