We spoke with Chat Joglekar, CEO of Baton, about how his company raised $500K from Zeno Ventures with Mercury Raise.
Feature: Mercury Raise
Company: Baton
CEO: Chat Joglekar
What they’re building: A transparent marketplace that uses verified data to match small business owners with serious buyers.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Tell us the story behind Baton.
I caught up with a friend of mine during COVID and he was talking about trying to buy a small business. As we were talking, he expressed the frustration that most small business owners didn't have a good sense of their business value, which made it hard, as a buyer, to meet them where they were.
I had been at Zillow for over five years, and because of that, my friend made the off-handed comment that what was needed in this space was a Zillow for small businesses, and I frankly couldn't stop thinking about the comment. After the call ended, I ended up reaching back out to him. It turns out he had been trying to acquire a couple of different businesses and the price was wildly different. I realized that if we could do what Zillow was able to do in the real estate market where everyone can understand what their house is worth and what house they're looking at is worth, you could unlock this whole market — which is really important for small business owners because a lot of times they end up shutting their business down instead of putting it on the market because there are no real good options in the market right now.
How does it work?
It starts with getting small business owners their valuation. We will give a business valuation to anyone, whether they're selling or not selling, because we really, from a mission perspective, feel like that is something that empowers an owner to decide what they want to do next. Do they want to grow their business? Do they want to sell it? If they want to grow, we'll help them connect them to lenders, connect them to a bookkeeper, and connect them to someone to help them. Or if they want to sell, we actually can help them sell and we become the sell-side broker.
How did you originally find out about Mercury Raise?
One of our board members was pinged about it. He shot me the link and said, “Hey, you know, you guys are kicking off your seed raise soon. You should apply for this.” The timing worked, we got in, and it was pretty much perfect timing just for us. We were just in the beginning stages of starting the raise, so it made sense. Plus, we'd been a Mercury customer since the very beginning.
Walk us through how you ended up raising money with Raise (through what is now called Investor Connect).
We got 15–20 interested inquiries, and one of them was from Zeno Ventures, who ended up writing us a $500K check. Since they also have a private equity arm (which often deals in small businesses), they understood the need and use case pretty natively.
It was good timing because we were in the final stages of putting together our round and figuring out who was in and who wasn’t. I was like, “Not to pressure you, but we're putting our seed round together and I'd love to have you on, but I kind of need to know within the next few days.” And they said yes pretty quickly, which was great. We signed, they wired the money over, and they've been super helpful ever since.
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