RIHub

Annette Tonti

Providence, Rhode Island
3X Startup Founder
Managing Director, RIHUB

I spent the early part of my career in a big corporation—Computer Sciences Corporation—and loved it. I kind of knew when I got to a certain point however, that I needed to jump off the diving board and try a startup, which was kind of scary.

The first company I created with the help of three other founders, was an online advertising company called Bluestreak. In the very early days of the Internet—before there was bandwidth for sound or video in ads—we pioneered interactive ad experiences to solve the problem of people clicking a banner ad and leaving the site. The technology enabled us to do some cool things—like an expanding banner that would do a survey live during the Oscars.

I thought since it was the Internet, we could start the company anywhere—so we started it right here in Newport, Rhode Island. But I ended up spending most of my time running up and down to New York, where we raised the majority of our money from. I raised $27.5 million for the company. You had to raise more money back then because there was no cloud. We had to buy infrastructure, put it in a closet, and run these global ads through our own servers.

But raising that amount of money came with a lot of venture capitalists who needed to exit their funds—something I didn’t fully understand at the time—meaning they were pushing hard for us to exit. That led us to be acquired by a global ad agency, which was a good place for us. It wasn’t a home run, but it was an exit to a global corporation that came with some money.

My second company was also here locally in Rhode Island, building mobile websites in the days of the flip phone when you couldn’t get good information from any kind of HTML website. After a couple of years, industry standards moved on and companies decided they didn’t want a bunch of separate mobile websites. Seeing the writing on the wall, I knew we had to sell—and we were acquired by a search engine company in California where I stayed for a few years. 

The third company, called Innovation Scout, helped big global corporations—who by nature are not good at doing quick innovation—find solutions to their biggest challenges using innovative startups around the world that could help them do things better, cheaper, and faster. We viewed matching startups and large corporations as a big data problem, and we built our own AI to do the matching. Lots of large companies wanted the end solution, but really wanted what boiled down to a consulting model. I’m enamored with helping startups bring innovation to scale, so that model wasn’t as exciting for me. As a result, I ended up jumping at the opportunity to lead Rhode Island and Southeast New England’s innovation hub, RIHub, and I sold the Innovation Scout software.

RIHub is all about building the innovation ecosystem here in Rhode Island. Exits are super important for that and great exits are even more important for circulating capital and knowledge. And they can help overcome some of the challenges I encountered raising money as a woman. Only two percent of VC funding goes to women, but that will change as more women achieve successful exits and become investors.

Getting to an exit means building a real business—one that creates something people truly want. Drawing on my career across a range of startup experiences, I’ve mentored founders to build strong, enduring businesses first. But exits also can have a geographic component. Proximity to larger companies that put money into the ecosystem and are potential acquirers is an essential part of innovation ecosystems and commonplace in startup hubs like Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas. Rhode Island—with a lot of focus on dual-use and ocean tech—is starting to attract more of those sorts of entities, which will be super important for the next phase of our state’s economy.