As host Kevin Mosley put it, Anil Chawla’s “exit story” starts with one of the best B2B SaaS stories in the Triangle. Mosley, a partner at Jurassic Capital, sat down with Chawla—the Founder of Durham’s ArchiveSocial—for this week’s Exit Stories podcast.
Chawla was working at IBM during the day and working on building a startup on nights and weekends before he quit his job to become a full-time entrepreneur, and eventually created ArchiveSocial.
ArchiveSocial provides software that automates record-keeping of social media content, primarily for government agencies. The company steadily grew until 2018, when they saw a 60% year-over-year growth rate and Chawla decided to exit after a $53M investment from private equity firm Level Equity that closed in May, 2019. Listen or watch the podcast below to learn how he did it.
Three Highlights
– Chawla first dipped his toe into entrepreneurship by creating a Twitter app called Tweety Mail that ended up garnering over 30,000 users in the first year. [2:40-3:07]
– He was also the solo founder of ArchiveSocial and bootstrapped the company until later strategically taking some funding, but not through a traditional fundraising round. [4:07-5:43]
– ”I would only take calls from investors that were already invested in local companies here,” Chawla said. Nothing like seeing a local startup supporting the Triangle tech & startup ecosystem! [16:55-17:29]
