An LSU alumna’s software company recently raised $8 million as part of a Series A funding round, the highest venture capital raise by a female-founded tech company in Louisiana.
Sevetri Wilson, a 2008 graduate of the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication, founded Resilia, a software-as-a-service platform, in 2016, the same year she served as communications strategist for the Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s mayoral campaign. Based in New Orleans, Resilias serves a two-sided market enabling grantors like cities, private foundations and corporations to deploy capital quickly and efficiently while giving nonprofits expanded tools for compliance, management, training and funding.
Wilson was also named to Inc.’s Female Founders 100 last year, a list of the 100 women the magazine says are building America’s most innovative and ambitious companies. Wilson, the only Louisiana woman to make the list, was listed with Joanna Gaines, Rihanna and Serena Williams.
Those involved in the capital campaign note Resilia’s impact on both early-stage nonprofits and well-established foundations, as well as Wilson’s impact on her own team.
“We spotted Resilia early-on, and have been impressed with Sevetri’s leadership and her team’s ability to identify market needs, move quickly, and expand their products to serve the complex needs of grantors and grantees,” says William Hsu, co-founder and partner at Mucker Capital who also joined Resilia’s board.
In addition to being the highest venture capital raised by a female-founder in Louisiana, the successful funding round is also one of the largest Series A rounds in the nation of an enterprise software company headed by a female African American founder. A Series A round is one of the stages in the capital-raising process by a startup, usually the second stage of startup financing and the first phase of venture capital financing.
The round was led by Los Angeles-based Mucker Capital and Thibodaux, Louisiana-based Callais Capital Management, with participation by Cultivation Capital, of Missouri.
Prior to its Series A round, the company raised $400,000 in pre-seed funds and $2 million worth of seed capital, which included investors like Kevin Lin, formerly of Twitch, and Tim Millikin, a partner at TPG Capital, as well as Newark Venture Partners, New Orleans StartupFund and others.
Resilia’s nearly 3,000 customers have ranged from small to mid-sized nonprofits, government offices, private foundations and corporations. Notable customers include Oxfam America, Kellogg, The United Way and Stem Library Lab.
“Their platform is particularly necessary during times of crises to ensure oversight, management and transparency,” says Hal Callais, managing partner and CIO at Callais Capital Management. “We’ve already seen tremendous opportunity in the last several weeks with the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent deployment of funding specifically earmarked for such relief.”
You can reach out to Sevetri Wilson here.
