CEO Stephanie Rieben was so enthusiastic about getting Inno Madness votes for her startup that she got kicked out of a Facebook group for moms.
Rieben, co-founder of Buffalo-based startup Diadem Capital, posted in a Facebook group of about 150 moms, asking them to vote in our annual contest where readers select the startups they would invest in.
She was removed from the group because of her off-topic post.
“I got kicked out of that group for posting about my company,” she said, laughing. “I’m like ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I thought this was for supporting other moms and their businesses.”
It’s just one example that shows Diadem Capital's gumption and passion, both of which contributed to the relatively young startup winning this year’s Inno Madness contest.
Diadem Capital, which helps connect private companies to venture capital, non-dilutive funding sources and venture debt, got 69.4% of the votes in the final round.
“For five weeks (of the contest), we really all were working together in the same boat,” said Joe Hammill, co-founder and COO. “It builds camaraderie.”
The startup, which launched in early 2022, defeated SelectFI, a business founded last year that has created a software platform for auto dealership regulatory compliance and financing pre-qualification.
Diadem Capital is built on trust
Diadem Capital was created to fill a gap that exists between private companies and funding.
The company has helped 27 companies raise over $92 million. The business has about 950 investor groups and about 150 lenders on its platform.
Three out of every four companies that Diadem Capital has worked with to successfully raise funding have come from referrals from its investor network, according Rieben.
“At the end of the day, what Diadem sells is trust,” Hammill said. “We’re doing introductions, but there’s a level of trust we get from our startups and from our investors that we will do right by them.”
The startup, which employs five full-time and five part-time workers, focuses on funding rounds seed stage through Series C.
The company closed late last year a pre-seed round of $600,000 — $100,000 more than the business aimed to raise.
Diadem Capital expects to raise my capital by the end of this year.
How did Diadem Capital win Inno Madness?
Hammill and Rieben know how to get votes.
The pair used to work together on Citi Velocity, Citi’s data and analytics platform. They got that platform to the No. 1 spot for years in a row on Institutional Investor Research’s rankings.
Just like for Citi Velocity, Hammill said he created an Excel for Inno Madness to track how many people the startup was reaching out to to vote, estimating the conversation rate for those asks and guestimating how many people were voting for or against Diadem Capital when they came to the contest to vote for other startup matchups.
“I was tracking where the vote was every two hours for the entire contest,” he said.
The startup got former colleagues, friends and family and its employees as well as contractors involved. But the key was also volume.
Hammill said he would go to friends and family who already voted for Diadem Capital and ask them to go to their largest group chats to ask them to vote as well. He tracked how many people were reached in his Excel sheet.
“What’s fun is how much it rallies (people),” he said.
Want to relive how the competition unfolded? Check out our round by round updates here.
