A local fin-tech startup has raised $2.5 million from a who’s who of startup executives in Buffalo.
Verivend’s completed seed round comes as it prepares to compete in this year’s 43North finals – where 19 companies will be whittled Oct. 27 and 28 into eight winners, with a $1 million grand prize and seven $500,000 runner-up awards.
The company was co-founded by CEO Rodney Reisdorf, president Aaron Santarosa and CTO Jonathan Ebel.
Verivend has developed a cloud-based platform for the management of business-to-business transactions, and will use the investment to fuel an aggressive expansion into industries where physical paper and email chains are still the standard.
“We want to be the fintech super app – the all-encompassing platform for businesses to manage accounts payable, accounts receivable and cash flow,” Reisdorf said. “We are going to deploy this seed round to move the business forward as quickly as possible.”
Verivend is headquartered at Seneca One Tower and has 10 full-time employees. Reisdorf said the seed round will support a hiring initiative focused on product development, software engineering, sales, marketing and customer success.
The seed round is, in some ways, a story about how previous startup successes in Buffalo fuel new companies. Reisdorf was an early employee and leading technologist at Liazon; Ebel was also a Liazon employee and an early technology leader at ACV Auctions; and Santarosa’s family owns the Santarosa Group of Companies.
Investors in the seed round include:
Ashok Subramanian: The co-founder and former CEO of Liazon Corp. (which later became the Willis Towers Watson office in downtown Buffalo), and the co-founder and CEO of Centivo, a health insurance startup based in Buffalo that has raised more than $118 million in venture capital.
Dan Magnuszewski: The co-founder of ACV Auctions, Buffalo’s first software unicorn which went public earlier this year.
Sam Russo: An active angel investor and partner in the Lorraine Capital private equity firm.
Michael Weisman: The co-founder of Campus Labs, one of Buffalo’s first successful software startups, which was first sold in 2012 and went through a series of subsequent business transitions. The former Campus Labs operation still operates a campus in downtown Buffalo under the Anthology/Blackboard ed-tech corporations. Weisman relocated to San Diego a few years ago.
John Jahnke: The Buffalo-based CEO of Tackle.io, which has a cluster of Buffalo employees but prioritizes remote work. Tackle raised $35 million in venture capital earlier this year.
“It’s a testament to the give-back mentality in the Buffalo startup ecosystem, where prior generations are giving back to the next generation of founders and startups,” Reisdorf said.
At the same time, Verivend’s investors span the Midwest and West Coast as well, which was an intentional strategy during fundraising.
“We feel very strongly that Verivend has a national brand and application across the country in different businesses and verticals,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we had support nationwide.”
Verivend is the 27th local company to acknowledge growth-oriented financing this year. The others include Jerry ($103 million), Squire ($60 million), Centivo ($51 million), Tackle.io ($35 million), Torch Labs ($25 million), CleanFiber ($11.9 million), Circuit Clinical ($7.5 million), SomaDetect ($6 million), Kickfurther ($5.9 million), HELIXintel ($1.6 million), Joblio ($4 million), Ognomy ($1.37 million), Patient Pattern ($1.2 million), Ellicottville Greens ($1 million), Immersed Games ($540,000), Braid Babes ($415,000), MemoryFox ($380,000), Zizo Technologies ($200,000), Thimble.io ($125,000), AirExpert ($100,000), Immunaeon ($100,000), Oro Sports ($100,000), Real Talk ($100,000), Alo ($100,000), HiOperator (undisclosed) and Classavo (undisclosed).
