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Secure business transaction platform CapLinked closed its first franchise deal this week with Sunbelt Business Brokers, a firm whose brokers work on thousands of transactions at once. This is an opportunity for CapLinked, which already serves large enterprise customers such as Thomson Reuters and Founders Fund, to simultaneously roll out its product at about 100 offices nationwide.
“Providing the software for all these broker dealers to better manage their deals and keep their information secure and speed up the process, it’s really a big deal,” CEO and co-founder Eric Jackson said. “Because if you look at it, it’s really something that matters to the ecosystem.”
Facilitating this rollout means that CapLinked’s 14-person team will be working in overdrive to put together materials such as how-to webinars so that 100 offices can learn to easily use CapLinked to “better manage their workflow” all at once.
Jackson said he knows just how important this smooth workflow is, as his own career has been marked by plenty of acquisitions: he left a six-year marketing stint at PayPal just as eBay was acquiring it and then later dealt with the extremely “cumbersome process” of selling his own company, World Ahead Media, in 2008. But by 2010, he and co-founder Chris Grey had come up with an accessible cloud-based platform to ease this process.
“CapLinked is more than just putting a bunch of files in the cloud; it’s managing that entire workflow including communication, due diligence and the collaboration of multiple parties on any given deal,” Jackson said. “You can’t get away with using Dropbox for something that’s that complex.”
But even Dropbox might be an improvement for some companies that still rely on email, shipping flashdrives (really!) and virtual data rooms to organize their transactions. Those methods, Jackson said, have got to go: “We are a replacement for old technologies: a customizable, universally-accepted software giving clients a lot more flexibility with these complex deals where you’ve got multiple parties needing to work together to secure information.”
Over the next few months, CapLinked, which is backed by Peter Thiel and 500 Startups, will be laser-focused on rolling out the Sunbelt deal and adding to its list of over 50 clients every week by working in its famously “reclusive” manner out in its El Segundo office.
“We stay very heads-down and very focused, which speaks to the need of an enterprise-facing company,” Jackson said. “We are more focused on execution; that’s our culture.”
