We are sharing all of the updates at Unicorn in 2024 with our partners, mentors, and friends.
A year ago, we embarked on a new mission: to fuse years of strategic development and acquisitions into a bootstrapped Private Equity Studio that incubates new ventures.
It is a more holistic approach to building a startup in the current market, combining the best parts (and throwing out the worst) of Venture Studios and Tech Incubators. While Silicon Valley startups and angel investing often see high failure rates, many startups born out of private equity can successfully launch/grow/exit due to lower capital needs. Our approach is built on a single funding round and sprinting towards profitability within 18 months.
We unpacked and explored the nature and strategies of brick-and-mortar businesses, private equity firms, and family offices to inform the Unicorn model. The best firms operate with a fund or syndicate and a central operating company. The operating company is very hands-on in managing the portfolio and syndicates can move quicker than funds to seize opportunities. By leveraging existing instruments such as Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV), we discovered a path to creating a portfolio with less risk and higher reward. By taking the stress out of fundraising for founders and being hands-on to reduce risk for investors, we have created a studio much more precise and predictable at building successful ventures. We make decisions on data, not speculation or hype.
Now that we have battle-tested our thesis and strategy, we are ready to slowly open up for scale. We have collective of serial entrepreneurs and investors who believe in building great things with great people. Our goal is to proudly let our friends and partners know what we are working on and invite anyone who is interested to play in our sandbox. With that said, here is the latest scoop on ventures.
Venture: Elevate
In 2017, we helped a large construction management firm build an award-winning application for project management (read the Case Study). At the time we knew the Construction Tech (ConTech) market was growing and increasingly ripe for disruption. Given our intimate knowledge in skilled trades (both blue and white collar), combined with our ability to build great tech solutions, we knew we would have to be ready to rapidly develop in the space when we saw the right signals. Those signals became immediate and obvious through COVID. The needs in the market are abundantly clear:
- Help streamline an employer’s connection to employees
- Figure out how to attract millennial and younger talent
- Risk mitigate hiring and management of talent
- Turn qualitative metrics into quantitative data
We partnered with a single investor in our Syndicate in January 2024 to spin up this venture in a way that provides more equity to investors and is operated day-to-day by Unicorn. SPVs like Elevate will eventually staff an executive team to carry the venture forward and replace Unicorn as operators to prepare for a clean exit or sustainable growth.
We can proudly say that with a modest $500k in funding and an aggressive year of development, we are complete with MVP and preparing to execute our go-to-market strategy in 2025. This model gives us the flexibility to sell non-dilutive shares of common stock and doesn’t have an upper limit for the returns or dividends that can be expected from the success of the business.
