In every market, there’s room for improvement.

, a partner at Atlanta Ventures and co-founder of Atlanta Tech Village, is naturally bullish on Atlanta but joins Tech Village co-founder Karen Houghton in believing the city needs to have some larger exits so it’s “put on the map more.”

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“We just need some more big wins,” Lightburn told Crunchbase News. “There’s a lot of funding available and West Coast investors coming to us consistently looking for companies, but still, money is a little harder to come by here than it is elsewhere.”

, chair of the technology group at , has been advising tech companies in Atlanta for nearly four decades, many of which were some of the city’s fastest-growing startups (such as the now publicly-traded and ).

To Yates, the Atlanta tech startup scene is unique for a few reasons.

“First, we are one of the only U.S. cities that has the ability to connect growing tech businesses with Fortune 100 companies,” he said. “The Metro Atlanta Chamber and Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) have joined together to build bridges between tech startups and F100 companies.”

As did nearly everyone else I talked to, Yates cited the talent pool coming from area’s educational institutions as a win, but also pointed out that Atlanta is becoming the “destination-of-choice for many foreign tech companies looking to establish their startup operations in the US.”

It’s also far more affordable in terms of both cost of living and starting a business, he said.

But it does have some work to do.

Echoing Hamilton’s point above, Yates believes Atlanta’s biggest challenge is attracting Series A financing for startups.

“Atlanta has a growing and vibrant angel community, but we need more capital at the next level. Interestingly, we have attracted loads of private equity to our city – PE funds are flocking to our region given the number of bootstrapped tech companies that provide great opportunities for funds to make control investments,” he said. “But we still need more investors willing to support startups with a $5 million to $10 million check to get to the next level of growth.”

The city is working on addressing the issue by meeting with funds in other U.S. cities and inviting them to visit Atlanta’s startup communities at the ATDC (at Georgia Tech), Atlanta Tech Village, Loeb.ATL, and Atlanta Tech Park, said Yates.

Atlanta also needs to exercise its influence on the state level to create incentives for companies to locate in the city “and avoid legislation that may be perceived by many in the tech community as unfriendly or restrictive,” he said.

The Diversity Conundrum

That venture money can be hard to come by in Atlanta is a fact that one black entrepreneur, , can attest to. He’s looking for funding for his startup, Underground App, and said it has been difficult despite the city being home to so many diverse founders.

Atlanta Tech Village, for example, operates the Pre-Accelerator Program that aims to give startups led by women and people of color “the opportunity to gain direct access to community, education, mentorship, and capital.”

“It’s difficult to get money in general, but as a black founder, it’s even more difficult,” Alexander told Crunchbase News. “It just makes it that much harder.”

He relates the story of a friend, founder and social entrepreneur , who he said had trouble raising money in her hometown and ended up closing a seed round led by San Francisco-based .

But some companies have managed just fine without venture backing by learning how to operate with a lean mentality. , which provides marketing automation for e-commerce businesses, is one of those startups with nary a venture dollar.

And has also managed to build a with no venture funding at all: , a SaaS provider that offers solutions to complex issues around lease accounting.

So although there are challenges in Atlanta (as there are in all cities), it seems for now the pros outweigh the cons.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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show that a child is bullied every seven minutes. And, suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people, resulting in about 4,400 deaths per year, according to the CDC as cited by .

I’m a mother, and I know firsthand that parenting in this era is very different than parenting when I grew up. We didn’t have cell phones or social media accounts. There was bullying, for sure. But it was not of the cyber variety.

For CEO , reality hit when his kids were old enough to have their own devices. The former Twitter exec had spent most of his career in either social media or mobile tech. But when it came to his own kids, Bason was unimpressed with the available options to help protect kids while online.

“I was well aware of the risks that come with giving our child an internet-connected device,” he told Crunchbase News. “But I realized that despite working in the space, I didn’t have a great solution as a parent.”

The idea of constantly monitoring his kids’ devices was unappealing to Bason. He also didn’t want to send a message to his kids that he didn’t trust them. Bason further felt a lot could slip through the cracks with “spot checking,” since kids can delete troublesome content in between those times.

“It’s an ineffective and time consuming way of monitoring and creates a huge problem with the relationship with your child,” he said.

So in 2015, he left (where he was CTO when it was acquired by ) and founded Bark, an Atlanta-based startup that uses artificial intelligence and conversational analysis to detect cyberbullying, suicidal ideation, and school shootings. In July, the company raised $5.6 million, an extension of the (led by Utah-based ) it had raised in August 2018. In total, Bark has , according to its Crunchbase profile.

In 2018, Bark analyzed over 900 million messages across texts, email, social media, and school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts of over 2.6M children ages 8-17. In 2019 alone so far, Bark has sent more than 3.6 million cyberbullying alerts. Today, the company says (in partnership with parents and schools) that it has helped “protect 3.5 million children, prevent 16 school shootings prevented and detected 10,000 severe self-harm situations.”

“We’ve invested heavily in some deep AI that can understand language contextually and that’s our secret sauce,” Bason said. “We can alert parents to things they need to know about without giving them access to all their kids’ messages. So their children still have privacy when things are going well but we’re still giving them a heightened level of awareness.”

The company has two products, one for families that costs either $9 per family per month or $99 a year. It also has a product for schools that it offers to districts that protects any school-issued device or account for free. Currently, over 1,300 school districts use its app.

Bark has seen impressive growth so far. Today it has over 40 employees, compared to eight a year ago. Revenue climbed by 400 percent year-over-year in 2018 and is on track to do the same in 2019, according to Bason.

, a vice president at Signal Peak, said his firm was attracted to Bark’s “unique” product that uses data science to not only address cyberbullying, but also problems such as sexting, drug use, depression and protecting children against predators, among others.

“We were immediately drawn to the team, execution and mission,” he said. “Bark is a product built by parents for parents.”

Although Bark represents his firm’s first investment in the child protection space, Signal Peak has backed other consumer startups targeting parents and families, such as , , and others.

Of course, Bark is not the only startup out there addressing cyberbullying. New York-based has raised a known $250,000. There’s also San Francisco-based , a social network app for teens that has raised since it was founded in 2014.

As a mother, and just as a human being, my heart breaks for a child or teen that is driven to such despair at the hands of someone else’s cruelty. So while I applaud the efforts of startups such as Bark, I wish we could come up with a solution to make these bullies stop with their meanness to begin with. That’s a gap that’s not being addressed.

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