William Leonard
Atlanta founder Chris Maurice has one of the more fascinating founding stories that you’ll ever hear. All before he co-founded the Yellow Card app, Chris was ghostwriting for large publications like CNN, selling Bitcoin out of a Taco Bell in Auburn, Alabama, while in college, and Chris even booked a one-way flight six days after graduation to Africa, to immerse himself in the continents crypto ecosystem. Today, Yellow Card is the premier cryptocurrency exchange empowering Africans to access cryptocurrency anywhere in everywhere across the continent. The company just announced a fresh injection of Series B funding totaling $40 million. I can promise you that this is one of the more insightful and entertaining conversations that we’ve had on the Atlanta Startup Podcast. Let’s dig in. Before we jump into the episode today, let’s quickly touch base on Venture Atlanta. One of the largest conferences in the country. It’s just a few days away, the valor team will have a table at the conference and we look forward to meeting you there. I will also be judging startup battle during the first night of Venture Atlanta. So whether you’re coming from out of town or you’re Atlanta based, drop me a note on LinkedIn or via email as I’d love to connect with you in person. happening this month is also the raise global summit in San Francisco. Valor General Partner, Lisa Calhoun would be there in attendance. So if you’d like to connect with Lisa there, please also drop her a note on LinkedIn. Now, back to today’s podcast. Chris, welcome to the podcast, man.
Chris Maurice
It is good to be here, man.
William Leonard
I’m so eager for this conversation, especially since you all just announced an incredible Series B funding round led by Polychain Capital but we’ll dive into that a little bit later in the conversation. I want to kick it off here with just a brief high-level overview of what Yellowcard is and then want to talk about your background as a founder.
Chris Maurice
Cool, man. Super high-level, we are the largest crypto exchange on the African continent. We operate in 16 countries, all within the continent today. You can think of a product very similar to coinbase.com as opposed to Binance or Coinbase Pro or something like that, right? Avery simple, user-friendly mobile experience. You come on, you load your currency, and whatever locally applicable payment method works for you. Cash, mobile money, bank transfer, Bitcoin, USDT, whatever you need, works the same way in reverse. So you send money on a chain, send crypto on, and then spit out Naira to a bank account in Nigeria? The idea is how do you make it as easy as possible for people to be able to access crypto and access this technology?
William Leonard
I love that. You mentioned Nigeria, are you exclusively focused on Africa?
Chris Maurice
Yes. We’re in 16 countries on the continent. We are exclusively focused on Africa and we partner with companies that do cool stuff in other parts of the world to help sort of bringing them into the continent and vice versa.
William Leonard
Got it. That’s interesting. I definitely want to dig into that a bit more. But tell us more about your background, your story, and your journey to entrepreneurship.
Chris Maurice
I grew up in New Orleans. I think the journey to entrepreneurship started in fifth grade. I would have been maybe about nine at the time. I got access to my dad’s eBay account and I started flipping Pokemon cards. Actually, I continued to do that almost through college. Pikachu paid my way through school is what I like to say. I literally paid my way through school selling Pokemon cards on the internet and did that up until Yellowcard became a priority. I did a couple of other things, especially in high school, I got into ghostwriting. I learned very early from the Pokemon card business that the beauty of the internet is nobody really cares how old you are. I was doing ghostwriting for, I mean, at one point, like CNN and a number of other different publications, right? I would write these articles for whoever they would publish in their name. Nobody ever asked who I was, nobody cared, right? All these freelance websites doing these articles and everything. That was also sort of a big, I guess anything entrepreneurial venture for me that, again, how I was able to pay for college. I went to Auburn University in Alabama. I’m about as Southern as it gets, right? I think going from Louisiana and Alabama and then Atlanta. At Auburn, that’s when I actually learned about crypto and that’s when I actually learned about Bitcoin. I guess 2013 would have been before I was at Auburn, but I learned about it from my now co-founder who’s a big nerd. He was scouring the web forums and everything back in the day and kind of came across this technology. He would talk to literally everybody about it. It didn’t matter if you were some guy on the street, all he wants to talk about was Bitcoin back there. We talked about it quite a bit and I started just researching, learning, and by 2015, I was just fully down the rabbit hole. This is what I’m doing for the rest of my life. This is fantastic.
William Leonard
I think that’s interesting. I would love to have you continue on because you’re taking us literally from the journey of Pokemon to ghostwriting to studying crypto while you were at Auburn and realizing that’s what you wanted to do to now thinking about Yellowcard. Take us through the journey.
Chris Maurice
We’re going from Charizard to Nigeria. This is a wild, winding road. So 2015, I’m fully down the rabbit hole, right? This is what I’m doing with my life. My first actual venture in crypto was one day, I was on eBay. I saw Bitcoin being sold on eBay for a 150% markup and Bitcoin was maybe $100-150 bucks at the time, right? People are selling it on eBay for $300-400. I’m like, that’s so weird. I thought this was a currency. I sent the link over to Justin and I was like, man, check this out. I know how to use eBay, you know how to use Bitcoin, let’s make some freakin money, right? This is fantastic. We listed Bitcoin on eBay at 100% markup and in the first week, we did over $40,000 in sales at 100% markup. This is more money than I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m gonna call my mom and tell her I’m dropping out of school. I’m gonna sell magic internet money for the rest of my life. That’s when I learned what a credit card chargeback is. What I thought was gonna be my retirement turned out to just be a bunch of guys in Russia and India that were stealing cards on the dark web, just running them until one of them hit. That’s also when I learned just how irreversible Bitcoin is. For those of you that don’t know, Bitcoin is very irreversible. There is no way to get that back. That sucked. I lost a lot of money. All of my trading cards and sold all this side business that I’ve been building since I was nine. It all just went down the drain there.
William Leonard
How did you bounce back?
Chris Maurice
Through some combination of insanity and intuition, I decided I was still interested in the space. This has not deterred me from crypto. I am still all in. We’re going to figure out a way to make this work. So we put our collective brain power together and we said okay, we’re going to accept the only irreversible payment method known to man which is cold hard cash. We put out ads on Craigslist that basically said, we have Bitcoin. Come meet us and give us your cash and we’ll give you the Bitcoin. People started responding to the ad. We did the only thing that I think two reasonable college students in our position would do, which is every Wednesday at about 7 pm, you could come to the Taco Bell on Gay Street in Auburn, Alabama. You can find Justin and I and you could slap up $100 cash on the table, we would scan your QR code, and give you Bitcoin.
William Leonard
Wow. You were selling Bitcoin out of a Taco Bell in Alabama.
Chris Maurice
It gets a little bit better than that. After about two weeks, we’re like holy shit, this is actually worrying. Unbelievable. This is actually working and we start calling up friends at LSU, Yale, Georgia, and Alabama, right? Anywhere that we knew somebody from high school. Within three more weeks, we had seven Taco Bells in the eastern United States, all within college campuses where you could walk in and buy Bitcoin. We’re running this network for maybe two and a half months. When they were talking, we said man, we should really do something less sketchy with our lives. That was when Yellowcard was originally born. The initial idea was actually we were going to put a gift card at CVS, Walmart, and places like that. You’d be able to walk in and buy this gift card and redeem it for crypto. We start building this out and we get probably a year into this. This brings us to let’s call it late 2017 or early 2018. One day, I’m at a Wells Fargo in Auburn, Alabama, of all places. I met this Nigerian guy who’s trying to send 200 bucks to his family. Wells Fargo charged him $90 to send $200 to his family in Nigeria. I thought like, oh my god, right? That’s absurd. I talked to this guy. Hey, have you heard of Bitcoin? It’s free. It’s instant. It’s fun, all this great stuff, and essentially went home later, and I just started thinking about this guy’s family, right? I’m thinking, what on earth would his mom in Lagos, Nigeria do with $200 worth of Bitcoin? We’ve solved the middle of the problem but then, you can’t pay rent with that. Even in San Francisco, you’d have a hard time. I’m just thinking about this and this woman’s problem is actually worse now because her money is stuck in cyberspace somewhere. I don’t think I knew where Nigeria was on a map at the time. They don’t teach you nearly as much about Africa, as you might think they do in the Louisiana education system. I just set out to learn everything that I could. I wanted to understand everything. I want to know, what’s the currency? What’s the banking system? Why does it cost this much? What are the factors that are going into this? Who’s lining their pockets off of this? Or is it just actually the cost of moving the capital? I started doing all this research and really getting into it. I realized if I really want to understand this, I need to talk to somebody from there, so I put out an ad online that basically said, looking to speak to Nigerian men, which in hindsight, I probably should have worded better. This guy reaches out, his name’s Bonacci, and we just strike up a conversation. I will tell anybody that Nigerians are the most convincing people that you will ever meet in your life because within about a month and a half of meeting this random Nigerian man on the internet, he convinced me to go get my passport and take the first international flight of my life. I’ve been on a plane maybe four times in my life at this point. This guy convinces me to go get my passport and I fly to Nigeria on a one-way ticket with no visa and no shots on a six-day-old passport. After a seven-hour ordeal of begging them not to deport me and to let me into the country, we finally get in and I didn’t have enough money to get back. The options were either we make it work, or we live in Nigeria for the rest of our lives. That’s how we got started.
William Leonard
That is so fascinating. No, seriously. You landed in Nigeria on a six-day-old passport, and you’re facing deportation, but you decide to make it work. What happens next for you all?
Chris Maurice
I am basically wandering the streets at this point. We had a hotel that we had sorted out beforehand. We had four guys sleeping on a twin bed in a hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. We were just spending all of our time just trying to understand what the market needs and why does it cost so much money to move money here? What is it that the market needs in order to improve that? We’re running around, we’re just meeting with everybody that we can. We’re meeting with people that know what Bitcoin is, we’re meeting with people that don’t know what crypto is, we’re meeting with lawyers, meeting with bankers, and meeting with literally anybody that will meet with us at the time, right? Eventually, it kind of clicks like, okay, Africa doesn’t need another remittance company. There are already like 50 million remittance companies that can send money for you. What it needs is a way to just to be able to interface with crypto. Obviously, I’ve been in the crypto space at this point for, 2-3 years. I knew enough to know that Bitcoin solves these problems and crypto solves these problems. It just doesn’t do so natively. You need some way of actually being able to interface with it. That was sort of what we realized, we didn’t come here to build a remittance company. We came here to build on and off ramps. We came here to build the ability for people to just be able to trade crypto period.
William Leonard
Was crypto widely known in Africa?
Chris Maurice
In Nigeria, it had taken off significantly more than the rest of the continent. And so at this point, it still was not very prevalent in the rest of the continent. But in Nigeria, I would say late 2016, Nigerians really started getting into the crypto space. Nigeria now is number three or four in the world in terms of countries using technology. It definitely had cottoned on there more than it had anywhere else. Right. The trip coincided with what was the first crypto conference, or at least the first one that I’m aware of that was actually held on the continent. It was a Nigerian crypto conference going on and it worked out perfectly. That’s essentially what we realized. We realized we’re not building a company here for people in the US to be able to send money, we need to build a company for people on the continent to be able to exchange. Because, again, if your mom in Nigeria receives that 200 bucks, what is she going to do with it? That was the problem that we actually need to solve. That’s sort of what started the pivot. This is what we need to go all in on.
William Leonard
That’s so fascinating. You all have this realization that there doesn’t need to be another remittance company but there needs to be this platform where you can interface with Bitcoin and utilize it in various ways. Now, you are on the continent of Africa, in Nigeria, I’m sure you’re doing a lot of customer discovery boots on the ground, talking with businesses, families, and stakeholders, about how does the company begin to get traction and get its legs moving and get off the ground?
Chris Maurice
This was in 2018. I went back for four days after graduating from Auburn actually. When we started the company, we were doing it in the US, I dropped out because I went through my like, “Oh, I’m going to be a billionaire. Dude, I don’t need College, whatever, right?” I dropped out which lasted for about a year. And then I was like, “Yeah, this shit is harder than I realized. I should probably get an education.” I went back and ended up graduating. I graduated in 2018, and four days after my graduation, I was on a plane to Nigeria. I think I told my mom about it when she was there for graduation. It’s not exactly what a mom wants to hear. “Oh, Mom, you know, graduating, going to Nigeria. See you later. Gonna go meet this guy met on the internet.”
William Leonard
Right. Sounds very sketchy.
Chris Maurice
For us, at this point, we’re pivoting, right? All of this work that we’ve put in till this point, some of it is salvageable. A lot of it is not. We’re pretty much starting over in terms of what we need this system to be able to do or what we need the app to be able to do. We start this pivot and we need to build an on and off-ramp, right? From our position on the ground, we’re getting accounts, we’re setting up a legal entity, and we’re doing all the fun stuff. And then in the background, we’re building out this technology for how people actually exchange. That takes us until let’s call that June of 2019 when we actually launched. Now, it’s actually out in the market and it took us maybe a month and a half to do $100k in transactions. $100k Sounds like a lot of money, but in crypto, that’s like like a draw. I mean when you look at like FTX and Binary, these guys do a couple of billion dollars a day, right? $100k is like a drop in the bucket. It takes us probably a month and a half to do our first $100k and then it’s just slow. By November, though, maybe like, five months later, we’re doing $100k a day. We’re starting to see something at least. It’s not there yet, but we’re starting to see something. I think when it really took off for us was when COVID hit. We’re kind of slowly growing and then when COVID hit, all of a sudden, there was like a mindset shift, and it happened. It happened here to a degree, but it happened here with different things. It’s like if a job is not remote, then I don’t even want the job. Whereas before there was sort of this expectation of going on and off. That’s sort of like the mental and mindset shift that happened stateside, but in Africa, the mindset shift really started to occur is anybody in countries that were not yet really prepared for digital solutions and that were not really huge fans of digital solutions, everything went digital. In most of these countries, you couldn’t leave your house, full military lockdown in a lot of parts. Everything moves online. People still need to be able to eat, people need to be able to make money, and for a lot of these guys, in Nigeria, for example, over 75% of people are self-employed. Self-employed is everything from like a guy that’s hustling, selling stuff on the street, to like a startup or business or anything like that. The majority of the population just hustling and trying to make money to eat that day. People start looking for whatever they can find online to just be able to make money to be able to support themselves through the lockdown and everything. That’s when crypto really took off there. That’s when people started realizing, with this, I can get paid from anywhere in the world, right? I can trade if that’s what I’m into. There’s access to the dollar, which allows me savings and things like that. It took off like crazy. And so at that point, we’re doing over a million dollars a day. It skyrocketed during COVID. So that was sort of a big turning point for us.
William Leonard
That’s so fascinating how COVID was the true catalyst for growth. You all raised, I think, Series A funding last year in the summer of 2021. And then you all just announced a few weeks ago, a few days ago, Series B, led by Polychain. From that Series A to Series B, what were some of the things that you wanted to focus on as the CEO to get to that next level of growth almost in a year’s timeframe?
Chris Maurice
Once that money came in for Series A, that was the first time that we really had money. We raised a seed round, which was 1.4 or 1.5 and that was in 2020. That was right after COVID. July of 2020 and that was off the back of the COVID growth and everything like that. But 1.5, if you’ve ever been in a startup, it sounds like a lot of money, but it doesn’t go as far, right? When we raised Series A, we have some firepower now. We could do some stuff here and that was really cool because it gave us an opportunity. What I made sure that we focused on was basically all of the stuff that bigger companies have to worry about that smaller companies don’t necessarily have to worry about. Making sure that we are registered in every country that we’re operating in to pay taxes, catching up on payroll taxes that never even crossed our mind we need to pay those, trademarks, actually having a compliance team, and actually having a legal team. It just allowed us to focus on the stuff that we needed to set up to be able to scale and to be able to really grow. We brought on Mandy, our Chief Compliance Officer. Before us, she was running all of MoneyGram for Africa on the compliance side. We brought her over and she set up an extremely robust KYC and anti-money laundering and all of that. We brought on a legal team. The lawyer that set up the company in Nigeria originally called her up, and we were like, “Hey, we need you full-time.” We got a lot of stuff going on. It allowed us to do that in all of these countries. In all 16 countries that we operate in now, we have legal entities, we have offices, and we have employees. We pay our taxes, we have our own bank accounts, and it allowed us in a way to really become a real company as opposed to like a startup. Not that we’re not still very much a start-up but that allowed us to do some of those things that you just don’t have to worry about when you’re small.
William Leonard
You focused on a lot of the core things, trademarks, and getting a compliance team in place. You’ve seen this spectrum of entrepreneurship literally since you were five years old, but now you’re actually doing it in a startup fashion, and you’re venture-backed. You’ve seen a lot. I want to ask you, for some of the lessons learned or nuggets of wisdom that you can share with other founders who are maybe at the seed or Series A stage, wanting to take their business to that next level of growth, what is the advice that you would give them?
Chris Maurice
In terms of mistakes that we’ve made and things that we’ve learned from, the first would be that if all you’re focused on is fundraising, you’re not going to accomplish anything. Nothing’s going to happen if all you’re trying to do was raise money. It took us two and a half years to actually pull down that seed round because the moment we had this concept, we talked to two people that we knew who never started a business. “You guys need to raise money.” That’s always that’s the first thing people always tell you as an entrepreneur. “You guys need to build something so you can raise some money.” And that helps quite a bit, having capital obviously makes a lot of things possible that otherwise would not be but if that’s all that you focus on, it’s not gonna happen. That was the big thing that we learned. Me, specifically, I spent a lot of that first two years just trying to raise money, constantly talking to investors and pitching and running around and doing this and doing that and racking up probably $15,000 in credit card debt and none of it worked. We didn’t get any money. I think we had what maybe something like a $100k total that we had raised and that was a combination of investors, angels, startup competitions, and all that. It’s draining, man. If all you’re doing is just constantly pitching and preparing to pitch, you don’t actually have time to build. I vividly remember because I was sitting in a $15-a-night hotel in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with roaches running around in the bathroom, and I was like, alright I’m done. We’re not gonna raise any money. We’re just gonna build this and make our own revenue. I can see that we’re gonna be in a position to do that to actually generate revenue. That’s what we’re gonna focus on and screw all this other stuff. We had been doing that the whole way because we didn’t have any money. We couldn’t operate at a loss because we didn’t have any money in the first place. Either we had to generate revenue or not exist. I’m sitting there, I was on a call with this investor group, and it just clicked. These guys aren’t gonna give us money. I’m telling them I’m going to sell Bitcoin in Nigeria. I’m raising literally every red flag possible. At that point, I completely stopped focusing on fundraising. All I would do is I would send out a monthly update to my email list, which included investors and stuff like that. Eventually, Polychain, six months later so brings us to May, who had told us no twice and already emails me back. They’re like, “Hey, we’ve been getting these monthly updates and tractions. Let’s have another conversation.” Eventually, they ended up leading the seed and kind of going from there. In terms of advice, fundraising should not be your focus. I know better than anybody that fundraising is a full-time job. It is exhausting and it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and follow-up and everything, right? But if you’re in the early stages before you have anything to really show, it’s tough because I didn’t have any connections or anything coming out. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know any VCs. I had no idea where to start. You get the few intros that you can do like Auburn’s network. I know that there are people out there that can call up Sequoia and they’ll write a $50 million check for your not even registered yet company, but we weren’t in that position, right? If you’re in that position, just be realistic about the position you’re in. Nobody knows me well enough to just give me money. We just need to build it, we need to show them that it works, and once we realize that and I shifted the focus completely toward that, everything changed. The old saying is very true. Once you don’t need money, that’s what everybody wants to give you. The only other thing that I would say, in terms of advice is that everybody that’s building with you, especially everybody in the trenches deserves a piece. Something that we did recently, and I believe we’re one of the only Fintechs on the continent that’s actually done this, we gave everybody on the team equity, all 214 people on the team have had equity of some sort. I think that it’s extremely important to make sure that everybody that’s building with you, everybody that’s on the team should have those incentives aligned. For some of the lower-tier employees, it’s not going to be enough to retire on but what we tell everybody when we gave them this, I guarantee you, this will be the best payday of your life if this works out. You might not be retired but it will be the best payday of your life. Basically, that’s what it comes down to, align incentives.
William Leonard
That’s incredible. The entire team has equity. Now in the company, as you and your team thought about that decision, that’s pretty significant. What went into that? You want to align incentives for everybody. Some companies aren’t in the position to do that, but I’m sure that was not an easy financial decision to make, but I think it’s probably going to be worth it from your viewpoint in terms of retention, company morale, and overall well-being of your team.
Chris Maurice
I would say every company is in a position to do that because equity is not cash, right? You dilute yourself as the founder, right? It’s not cash. Cash is totally different, right? Some people didn’t take us up on this, but like in the early days, people would ask for a raise. How about 1% of the company instead? Because we don’t have any money, right? In hindsight, it’s like, oh, shit, I can’t believe people didn’t take us up on that but they wanted cash right? Cash is so different than equity. There is a balancing act because when you’re starting out, cash is significantly more expensive than equity because the company’s not really worth anything when you’re starting out. It has a valuation but let’s be honest. It’s two people with a PowerPoint. As it grows, cash becomes so much cheaper. Cash is significantly cheaper for us now than equity. When we were thinking through it, it’s not so much a company decision, it’s more of a personal decision. How much of the company that I started and sweating through all of this crap that I’ve gone through am I willing to give up? When we thought about it, the big thing I kept saying is, and I still believe this and I would stress this, you should never give equity to anybody unless you think that they make that equity more valuable. If I’m gonna give you 2% of the company, if I don’t think that you’re going to increase the value of the company by 2%, then I shouldn’t give you that. That’s sort of the way that we were thinking about it. With the team that we have, I can only do so much at this stage. In the early days, it was like me and a few people doing literally everything, but now, I can’t do everything by myself. We have a full customer support team, ops, and legal. We have everything right. If incentives are not aligned, then it’s not going to grow.
William Leonard
it makes sense. I love that philosophy, Chris. As we’re wrapping up the conversation here, you all just raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Polychian Congratulations there. What’s next for you all looking ahead to the rest of 2022 and 2023, and beyond?
Chris Maurice
I think the big focus for us right now is more on the product side. I think after Series A and even a little bit before, we were in a position to really focus on geographical expansion. That’s how we were able to get into some of these more difficult countries, right? That’s how we were able to launch in DR Congo, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Francophone Africa, and stuff like that because we had sort of those access to resources. Now, all those countries are launched. We’re in sort of the big economic markets that we want to be in. How do we go deeper? I think for us, it’s really going to be the product for the rest of the year. We have several product initiatives that are coming out and are going to launch in Q4. We’re really excited about that. How do we make it easier for people to be able to do what they’re doing with crypto, which is largely payments, international payments, savings, and remittance? How do we make that easier for people? Well, in some cases, abstracting the crypto layer because I think the other thing speaking specifically about the industry is it gets very easy to get in this echo chamber of like, crypto is going to change the world and all of this. It is right and crypto is very actively changing the world, right? However, my mom is never gonna use crypto. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I come back and she’s like, can you show me how to use this Coinbase wallet? When you think about that, that’s not a unique position. There are a lot of people out there that are just not going to use it because a) they don’t want to bother to learn it, or b) they’re stubborn, or any other number of reasons. It scares them or it’s not safe or whatever. Especially when you think about it in the context of Africa where access to financial services is already limited. Should people be punished because they’re afraid to use crypto or because they don’t know how to use crypto or because they don’t want to figure out how it works? No, they shouldn’t. How do we make access to payments and things like that easier for those people while still using crypto on the back end? That’s really the philosophy when we think about new products, how do we use this core exchange infrastructure that we built and then just abstract that and essentially change the front end? How do we keep the back end and change the front end?
William Leonard
I love that. I’m excited to see how the product continues to evolve. You all are such a fascinating story. This was one of the more vivid and entertaining interviews on this podcast that we have. I know our audience will certainly appreciate the level of depth and detail that you went to; to launch this company, scale this company and build Yellowcard as intentionally as possible. So, Chris, I greatly appreciate your time this morning and looking forward to seeing you all continue to grow and become a unicorn next, man.
Chris Maurice
We’re gonna do what we can, my brother in Christ. We’re gonna make it work.
William Leonard
I love it, Chris. Thank you so much for joining me today, man. Take care.
Lisa Calhoun
We’re thrilled to have you as an Atlanta Startup Podcast listener to help you get the most out of the experience. Let me invite you to three insider opportunities from our host Valor Ventures. First, want to be a guest on this amazing show. Reach out to our booking team at atlantastartuppodcast.com. Click on booking, It’s a no-brainer from there. Are you raising a seed round? Valor definitely wants to hear from you. Share your startup story at valor.vc/pitch. Are you a woman or minority-led startup valor sister program? The Startup Runway Foundation gives away grants to promising startups led by underrepresented founders. The mission of the Startup Runway Foundation is connecting underrepresented founders to their first investors. Startup runway finalists have raised over $40 million. See if you qualify for one of these amazing grants at startuprunway.org. You can also sign up for our next showcase for free there. Let me let you go today with a shout-out to Startup Runway presenting sponsor Cox Enterprises and to our founding partners, American Family Institute, Truist, Georgia Power, Avanta Ventures, and Innovators Legal. These great organizations make Startup Runway possible. Thanks for listening today and see you back next week.
