STRATIS IoT’s cofounders are onto their next venture: BOSS.Tech, a dashboard for small businesses
The company, the Manayunk-based maker of IoT devices and a management platform, was first acquired in 2020 by real estate software company RealPage — a move CEO Moorman initially thought was going to go quite well for the company. But in 2021, RealPage was acquired by private equity firm Thomas Bravo. It was a “rough” transition, Moorman said.
“We know what private equity does to companies,” she told Technical.ly. “It cuts everything that can be cut, takes everything to bare bones.”
Only one person from the company’s core team remains, she said. Buchert departed the company at the end of 2021, and Moorman’s last day was two months ago on July 1.
The pair, who are longtime business partners and a married couple, had been kicking around a lot of possible business ideas, but got stuck on something they discovered amid the acquisitions: The roughly 100-person company was subscribed to nearly 100 software solutions to manage things like payroll, HR, scheduling, invoices and the like. It’s not uncommon, they said, for businesses to pay for SaaS products and forget about or underutilize them.
That’s where their next project comes in. Moorman and Buchert began work on what’s being called BOSS.Tech, an automated business operating solution for small to medium-sized companies. The platform will gather all the APIs from subscriptions like SalesForce, Monday.com and others to have a cohesive place for business owners to check in on the status of their business operations.
“We hope to help make successful entrepreneurs so they can access what they need for success faster.”
“We’re connecting all these powerful existing platforms,” Buchert said, “and making those data sources sync between each other. We are not focused on recreating what they’re doing.”
The pair began work on the company in the spring, and now have a team of 10 — Moorman as CEO and Buchert as CTO, plus three technical advisors in the Philly region and a development team of five in Costa Rica.
Work-life balance isn’t just a goal for the pair, they said. It’s driving how they build a team.
“Not just work-life balance, but work-life-love,” Moorman said. “A team of people who would do anything for each other.”
The business is also driven by the hope that the dashboard makes business easier for entrepreneurs. Moorman noted the “abysmal” VC numbers for women founders, and has hope that BOSS.Tech will attribute to success of small businesses, and offer some equity for folks across the board.
“We hope to help make successful entrepreneurs so they can access what they need for success faster,” she said.
The team had initially planned to launch an MVP of the dashboard in early 2023, but Moorman discovered that National Bosses Day is celebrated in mid-October. They now have a goal of launching this fall. The pair has bootstrapped the company to this point, but they intend to raise some venture capital — likely from early investors in STRATIS — soon.
Though the pair had been incubating a handful of ideas for future ventures, they decided the mission of helping other entrepreneurs was worthy of their first attention post-STRATIS.
“Anything we do in the future has to leave a legacy,” Moorman said. “We believe in giving back, and we’re really excited for that mission.”
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