Yonder provides intelligent solutions for operations manuals, guidelines, regulations and standards. It leverages the full potential of digitalization by offering companies a solution built around dynamic content rather than static documents, creating a modern, user-centric experience.

In its Seed round in 2019, Yonder set its sights on the aviation industry as its primary market, with long term plans to expand into other markets. The COVID-19 pandemic however turned things on their head and, with most airplanes grounded, Yonder suddenly found itself with a rapidly emptying pipeline. Many startups would have folded under such dire circumstances, but Yonder did not only pull through, but managed to significantly increase its recurring revenue over the last two years.

“The pandemic actually helped us spread out faster into other industries.”

Last we heard from Yonder, it was in summer 2019, when the company had its Seed round which Verve Ventures was a part of. At that time, your focus was on aviation. Less than a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic came and brought the aviation industry to a grinding halt. What did this mean for Yonder?

First of all, it meant a very empty pipeline, because a lot of projects were canceled or delayed indefinitely. This forced us to make a lot of changes in our company. We stopped hiring, we had to cut back on a few things, but the main thing was that we had to expand outside of aviation faster than we had planned. Because from the very beginning, we were thinking of creating a product that is industry agnostic. In that respect, the pandemic actually helped us spread out faster into other industries.

How did you make it happen in such a short time span?

In those crazy months of 2020, we intensified our business development activities, to identify other suitable industries that have the same problem. We had some success with the critical infrastructure segment that’s everything from the energy sector to police forces and military organizations and started generating the first customers in those markets. In this way, we signed our first customers outside aviation. What was interesting to see was that after about a couple of months of the pandemic, some of the airlines started realizing they now had time to think about digitization. So we still closed a fair number of big aviation deals with the likes of TUI Group and Cargolux in 2020 and 2021.

Internationalization doesn’t seem to be an issue for Yonder. You’ve managed to sign some big customers like TUI Group and Cargolux outside of Switzerland already. What makes it easier for you?

The reason it isn’t an issue for us is because the first industry we launched into was aviation. Aviation is a global business and people are used to working with companies from all over the world. The same is true for the energy sector. Companies like Swissgrid are national electricity grid operators, but you can’t manage electricity in Switzerland without talking to France, Germany, Austria, Italy. On top of that, before we founded Yonder, one of my co-founders, Marc Rauch, and I were scaling sales and operations on a global scale for Xovis in the airport industry. So we know how to answer tenders internationally, how to set up contracts taking into consideration international law and all these kinds of things.

You talked about expanding into new markets. Are there any markets in particular you’re interested in branching out into?

For the time being, besides aviation, we see a lot of interest in what we call first responders, so police, armed forces, fire brigades. These are areas where we have a lot of in-house knowledge. We have people who serve as firemen in the active reserve fire system, people who served in the armed forces, people who led organizations close to the police forces in the past. This, I think, gives us some traction in these sectors.

But what is interesting is that we have quite a lot of enterprise sales channels in the pipeline that are very interested in working with us as well. They want to sell their products to enterprise customers with the right software bundles already available for certain use cases. I think that shows that the solution itself creates some kind of resonance in the wider market and that’s a big confirmation for me that going industry agnostic is the right way.

When you started out, you were outsourcing your software development. But you’ve since moved on to your own development team. What made you decide to make the change?

We started with development outsourcing because we didn’t have a lot of time. There are two ways to create a software company: one is to sleep in the server room and do everything by yourself and pray that somebody is going to buy it. The other is to go out into the market and sell something you don’t have. When somebody says I’m going to buy it, then you go and build it. And that’s what we did. Because we had to keep to very tight deadlines, we didn’t have time to set up our own team so we outsourced the work to an agency we knew in Zurich. But as we grew, we realized we needed to build our product in-house.

Our development team has now grown to about 15 engineers and it has allowed us to build new features considerably faster.  Having developers in-house also means that they are focused only on our product and best understand it and what the market needs. For example, we are going to release a new file drop functionality in a few weeks that will allow users to add PDF documents that change daily such as briefing packages and meal lists to Yonder and view them side by side with fully digital documents. This is a real game changer because PDFs are still very common and a lot of people don’t see the value of creating modularized documents for things that change every day.

I saw that one of the things you will be doing soon is refactoring your product which means you’ll be cleaning up the code, right? Why is that necessary? 

Because of the simple fact that technology always changes. When we started in 2019, a few functions that we see in today’s iPads weren’t available yet. For example, the spotlight search, voice recognition, voice commands, things like this. If you don’t refactor, then you can’t make use of these features. And at some point, your software becomes obsolete, just because people can’t do what they expect to on an iPad. Refactoring doesn’t mean building something new, but performing a sort of maintenance, ensuring your product is still up to date.

There are solutions on the market that offer broader features for things like compliance, governance and risk management. Why should companies choose Yonder that focuses on one particular issue?

That’s a question we often hear when we pitch our solution. They say, well, SharePoint has a workflow, why do we need another solution? Well, if you want to use SharePoint and just have a huge cemetery of files, go ahead. We do something very specific for controlled documents, and we have no intention of replacing SharePoint.

You’re dealing with highly regulated industries. This often means very long sales cycles. How does this affect Yonder’s revenue streams?

That’s one of the key problems that you have when you start out in the enterprise segment. Many of the markets we want to serve are very close to the public sector. That means you need to tender, decisions take very long and there can often be delays and all this can translate into long sales cycles and delayed revenues. We started to compensate for this by investing in marketing automation with a system where we buy leads and go broad with campaigns. It will need time to actually trickle down into sales qualified leads, but we’ve built up the system, we hired a B2B marketing person who has experience with building these types of campaigns. I don’t think this will shorten the duration of the sales cycle, but I expect the number of sales qualified leads to go up.

Yonder has had a difficult journey so far but has managed to come out on top. What makes Yonder such a resilient company?

When we talk about strength, there’s nothing harder than onboarding an international airline during the pandemic, completely remote. But I think the reason we could do this is because we have all the skills required both on the technical and the commercial side.  Marc and I are more on the commercial side, we know how to deal with airplane manufacturers and how to close a tender in the Middle East because of our past experience in the sector. On the technical side, we have built a diverse team of engineers who enjoy talking to each other and solving problems.

Furthermore, I would call our leadership “no-nonsense”. We don’t hide bad news, we call things what they are.. We started out with four guys and now we’re 33 so we reorganized the company if and when required, and we did so without leaving people behind. And I think that’s a big strength.

The last is our capital efficiency. We are crisis children. We were faced with the hardest possible challenges in our early days as a startup due to the pandemic and now due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. We not only overcame those challenges, but we managed to get by with the funding we had regardless of the situation. And we are also confident that we can be diligent with additional funding and reach new heights with the next rounds. I’m proud of this personally, what we could do with the money and the people during really hard economic times in aviation.