Catherine Kleinmuntz and the business of what happens next

In August 2023, two software businesses came together, and Catherine Kleinmuntz had a reason to recognize both sides of the announcement. She had co-founded one of them. Earlier in her career, she had built the software operation from which the other eventually emerged. Corporate acquisitions usually arrive with diagrams of ownership. This one came with a rather good family resemblance.

Roper Technologies had acquired Syntellis Performance Solutions and was combining it with Strata Decision Technology. Kleinmuntz celebrated the news on LinkedIn. “This is a momentous day for Strata,” she wrote. Her husband and business partner, Don, supplied the backstory in a comment: at Kaufman Hall, Catherine had created the software business that eventually became Syntellis. Then she left, and the couple founded Strata.

The reunion happened long after her years as Strata’s president and CEO. She was applauding the executive team and the company’s commitment to customers. For a founder, there is something unusually satisfying about that position: watching a business make its own decisions and still finding something familiar in the result. Her name was absent from the acquisition headline. Her work ran through both sides of it.

To understand that circuit, go back to Champaign, Illinois, in 1996. The starting address was the Kleinmuntzes’ home. More specifically, its basement. Before there was an acquisition announcement to celebrate, there was a company to build downstairs.

A basement with a finance department

Kleinmuntz arrived at that basement with considerable preparation. At the University of Chicago, she earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences, followed by a master’s and doctorate in social service administration. Later, while working at Kaufman Hall, she added an MBA from Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Her education crossed disciplines; her subsequent work required her to do much the same.

At Kaufman Hall, she took responsibility for software operations and rose to vice president. She was the architect of its financial forecasting system. The work placed her between the people building analytical tools and the executives expected to make decisions with them. A forecast can be mathematically respectable and still leave a room full of people arguing about what to do on Monday.

Strata, founded with Don in 1996, addressed financial planning and decision making through software. Catherine’s responsibilities covered company strategy, product direction, building the management team, sales and business development. Those are easily compressed into a line of biography. In practice, they describe several different jobs, each quite capable of consuming the working week.

Don brought an academic and professional background in decision analysis and business analytics. Their partnership joined that work with Catherine’s experience running software operations and advising executives. They were spouses as well as co-founders, sharing a business whose beginnings were physically part of their household. The basement detail gives the story its location. The preceding career explains why they had something to do there.

The numbers had to travel

A small piece of the early Strata story survives in a 1999 conference program. Catherine and Don were listed together on a presentation about StrataCap, software supporting resource allocation in corporate settings. They also appeared on a session about integrating financial forecasting with decision analysis. The titles are wonderfully untroubled by the possibility of becoming slogans.

Yet they describe an enduring management problem. Organizations have more proposals than money. They need ways to compare competing uses of the same resources. That requires calculations, but also a process people can understand well enough to participate in. The interesting distance is between an answer produced by an analytical model and a decision an organization can actually carry out.

By the time of Strata’s 2011 sale to private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson, its web-based software covered planning, budgeting and reporting. Its StrataJazz platform brought financial analytics together in a software-as-a-service suite. The business also supplied implementation and support. Getting the application installed and making it useful belonged to the same commercial proposition.

The sale announcement emphasized collaboration and coordination alongside analysis. It described tools that helped senior decision makers communicate with non-financial audiences. There is a revealing piece of product design in that description: information had to move beyond the people already comfortable with it. A beautifully organized answer, kept among its admirers, has limited prospects as a business.

Fifteen years, then a different seat

Catherine led Strata as president and CEO until the 2011 sale, then continued for several years as an executive adviser. The meaningful interval in her own story is the 15 years between starting the company and selling it: a sustained period of operating responsibility, followed by a gradual change in her relationship with the business.

Kleinmuntz Associates was founded in Chicago in 2013. Catherine is a principal, combining investment with strategic advice to startup companies and nonprofit groups. The move put her on the other side of conversations she had spent years having as an operator. Capital and advice are the firm’s stated combination; both can matter well before a young business has an impressive organization chart.

Her experience as a woman entrepreneur also became the subject of a Gould & Ratner video conversation with Ammara Khan in the firm’s Ten Talks series. In 2020, the America-Israel Chamber of Commerce Chicago named Catherine and Don among its Business Leadership Award recipients. These appearances place her in a broader community of investors and entrepreneurs, beyond the company she once ran.

The next enterprise carrying the Kleinmuntz name had a different purpose. Catherine and Don established their family foundation in 2018. It supports charitable organizations through donations and volunteer work, with interests including arts, education, scientific research, social welfare and technology. The foundation says it does not solicit outside donations. Its work concerns what its founders can contribute.

The guest lecture that kept going

Her connection to the University of Illinois Institute for Genomic Biology began with an invitation to speak about entrepreneurship and building a startup. It is a pleasingly practical origin for a philanthropic relationship. A founder visits to explain how a business gets built; the visit eventually leads to support for other people trying to make that journey.

In February 2019, the institute announced the Catherine and Don Kleinmuntz Center for Genomics in Business and Society. The couple’s gift supported a program linking research, commercialization and public engagement. The center’s name describes three constituencies that do not automatically understand one another. Bringing them together requires more than putting their names on the same invitation.

Catherine described a need to help scientists learn how research becomes a commercial application. The center would support proof-of-concept and pre-commercialization work, helping researchers take an idea closer to something usable. It would also broaden public engagement, including exhibitions and workshops for audiences outside the laboratory.

That second purpose matters. Investors and researchers are only part of the audience for a scientific advance. Journalists, government agencies and students have their own questions. The planned programs recognized that a discovery may need several explanations, each suited to the person hearing it. The idea of communicating beyond a specialist audience had already appeared in Strata’s software business.

“Part of the solution is to help scientists understand what it takes to make the transition to commercial applications.”

Catherine Kleinmuntz · 2019

A little money for the awkward middle

The center’s Mikashi Awards make the approach concrete. The 2021 program offered $50,000 to $75,000 a year for up to two years, subject to renewal. The awards were designed for the stretch between university research support and private investment: a point at which a technology may need a prototype or a demonstration before someone is ready to license it.

The rules asked applicants for a problem, a proposed solution, a market, a budget and milestones. Reviewers would consider both the technology and its commercial prospects. Even the instructions about writing were practical: proposals had to make sense to a general audience. A promising invention still had to explain itself to people with different expertise and different reasons for saying yes.

The name Mikashi honors the Kleinmuntzes’ children, Mika and Sashi. In a program of budgets and review criteria, that is a small, personal signature. The Young Innovator Program added another route, giving graduate students professional development and a project through which to explore economic and social impact. Support could take the form of money, experience or an opportunity to try.

Kleinmuntz’s public roles now include principal at the investment firm and co-executive director of the family foundation. She also appears on the institute’s Leadership Council, which advises on business development, commercialization and philanthropy. These are different ways to stay involved in what happens after an idea has first attracted attention.

The business keeps its own calendar

Look again at the 2023 combination of Strata and Syntellis. It would be easy to make the coincidence the whole story: two branches of a career meeting years later. The more interesting part is the work between those points. Kleinmuntz built a forecasting operation, started and ran a company, then helped establish ways for other people to develop their own projects.

The dates resist the tidy speed of an entrepreneurial anecdote. Strata began in 1996. Its sale came in 2011. The investment firm followed in 2013, the foundation in 2018 and the center in 2019. Each required a different arrangement of responsibilities. Together, they show a career extending beyond the moment a founder hands over the chief executive’s job.

A basement is a memorable place to begin. What followed depended on less photogenic work: products, management teams, customer relationships, budgets and explanations. Kleinmuntz’s later activities keep returning to those practical requirements. An idea gets its first audience. Then someone has to help it earn the next one.