Dan Martell, one of the most accomplished tech entrepreneurs in Atlantic Canada, has sold his latest company Clarity to equity crowdfunding company Fundable to become one of the platforms in its new startup launch platform, startups.co.
Moncton-based Clarity, which connects entrepreneurs and others with a network of mentors around the world, did not reveal the terms of the deal.
Clarity and Columbus, Ohio-based Fundable announced the deal in a joint press release, which also unveiled the creation of startups.com as a new launch platform for startups. The other components of startups.co are Launchrock.com , Bizplan.com , and KillerStartups.com.
It is the third exit for the 36-year-old Martell and it is a reward for the investors who sank $1.6 million into the company two years ago.
“When you raise venture capital, there is a responsibility to reward your investors with a return,” said Martell in an interview Tuesday. “This opportunity with Fundable came along and they were trying to do what we were trying to do. I just felt it made sense to accept their offer.”
Martell is an obsessive networker and natural mentor, and Clarity embodied both traits. The company assembled a network of 50,000 mentors from around the world and allowed entrepreneurs to book calls with them at a certain price per hour. Martell himself took thousands of these calls. There were more than 150,000 such sessions last year alone.
Now Clarity will become part of startups.co, which is being billed at the largest platform for launching companies in the world. The platform now includes 825,00 registered startups, 13 million registered investors, backers, and followers and over $150 million in startup funding committed to the platform.
By adding Clarity, it now has a leading source of mentorship for the companies that use the platform.
“The vision for Startups.co is to help startups get customers, press, funding and mentors to overcome critical obstacles in the launch of their company,” said Startups.co Founder and CEO Wil Schroter in a statement. “Clarity.fm provides the most well-respected platform for our startups to get critical advice they need from seasoned founders who have been there before.”
Martell will stay on as an adviser for about a year or so, and then he plans to spend time with his wife, Onboardly Co-Founder Renée Warren, and their two young sons. He said Clarity would remain in Moncton, and the staff will stay on with the company.
The investors in Clarity include: Baseline Ventures, Freestyle Capital, both of San Fransisco; Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks; Real Ventures of Montreal; Version One Ventures, a Vancouver fund headed by noted investor Boris Wertz; 500 Startups, of Mountainview, Ca.; Venture 51 of Phoenix, AZ; and several angels including Gerry Pond, the co-founder of East Valley Ventures of Saint John.
Martell sold his first venture Spheric Technologies in 2008. He then moved to California, where he co-founded Flowtown, a San Francisco online gift marketing enterprise, which raised $750,000 from angels in September 2010. Thirteen months later, Martell and his partners exited the company for an undisclosed price.
Peter Moreira is a principal of http://www.Entrevestor.com, a news and data site for Atlantic Canadian startups. Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support start-up companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies are featured in this column nor do they have the right to review columns before they are published.
