Brian Handly, the veteran entrepreneur and CEO of recently renamed Reveal in Raleigh, will be making an in-person pitch to AOL founder Steve Case next week in Raleigh. Handly hopes to land $100,000 for the former StepLeader after its pivot in a new direction. Why make the pitch? Plus, Handly discusses more details about the pivot, financing and his team in the second part of WTW’s Insider Q&A. (Read the inside story about why all the changes were made in Part One.

Case is bringing his “Rise of the Rest” tour to the Triangle on May 5. A highlight will be the pitch event at which eight finalists will compete to land the Case cash.

As we reported on Thursday, Handly has “pivoted” StepLeader to a new mission with a new name and new products. The company has already raised new funding, but Handly is looking for more. Plus, he sees Case as giving the company “fuel” if Reveal is selected.

  • Why did you decide to apply for the chance to pitch to Case? Is it the money or is it the exposure and connections he could bring to the company?

When you’re a new company, you pursue (almost) every relevant opportunity that comes your way. For us, we viewed the Rise of the Rest competition as important for two reasons.

First, there’s great mobile talent here locally, but very little recognition for it. We want to highlight how prevalent the mobile ecosystem is here, and draw attention to this region’s strengths.

Second, Steve Case’s background as a founder of AOL plays very well to our target market. More important than money is smart money that can advise, introduce, and unravel the digital publishing landscape.

We’re off to a strong start, and working with Case throws fuel on the fire.

  • Who is the core team and title(s)? How does Dean fit into the new focus/strategy?

Our founding team includes myself, CTO Jared Dean [a former SAS executive], and VP of Product Marketing Matthew Davis.

Bringing Jared’s data mining and machine learning expertise to our team was certainly a strategic move to help shift direction. Anyone can collect “big data”, but very few people can make sense of it. Even fewer can integrate that into a business model. Jared’s ability to distil unbelievable amounts of data into actionable and profitable knowledge is core to our business, and we’re thrilled to have him on the team.

  • Did all the existing investors participate and thus support the strategic shift?

We closed half of a $1,000,000 seed round in October 2014. All previous investors, including myself, participated in the new round. We all support the shift because we’ve got the team in place to execute on solving a very big problem, with customers validating at every step that we’re solving their pain.

  • Are you seeking additional funding? If so, how much? How would the funds be used?

We’re in the process of closing out the remaining $500,000 seed round in the next few months. We’ll use those funds to bring on additional engineering and business development talent.

  • Your previous software product was sold to another firm. What is you relationship with that firm going forward?

We sold the StepLeader assets in mid-March to DoApp, based out of Minneapolis, MN. Despite being direct competitors, we’ve maintained a great relationship with them the past few years, and have enormous respect for their team and product. They’ve done a phenomenal job of on boarding our previous customers to their platform.

We also formed a partnership with DoApp, who will complete the integration of the Reveal product into their 400+ apps by the end of May.

We gain additional distribution while empowering their customers with mobile audience analytics.

(Note: Capitol Broadcasting Company, the corporate parent of WRAL TechWire, is an investor in Reveal.)