Charlotte FinTech company DealCloud has come a long way from its incubator days at Falfurrias Capital Partners. Since then, the team has landed $5.3 million in funding, tripled the size of their team, opened a second office in Hoboken, New Jersey and moved out of coworking spaces into a 3,330-square-foot uptown office on Trade Street.
DealCloud’s software-as-a-service supports private equity, investment banks and lenders manage their merger and acquisition deals.
DealCloud was conceptualized while co-founders Rob Cummings and Ben Harrison were working in at Falfurrias Capital Partners, a Charlotte private equity firm founded by former Bank of America executives Hugh McColl, Jr. and Marc Oken, the bank’s former CEO and chief financial officer, respectively.
“There’s a misconception out there that Falfurrias Capital actually invested in DealCloud,” Cummings said. “Falfurrias Capital and most private equity firms invest in much later stage companies. It’s not part of their mandate at all to invest in startups.” However, the company had support from several Falfurrias executives, and McColl was among the first of DealCloud’s early investors.
From there, Cummings, a self-proclaimed software guy, and Harrison, a career banker, commercialized the product and began selling the software platform to other private equity firms across the country. “When we landed our first client that didn’t come from our immediate network in the Midwest, we knew our value proposition resonated,” Cummings said.
In 2012 DealCloud gained more traction when they won the NC Idea Grant and the Charlotte Venture Challenge in both the Technology and the People’s Choice categories.
Most of their early-stage funding came from private high-net-worth individuals, Cummings said. Institutional funding didn’t come until 2015 when Cultivation Capital, a venture capital firm out of St. Louis, Missouri led a $5.3 million investment round.
After that round, they brought on Rick Kushel as Chief Executive Officer in the winter of 2015 and today they have a team of “close to 40,” said Cummings, working out of their Charlotte headquarters, Hoboken, New Jersey and international product development offices.
The Charlotte office handles implementation, support and customer service, while the Hoboken team primarily focuses on sales and product management.
When they were first starting out in Charlotte, the DealCloud team – much smaller back then – worked out of Packard Place, first in a “closet,” according to Cummings, then in a larger office in the same building before moving on to Industry Coworking for a year.
“We were company number two at Packard,” Cummings said. “So if you go into the Packard Place entrance and look at all the panels on the wall, we’re the second one.”
In August they moved again into the uptown Charlotte office. The new space was subleased from ride-sharing company Uber, who previously had an office space in Charlotte before relocating to Washington, D.C. It is just above King’s Kitchen, and represents a look toward the future growth of the company, Cummings said. The new space can accommodate around 18 people.
“We’re always hiring in both locations,” Cummings said. “we’re investing in sales and product development. We want to be leading edge on the product side of things and you always need a good sales team to sell it.” Hear that, Charlotte?
Recently, Cummings took some of DealCloud’s newer employees, hired through the Venture for America program, on a tour of the original Packard Place office.
Venture for America is a fellowship program that connect recent graduates with high-growth startup business.
“We’ve had huge success with VFA,” Cummings said. “For them, it’s an opportunity to work with founders and learn the inner workings of a high growth business.”
After taking a break from events while DealCloud was in its early stages, Cummings has jumped back into the Charlotte startup community, as an angel investor with Charlotte Angel fund and as an adviser to up-and-coming companies.
“It’s hard to get to that point where you’re profitable and you actually have a sustainable business,” Cummings said. I hope I can provide practical advice to help other companies do that. There are some great high growth companies that are doing well here in Charlotte, many more than there used to be.”
He credits some of the uptick to the city’s increased interest, including Mayor Jennifer Roberts’ enthusiasm for the city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem as well as to individuals like Packard Place, QC FinTech and RevTech Labs founder Dan Roselli.
“Five years ago you didn’t have the mayor, you didn’t have the chamber, you didn’t have the Dan Rosellis of the world that were focused on entrepreneurs,” Cummings said. “It’s led to a better ecosystem. Right now our recent success story is AvidXchange. In the next three years, I think the environment is right for companies like a DealCloud to get there also.”
