We couldn’t be more excited to add Staircase Ventures and Ascent Energy Ventures to our team here at Galatea. Galatea is focused on transforming the logistics workflows of commodity industries enabling a future of digitalized, optimized and automated solutions.
We’re going to be real here, raising a round of capital wasn’t easy and it took the whole team to pull this off. We worked hard to be fortunate in having both Staircase and Ascent come to the table to co-lead this round alongside our existing and fantastic partner, NGIF.
We’ve been getting some overwhelming traction in Canada supported by some of the best oil & gas producers in the world. Our clients are seeing increased transparency, automated compliance and reduced regulatory risk as a result of implementing our digitalization product. This product makes it easy for commodity producers to generate digital truck tickets, transportation of dangerous goods documents and waste manifests. We then use the data collected in the digitalization step to optimize the decision making process. Through informed decisions we’re able to optimize load planning resulting in reduced costs, increased regulatory compliance and environmental performance.
With increasing regulatory pressure in many North American markets we saw a need to make sure we’re ready to scale.
We kicked off the fundraising process after a successful trip to Texas for Rice University’s annual Energy Venture Forum. At the Forum, one investor really stood out. David Forsberg with Ascent Energy Ventures really leaned in. From introducing us to everyone at the event, to helping us craft a presentation that allowed us to take home the “People’s Choice Award”. Every step of the way, David has been incredibly helpful in making connections and offering feedback and coaching when needed. David is the real-deal and we couldn’t be more honored to be an Ascent portfolio company. Ascent has an amazing portfolio and track record of investing in the highest potential energy focused companies.
The combination of our traction and vision enabled us to get the attention of several world-class VC’s. We had to make some hard decisions, but guiding us was a need to add diversity of thought and experience to our board. We needed to find an operator, someone who’s scaled a business, someone who can help us think tactically and most importantly someone who loves our culture at Galatea where we’re hyper focused on the client.
We are delighted to announce that Janet Bannister and her fund, Staircase Ventures, along side Ascent are leading our round. Janet's operating background, focus on founder growth and development, and our aligned values made her the partner we wanted to work with.
"Galatea is transforming a massive industry that is in need of digitization in order to reduce costs and environmental impact. We believe that Galatea has the potential to build a large, network-driven business, and the team, with a total of 100+ years in the industry and a determined, growth mindset, is one we wanted to back." - Janet Bannister
This oversubscribed round wouldn’t have come together without the support of our partner NGIF. John Adams, Isaac da Silva Aboo and their team have gone the extra mile to plug us into the community their building and we get great insights and most importantly a roster of clients to show for it.
We also added the support of some of our industry's best business builders. We used this as an opportunity to align ourselves with some of the most influential business leaders who generously leaned in with counsel, connections and support.
We’re so happy to be out the other side with this financing. With over $7 million raised to date, we’ve worked hard to retune and recalibrate our trajectory and we see so much potential in continuing to help our clients be the industry leaders we so badly need.
It’s time to put our heads back down and build a better future alongside some of the best commodity producers in the world.
Let’s go!