Rick McCartney had an unusual way of announcing that things were going well. His income had fallen to a third of what it had been a year earlier. He had sold his private practice and left his job to pursue a technology startup. By the familiar arithmetic of career advancement, this was a curious promotion.
He considered himself successful anyway. The startup had early traction, and he saw a chance to grow something beyond the limits of his previous work. He described his first three businesses as practice for the next one. It takes a particular tolerance for unfinished business to give three companies the status of rehearsals.
Today, McCartney is the co-founder and CEO of Significo, the software company he built with Chris Koha. Its history dates to 2014. Its business stretches across the United States and Germany. In October 2025, it announced a financing round that valued the company at $100 million. Between the smaller paycheck and the larger valuation lies a story about how he chooses to build: with people he already knows, capabilities he wants to bring together, and a willingness to reconsider the machinery of a company itself.
“I make 1/3 of what I made a year ago.”
Rick McCartney, reflecting on his startup decision
The smaller paycheck had a purpose
There is a temptation to read an early sacrifice backward from a later financing announcement. The numbers make a satisfying before-and-after picture. McCartney's own explanation was more immediate. He valued being content in his daily work and believing that each day's tasks moved him toward having a positive impact. He was describing a working life he could justify to himself while he was living it.
That distinction gives the pay cut its interest. He was already experienced enough to have businesses behind him. Starting again meant choosing a different kind of opportunity with the knowledge that another path paid more. The loss of income was concrete. Exponential growth remained an opportunity. The two did not arrive in his bank account together.
His subsequent career has kept him close to the question of participation: why people engage with something, what makes them return, and how organizations can encourage them. Divvy Engagement lists him on its board and credits his work on digital engagement and transformation. His earlier startup concerned rewards and behavior. Across those roles, the recurring business problem is how to make an intended action fit the person expected to take it.
His reported income after leaving his previous work to pursue a technology startup, compared with a year earlier.
Seven years before the deal
When Significo acquired Bunch in 2024, McCartney's response was revealingly personal. He had known Bunch's co-founders, Darja Gutnick and Anthony Reo, for seven years. They had co-hosted startup events in Berlin. He had watched them build their company and wanted to work with them more closely. For a long time, that possibility had seemed out of reach.
An acquisition gave them a way to do it. McCartney's announcement began with the people involved, then moved to what the businesses could try together. The sequence matters. His account of the transaction started well before anyone signed it. Seven years is a considerable stretch of time in a business culture that likes its introductions followed promptly by a calendar invitation.
Bunch brought an AI leadership-coaching app and experience in data, design, engineering, and psychology. Its promise was deliberately modest in its demand on the user: practical learning in as little as two minutes a day. For a manager facing another full calendar, the size of the request is part of the product. A lesson that fits into an available moment has a chance to be used.
McCartney also saw a commercial experiment. Significo had been heavily oriented toward business customers; Bunch brought a direct relationship with individual consumers. He anticipated challenges and was interested in testing business models that could connect those worlds. His enthusiasm included the unfamiliar work of making the combination useful. A deal announcement can celebrate a finished transaction while the actual business is only beginning.
In Potsdam, familiar colleagues
Bunch was one example of a broader habit. In January 2024, Significo announced its acquisition of Piobyte, a software-development company based in Potsdam and founded in 2010. The two companies had already worked together for years. Once again, the next step in the organization followed an existing working relationship.
Piobyte brought experience in web portals, hardware integrations, and mobile applications, along with process management and documentation. Those last two items rarely receive star billing. They do, however, become rather interesting when several teams need to deliver one project. Documentation is the colleague who remembers what everyone agreed after everyone else has forgotten.
The people involved described continuity as well as expansion. Piobyte co-founder Jonas Bruestel joined as a software engineer; co-founder Stefan Pratsch became director of engineering. Bruestel already knew many of his new colleagues through their previous collaboration. The transaction changed the company boundary around people who had experience of working across it.
Read alongside the Bunch deal, this gives McCartney's approach a recognizable shape. Both acquisitions added capabilities, and both rested on familiarity. The practical attraction is easy to understand: a previous collaboration lets partners see how work gets done before they undertake the additional obligations of being one organization. McCartney's growth story contains quite a lot of getting to know people.
Building Significo also involved making the company recognizable. McCartney worked with a creative team on its rebrand and rollout, work that included a pop-up at SXSW and advertising campaigns. In his account of the collaboration, he singled out the thoughtfulness, research, and experience the team brought. Even the business of introducing a company to the world became another occasion to describe the people doing the work.
That attention to the collaborators adds texture to his executive role. The company needs engineering, a commercial organization, and a way to explain itself. McCartney's public comments return repeatedly to the contributors behind those different tasks, giving the expanding business a cast of specific people. By that point, building the company involved choosing partners in several kinds of work, from writing software to explaining why someone should use it.
The money comes with an organization
Significo's June 2023 Series A brought in $12 million, led by Doug Blough, described at the time as a longstanding supporter of McCartney and Koha. The announcement paired the financing with additions to marketing, sales, and financial planning. Michael Robin joined as vice president of marketing, Gary Rust as executive vice president of sales, and Daniel Schuster as director of financial planning and analysis.
It is a useful glimpse of the work behind a funding headline. More capital brings more decisions about customers, products, budgets, and delivery. McCartney spoke at the time about looking after existing customers and building the infrastructure for growth. The emphasis was on keeping the business workable as its ambitions increased.
The physical organization was already international. Significo described hubs in Austin, Berlin, and Spain. Its careers page also presents fully remote work, with autonomy and responsibility among the things it offers prospective colleagues. For McCartney, based in Austin, collaboration across borders is part of the company he runs rather than a distant expansion plan.
Different measures, different moments: funding is money raised; valuation is the company's stated value in a transaction.
By October 2025, acquisition had become an explicit part of the financing story. Significo announced a Series B led by JSTAR Capital Investments' Horizon Fund II at a $100 million valuation. The plans included product development, international expansion, and further acquisitions. Bringing complementary businesses together had become a stated strategy backed by new investment.
The valuation describes the company at that financing event. McCartney's earlier income figure describes a personal decision. Placed together, the numbers show how much the scale of his work has changed. They also leave the important operational question intact: what happens inside the organization after the announcement has passed?
Who does the work now?
McCartney has lately been willing to push that question further. At Bunch, where he is also CEO, his stated ambition is to use technology to improve at least one billion lives. Bunchee, the company's AI coach, offers personalized guidance for workplace challenges. The ambition is a statement of intent, while the product gives it a specific place to start.
In December 2025, McCartney described himself as an owner and steward at Bunch and presented the business as operating through AI agents. He has argued for systems that handle execution while people retain responsibility for strategy, values, and constraints.
This introduces an interesting tension into a career built through working relationships. The founder who welcomed familiar colleagues into Significo is also interested in companies where software takes on work normally coordinated through departments. His argument centers on accountability: defined responsibilities, observable outputs, and human intervention when judgment is required. The appeal, in his telling, is less time spent coordinating execution.
Bunch also places a responsibility on its users: they remain accountable for decisions made with AI-generated guidance, and should check important information independently. An app may offer a suggestion quickly. A manager still has to decide how to use it with another person. The responsibility survives the convenience.
McCartney's story began here with a smaller paycheck and a choice about what deserved his working day. It now includes an international software business, acquisitions shaped by years of acquaintance, and experiments with who or what carries out the work. The scale has changed considerably. His habit of reopening the question of how to build a company seems to have survived the growth.