Most entrepreneurs spend years chasing a billion-dollar exit. Once they reach this goal, many move away from the demands of building companies. The typical approach is straightforward: invest quietly, join a few boards, and enjoy the benefits of success.
Shegun Otulana took a different route.
In 2021, the Nigerian entrepreneur based in Alabama sold his healthcare software company, TheraNest, to the private equity firm KKR in a deal valued at about $1.25 billion. This exit established him as one of the most successful African-born founders in the U.S. Instead of easing off, Otulana invested his money and experience on a bigger challenge: creating companies from scratch through Harmony Venture Labs. Instead of waiting for founders to tackle overlooked industry issues, his venture studio builds businesses around them, turning operational gaps into scalable technology companies.
The Defining Move
Otulana could have moved his capital and network to an established technology centre. Instead, he concentrated his next venture in Birmingham, Alabama, a market he believed had strong ideas but lacked the density of capital, experienced operators and venture-building infrastructure found in larger hubs.
The decision carried a different type of risk from founding one startup. A venture studio must identify several viable problems, recruit founders, share talent across companies and allocate capital before it knows which ventures will survive. The amount of Otulana’s personal capital committed to Harmony Venture Labs has not been disclosed, so it would be inaccurate to suggest that he reinvested the entire value of the Therapy Brands transaction.
His execution model is more important than the cheque size. Harmony Venture Labs works with companies and institutions to identify expensive industry problems, test demand with real customers, design a business model and then recruit an internal or external operator to lead the resulting company. Its current process moves through discovery, testing, venture design and launch instead of funding an idea immediately.
That approach has produced companies including ListedKit, a real-estate transaction platform, and newer ventures such as PackPay, DealTree and SupplyFlo. Harmony Venture Labs is also managing the Innovate Alabama Venture Studio and Fund, which aims to launch at least 10 companies and attract $10 million in venture capital by 2028.
The result is not yet another billion-dollar success. The stronger conclusion is that Otulana has converted his experience into an institutional company-building platform. Its performance should eventually be judged by company survival, recurring revenue, follow-on capital and exits, not simply by the number of ventures launched.
Otulana’s Operating Code
Start With Customer Evidence, Not Investor Interest
A founder’s first responsibility is to prove that a customer has a recurring problem and will pay for a solution. Fundraising should accelerate evidence, not replace it. “The focus of your job is to deal with the product and get customers, not raising money,” Shegun Otulana said during a Harmony Venture Labs discussion on startup fundraising.
Otulana spent about nine or 10 months raising TheraNest’s first $250,000. Instead of remaining in a continuous fundraising cycle, the company used limited capital and customer revenue to become profitable. According to an interview published by INDIE, the business later exceeded $50 million in annual recurring revenue within five years.
Harmony Venture Labs applies the same principle by testing potential ventures with real customers before committing significant capital or building a full product.
Follow Sales Economics, Not the Original Plan
A customer segment is only attractive when its purchasing process, acquisition cost, revenue, and retention support scalable growth. Higher contract values do not automatically make a segment better.
“It became clear that selling to those nonprofit centers is a long sales cycle,” Otulana said, explaining why TheraNest shifted its early focus towards private practices.
TheraNest initially focused on nonprofit counselling organisations. These customers often required board approval and a sales-led process. Otulana discovered that smaller private practices could buy through a faster, product-led process, even when some paid less individually.
The company adjusted its customer focus rather than defending its original thesis. That shift reduced friction, accelerated adoption and eventually allowed the platform to expand into a much broader behavioural-health market.
Turn Problems Into Investable Milestones
Capital should fund a defined value-creation event, such as validating demand, reaching a revenue target or proving a repeatable acquisition channel. According to him, after the Harmony Venture Labs’ partnership with Innovate Alabama, “This studio partnership is our answer to that gap: building real companies around real problems, with early customer validation and the backing to grow.”
Harmony Venture Labs does not begin with a founder pitching a finished idea. It starts by examining the operational knowledge, customer complaints and inefficient processes inside an industry. The studio then tests whether the problem is painful and frequent enough to support an independent company.
This changes the investment question from “Is this an interesting idea?” to “What evidence must exist before more capital is released?”
The Strategy
Before TheraNest, Otulana experimented with several ideas that did not work. One account of his early entrepreneurial period describes a failed partnership and accumulated debt, although the amount of that debt has not been disclosed. Otulana has also acknowledged that he had “various ideas that didn’t work” before finding the opportunity that became TheraNest.
The important change was methodological.
Instead of starting with another idea he wanted the market to accept, Otulana used his software consultancy as a problem-discovery mechanism. A request from a counselling organisation exposed weaknesses in the available practice-management systems. He built a basic solution, responded to feature requests and allowed customer behaviour to guide the product.
He later made another correction when the initial nonprofit customer segment proved slow to acquire. The operating lesson was specific: test the customer, purchasing process and pricing model together. Product demand alone is insufficient when the route to revenue is too expensive or slow.
That lesson is now embedded in Harmony Venture Labs’ process. Problems are tested before companies are formed, and concepts can be rejected before they consume a full team and large amounts of capital.
The Power Network
Backers
TheraNest’s early growth began with approximately $250,000 from local angel investors. As Therapy Brands expanded, its institutional network included Greater Sum Ventures, PSG, Lightyear Capital and Oak HC/FT. KKR later acquired a majority interest, while PSG remained a minority investor.
For Harmony Venture Labs, the most significant verified institutional relationship is Innovate Alabama. The partnership gives the studio access to a state-backed venture fund, corporate relationships and an economic-development platform designed to keep new companies in Alabama.
Protégés and Studio-Built Operators
Harmony Venture Labs’ entrepreneur-in-residence programme functions as an operator pipeline.
Derrick Magnotta entered the programme before becoming chief executive of ListedKit. Kellie Clark led AppThink, the studio’s platform for helping early-stage founders validate and launch ideas. Jeremy Carter joined as a founder-in-residence to lead PackPay, which is developing software to help consumer-goods companies recover money lost through retailer deductions.
These operators are the closest publicly verifiable equivalent to Otulana’s protégés. They are not merely receiving advice or capital. They are being placed inside a shared system for product development, hiring, customer discovery and go-to-market execution.
Strategic Access
The network gives Harmony Venture Labs four advantages.
Corporate partners provide operational problems and potential early customers. Innovate Alabama contributes institutional support and connections across the state. Otulana’s private-equity relationships provide knowledge of financing, acquisitions and enterprise value creation. The studio’s shared product, design and commercial teams reduce the cost of assembling a separate workforce for every experiment.
The strategic objective is to create a cycle in which successful companies attract capital, capital attracts experienced talent and that talent helps launch additional companies.
Build a Problem-to-Milestone Memo
Founders can apply Otulana’s operating system before writing a pitch deck.
Choose one expensive and recurring customer problem. Interview at least 10 people who experience it. Identify the smallest solution they would pay to use. Then define one measurable milestone that new capital would achieve, such as 20 paying customers, a specific retention rate or a repeatable acquisition cost.
Do not raise money merely because the company needs more time. Raise when the relationship between the capital, the activity it funds, and the increase in company value can be clearly explained.