• Submittable

  Participated · Equity · Jun 2012

  Submittable provides a platform used by thousands of corporations, governments, and philanthropic organizations to manage social impact programs, from grants and awards to government relief funds and corporate social responsibility efforts. The platform streamlines program management from first application to final report with workflow automations, funds distribution services, and reporting tools. Customers have launched more than 134,000 programs and the platform has taken in nearly 22 million applications to date. In the three years since its Series B, the company has nearly doubled in size and opened a second location in Bellevue, Wash., alongside its headquarters in Missoula, Mont. The new funding will allow Submittable to expand its products and features—especially for corporate social responsibility—while growing its team and platform to meet increasing demand. The company expects to double headcount again and expand its office space in the next 18 months. Submittable provides a platform to manage submissions and applications across multiple industries, originally focused on literary magazines and now serving corporate, academic, philanthropy and publishing verticals. The product lets customers collect, review and rank submissions using granular criteria such as sentence structure and voice. The company has signed customers including AT&T, HBO, Condé Nast, Harvard and MIT. Planned product work includes a mobile launch and a marketplace described as a "ZipRecruiter for Opportunities" that would match people and organizations based on Submittable data. Submittable is based in Missoula, Mont., and is led by co-founder and CEO Michael FitzGerald. The company reported a headcount of 88 and plans to expand to about 240 employees by the end of 2020. Founded in 2010 and based in Missoula, Montana, Submittable provides submission-management software used by more than 9,000 companies to track manuscripts, applications, résumés and contest entries. The company began focused on literary magazines and has expanded to serve organizations including TEDx, The New Yorker and Stanford University. Submittable’s product can algorithmically generate recommendations for writers and filmmakers, a capability CEO Michael FitzGerald frames as an "opportunities marketplace." The startup plans to build that marketplace further, enabling businesses to promote calls for submissions and offering a potential premium writer product. Its core business model remains selling submission-management SaaS to organizations, while exploring additional revenue from advertising and premium features. At the time of the raise the company was already profitable and employed more than 35 people. Submittable provides a platform for publications and businesses to receive, track, and manage submissions, with early customers including literary magazines and newer clients such as CBS, Simon & Schuster, and the NCAA. The company added an API last fall to allow customers to publish Submittable content directly to their sites and to build custom interfaces, and it launched a mobile version in January. Co-founder Michael FitzGerald, a published novelist, has described the company’s ultimate vision as becoming the on‑ramp for all content and media in organizations. Submittable was Y Combinator‑backed and remains headquartered in Missoula, Montana. FitzGerald says the company is profitable, and the product development and client wins suggest continued organic growth. Submittable is a Y Combinator–backed software-as-a-service platform that helps publishers and other organizations collect and manage submissions. Its file-agnostic forms accept documents and media, including YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud links, and each submission is organized in a dashboard for teams to assign, label, vote, and track progress. Submitters have an interface to monitor the status of their submissions. Customers include literary magazines such as The Colorado Review, The American Scholar, The Believer, and Ben Trovato, as well as MIT (for its Clean Tech business plan competition), literary agents, SMBs, and organizations running contests. The company offers simple SaaS pricing and an optional small per-submission fee (usually $2–$5), a feature used by "hundreds" of customers. Submittable generated $1 million in its first year and was on track to do $2.5 million in the current year. The company was founded in Montana.

• RecordSetter

  Participated · Series A · Sep 2011

  RecordSetter, previously known as URDB (Universal Records Database), operates a platform for users to submit and challenge world-records via uploaded videos. The site hosts a wide range of records, from traditional athletic feats to outlandish, creative entries, and emphasizes permissive rules as long as evidence is provided. In three years the site has accumulated over 10,000 submissions from more than 50 countries and claims the largest collection of world-record videos on the Internet. Founder Dan Rollman aims to expand editorial content (including tips on setting records), pursue media deals and brand partnerships with companies like Toyota and Livestrong, and develop a community moderation beta for niche groups. The company is also in talks with production companies about a potential TV show and hopes to compete with platforms like YouTube and Break.com. Financially, RecordSetter announced a $1 million Series A to support these growth plans.

No current team members are available.