As they prepare to launch a platform two years in the making, the founders of Malartu Funds share their entrepreneurial journey, and why they’re fundraising using their own site. This piece was originally posted on LinkedIn.
It’s a pretty cool moment when you experience the value of what you’ve built first hand. Malartu fundraising on Malartu is
- A most awesome meta announcement and
- An experience where we test the value of the ecosystem we’re working to create. That’s pretty meta too, actually.
For the uninitiated, Malartu Funds is an online platform derived from a pretty simple, yet arduous mission: Help startups grow. For the initiated, you know this has taken a number of strategic steps (read: “oh shit” moments) and a couple years to get to where we are today. I’d like to briefly touch on that and explain how we got to fundraising our current round.
The start
I met my cofounders Jon Spinney and Lewis Sheats in the entrepreneurship program at NC State. Through Lewis’ class, we got to work with a pretty good number of startups in the Raleigh-Durham area. We got to work with a few while they raised capital. We knew the capital raising process was broken since fundraising is almost always the biggest complaint of any successful entrepreneur. We knew there was a better way to fundraise and we saw a few smart people doing it elsewhere, mostly in Silicon Valley. We knew that in some capacity those same processes could work for companies in our region, the Southeast, and specifically the Raleigh-Durham area of NC.
And here we are.
And we’re ready to go. The growth platform we wanted to build in the first place now has a funky name and a promising plan. Malartu is where business intelligence meets venture capital. We help companies aggregate and analyze their data, create reports, then share those reports with their teams, their advisors, and the right investors at the right time. Investors track startups, form syndicates, and grow portfolios of growing companies with more transparency than literally anyone has ever experienced.
And we’re eating our own dog food.
We’re fundraising on our platform. We’re launching our business intelligence tool in about one month and we’re raising a round of financing to boot. We’re ready to roll. Since announcing our integration of business intelligence to our platform we’re collecting interest from major networks of startups and investors, anything from university venture arms to development groups. Turns out more than a few people are picking up what we’re putting down.
*One of the companies we invested in was one we met through Lewis’ class. This company is WedPics, led by the talented and inspiring Justin Miller (@ImJustinMiller). Also the company that I referenced that is crushing it.
