Zap's Wrap May 26th

hi friends,

Last week was a big week for Nashville startups. If you missed it, here's what you need to know.

Three raises dropped basically at once:

• Optura announced their $17.5M Series A. I got to sit down with cofounder Mike Hollis, you can watch and listen to that conversation.

• Sitevue announced their $7M seed. Andrew even put a Sitevue billboard on the side of the highway. Love to see it.

• Watt announced their $4.3M preseed. CEO Jared is interviewing Elena Verna about PLG in an AI world this Thursday- worth showing up for.

The Lighthouse invested in the latter 2. We closed our SPV into Sitevue's preseed, and we just closed our SPV into Watt's preseed as well 🎉 

SPV #8 is coming very soon into a founder I already backed and believe in. More on that shortly…

If you've been curious about how Lighthouse SPVs work, I wrote a quick 2-pager that explains the whole thing- check it out here.

I've been building something new.

For a while I've felt like something was missing from the Nashville startup ecosystem. A single place where you could actually figure out what's going on- who's building, what events are happening, where to show up. It didn't exist, so we built it.

Introducing Founded in Nashville.

Lorenzo, my engineer Gabriel in Brazil, and a lot of vibecoding made this happen.

Here's what's in it:

• A directory of Nashville founders you can sort through and add yourself to

• An ecosystem map of every org, investor, coworking space, and resource worth knowing about

• A unified event calendar pulling from every entrepreneur org in the city, plus a weekly email that's just a bullet list of what's happening

• A community board, think Reddit for Nashville startups, just asks and offers

So many people come to me wanting to get plugged into the Nashville startup scene and not knowing where to start. This is my answer to that.

It's not done yet. But we're close, and I wanted to share it early and get your thoughts.

Events

• The New Playbook, PLG in an AI-Native World. A Fireside Chat with Elena Verna. Thursday, May 28th @ 5:30pm.

  • Elena is the GOAT of PLG. If you are a startup founder needing to unlock growth (which should be pretty much every founder lol), this is a must-attend event! We are pretty much full, but I’m taking founders off the waitlist (:

• Zappy Hour with Wefunder, Wednesday June 10th @ 5:30pm

  • Zappy Hour is open to anyone who cares about startups in Nashville- founders, operators, investors, and the curious. Come grab a drink.

• Nashville Customer Success Community Kickoff Event, Thursday June 11th @ 5:30pm

  • Listen, Nashville has meetups for product and coding, now it needs one for customer success folks! I’m helping ​Ben George (Motive) and Steve Mason (Signal Consulting) get this community started. Join us if you work in CS!

• ^Thinking of startup a community around startups operations. If you work in startup/tech ops, HMU!

WE NEED ENGINEERS

We had a PACKED lighthouse last week for the latest edition of Engineers Meet Nashville startups (shoutout to my amazing cohost, Hunter Mitchem).

These guys need engineers!

• Tristan Wilson, Edgevanta needs intense engineers

• Adam Jaggers, Longview needs a junior engineer

• Mike Audi, Watt Data needs data engineers

• Ricardo Medina, the garage needs a technical cofounder

• Mark Evgenev, Desync needs engineer friends because him and his team are moving to town

• Margaret Rox, Omnibuds needs a fullstack and mobile developer

• Naveen Jain, stealth needs any engineer

• Kylah Martin, Sitevue needs ML engineer

Personal

Went on a girls trip to Toronto with Brianna! While we did suffer from terrible rain and wind, Toronto was a super cool city. I loved Ossington street, all the ethnic food, and going to the first Othership location.

to the moon,

zap⚡