Joe Anstine’s company acquired a shorter name in May 2022. PriorAuthNow became Rhyme, exchanging a label that described a particular task for a word with rather more room in it. The announcement arrived with an unusually economical explanation: “Same company. Same mission. New name.” For a founder who had already moved from recruiting to business intelligence to running a software company, changing the words on the door was another turn in a career that had taken several.
Anstine had been looking forward to May 3. He had circled it on his calendar and teased the date publicly. When the announcement came, he praised the work behind the new identity and the team that had brought the business to that point. His pleasure was quite legible. Naming a company is one of the few executive duties that permits a little wordplay, and Rhyme offered an obvious opening. He took it.
By then, the business had announced a $25 million investment round. Anstine was leading a company that had attracted several institutional investors, survived its earliest experiments and outgrown its first public identity. The interesting question was how a former executive search consultant had arrived there. The answer begins well before the new logo.
Before the pitch, the search
Anstine studied at Ohio Wesleyan University from 2000 to 2004, earning a bachelor of science in Economics Management. His next recorded professional chapter began in 2004 at York & Associates, where he worked as an executive search consultant. He remained in that line of work until 2010. Before he was responsible for building his own executive team, his business was helping other organizations find people.
Those dates give the early career some useful scale. Recruiting occupied roughly six years, a substantial stretch between university and his next venture. It belongs in the story on its own terms. A résumé that starts with the eventual CEO title misses the years when his professional identity had a different name and a different daily assignment.
In 2010, he moved into B.I. Voyage. He served as president and was its owner and senior managing partner. The company worked with Microsoft data warehousing and business intelligence. Anstine led sales and marketing, including their strategic and operational sides. This was a business selling services around data, with the commercial responsibilities resting squarely in his remit.
Business intelligence has a prosaic name for work that businesses take seriously: making information usable. At B.I. Voyage, Anstine’s documented role concerned getting that work into the market. The distinction matters in a personal profile. His career was developing through ownership, customers and operations, rather than a publicly documented sequence of engineering jobs.
Executive search
Business intelligence
CEO
becomes Rhyme
A Monday evening in Columbus
On March 13, 2017, Anstine appeared at a Startup Grind event at Rev1 Ventures in Columbus. The programme was pleasantly practical: food and conversation, a chat with Joe, then more food and conversation. For two hours on a Monday evening, the subject was a local founder building a business. The setting places him inside Columbus’s entrepreneurial community at an early stage of the company’s public life.
The event biography gave him a broad brief. He was responsible for the company’s direction, raising capital and laying out the steps to reach the market. It also reached back to B.I. Voyage, making clear that this founder had run a business before. Then it departed from corporate biography to joke about his crew cut and V-neck T-shirt. Even an account of executive responsibilities can occasionally let its collar down.
The dates are useful here. That conversation took place months before the company’s publicly announced $3.6 million financing in August 2017. Anstine was discussing the work while much of the better-known funding history was still ahead. The company was already a subject for a roomful of entrepreneurs before it became a succession of investment announcements.
The first plan had company
Anstine has described the early business as an “iteration-company.” Its initial product was not the one around which the company ultimately developed. Conversations with customers redirected the work. That makes revision part of the origin, rather than an awkward footnote to it. The business that acquired investors and eventually a new name had already changed its mind about what it should build.
His explanation of learning was equally plain: “I was a sponge.” He emphasized listening, adapting and deciding what deserved attention. These are modest verbs for a founder story, but they give the early years a human scale. There was a first proposal, other people had things to say about it, and the proposal changed.
“iteration-company”
Joe Anstine’s description of the early business
He also described wanting a workplace people enjoyed belonging to, and spoke about finding satisfaction in the process. The aspiration was social as well as commercial. A company meant the people who showed up to build it, alongside the product they were making. Those stated priorities help explain what he wanted the organization to feel like as it grew.
The numbers grew, in stages
In August 2017, the company announced $3.6 million in funding, led by NCT Ventures with participation from Detroit Venture Partners. The stated uses included accelerating its rollout and expanding the team. Anstine’s capital-raising responsibility now had a public figure attached. The business was bringing in outside money to support a wider operation.
That announcement gives the story its first financial marker. It records a particular round, particular investors and plans for the proceeds. It also connects the Columbus founder to a backer in Detroit. The company’s investment relationships were spreading beyond its home city while its leadership remained identified with Columbus.
May 2018 brought a $10.5 million Series A, led by Atlanta-based BIP Capital. NCT Ventures and Detroit Venture Partners participated again. The company said it intended to expand its operating capabilities and double its staff during the year. That staffing ambition was a plan announced at the time, and it gives a sense of the organizational work the financing was intended to support.
The 2018 announcement also included a forward-looking revenue claim. Anstine said the company was experiencing substantial revenue growth and expected to triple revenue again in 2019. That was an expectation, expressed during a financing announcement. Read alongside the plan to double staff, it shows the scale of the expansion he was discussing at that moment. The company was proposing to grow both the business coming in and the organization needed to handle it.
Anstine called the investment a “huge vote of confidence in our business.” The phrase was conventional; the continuity of the investors was more revealing. Two earlier backers were participating alongside a new lead investor. The next phase involved both fresh relationships and existing ones, with a larger team among the stated goals.
Selected individual rounds, not cumulative funding or company valuation.
By February 2022, the next major public marker was a $25 million round led by Insight Partners. Panoramic Ventures and Health2047 also participated. The announcement put total funding above $57 million and said the new capital would support expansion of the network and team. These were company financing figures, with no claim about Anstine’s personal wealth.
The transaction brought changes around the boardroom table, too. Insight’s Jon Rosenbaum was to join the board, while Scott Barclay would become a board observer. Funding announcements can look like a single number in large type. This one also named the people who would acquire a formal place in the company’s governance.
A name with room in it
The investor relationships now reached New York as well as Atlanta, Detroit and Columbus. Anstine’s role still combined the tasks outlined in his earlier event biography: setting direction, securing capital and moving the business forward. The succession of announcements offers a way to follow those responsibilities through time. Each round named its backers and described a proposed next step, leaving a dated record of the company’s plans.
The rebrand followed in May. Anstine explained that the old, functional name had become limiting as the company’s ambitions broadened. There is a familiar business problem tucked inside that decision: a useful early description can become restrictive later. A company may still recognize its original purpose while wanting more freedom in how it presents itself.
His own announcement concentrated on continuity and colleagues. He described seeing the vision take shape as a privilege and expressed pride in the team. The new identity did not require a new founding cast or an invented origin. It gave the existing company a different way to introduce itself.
The B.I. Voyage chapter keeps the career in proportion. His experience as an owner preceded these financing rounds, and his sales and marketing responsibilities preceded the Rhyme announcement. The newer company may occupy more attention, but it followed an earlier business with its own customers, commercial work and executive responsibilities. By the time the name changed, he had spent years running businesses.
Rhyme is a short word with a built-in invitation to be remembered. For Anstine, it also marked a visible point in a longer sequence: a university degree, recruiting, a data services business, a software venture and rounds of financing. Each chapter had its own work. The tidy name arrived after years of less tidy company-building.
Anstine remains Rhyme’s chief executive, based in the Columbus metropolitan area. The thread running through the record is sustained responsibility for an organization whose plans and presentation have evolved. Anstine’s second idea became a business large enough to need another name. There is a certain pleasure in that sequence. Even the identity got a revision.