Wilkes: Galileo raised venture capital primarily to get press and analyst coverage
Clay Wilkes · 20VC: Why The Unbundling of Fintech Will Continue, How VCs Are Propping Up The Neo-Banking Industry & Why We Need A New Framework To Value Businesses Today with Clay Wilkes, Founder & CEO @ Galileo · Jul 31, 2020 · at 18:04
Clay Wilkes, founder and CEO of Galileo, explains why he chose to raise an $86M round from Accel after 15 years of operating as a bootstrapped company.
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“When we did make a decision to raise, you know, we were profitable and had been profitable for quite some time. We had a large and scaling business, but it was hard to get analysts and press to pay attention to you or to consider you as an alternative. It's an interesting conversation. I was speaking with Anand Sanwa yesterday, actually, of CEO of CB Insights, and I mentioned to him, I said, you guys are writing all this incredible research on all of our clients, and yet we're not included on the cover of your report, like all of those And teasing, we were having a great conversation, but for three years, we tried to get them to pay attention. If they pay attention, the VCs pay attention, press pays attention. It changes that dynamic a bit, and I'm not naive to that, and so that was ultimately one of the reasons why we chose to do the deal with Excel, and I'm very glad that we did.”
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