18 Dec Q&A with iink CEO and IU Alumni Thomas McGrath
IU Ventures recently caught up with Thomas McGrath, the CEO of iink, a digital payments network that expedites the disbursement of funds associated with multi-party property insurance claims, to check in on the company and its plan for the future.
Tell us about iink—what does the company do?
iink helps homeowners and restoration professionals get paid up to 60 times faster after an insured property loss. This is accomplished through a combination of intelligent workflow automation and multi-party digital payment rails that connects all relevant stakeholders involved with the insurance claim.
IU Ventures participated in iink’s $2.2 MM seed round in March 2022 and the seed round extension. How did you first get connected with IU Ventures?
I graduated from IU’s Kelley School of Business in 2013 with a degree in Entrepreneurship and I became aware of IU Ventures through an alumni newsletter. In October 2020, I joined as an educational member to help review pitches and conduct due diligence on potential portfolio companies. After about two years of relationship building, I decided to get IU Ventures involved with my own startup.
How did your time at IU prepare you to become an entrepreneur—both inside and outside of the classroom?
I think one of the unique advantages of IU, as an aspiring entrepreneur, is its size and diversity of students following different academic pursuits. Innovation is often the result of a unique combination of people, skill sets, and perspectives coming together to approach a problem in a different way. I was fortunate to be able to mingle with Informatics and Computer Science students, law students, journalism majors, artists, etc. and this gave me a diverse network of people I can call upon.
You secured your Series A funding about a year ago. How did iink use that investment?
We invested in every area of our business but over the last 6-12 months had a particular focus in building scalable and standardized processes, metrics, and reporting across our core functions. A mantra I routinely repeat is this: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Beyond that we’ve been doing a lot lately to build a culture of high performance and collaboration. All the tooling, reporting, and product development in the world can’t replace a high-trust / high-performance team, so we’ve been investing here as well.
What milestones are you currently working on?
A $10 MM annual revenue run rate with consistent 70 percent + gross margins month over month.
When will you be ready for a Series B investment?
We’ll likely need to start looking at fundraising in early summer 2025. There is also a world where we could optimize for profitability and extend our runway further.
Where do you plan to focus future efforts?
We plan to focus efforts on reinvesting in the platform and expanding across the workflow of our ideal customer profile. Our vision is to become the ubiquitous financial operating system for restoration professionals so we will continue to build and solve for their most pressing needs.
What do you wish you knew before starting the company?
I wish I better understood the importance of people—treating people well and making them feel important and impactful. As we continue to grow, beyond the original co-founders, that is an area where I wish we had invested more early on. As a founder and CEO you can sometimes get caught up in your own world, but it’s also important to make sure you are overcommunicating, expressing gratitude, and demonstrating that you trust your people to get the job done without micromanaging them.
What advice would you give to a budding entrepreneur at IU?
Just do it. There’s not a magic formula other than the longer you wait, the more risk there is. I started my first company at 21 and the worst thing that could have happened to me then, if it failed, was I ended up on my parents couch.