E8 | Nectar, Saleo, Grayscale, TruckerCloud, Curricula
Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.
My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures.
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Company Coming Up:
Nectar, a TechStars Atlanta 21’ company, helps real estate entrepreneurs scale with cash flow financing. Here is how it works: accredited investors invest in the Nectar Fund that yield 12-15% annual dividends. Nectar finds and works with the best and most proven short term rental entrepreneurs to help them grow their real estate portfolio and operation. These real estate investors are mostly proven AirBnB hosts with over 3 years of operating experience. This company is led by two Co-founders, Brittany Mosley and Derrick Barker. Both are Harvard graduates with extensive real estate and finance background. Keep an eye out for this company coming up and check out their website linked in the show notes.
Product of the Week:
This week we’re highlighting Saleo led by Justin McDonald. Saleo empowers sales reps to build interactive and customized demos. As sales reps across the world give demos of their company’s product, it is really hard to deliver an accurate, customized demo filled with rich data without the help of an engineer – which is timely and expensive. Saleo’s software fixes this. There are several companies spawning in this early market and Saleo is making a fantastic splash with their entry. They recently raised their seed round. This market is one to follow in the upcoming months and years.
Events To Put on the Calendar:
The Jewish Business Network is hosting some top notch folks on July 25th at Chabad Intown, right across the street from Ponce City Market. Investors from Phoenix Capital, Overline, Joule, and Overtime will be sharing their thoughts and perspectives on the current state of fundraising and valuations. It is $18 to attend and the link is in the show notes.
Companies Worth Applying To:
We mentioned them in episode one, but I just caught up with Ty Abernethy of Grayscale and they are hiring for senior positions in just about every category: VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, VP of Product, and more. Grayscale improves recruiting with SMS. Customers including Amazon, Wayfair, and hundreds of others use them to streamline communication with applicants and maintain a tight process when it comes to recruiting in high-volume industries.
Another early stage company hiring in Customer Success is TruckerCloud. This company is led by their CEO, Spencer Mitchell, and originated out of the Rule1 Ventures Studio. TruckerCloud connects any fleets’ Electronic Logging Device (or ELD) data to any application with the use of their API. The product is scaling and customer success is needed. Give them search and click.
Acquisitions in the Air:
It was announced this week that Nick Santora, the CEO of Curricula, sold his company to Huntress, the managed security platform for SMB’s. Nick and his team started Curricula back in 2015 as a security awareness training platform. Instead of the boring, check the box, traditional training software, Nick focused on fun, storytelling techniques, to captivate employees’ attention and provide a superior education. In early 2020, they raised $3M and have grown the team and customers ever since. What started as a one man show out of the Atlanta Tech Village has now grown to a $22M exit. Impressive and exciting for Nick and the entire Curricula team. He wrote a thorough and heartfelt post on the translation that I encourage all who are listening to read.
Annnnd, that’s 5 minutes.
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Resources discussed in this episode:
Company Coming Up:
Product of the Week:
Events To Put on the Calendar:
Companies Worth Applying To:
Acquisitions in the Air:
TechStars Announcement:
