He grew up on a farm in Cajun Country, Louisiana. His parents came from Cuba and Romania, landing in New York City before the family found its way to the American South. He worked at a local grocery store, helped run a family crop-dusting service, did stints in radio and recruiting. His undergrad degree was in Political Science. None of this looks like the biography of someone who would eventually build a company that monitors 250,000 connected sensors across America's most critical physical infrastructure.
But that's exactly the point about Nathan Hanks. He has never approached technology the way people who grew up in technology approach it. He approaches it the way someone who grew up watching physical things break approaches it - with an eye toward the unsexy problem, the one everyone else assumes someone is already solving.
In 2003, that unsexy problem was local search advertising. Small businesses needed to be found online. The tools were clunky, the industry was underestimated, and nobody thought scaling to 24 countries was possible through sheer operational discipline. Hanks and five co-founders built ReachLocal anyway. By 2010 they were on NASDAQ. By the time Gannett acquired the company in 2016, it had 2,200 employees serving 24,000 clients and generating $500 million a year in revenue.
AI is only as good as the data it's fed.
- Nathan Hanks, Co-founder, BrightAI
Most people who've done that once take a board seat, do some angel investing, write occasional essays on LinkedIn about "founder learnings." Hanks started a music sponsorship technology platform called Music Audience Exchange. Then, in 2019, he co-founded BrightAI alongside Alex Hawkinson - the entrepreneur who built SmartThings and sold it to Samsung - along with Douglas Burman and Robert Parker.
For four years, they said almost nothing publicly. No press releases, no funding announcements, no conference talks. They just built. When BrightAI finally emerged from stealth in November 2023, it arrived with a number that stopped people cold: $80 million in annual revenue. Bootstrapped.
By July 2025, the company had raised $51 million in a Series A led by Khosla Ventures and Inspired Capital - and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
