In this episode of the Full Throttle Leaders podcast, host Michael Falato interviews Mary Shea, co‑founder of Meerkat (trymeerkat.ai). Mary explains that Meerkat was created to solve the "shared intelligence" problem: teams have conversations, decisions, LLM outputs, and relationship data scattered across multiple tools, causing valuable context to fall into a black‑hole. Meerkat unifies chat, video meetings, note‑taking, action‑item tracking, and network intelligence (LinkedIn contact import, enrichment, and prospecting insights) into a single, AI‑first app. The product is in its first year, with a fully functional beta, a freemium tier and a paid tier at $9.99 per user per month plus optional data add‑ons. The go‑to‑market approach combines a product‑led growth (PLG) strategy for individual users and small groups with a B2B focus on SMBs, avoiding large enterprises. Mary notes there are no direct competitors offering the same holistic experience, positioning Meerkat as a disintermediator of point solutions like Slack, WhatsApp, note‑taking apps, and LinkedIn. The company currently serves 3‑4 paying clients, has closed its first year of revenue, and is in an angel round backed by two billionaire Oracle co‑founders, seeking $1 million (half raised). Ideal customers are sole proprietors, small teams, and event organizers who need a single platform for communication, networking, and post‑event community building. Mary shares a concrete use case: replacing Cvent for a high‑touch, C‑suite conference, providing attendees with Meerkat for pre‑, during‑, and post‑event networking. Contact information (LinkedIn, email mary@trymeerkat.ai, website) is provided for listeners interested in the product or investment.
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All right everybody, it's Michael Falato again and Full Throttle Leaders is the podcast. And we have Mary Shea and it's called MerCat, right?
Meerkat. Meerkat. Actually, if you think, think of the little animals that live in a very small area in the desert, in the southern part of the African continent. Those are meerkats, and they're highly collaborative, communicative, productive animals that group together in groups of 20 to 50, and they take care of each other and look after each other. So that's awesome. We thought it was a great name for our tool.
And we had an earlier podcast today with Badger.
Okay, so there's a lot of that going on.
Yeah, Badger Maps was interesting. So I'm going to look for maybe a fox and a lion today, and then we'll close this out.
Absolutely. I love it.
But tell us a little bit about your company, why you decided to even come on the podcast today, and, you know, what, what problem are you solving?
Yeah, thanks so much. I mean, it's a very exciting time, as everyone knows. Founders that are focused on AI-first AI-first world, there's so much we could do with small, nimble teams. And so myself and my founder, co-founder Ralph Schoenbach, had this idea that, you know, most companies don't really have a productivity problem. They really have this problem where they don't have shared intelligence. So if you think about conversations that typically happen, they happen, you know, one-to-one in one tool, and then decisions live in another tool, and then LLMs are in another tool, and then Relationships are scattered across all kinds of networks. And so what you find is that this intelligence that you have from teams, small teams, anywhere from 3 to 5 to 10 to 20 people kind of gets lost in this black hole. And so what we're trying to solve for is create a much more sticky type of app for collaboration, communication, and productivity that's drawing on the shared intelligence of all of our networks. Okay.
And is— how long has your company been in business doing this? And like, how far are you in the whole revenue cycle?
Yeah. So this is my first time. I've worked in startups and scale-ups for much of the 25 years that I've been in the business world. And Meerkat's been around for just a little bit over a year now. So we're still very early stage. This is the earliest stage company that I've ever been in. So I'm learning a lot. But it's yours. It is. I'm, I'm a true owner and, you know, I just love the people I work with and we have similar values and we're tech geeks. And so we love what we're doing. It's a blast. So we've been around for a year. We have a fully functional product. So we're taking both a horizontal and vertical approach to going to market. So horizontal in terms of getting the app out there in the hands of people. End users could be friends and family groups, people are planning travel, people are managing households. So you can communicate with chat, you can communicate over video meetings, you can assign— I could assign you action items and we can pull in our shared networks and understand who we know in common. So we're going after sort of a PLG growth strategy on the BDC side. And also on the B2B side where we're working with companies that are SMB and below. We're letting, you know, the Microsofts and the big tech of the world go after the big true large enterprises.
But who competes with you if you're not going after enterprise or maybe light enterprise? I'm in this business. I use tools like this a lot and there's not one tool I've seen like yours.
Yeah. So that's what's really exciting. There isn't. This is— we have a very unique tool and a huge differentiator with our ability to bring in network connections and provide deep insights. And we also pipe in proprietary data to the tool so we can start to help folks with prospecting. And that's a whole other side of the business that we have. But yeah, it's a really unique tool. And, you know, we can disintermediate LLMs, we can disintermediate what we're using today, Firefly, the notetakers. We can disintermediate WhatsApp and Signals of the world. The difference is that all of those tools are point solutions, right? Yeah. We come in with a holistic tool that allows you to do, you know, 5 different types of things without having to jump in and out of your apps. So you're— this is my founder calling me. He's got We're just closing a deal right now, so I'm sure he's really excited, but he's going to have to wait because I'm live.
How many current clients are you servicing now?
Yeah, so we have about 3 or 4 different clients. We closed revenue in our first year last year, and we've got a really rich pipeline right now. The app is freemium, so people like yourself and your listeners can get our app. And not even have to pay anything. And with the app, they get note-taking capabilities just like you'd have in all the standard note-takers. You get like a Jira Lite action item capabilities and the ability to dictate, you know, my to-do list. You get chat and DM, so it's a Slack buster. And you also have the ability to get deep, deep insights on your network. So in your case, Who do I, who do Mary and Michael know that would be a phenomenal guest who's a founder, you know, Series A and below or what have you? And Mary knows that person. I can get them to write a quick note, intro you, and boom, you're off. And so you're doing this.
Are you doing LinkedIn automation inside the platform?
We don't automate LinkedIn. We don't, you know, LinkedIn is a bit of a walled garden. As an analyst before, I covered LinkedIn very closely. So what we do is we extract your and this is all legal, you actually extract all of your contacts from LinkedIn, you give it to us, and then you could start to build a thread with myself, Ralph, 3, 4 other people, and we could start to do all kinds of insights around who we know collectively. So for founders, it's great because they could figure out how to get warm intros. For VC firms, they could put all their portcos on it or their LPs on it, and they have a mode to communicate and get insights from the collective network. And it's just a great communication tool. So, and you also save money because you're not toggling from app to app and you're not having to waste time doing that.
So what's your proposed licensing fee?
Yeah, so we're, like I said, we have a freemium for just about all the capabilities. Obviously, you know, the compute cost costs and the data cleansing, because once we take your data in from LinkedIn, we enrich it with phone and email, which is an invaluable capability too. So, you know, we're looking at sort of freemium first, $9.99 per person a month after that, and then depending on The level of— if you want additional proprietary data, then we add costs on top of that. But everyone who's listening could use it for the basic capabilities right now. We're on pretty much like a 3-month beta, so we just want users and we want feedback.
Are you in a seed round, angel round? Where are you at in funding?
We're in the angel round, so we have 2 significant angel investors. They're both billionaires and founding members of the software company Oracle, which we all know quite well. And I'll leave it at that. You know, we're— this round will be angel. Shortly after that, we'll do seed or pre-seed.
And what's your goal for angel round? Yeah, so far as the raise?
Yeah, we're raising $1 million. And we're halfway there. So if any of your listeners want in on the investment, just DM me. We've got—
How do they reach you, Mary?
Yeah, they can reach me on LinkedIn. So Mary Shea, PhD, on LinkedIn. Also go to Meerkat. You can download the app and then I'll get notified immediately once you get on the app and I'll start communicating with you. But I'm pretty easy to find.
And it's M-E-E-R-K-A-T?
Yeah. So it's trymeerkat.ai.
Yeah. And do you want to give out any phone number or email as well, or just that?
Yeah. My email is mary@trymeerkat.ai. And I think my phone number's on my LinkedIn, so people can find me. I'm very available.
Who would you think would be the best ideal customer profile for you before we close this out?
Yeah, I mean, like we talked about just a few minutes before the call, you certainly yourself, anyone who's a sole proprietor, small business, has a podcast, or who relies on networking and understanding, you know, who, who they want to talk to, people who set up regional events, people who are looking for talent. So We're really targeting teams, small teams, sole proprietors, and then SMB businesses. This is that— don't go ahead. No, no, no, no. Businesses that don't want to have 5 different tools, you know, and want to go with one provider that's easy to use and fun.
I'm thinking out loud before we let this go, like conferences, like you don't know who's going to be at the conference and how they relate to you. Is there a way you can tie into like a EventMobi, or I forgot the names of these companies that do, that do Cvent, like those types of things.
Yeah. Well, it's interesting you should say that because we're replacing Cvent for a conference that we're supporting an organization for this fall. And there's a lot of limitations with Cvent. So what we're doing for this other organization, and hopefully we'll have a press release once we ink the deal and everything, but that we could share. But basically we're going to provide all of the attendees. It's a very high-level event, C-suite only, 60 attendees in a very gorgeous location out west. We're going to get everyone access to Meerkat so they can communicate with each other before the event. We will be posting all of the event agenda information about the hotel, fun videos, and then we're going to ask everyone to bring their LinkedIn networks in. So that they can actually share their contacts before, during, and after event. And then we'll also be giving them access to Meerkat for, you know, 3 months post-event. So this is, you know, I mean, this is like a whole new way of getting much deeper connections and interactions versus— the problem with these event platforms is you use them once, you never use them again. Oh. Even the community, community platforms like Disco. I'm on a community. I check it once a month because it's not, it's not in my workflows.
So I spend time going high on, on the apps and it's a waste of time. You know, there has to be—
it's a waste of time. Use it 3 times and you're like, well, if I'm not using it for my video meetings, my chat, like I'm not using it. So I— anyway.
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for making time. Uh, once again, to reach out to me as well, I'm Michael Falato, the CEO and founder of Full Throttle Falato Leads, and this is Full Throttle Leaders, the podcast. And you can reach me at michael@fullthrottlefalatoleads.com or give me a ring, 512-639-3375. I would love to help you with your top of funnel. Mary's been a great guest. Thank you.
