Zeck is a software that aims to make board meetings more collaborative and efficient that can also be accessed on mobile devices, offering an "always live," iterative platform for building and sharing materials for Boards in a mobile-friendly format more akin to reading a media site than a fixed PDF slide deck, according to a news release.
“A board meeting is one of a company's most important meetings of the year, so we could not put out a half-baked product, there couldn't be a typical MVP, because companies would not have put a half baked product in front of their board,” Wolfe said. “So we needed to put in a ton of product development into the initial product. So we did raise money pre-product, and then we said, ‘Okay, if this works and we get some market share, then let's go do another round of bridge.’ And we did that, and then that bridge was to this A-round.”
Norton also founded EDO, an advertising data firm, and worked with the Wolfe brothers to found CrowdRise. CrowdRise was acquired by San Diego, Calif.-headquartered GoFundMe in 2017.
Robert Wolfe and Jeffrey Wolfe, of Huntington Woods, met Norton through Norton’s wife, Shauna Robertson, who was a longtime friend of the brothers. They were trying to get the idea for CrowdRise off the ground and Norton joined the cause.
The idea for Zeck was developed as a result of the issues Robert Wolfe noticed while running board meetings for Moosejaw and CrowdRise.
“I feel like there's this wild opportunity for us to change what should be the most productive part of a company's engagement with their investors. And it's so important, and we're, I feel like, humbly, on the cusp of solving it,” Wolfe said.
The Detroit-headquartered company was originally designed to tackle issues at the startup level, Robert Wolfe said, but has been able to scale up since it was initially launched in 2022. Ten of the 20 employees of the company work remotely in the city, while the other half works remotely from around the country.
Detroit Venture Partners and Invest Detroit also invested in this round of funding.
Wolfe declined to share information about the investment round, but said that the group approached funding for Zeck differently than it had for previous startups.
“There is nothing more miserable in business than the board meeting, and we're trying to flip that,” Wolfe said. “So if you go to our website, there's a section called ‘Madness’ … you'll see the narrative is so silly and so dumb and very different than what you would expect for a corporate board’s face, but again, it follows the same kind of branded playbook as our prior Detroit-based companies.”
Zeck Madness is a blog-style section of the website where tips and updates are shared with users that are intended to approach business in a more relaxed way.
“Someone at Zeck just told me that I swish my drinks in my mouth and it’s annoyed her for the past six months. Nothing to do with Viewing anything but figured I should open up about it,” the “Decent Humans of Zeck” wrote in one Zeck Madness post on “Viewing.”
