atlanta-startups
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The Christmas Presents That Became a $3 Billion Bet
Sean Henry started selling online before he was old enough to drive. Two decades later, his obsession with what happens after the click has turned Stord into a $3 billion experiment in making independent commerce move like the giants.
Flock Built a $7.5 Billion Crime-Solving Network. Now It Has to Prove the Network Can Police Itself.
Flock made license-plate intelligence cheap to deploy and easy to share. The product worked so well that the governance around it became the company’s most important engineering problem.
A BMW Directory Couldn't Prove It Made the Phone Ring. CallRail Turned That Blind Spot Into $100 Million in ARR.
CallRail began with an embarrassingly ordinary question: did that ad make the phone ring? Fifteen years later, its answer spans attribution, conversation intelligence and an AI receptionist - with a few hard lessons about what not to build along the way.
Lundyn Carter Is Making the Wedding Dress a Service, Not a Souvenir
A $5,000 alterations bill exposed a strange truth about bridal retail. Carter built Laine London around the part brides actually keep: the fit, the feeling and the memory.
The $5,000 Wedding Dress Mistake That Became Atlanta's Rental Bridal Bet
Lundyn Carter spent $5,000 altering a family wedding dress, then built the service she wished had existed. Laine London's sharper idea is not rental alone - it is treating fit as the product.
RightData’s $6 Million Bet: Make Bad Data Boring Before AI Makes It Expensive
Enterprise AI has made an old plumbing problem newly urgent: a pipeline can run perfectly while delivering the wrong answer. RightData sells a three-part control system designed to catch that failure before it reaches a dashboard, an audit, or an algorithm.
The Atlanta Venture Studio That Took Its Operator Playbook to the Future Battlefield
Rule 1 Ventures spent years turning freight, finance and security headaches into B2B software. Now the Atlanta firm is applying the same operator-first logic to aerospace and defense - where access, speed and execution matter as much as capital.
Michael Malakhov
Michael Malakhov is the founder and CEO of Carpool Logistics, an Atlanta-based technology company that modernizes how cars move across the supply chain by bundling vehicle shipments to cut costs and emissions. After nearly two decades in freight and automotive logistics - 16 years at C.H. Robinson and an executive role at ACERTUS - he launched Carpool in 2021. The company has shipped more than 150,000 vehicles for over 1,800 clients and raised a $12M Series A in 2025 led by Wavecrest Growth Partners with participation from CarMax. An immigrant who says he has lived under communist, socialist, and American systems, Malakhov is a vocal believer that 'the American dream is alive and well.'
Nick Miller
Nick Miller is the founder and CEO of Universe, an Atlanta-based holding company that buys and builds vertical software businesses. He first built Gather, a hospitality SaaS platform for private events that grew from a 200-square-foot closet to a company acquired by Vista Equity Partners and later merged into Tripleseat. With Universe he now owns and operates Goldie, an all-in-one business tool for solopreneurs, and Equilab, a training community for equestrians, applying lessons from one exit to a portfolio of purpose-built software for overlooked markets.