Christine Nicodemus: How an Entrepreneur Pulled off a Multi-Exit in Two Years
- S3E9
- 32:17
- November 8th 2022
On this week's episode of Exit Stories, Ascend Goals Co-founder Christine Nicodemus joins our host Kevin Mosley.
Ascend was created in 2019 as a simple goal setting app for high school students, but quickly evolved into something much more. Together with Reg Gabriel, Christine built the company into a student empowerment software platform that helps schools and mentoring organizations cultivate, track, and measure their goals and achievements. She talks about seeking acquisition opportunities early on and being acquired by edtech partner, Aperture Education. In 2021, the combined companies struck a deal worth $18 million with the largest school district in the country, the New York City Department of Education, which proved to be a major win for them. Aperture was acquired by Riverside Insights in May 2022. Christine also discusses working with an investment bank to sell the company, which included managing the IOIs and LOIs.
Exit Stories
Exit Stories features tech founders, buyers, and sellers from the Triangle, North Carolina and the Southeast to tell their stories about raising capital and selling their startups.
This program is produced by GrepBeat and hosted by Kevin Mosley of Jurassic Capital.
Meet the Host
Kevin is a General Partner at Jurassic Capital, a Durham, NC-based Growth Equity firm focused on growing B2B software companies in the Southeast. Alongside cofounder Joe Colopy, Jurassic’s deep entrepreneurial and operating experience from Bronto and other SaaS companies helps grow and scale capital-efficient companies over $1M in Revenue. They recently closed a $20M+ fund and have portfolio companies building software in HR (Workdove), B2B eCommerce (Corevist), and Test Automation (Cycle Labs).
Kevin spent his pre-Jurassic career operating at growth-stage software companies, including Sageworks, Lulu, Bronto, and Republic Wireless/Relay. He graduated with a BS in Finance from Clemson and loves spending time with his wife in the Triangle as well as watching and playing all sports, especially golf and tennis.