Patricia Recarte: Winner of the 2024 Great Companies International Women Entrepreneur Award

Name: Patricia Recarte

Business Name: KADO

Location: New York , USA

Establishment (Year): 2020

Category: Information Technology

Profession/ Specialty: IT

Website: https://www.kadonetworks.com

Social Media : Linkedin

Company Detail:

KADO is an end-to-end digital business cards and relationship management tool. Meant for client facing businesses (insurance, real estate, financial advisory, B2B pharma, amongst others) who rely on their network to generate revenue.

As for her background story, Patricia Recarte started off her career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. The people she’s surrounded by work in service-linked industries, like lawyers, consultants and real estate brokers. In these sectors, business is not only transactional but mostly about network and relationships. Bottom line is that in these industries networking and relationship management is archaic. There is no standard – people use notepads, emails, CRMs, etc. They don’t have a single tool to network and that connects and integrates all their systems for interactions, tasks, etc. KADO was born as an all-in-one digital business card and contact management tool, to allow professionals to exchange contacts and, immediately, sync with their business tools (CRMs, email, calendar, task managers...). They are now looking to implement new functionalities, like the possibility to get automated intelligent news feed after instantly meeting someone, or the possibility to send automated AI-written follow up emails after the contact exchange happens.

Unique Selling Proposition or Competitive Advantage:

KADO is not just a digital business card provider, but it is the only solution currently providing an end-to-end fully-integrated solution:

• HRM integration for automatic set up, edition and deletion of employees

• CRM / Outlook / GSuite integration to automatically push contacts newly captured via the digital business card.

• Email / calendar integration to instantly follow up and review interactions with recently captured contacts

• Plus the upcoming news feeds and automated emails
  

Challenges Faced During the Journey

The development started in 2021 and generated its first revenue at the end of the year. They did fundraise over $1M in pre-seed from angels and an accelerator. However, at the beginning of 2023, after the crash of SVB, the company nearly closed. Patricia Recarte and her cofounder had to fire their 8 employees and go back to ground zero / bootstrapping. This came together with a personal challenge, a very complicated divorce, that led her to move from a comfortable life to a 6 sq meter room in Chinatown, New York.

Despite that, they managed to revamp the company and grow their revenue, reaching over $200k ARR and closing their first enterprise contracts. Now they continue to grow, and pay for their own costs without external financing. This experience led them to becoming more conscious about cost and expenses, seeing a considerably stronger return on their investments.

Advice for Women Entrepreneurs:

Perseverance and resilience are the main keys to success. There are moments when everything will seem very dark with no light at the end of the tunnel, but it's in those moments where one sees the best out of oneself, and where the best leaders shine and companies grow. As an example, out of the 12 companies in her accelerator program, only 4 of them are still in business, and not because their ideas were better than others, but because they pushed hard when the toughest challenges arose.

Entrepreneurship is not only about great ideas and funding, but also about being able to overcome difficult situations. They all have it in them, so never give up!