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Aaron Rankin
Founder of Sprout Social
Greater Chicago Area
Overview
Aaron Rankin is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Sprout Social, a successful enterprise software company based in the Greater Chicago Area. With an educational background from Carnegie Mellon University and experience at companies like Endeca and IBM, Aaron has invested in and supported various start-ups, including Bridge Money, OpsLevel, and NutriSense.
Aaron's career highlights include co-founding Sprout Social, a leading SaaS platform, and investing in a range of successful companies across different stages and sectors, showcasing his expertise in enterprise software, SaaS, and start-up ventures.
Work Experience
Co-Founder & Board Member
2009 - Current
(NASDAQ: SPT) Our software helps 30,000+ companies around the world manage their social media channels more efficiently and create stronger relationships with their customers. From local businesses to global charities, our products make a difference every second of every day. Our team is relentless about solving hard problems and is wholly committed to the success of our customers.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder
2010 - 2023
From inception, I worked to build our technology, grow our product teams, develop our business, product, and technical strategies, and shape a culture of excellent products and customer success.
Sprout Social provides a platform for businesses to manage social media engagement, publishing and analytics.
Raised $111,498,796.00 from Goldman Sachs, Future Fund and New Enterprise Associates.
Investor & Principal
2020
A small family office focused on: - Direct investing in companies addressing decarbonization, the energy transition, sustainability, and climate change mitigation. Existing investment areas include hydrogen infrastructure, water, space, food tech, construction, and CDR. - Direct investing in software startups. Since 2020 we’ve supported over 40 companies spanning B2B SaaS, software infrastructure, health & wellness, and other discretionary themes. - LP in thematically related funds. - Philanthropically supporting environmental, climate, education, and health causes.
Software Engineer, Special Operations
2006 - 2010
I worked for Endeca, which was acquired by Oracle for $1.1B in 2011. Endeca was a pioneer in search and information retrieval. Predominantly worked on the CEO's special projects team, pioneering productizations of our technology, helping the company prove ROI to penetrate new segments. My teams and I worked in a forward-deployed manner, working with customers to prototype and develop novel, high-scale applications on Endeca, which addressed specific business inefficiencies such as high-volume global staffing, auto warranty claims, and optimal part selection for manufacturing design. Our work helped incubate Endeca's Business Intelligence product line, which became Oracle BI.
Endeca is a software company that sells e-commerce search, customer experience management, enterprise search and business intelligence apps.
Raised $81,149,000.00 from DN Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Venrock, Intel Capital and Notable Capital.
IT Strategy
2004 - 2006
My team was responsible IT security policy, risk and architecture for the internal IBM business, a group reporting up into the IBM CIO. I had direct business responsibility for the workstation security of 300,000+ IBM colleagues.
IBM is an IT technology and consulting firm providing computer hardware, software, infrastructure, and hosting services.
Extreme Blue intern
2003 - 2003
Premier industry internship. My team (3 devs, 1 MBA) worked on behalf of IBM Tivoli on a novel system to classifying Intrusion Detection System alarms.
IBM is an IT technology and consulting firm providing computer hardware, software, infrastructure, and hosting services.
IT & Web Programming
1999 - 2000
I was fortunate to be on the ground for the dot-com era through a high-school internship. I worked on a Visual Basic “ASP” web application, I built and maintained Windows NT/2000 & Linux servers, and & did desktop computing support for a rapidly growing startup.
Education
Investments
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