DJ Lee is a startup founder who began his professional career being drafted in 2019 by Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics out of the University of Richmond. Unfortunately, the outfielder and three-time team captain for the Spiders was injured at the time of the draft, so instead of training with fellow minor leaguers in the Arizona Complex League, he says he was sent back to Richmond for rehab.
Growing up in suburban Chicago, Lee watched his father, Derek, play baseball in the minor leagues and he set a personal goal to also play professionally (Derek Lee played 15 major league games with the Minnesota Twins before DJ was born). His mother, JoEllen, was a teacher and emphasized school.
“She pushed me and made sure I was covering all my bases with my education,” Lee said.
That preparedness came into play when Lee was healthy and ready to rejoin the A’s system. But the minor league baseball season was essentially canceled in 2020 due to Covid-19. Lee needed another job.
Upon returning to Richmond, he began working for startup consulting firm Sandbox. He had the opportunity to observe patterns of how executives approached data and found career financial leaders were not leveraging assets available to them.
“They manually worked in Excel because they’d been doing that for 20 years and did not trust a tool or analyst to produce that data automatically,” Lee said.
There was a need for a programmatic system that didn’t have the traditional barriers to entry of risk and price, Lee said. So, he set about building what became SeedMetrics, a business intelligence platform.
The transition from Sandbox to SeedMetrics was a natural one for Lee, whose heart was always in entrepreneurship and startups. The platform is plug-and-play and connects accounting and finance software with customer relationship management and billing tools. It produces high-quality data modeling and architecture through dashboards and reporting tools. SeedMetrics recently received a $100,000 grant from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corp.’s Commonwealth Commercialization Fund.
Lee’s immediate goals for SeedMetrics are to increase data normalization and to focus on interoperability.
“We see dashboards as one way to digest and receive information about your business,” Lee said. By exporting data directly into Excel, SeedMetrics allows in-house finance teams and analysts to continue to manipulate data in an ad hoc way. Lee envisions sending automated daily emails and PDFs to investors.
The company, which Lee said is on pace to break into $100,000 in revenue this year, is currently working to normalize data and build out connectors that allow for automation between HR and accounting platforms.
In the next few years, Lee sees great potential in developing a language model for an AI tool that could answer questions such as, “What was our customer acquisition cost for Q2 and how did that compare year over year?” The company is currently focusing on listening to its customers and using that input to grow. It is actively seeking beta customers, offering risk-free ways to try the platform.
SeedMetrics is based in Startup Virginia’s 1717 Innovation Center in Shockoe Bottom.
“Startup Virginia is an incredibly supportive community and has been a huge part of me being comfortable enough to take the leap into entrepreneurship,” Lee said.
