Overland Park’s ClaimKit LLC, which produces document management software for insurance companies, has completed its Series A round of funding at $940,000, including a recent outlay of $380,000 from Midwest angel investors.
“I’m really excited about our investors, because they’re a great group of people” said Chris Cheatham, co-founder and CEO of ClaimKit. “Our first investor was Mid-America Angels. They introduced us to some other angel groups in the region: the Nebraska Angels, Seed Step Angels in Oklahoma and Wichita Technology Corporation in Wichita. And we found interested investors in those various groups and went from there.”
What’s hooked the investors in ClaimKit?
“I think it’s that we’re working with large insurance companies to solve a very tangible problem, which is messy documents,” Cheatham said. “The other thing that hooks them is I used to be the insurance attorney working for these large companies that are now ClaimKit’s clients. I’m solving a problem I had, which was getting a disc or a box of documents when I started a case and having no idea what’s going on. Why am I getting these documents? How are they organized? Are they not organized?
“So it’s a problem, and it’s why I love (entrepreneurs), frankly, that are solving a problem that they used to have in their former jobs. Because they know it’s real. They know how big it is. And they know how to sell it to people, too.”
What does it mean to ClaimKit to receive this angel funding?
“It means we get to add the people that we wanted to add all along,” Cheatham said. “There’s a group of people that I had been sort of courting as the next wave of employees at ClaimKit. And I told the investors, ‘Here are the people we’re going to hire.’ I said, ‘We’re going to go get a salesperson. We’re going to go get a technology person. And we’re going to go get a project manager. Here are their names. They’re excited. They’re ready to go. You give me money, and I will go hire them, and we’ll start building this business.’
“’I warehouse people’ is what I say. I’m always looking for talent. And I just try to figure out how I can fit them into the ClaimKit puzzle.”
Making the deal even sweeter for ClaimKit was getting matching funds from Network Kansas, Cheatham said. “They came in and matched, I think, 9 percent of what we raised at the same terms,” he said. “That’s pretty cool.”
Cheatham has spent the last year pitching his business to potential investors, “and now it’s just a matter of executing and staying focused,” he said. “Because there’s a lot of noise when you try to build a business, and ignoring that noise is sometimes a challenge.”
What noise is there for ClaimKit to ignore?
“Technology distractions,” Cheatham said. “There are always new applications or new features that you can think up that people might use. But when you have a product that people are already using and you can just go show it or sell it to other people, and you can refine it and make it better—that is where a scaling company should focus, in my opinion.”
