Charlotte-based startup Catapult walked away from July with $2.6 million in equity funding.
The company was founded by Justin Witz in 2017 and went through QC Fintech's accelerator program the same year. Witz said Catapult's platform streamlines the Request for Proposal procurement process for corporations buying, selling and evaluating vendors. Amazon used a similar RFP platform when determining where to build its second headquarters, he said.
Witz said the idea behind Catapult began in 2009 when he was in the Air Force working alongside the Italian government, NASA and Boeing. The platform launched in 2018 and his team of 14 has been focusing on steady growth since then, on-boarding more than 6,000 users across 700 companies.
According to an SEC filing, Catapult raised $1.7 million of a $3 million round on July 28. Witz said the company has actually collected a total of $2.6 million from the round. He plans to use the capital to scale support staff and marketing efforts. Since 2017, the company has raised just over $3 million.
Witz said he began pursuing funding in October to make Catapult a more attractive RFP option for Fortune 500 companies.
"We saw an opportunity to scale in such a way that would be more attractive to that audience and allow us to position ourselves as a pivotal piece [in the business]," he sad.
The raise, Witz said, was backed by several individuals from a private equity group.
"The strategy has always been to look for investors who can help me grow and scale personally, professionally and company-wise," he said. "They've invested personally because they believe in the business... As private investors, they're giving me the space and capacity to do what I need to do to grow the business without unrealistic expectations."
Witz said because business quadrupled during Covid, he expects the latest round of funding to hold the company steady for about three years.
