I never realized what Curate would become.
When my wife and I were at our kitchen table covered in administrative papers and Frankenstein spreadsheets, we just thought we were creating a streamlined system to save time and money in our small business and give us confidence. Yet, it’s gone from event design in our basement to becoming the market leader in the floral industry to the fastest growing software in the catering industry.
In the midst of an incredibly difficult 2020, our team put blood, sweat, and tears into helping our old and new customers survive and, boy, is it great to see validation for those efforts.
We’re excited to announce our $1.25 million Series Seed 2 Funding round, backed by OCA Ventures out of Chicago, Square CoFounder Jim McKelvey, and a host of other incredible investors.
This is an incredible validator to the work we’ve done to help creative small businesses and it’s going to make a monumental impact on our customers.
So what does this fundraise mean?
It means we’re moving from a great software in a local industry to a world-class software that is built to impact 10's of thousands of small businesses.
My wife and I were just local florists when I built the first version of our application on a hacked out Wordpress theme. That allowed us to help florists and caterers quickly - though there are still some pieces of our software that are hampered by those initial decisions (ex. how our photos are handled, load time on some pages).
While we’ve rebuilt small parts of it to make it better, this fundraise is going to allow us to rebuild our entire application in an incredible way (and finally removing those last bits of code written by yours truly). We’re going to be able to add powerful CRM functionality and even more advanced reporting that many customers have been requesting.
We’re also hiring the right people. We've certainly had to wear a ton of hats, but we realize there comes a point in time to bring in more incredible professionals.
A year ago, we had a two person development team. Now we’re going on nine. We’ve brought on our new Chief Product Officer from Calendly to make our software development choices more mature. And we’ve brought on a Head of Growth and VP of Sales who are passionate about getting customers into the software without having to wait to find a human to talk with before getting started. We're also doubling the number of consultants to ensure a human is there if customers need it.
Beyond that, we’re moving our Customer Success to a new model to give customers an even better experience. And we’re bringing on a Head of People who can focus on helping our awesome team become better.
If you’re a customer, this means we’re moving towards becoming the type of mature company that you can partner with for decades.
We’re also excited about our new partners. Our investors are time-proven leaders who we’ll be able to lean on for advice on how to grow. We have partners like OCA Ventures, Jim McKelvey, Cultivation Capital, Stout Street Capital, Rick Holton, Matthew Porter, Cliff Holekamp, and DCAAM.
The future is bright for Curate and its users! I can’t wait to share all of the incredible things that will be made possible by this round of funding!