Welcoming Birmingham Bound Company #14: True Load Time
While in-person experiences and southern hospitality are at the core of Birmingham Bound’s strategy to showcase and recruit high level tech talent to our city, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to restructure to a temporary virtual model.
Our second social-distanced Birmingham Bound experience was in early May with True Load Time, a Greenville, SC, based company that is developing a web and mobile platform for the transportation & logistics sector to address the billion-dollar truckload detention issue. We first came in touch with TLT’s founder through Alabama Futures Fund who was in discussions with TLT about an investment.
We organized a visit for TLT’s CEO and Founder, Kevin Nadeau, and his wife to safely experience a weekend in Birmingham by exploring the city center and surrounding neighborhoods. We created walking tours, hopped on Zoom meetings with tech thought leaders, and ordered favorites from the drive-thru Pepper Place farmer’s market and Slice. Nadeau remarked that, “Visiting Birmingham during the pandemic was definitely one of the more unusual adventures my wife and I have undertaken in recent years. We weren’t sure what to expect due to the mandatory closures, but the quiet city streets and parks actually provided quite an intimate setting for our visit. The reduced traffic congestion really made exploring the city and surrounding neighborhoods a breeze. We’re incredibly grateful to Britney and the Birmingham Bound team for welcoming us to their city!”
Concluding the visit, True Load Time decided to relocate to Birmingham, and Alabama Futures Fund under Redhawk Advisory made an investment in the company. According to Matt Hottle, Partner at Redhawk Advisory, “Birmingham Bound played a leading role in helping us recruit True Load Time to Birmingham. At the height of closures and business disruption in Birmingham because of Covid, they still found a way to successfully promote Birmingham as an emerging tech hub, ideally positioned for early stage startups.”
Hottle went on to say, “We were blown away by Birmingham Bound’s creative approach given the city was a virtual ghost town. Kevin Nadeau, the Founder and CEO of TLT barely made it back home before he told us he was committed to relocating the company’s headquarters to the Magic City.”
True Load Time will be moving to Birmingham in the next few months, and we will continue to help their success as they further develop their product in a new headquarters.
We are watching the COVID-19 guidelines closely and will continue to innovate for future visits with prospective tech companies in our pipeline. The pandemic cannot not take away our city’s magical effect on visitors, even with fewer people out and about.
