Kingsport-based rpl raises lead gift for pre-seed round
Career coaching and mentoring were the basis around which Lauren Glass co-founded Kingsport-based rpl several years ago as we noted in this April 2021 teknovation.biz article.
At the time, her focus was on colleges and their alumni networks. Recently, Glass posted on social media about a pivot that the start-up is making along with an investment that has been made by Sims Venture Capital of Kingsport.
“We are moving more into the recruitment space,” she told us in an email response. “We call it ‘mentorship-based recruitment.’ This was a natural pivot because the more mentor sessions that began to happen, the more the mentors started realizing the talent their mentees had, so naturally people started offering jobs and internships.”
Glass said that she “never expected this to happen, but we’re so glad it did because that was the feature that started to get attention from VCs.” With Sims serving as lead investor, rpl cis raising a $250,000 pre-seed round that Glass says will “take all that we have learned through our many beta tests to officially bring the recruitment arm of rpl to market. We can’t wait!”
Today, the start-up is described on the Sims listing of its seven portfolio companies as “a mentorship-based recruitment platform designed to connect small businesses and start-ups with like-minded entrepreneurial driven job-seekers.” Led by Chief Executive Officer Aaron Sims, the venture capital firm was founded in 2021 as a holding company for a family of enterprises that include holdings in the insurance, digital advertising, web development, and pet care industries.
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