FLASH: Triangle Tweener Feedtrail Acquired - Details plus Founder Interview!
Second big deal of 2025 and it's January 9th! 🤯 PLUS: It's another Cofounders Capital deal!
FLASH: today (January 9, 2025) ANOTHER Triangle Tweener startup (HQ’d in the Triangle, revs > $1m) has been acquired. In this post we reveal the details of the deal, how the deal came about plus an exclusive interview with the founding CEO, Paul Jaglowski. But before we dig in….
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The DEAL
Today, Relias is announcing they have acquired Feedtrail. Relias is a very large local company in the Healthcare space(details below) and that’s one of the unique aspects of this deal - having a large local established company acquire a local startup highlights yet another reason the Triangle is a great place to start a company - heck maybe your future acquirer is right in your backyard?
Relias CEO, Kay Krafft said:
"We’re delighted to welcome Feedtrail to the Relias team. This strategic acquisition complements our healthcare workforce offerings with a set of comprehensive patient experience solutions," said Kay Krafft, CEO of Relias. "By integrating Feedtrail’s innovative patient experience software with our existing solutions, we’ll extend Relias’ ability to improve outcomes in both patient care quality and workforce management for our customers.”
Paul Jaglowski Interview (Founding CEO)
Feedtrail has be on the Tweener List since 2021 and Paul is a well known founder in the area. He was kind enough to take ~15mins on a super busy day and give an interview. In the interview, we cover the founding of Feedtrail, how he got to the Triangle, their relationship with local investor Cofounders Capital and how/why they ended up joining forces with Relias: (13mins)
(Apologies for the weird camera angle on my side, I have new office and the setup leaves a lot to be desired, working on it!).
A couple of highlights:
There’s a lot of synergy here - Feedtrail can recommend to clients the Relias educational services they need to improve their CSAT and then they can re-measure with Feedtrail.
Being local and in similar but non competitive areas, the companies got to know each other and Feedtrail had customers asking for a customer like Relias offers.
Relias is keeping the entire Feedtrail team and since they are local, they can now office/hybrid it up vs. working remote.
I’m sure Relias loves having something new (Feedtrail) to sell their 12,000 healthcare customers
About Feedtrail
Founded in 2017, Feedtrail started as a general customer feedback system that’s better than 10 day old surveys. As Paul mentions in the interview, they ultimately ‘went small to get big’ and focused in on the Healthcare segment. Health organizations use Feedtrail to measure and improve their customer satisfaction ratings across many dimensions.
About Relias
Relias provides lifelong workforce enablement solutions for 12,000 healthcare organizations and 4.5 million caregivers to drive measurable outcomes. Customers choose Relias to reduce cost and risk, increase retention, and improve patient experience and care through the Relias Platform of connected solutions, which includes Learning, Performance, Compliance, Quality, and Recruiting. The Relias family of brands — Nurse.com, Wound Care Education Institute, Relias Academy, FreeCME, and Relias Media — serves the entire healthcare continuum and shares a common mission of improving the lives of the most vulnerable members of society and those who care for them.
Summary
Congrats to Paul and the Feedtrail team, congrats to Dave, Time, Tobi, Scott and Daniel on their fourth deal in < 30 days: Element451, Pattern Health, Biospatial and Feedtrail - they are clearly on a hot streak (started 5+ yrs ago - venture timing is weird).
Congrats to Relias for adding a great team and an awesome new offering to your solutions.
For the Triangle, these deals continue to speak to the quality of companies we are building here, the quality of our investors, founders and this one even had the unique angle of two Triangle companies in different phases of their growth partnering together.
But wait, there’s more…
It’s easy to assume, wow, all the deals got done in 30 days here, now there will be a dry spell… Turns out there are several big rounds moving and several companies in process for M+A, so stay tuned, much more to come, 2025 for the Triangle Tweener cohort of companies is going to be 🚀