252. Meet Sunny Han, Founder & CEO of Fulcrum Artwork

VC Minute

Quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better. Founders, do you feel like you're fundraising on an uneven playing field? You are. The VC minute is here to help you level up. Venture capitalists navigate pitches and negotiate investments every day. They know the ins and outs and are up-to-date on the current funding environment. But as a founder, it may be your first foray into fundraising, and no matter how much success you've had in other areas nothing truly prepares you for the fundraising journey. The VC Minute was created to help founders close this gap. While it may seem like securing an investment at the seed stage is mostly driven by luck, there are steps founders can take to increase the odds of successfully raising a round. And that's what we're going to cover on the VC Minute through a series of short episodes. I'm going to share with you insights to help navigate the seed stage financing dynamics. I'm Rich Maloy, Managing Partner at SpringTime Ventures with 25 years business experience a dozen years in the startup ecosystem. I've applied my experience from sales, finance, and venture investing, to help startup founders fundraise better.

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VC Minute

252. Meet Sunny Han, Founder & CEO of Fulcrum

September 30, 2024 • Sunny Han • Season 4 • Episode 252

Text your thoughts directly to Rich.

Meet Sunny Han, founder & CEO of Fulcrum. SpringTime invested in Fulcrum and has been with them through all the ups and downs.

About Fulcrum
Fulcrum applies modern technology to manufacturing processes, helping makers focus on their craft and grow their businesses. The innovation of American manufacturers is critical to a better world, and Fulcrum aims to revitalize the industry with automation software.

About AVL Growth Partners
AVL Growth Partners, founded in 2009, is the leading fractional Finance and Accounting firm supporting organizations in pivoting from growth to scale. AVL brings an experienced team of CFOs, Controllers, and Accountants to your organization, delivering transparent, strategic actions for short and long-term success. Transform your financial approach affordably with AVL, supporting companies coast to coast - get to know AVL Growth Partners at avlgrowth.com. (Sponsored)

About SpringTime Ventures
SpringTime Ventures seeds high-growth startups in healthcare, fintech & insurtech, and logistics & supply chain. We look for founders with domain expertise, forging a path with a truly transformative technology. We only invest in software-based businesses in the USA. We bring a people-focused approach, work quickly, and reach conviction independently. Our initial check size is $600k. You can learn more about us and our approach.

Rich: 0:01

This is Rich Maloy with SpringTime Ventures, bringing you the VC Minute, quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better. Welcome back everyone. We're going to pick up with a number of great interviews, starting off with Sunny Han, founder and CEO of Fulcrum. Sunny is based in Minneapolis and it was one of our fund one investments. I asked him, actually, I begged him to share his story because he has been through it all. All of the ups and downs, riding the startup fundraising rollercoaster for the last four years. I appreciate that he shares his story openly, honestly, and with humility. I know you'll enjoy it. But first, founded in 2009, AVL has fueled the success of over 1200 early stage companies. Specializing in raising capital, M&A, financial modeling, scaling, and bringing financial transparency and a disciplined approach to the companies they work with. AVL works seamlessly as a member of your team and has the experience to support both VC-backed and bootstrapped companies. Head to AVLgrowth.com and explore how they can be pivotal to your growth. AVL Growth Partners. Your success. Their expertise.

Sunny Han: 1:19

My name is Sunny. I'm the CEO and founder of Fulcrum. I've been operating this company as a venture backed company for, about three and a half years now. We've raised three rounds of funding, a seed round, which was facilitated in large part by SpringTime Ventures, and an A and an A extension. And, the timeline is our first round was Near the end of 2020, and, our Series A was really, really quickly behind that, almost just seven months or eight months after our seed round. And then the extension round was, almost two years after that, so about a year and a half to two years after that. I've known Rich and, SpringTime Ventures for quite some time now. They're one of the only, investors that I've had a long standing relationship with. I've been to their events and have loved working with them and the other founders that they invest in. Fulcrum is a system of record product. It's an ERP product, if you want to call it that, if you want to use an old and dusty term. But it's for manufacturers. From a VC perspective, we're a vertical B2B SaaS company. you can think of us as Toast or Procore or Service Titan, but instead of, restaurants or construction or service companies for manufacturers. We focus specifically on fabricators, people that are making the actual components of stuff. They're people that are designing planes and trains and automobiles. Our goal, the vision, is that we believe that we're at a crossroads where we need more stuff. We need that stuff to be more valuable. We're working on using technology, software, to increase the value of the stuff that we produce and reduce the resources that are needed. And we believe that doing this across all manufacturing will create an emergent network of manufacturing that will be really awesome, that will get us producing way more things way faster, way better, for way less cost.

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Rich Maloy

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