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SOLOMO Technology, I'm the CEO. We've been in business about 2 ½ years and we built
a technology platform that will do indoor location tracking and personal identity management.
So as you're walking through an indoor location we can provide you content or information
based on who you are and where you're at. So for example in this conference facility
we could detect that you're in front of Madison Ballroom B and provide you information about
what's happening in Ballroom B. And then as you move to Ballroom C, we can provide you
content based on that location as well.
Can you go into a little bit about how the technology works or how it was developed originally?
My background and the background of our management team is really in the enterprise, so it's
a B2B platform intended to help enterprises implement these technologies, which can be
a little bit big brother or sort of scary. They don't want to violate trust and they
want to make sure it's secure and private. So we built the platform with those tenants
in mind. And then enterprises can feel comfortable in promoting those technologies and giving
the consumer the ability to opt out, to manage their tracking, to manage the information
that they exchange.
What about the background of some of your employees? What kinds of people are you hiring
and where are you hiring from?
We have about 33 employees. Our management team is very senior. I've worked with many
of them in the past. They come from places like Microsoft or Oracle or CDW or Weather
Central. Our technical team, a lot of them are out of the UW system, so either Madison
or Eau Claire or some of the computer science programs there. We work closely with the university
system. We have internship programs. I think our fall internship we have 8 interns that
are on board. And then we work with many of the professors for special projects like data
analysis or business case development, things like that.
I hear you guys recently raised a pretty substantial round. I was wondering if you could go into
the process that you went through and your pitch? I know we're going to be hearing from
some companies today who are going to be pitching, but maybe if you could elaborate a little
bit on your guys' pitch and the process that you went through to receive that funding?
We did an initial angel round of about $500,000 about a year and a half ago. And that was
made up of many of the Wisconsin angel groups that helped lead that round or syndicate that
particular round. And then June of this year (2013) we did a Series A raise of $1.5 million
and that was led by two investment groups here in Wisconsin, and I think all of our
investment money has come out of Wisconsin. We have a little bit, some of our board members
are out of state and so they've invested as well. The process is really lengthy. For an
angel round you can certainly make the connections, and family and friends and people can help
you do that. When you get to a Series A round it's really important to get a strong lead
that can sort of help coral all the investors. It's easier for the lead investor to make
requests of the other investors than it is for the entrepreneur to do that. We were fortunate
to have a good lead for our particular round and that helped tremendously. And then we
matched those funds from the Wisconsin Economic Department of Commerce with some loans. And
then also we worked with Madison Development Corporation for some venture debt funding.
So in total we've raised about $2.3 million dollars in funding.