You are Elena Sadurní, founder and chief executive of Rutalia, a Madrid software company that optimises routes and vehicle loading for mid-sized logistics operators. On 5 June your €5 million Series A reached the bank; on 30 June the board will approve an eighteen-month plan. Before anyone argues about speed, the board wants a diagnosis from you: is Rutalia ready to scale?
The situation
Rutalia is two years old, with eighteen people, twenty-two paying customers and €1.20M of annual recurring revenue (ARR). After the round it holds €5.4M in cash: forty-five months at the current spending rate, against a safety floor of twelve months the board itself has set. The lead investor, Bruno Vilanova of Sextante Ventures, now sits on that board and needs to multiply his money three to five times within five to seven years.
Vilanova proposes opening France, Italy and Portugal at once, hiring twenty people and lifting the commercial budget from €40k to €150k a month: €450k of monthly burn and about twelve months of cash, with no next round guaranteed. His argument has a name: Voxroute, a French competitor with the same product thesis, has just raised €15M. Your co-founder and chief technology officer, Iván Torroba, proposes stabilising first, rebuilding the platform (€600k, six to nine months) and entering France alone in month nine: €220k a month and about twenty-four months of cash.
The May incident report Torroba left on your desk tells another story: 99.2% real uptime against 99.9% promised by contract, and three critical incidents in the month. Each month 2.5% of customers leave, net revenue retention is 95%, winning back what it costs to acquire a customer takes fourteen months, and three customers hold 55% of ARR. The board's two indices, Product Health and Customer Health, stand at 30 and 38 out of 100.