About ONSET

Neehar Giri

Founder and Vice President, Product
Nextance, Inc.
Redwood City, CA
ONSET Ventures sponsor: Terry Opdendyk

The three founders of Nextance – Neehar Giri, Nathan Krishnan and Ganesh Ramachandran – had professional and personal ties for some time before founding Nextance in March 2000. They had often talked about starting a company together, but it wasn't until Neehar went to work at Clarify – a successful ONSET Ventures portfolio company in the customer relationship management (CRM) business – and Nathan and Ganesh had formed a company called Transcend that everything came together. It was at that point in time that all three of them became acutely aware of the challenge big companies faced managing their contracts and intellectual property.

At Clarify, Neehar worked directly with sales and service contracts and at Transcend, one of the company's projects for a large toy manufacturer involved royalty and licensing contracts. "We all learned about the significant pain around this problem because our customers talked about it all the time," says Neehar. "It was a real eye-opener and that led us to develop a concept for an enterprise software product that we believed would address the pain."

Enter ONSET Ventures and Mark Hilderbrand. "Even though we had no business plan and no well-defined business strategy, Mark thought the idea had promise," says Neehar. "But first we had to prove we had a market."

With ONSET's guidance, hands-on assistance and seed money, the three founders and two ONSET partners interviewed about 150 companies. Out of that market validation research came Nextance, a company that delivers enterprise-wide solutions for contracts, intellectual property and procurement management.

"Without ONSET, we wouldn't have been able to get Nextance off the ground as quickly as we did," says Neehar. "We worked out of ONSET's offices, they helped us do the market validation research and they helped us find an experienced CEO."

"When ONSET funded us, they also gave us legitimacy," says Neehar. "All of a sudden it didn't seem so far-fetched that three technical guys could start a successful company."