Rising Tide, a Richmond company that offers a last-mile delivery productivity platform that utilizes blockchain and AI, is setting out to raise a seven- or eight-figure round of funding.
Co-founded by Jeff Corbett, the CEO, along with Nels Yehnert, Craig Huber and Zach Robinson, the company is building off an initial raise of $650,000 it primarily used to build its engineering staff. It intends to work on building out that staff with any new funding, Vice President Rafe Wilkinson Jr. said.
Rising Tide has several strategic angles for its next round, according to Wilkinson. First, the company is looking to local strategic investors. Second, the company is considering grants from established blockchain platforms. Such grants give up to $1 million-plus in equity-free funding to build platforms on public blockchain, Wilkinson said. Finally, Rising Tide is also teeing up a round of VC investors on the West Coast who specialize in large AI and blockchain solutions. The company is considering opening the round with an ask of $5 million.
“Ninety percent of our previous round is going to engineering development, and we will see the same for our new round,” Wilkinson said. “We have a few tricks up our sleeve that we can’t disclose, but this next phase is going to be a very exciting time.”
The Richmond company launched its platform at the beginning of this year, and execs are projecting annual recurring revenue of just over $5 million by the end of 2024.
In popular culture, blockchain is interchangeable with crypto — but they are not the same thing. “Blockchain’s greatest value is what is referred to as ‘trustlessness,’” Wilkinson said. “That means parties to a transaction do not need to trust the veracity of data being pushed and pulled because they see it within their own database. The manual transfer, visibility and reporting of data is a huge hole in current logistics operations that is largely inefficient.”
Wilkinson says demand is high, so Rising Tide is scaling.
“For us, scaling means not just up and to the right from a revenue viewpoint, it’s also about the scale of configurations and complexity of the solution,” Wilkinson said. “Our product has many applicable industries and is highly configured, so it’s an intensive process. We don’t just give a customer a password/login and let them go. When you are automating operations, you need to have a landscape understanding of those ops.”
Rising Tide has doubled its team in four months and now has a headcount of nine. The staff balances workflow between current engineering resources and exploring what new opportunities they can handle. Corbett and Wilkinson were born and raised in Richmond.
“We love this city,” Wilkinson said. “We want this city to develop into a known hub for innovation. We are now prioritizing hires that will relocate here toward that goal.”