The First Coast is chock full of companies and nonprofits developing new products, growing their teams and supporting their communities.
To provide a window into that growth, we’ve singled out six outstanding innovators to honor with the 2023 Fire Awards, presented by First Coast Inno and the Jacksonville Business Journal. The honorees include startups and more established firms, and vary in industry and geography across the First Coast. Read more about each of the Inno on Fire Class of 2023 Honorees below:
Company Name: Urban SDK
Industry: Software & Analytics
Co-founders: Justin Dennis (COO) and Drew Messer (CEO)
Year Founded: 2018
Brief description of what the company does: Urban SDK is a software company working to make transportation more data and analytics driven, in order to increase efficiency for their customers.
2022 Funding: $4,570,000 (Seed Round)
As you reflect on 2022's successes and growth, what was the prime contributing factor?
Messer: We closed a serious round of capital investment at the end of last year. So, we put $3 million of capital to work to grow the business, really beginning January 1 of this past year. I think that’s an obvious contributing factor that we have- we’ve grown our new sales 175% year-over-year, and we’ve grown our current customer revenue by 110%. We tripled our customer base within the last 12 months, we’ve expanded into international presence into Canada, and we’re currently in 17 different states. So, we’ve had a tremendous amount of growth this year.
Now that VC funding and investments have begun to slow, what is your strategy for seeking outside capital?
Messer: It’s true, current market conditions have slowed a lot of investors. But, we haven’t really seen that contributing to the market we’re in. Government has a tendency to a little bit more recession-proof than your typical private sector market. And Congress this year passed the trillion dollar infrastructure package, going directly to our type of customers at the public sector level. I think we’ve become an actual target for some of the top funds in the country to rest their capital as we navigate this potential recession that we’re kind of moving into, because we’re selling directly to customers that don’t necessarily feel the recession.
Follow Up: What does growth look like to you and what is your strategy to achieve it?
Messer: First, we’ve been able to develop a high-powered sales team that we are continually refining our go-to market strategy with. Our 175% year-over-year growth and net new sales is kind of record breaking numbers for our industry. We want to use that additional capital that we’ll be able to raise to hire those talented people and continue to replicate that fast growth. The second thing is that we’ve started to notice we can start to hire civil engineers and certified city planners and lead planners on our team to do more of the work that our customers are looking for. So by going out and finding some of those subject matter experts, we can deliver more than what we’ve been able to over the last 12 months.
Taking a step back to the company’s founding, are you where you expected to be by now? If more or less, how so?
Dennis: We’re really a fast growing software company in a slow moving market, and so it’s fairly rare- not many companies are able to expand in this government tech market, to as many states as quickly or as efficiently as we have. So, I think we’re a little bit ahead of that, and we were able to get here while battling through Covid, losing a quarter through that, hiring the team and building the product, and then moving into raising capital during a recession period.
Where does the company go from here? What is next for your company in the short to near-term?
Dennis: Like most companies, we want to expand nationally and internationally. We added our first team members in Canada, in Toronto, so that’s the near-term.
What is your outlook for your industry and the role you play in it going into the new year?
Dennis: There is an injection of capital from the current federal administration to improve our aging infrastructure, to improve our transportation and transit networks, and impact sort of at-risk communities with the inflation and infrastructure act. Our market is growing fast, this would be significant impact to our business market, and we’re very inspired by where the markets will grow in the next five years and the demand for data analytics within that market – it’s only just started. It’s going to become something that has to be done internationally in order to pursue these funds, collect these funds, and then deploy them appropriately. Once they’re deployed, then it’s monitoring the effectiveness of the investments that these communities made with these funds.
