What to Do When Your Funding Vanishes
Jimmy Odom and his co-founders at WeDeliver, a same-day delivery platform, had a lot going for them when they launched in 2013. The buzzed-about Chicago venture won the local Startup Weekend and quickly grew to provide deliveries for 100 area companies. WeDeliver also launched Locally, a stand-alone app that allowed businesses to sell products online for same-day delivery.
But in June of this year, WeDeliver announced it was being acquired by California-based Deliv, a similar but larger service that crowdsources its drivers. The outcome was in part due to a failed funding round—money the company expected that never quite materialized.
“We always wanted to build a national delivery company, but we just didn’t have the capacity,” Odom says. “Our angel investors believed in us, but angel investors cannot fund a company that should be venture-backed. If you can’t get into the VC world, it’s a chasm where you perish.”
WeDeliver was on the brink of securing Series A funding last year with a Chicago VC, Odom claims, when another local fund made a sizable investment in a similar company elsewhere in the U.S. “We were
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