Key Intelligence Insight
Acq. February 6, 2026 (by Daizy) • $16M Total funding raised • Founded 2018 • ~42 employees (peak, Jan 2025) • ~15 employees at acquisition
Next Matter built the right product for a real, underserved category -- operations orchestration for regulated environments -- and navigated a market where generalist platforms were expanding rapidly into adjacent spaces. Daizy's acquisition sharpens the focus: financial services and adjacent regulated sectors, where switching costs are high, compliance requirements are demanding, and the combined product has a credible and specific moat.
Founding Story
Jan Hugenroth, a former McKinsey operations expert, founded Next Matter in 2018 on a specific operational insight: enterprises in regulated environments don't need more workflow automation. They need operations orchestration -- the structured coordination of people, processes, handoffs, and compliance checkpoints that keeps high-stakes operations running without failure.
The distinction was precise. Zapier connects SaaS tools. Make builds visual workflows. Next Matter managed the operational layer: task assignment, cross-departmental orchestration, visibility into running processes, auditability at every step. The product was built for organisations where operations can't fail.
Product
Next Matter's enterprise orchestration and automation platform combines workflow automation, task management, and cross-departmental coordination into a single purpose-built system for operations teams.
The core value proposition: pilots live in weeks, adoption in days, compliance by design, IT approved. Where generalist automation platforms require significant configuration to approximate operations management, Next Matter shipped operations-specific templates for common high-stakes scenarios -- contract signing, payment processing, compliance workflows -- out of the box.
The platform serves regulated environments specifically. Financial disruptors like Trade Republic rolled out new processes in weeks while maintaining compliance standards. Global firms like Ocorian fully digitised complex fund administration with end-to-end automation. Retail leaders like OBI launched production-ready process prototypes in days.
Pricing starts at $7,500 per month platform fee, plus $49 per user per month, plus $1 per workflow run over 10,000 runs per month. Two tiers: Enterprise (book a demo) and Enterprise Custom (talk to sales). The pricing structure reflects an enterprise-only motion -- no self-serve, no freemium.
In February 2026, the Next Matter platform and business was acquired by Daizy. The platform continues to operate as usual, with existing workflows, implementations, and client relationships in place.
Market, Competition & Business Performance
Market
The business process automation and workflow automation markets are projected to reach $65–80 billion combined by 2030, representing 18–22% CAGR. Next Matter targeted a narrower slice: operational efficiency automation for enterprises in regulated environments. The company's original TAM framing was $3 trillion in operational efficiency in the US alone -- a figure that reflected the genuine scale of the operations problem it was solving.
The broader market growth is real. What changed over Next Matter's lifecycle was how aggressively the generalist platforms moved into operations-adjacent territory.
Competition
Next Matter competed at the intersection of three market segments, each with well-capitalised incumbents moving quickly.
Zapier owns workflow automation with 7,000+ integrations -- the largest ecosystem of any automation platform. The compounding dynamic: every SaaS platform integrates with Zapier first, which means operations teams typically encounter Zapier before they encounter Next Matter. As Zapier expanded into operations-adjacent templates, it shifted the evaluation question -- a structural market dynamic that affected the entire specialist tier, not just Next Matter.
Make (formerly Integromat) targets power-user operations teams with a visual workflow builder and sophisticated multi-step logic. More affordable than Zapier for complex workflows, it competed for the same audience with lower-friction onboarding.
Workato owns enterprise at the mission-critical tier -- role-based access, security architecture, IT procurement relationships, and training infrastructure. Next Matter competed below that threshold, serving organisations sophisticated enough for purpose-built operations software and operating in environments where Workato's procurement overhead wasn't yet justified.
Microsoft Power Automate extended the competitive surface through enterprise licensing: RPA capabilities bundled into existing Microsoft relationships that operations teams could access without a separate procurement decision.
The market dynamic that mattered most: integration surface area. Generalist platforms built network effects through ecosystem breadth that deepened over time, creating a structural tailwind that specialist platforms had to compete against with depth rather than breadth.
Business Model
Next Matter operated an enterprise-only SaaS model with no self-serve motion. Platform fee of $7,500 per month, per-seat pricing at $49 per user per month, and consumption-based pricing at $1 per workflow run above 10,000 monthly runs. Go-to-market was inbound-led with distribution bets on enterprise channels including Microsoft's Marketplace, where Next Matter listed its workflow automation offering.
The pricing model required a full sales cycle and procurement process -- appropriate for the product's complexity and the regulated environments it served.
Traction
The $16M Series A in June 2022, led by OMERS Ventures, validated the category at the time of raise: 25% month-on-month growth, 344% quarterly MAU growth, and enterprise customers reporting 90% resource savings on operations indicated genuine product-market fit.
Headcount reflected the subsequent market conditions. 42 employees at the start of January 2025, approximately 15 by January 2026 as the company optimised ahead of the acquisition. The Microsoft Marketplace listing was last updated January 17, 2026 -- three weeks before the acquisition announcement.
Daizy acquired the platform and business on February 6, 2026. Core Next Matter leadership -- including the CEO and COO -- transferred to Daizy, ensuring continuity of the product and the institutional knowledge of regulated environments it serves.
Jan Hugenroth, Founder: "Next Matter was built for organisations where operations need to work, every day, without compromise. Daizy understands that context and brings the long-term mindset and technical depth that clients depend on."
Deborah Yang, CEO of Daizy: "Next Matter is a strong operational platform used in environments where trust and precision are non-negotiable. We're excited to support the product and thoughtfully explore how AI can enhance operational workflows over time."