When it comes to the insurtech space, it pays to go with the flow.
Just ask the founder of Lexington, Kentucky-based Leadrilla, who on Thursday unveiled the name of its spinoff company, SalesRiver — along with the news that it recently closed its Series A round of $3.95 million with Mucker Capital as the lead investor.
On Wednesday, Leadrilla founder and CEO Koby Hastings told me SalesRiver was born out of continuous requests from large insurance carriers, brokerages, agencies and companies in other verticals, including real estate and home services.
“[Companies] were interested in our software because it's kind of the first of its kind,” Hastings said. “They didn't want to send their sales reps to us to purchase leads and calls from us, but they had a lot of interest in the software — and they wanted that internally.”
So in the beginning of the first quarter in 2022, Hastings and his team started extracting the same software that has garnered Leadrilla more than 20,000 licensed insurance agents and building in “white-label capabilities” and completely branding it for that company. The client would then pay for seat licensing fees, with the price determined by how many users the company has per month.
“We just become the rails for routing your leads and calls out to your sales reps,” Hastings said.
SalesRiver — referred to as an “enterprise sales enablement platform for distributed sales teams” according to a news release — already has several Fortune 5000 companies and one Fortune 100 company, with approximately 1,500 users within its customer companies. In October, one such client, Amerilife, announced its “Leadstar Marketplace” platform, which was built by Leadrilla/SalesRiver.
In October, Leadrilla leadership began engaging with Los Angeles-area-based Mucker Capital — and were able to close out its first round after a commitment from the firm.
“We're excited to partner with SalesRIver and help them scale their business," said Omar Hamoui, a partner at Mucker Capital who works with Series A rounds, in the release. "Their comprehensive platform is a game-changer for organizations with distributed sales teams, offering full visibility into performance metrics, advanced lead routing capabilities, and improved marketing ROI [return on investment].”
The round was also assisted by Lexington-based Airwing Ventures.
When it came to choosing a name, Hastings said his team and he were focused on “brand positioning and the true value that our platform adds.”
“What it comes down to is that we really sit throughout the entire sales cycle,” Hastings said, referencing the stages of customer acquisition, intelligent routing, sales enablement and sales management.
“We wanted to have a brand that reflected constant movement and never static — like a sales process. Everything's constantly moving in an organized fashion.”
The name SalesRiver was actually suggested by Hamoui, who now sits on the company's first board of directors — along with Hastings — with a third spot still to be filled.
Coincidentally, Hastings’ oldest daughter is named River.
“And at the time, Omar didn't know the name of my kids,” Hastings said.
It should be noted that Hamoui is the founder of AdMob, which had an exit with Google in 2009 — for $750 million. He left Sequoia Capital for Mucker in 2019.
Leadrilla continues on its own
Leadrilla — founded in 2019 and recently named one of our 2023 Startups to Watch on Tuesday — will still operate as it did before, working alongside SalesRiver. Although Hastings declined to discuss revenue figures, the company did say in a Q&A leading up the awards that Leadrilla exceeded $1 million in sales in its first year after starting in April 2019.
A native of Louisville, Hastings told his story to the crowd at Startups to Watch about how as a teenager he would knock on the doors of businesses on Bardstown Road, offering to make websites for $200, which amounted to about $2 an hour.
Two years after graduating from Eastern Kentucky University in 2015, he founded a Blockchain-based tech startup Tech 29, which ran for two years and would supply the bootstrapping money needed to fund Leadrilla until the Series A funding round was closed in December.
Hastings initially had the idea to start Leadrilla in 2018 after a round of golf in Florida with his oldest brother, who works as an insurance agent there — and explained to him the pain points of lead generation in his field.
Leadrilla/SalesRiver currently has 14 employees, a majority of whom work out of 3,500-square-foot office inside Victorian Square in downtown Lexington, located across the street from Rupp Arena. Hastings said by the end of the year, he hopes to expand to 25 employees.
On Sunday, Hastings and his team will fly to Arizona to start spreading the word of their new brand at the annual conference Inter-Company Marketing Group (ICMG) in Scottsdale from Feb. 6-8. Although he will be in close proximity to the site of Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, he will not be sticking around for any of the fanfare.
“If the [Dallas] Cowboys were there,” he quipped, “I’d be staying.”
