What’s the deal with the Dealroom platform? Knoxville Chamber leadership outlines the strategy
The platform helps paint the “big picture” of what’s taking place in entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic development in the Knoxville area.
A few weeks ago, the Knoxville Chamber soft-launched its latest offering: Dealroom. The platform is a global resource with hyper-local features to help communities track, measure, and identify long-term growth strategies.
Mike Odom, the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Knoxville Chamber, said it all dates back to the very defining Techstars Assessment of the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem of the Greater Metropolitan Area in January of 2021.
The assessment identified five areas of strength and six areas of improvement. Those areas for improvement remain significant challenges for Knoxville’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The six areas of improvement were as follows:
- The Perception Gap
- The Funding Gap
- The Support Gap
- The Access Gap
- The Participation Gap
- The Measurement Gap.
Since then, local organizations have worked to close these gaps through targeted initiatives.
For example, programs like 100Knoxville, Women in Entrepreneurship (WiE), the Women and Shora Foundations, and Damon Rawls’ newly launched Evergreen Development Corporation are working together to address the “Participation Gap.” They encourage minority-owned businesses, start-ups, and new ventures.
Efforts to address the “Perception Gap” stem from an evaluation showing that few people in East Tennessee recognized the strong performance of local technology companies.
Some of the current efforts are reflected through the opening of 121 Tech Hub in the Old City and the Pitch Before the Pitch series. This series is sponsored by PYA. It featured start-up successes on the Covenant Health Park jumbotron.
Additionally, Brandon Bruce, John Bruck, Marty Brown, Harry Boston, and Rosa Mar launched Market Square Ventures in early 2024 as an early-stage venture capital firm. This initiative aims to begin to chip away at the “Funding Gap,” and Three Roots Capital, founded by Grady Vanderhoofven, has been increasingly vocal about local deals with area start-ups.
Now, the Knoxville Chamber is working with Dealroom to address the “Measurement Gap.”
According to the Techstars Assessment, “Basic information on the status of local tech entrepreneurship, such as estimates on the number of local tech companies, varies significantly…The lack of shared data makes coordination among organizations working in this sector more challenging.”
It became clear to Odom, Joe Riley, the Chamber’s Director of Research and Analytics, and the rest of the team that a proper measurement software was a worthwhile investment.
So, they went on a fact-finding mission.
Dealroom emerges as the frontrunner
Through research of Raleigh, Austin, and Cincinnati, one platform stood out. It had the key tools to measure, track, and analyze the growth of Knoxville area businesses.
“We wanted something that could track both emerging and established companies, because innovation looks different across different industries,” Odom said.
Dealroom aggregates news, blogs, census data, deal flow, Crunchbase and Pitchbook reports, and user input. This creates a real-time database of local business activity.
It shows the number of companies, the number of investors, the number of funding rounds, and the number of people employed by start-ups.
Odom said it helps his team– and other community leaders keep a “pulse on the business community from an innovation standpoint.”
“We need to be able to measure innovation in our community,” Odom said. “Our team has been working on a regional innovation strategy. This data will help inform that.”
A work in progress
Dealroom is a useful tool for the Chamber and other economic developers in the area. However, it’s not a catch-all solution. It aggregates data from various sources, including the founders themselves. This means onboarding business owners, having them ensure all information is correct, and keeping them looped in on business profile changes is incredibly important.
The Knoxville Dealroom page only allows people with a business-specific email address to make changes to their company information.
“We rolled this out in a soft launch to give business owners, founders, and investors time to see their profile and status before we push it live to the general public,” Odom said. “But, we are excited for people in this community to see how much is going on with entrepreneurship, business growth, and innovation in the area.”
The platform helps paint the “big picture” of what’s taking place in the Knoxville area. Odom and Riley shared that it can also help them understand how the Knoxville Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) shapes up against other cities of its size.
Another benefit of Dealroom that Odom and Riley see is in bringing more capital to the region.
“Our first realization was that there’s actually more investors in this area than we thought,” Odom said. Currently, the dashboard identifies 62 VC investors in the area.
Odom had also noticed while testing Dealroom out in Beta that a Knoxville start-up received investment from a Venture Capital firm on the West Coast.
Dealroom helped to identify those out-of-state dollars, add new investors to the radar, and serves as a launch point for new connections.
Our takeaways
The Dealroom platform is a great way to collect and analyze data. If utilized to the full extent, it will allow local business leaders, founders, entrepreneurial and small business support organizations, and government entities to make data-informed decisions about how to direct their efforts.
The true test for Dealroom will be whether its data drives meaningful action—because data is only as valuable as the decisions it informs.
Check out the Dealroom Platform.
Learn more about the Knoxville Chamber.
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