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byline: Virginia Business

StartVirginia: Heard Around Virginia July 2024

Auterion, a software maker for computing platforms that support drones and autonomous robotics systems, has relocated its headquarters to Arlington County from Moorpark, California, as it seeks to be closer to its defense-related customers. The company already had some of its 112 employees based in the Washington, D.C., metro area for several years, but Auterion’s new HQ at 3100 Clarendon Blvd. now serves as its global base of operations. It also maintains research and development offices in Munich, Germany, and Zürich, Switzerland. (DC Inno)

BetterWorld, a Charlottesville company that offers tools to help organizations raise funds, is bringing in some funding of its own. The company has raised $7.35 million in equity from five investors, according to a May 21 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Betterworld’s platform includes tools to set up auctions, raffles, crowdfunding, giveaways, ticketing and more charitable giving options. The company counts more than 95,000 users, including Boys & Girls Clubs, Make-A-Wish America, the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, and USA Cycling. (Richmond Inno)

Alexandria-based tech startup HyperSpectral raised $8.5 million in Series A funding, the company announced June 5. The round was co-led by New York-based RRE Ventures and Kibo Ventures, based in Spain, with participating venture capital firms including San Diego-based Correlation Ventures and San Francisco-based GC&H, the venture capital arm of Cooley. HyperSpectral uses spectroscopy to identify E. coli, salmonella, listeria and other dangerous pathogens for the agricultural and medical industries. (News release)

The River District Association in Danville awarded four businesses more than $52,000 in grants to open or expand their brick-and-mortar businesses in the city’s River District, the organization announced May 22. Nine businesses pitched, and four were awarded funding: Links Coffee House, awarded $13,000; Social Circle Content Marketing, awarded $8,000, plus a $2,500 Community Investment Collaborative grant prize; Nancy Parris Interiors, awarded $10,000; and Valkyrie Aerial Acrobatics, awarded $19,000. (News release)

As of early June, Arlington County cloud management startup Stacklet had raised $14.5 million in funding to help boost its workforce and product offerings. The close of the Series B round brings the company’s total outside investment to $36.5 million since its founding by CEO Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu in 2020. SineWave Ventures, a San Francisco early-stage venture capital firm with a dual headquarters in Washington, D.C., led the round. Other firms that participated in Stacklet’s latest funding round include McLean’s Capital One Ventures, Palo Alto, California’s Foundation Capital and San Francisco’s Uncorrelated Ventures. (DC Inno)

Virginia Peninsula-based Start Peninsula named three finalists during its May 16 micro-pitch competition: Growables, a Norfolk-based houseplant kit company; Lockgreen, a Suffolk-based company that makes locking stash boxes for cannabis; and Vix, a fitness app from Norfolk-based Beige, a company founded by three Virginia Tech alumni. Each will compete at a championship pitch event for $5,000 in November, along with winners of three other micro-pitch contests held this year. (News release)

PEOPLE

Glen Allen-based fintech Koalafi has named Eric Kobe as president, the company announced May 17. He manages day-to-day operations and reports to Boomer Muth, the company’s CEO. Most recently, Kobe was CEO of Groundspeed, an insurance startup, and before that, held various management positions at Affirm, a leading buy-now, pay-later consumer financing company. “At Affirm, I witnessed the challenges that nearly 50% of prospective customers faced when denied credit,” Kobe said in a statement. “This represents a critical gap in financial access for an underserved population needing to make important purchases.” (News release)

MELODY DICKERSON

In December, Melody Dickerson added a new set of letters after her name: DNP, or Doctor of Nursing Practice. More than one person wondered aloud: “Why on earth did you go back and get your doctorate now?” 

The reality was Dickerson had contemplated going back to school for years, but the pandemic gave her the extra push she needed to enroll in Baylor University’s Executive Nurse Leadership Program.

“I was hungry for information I could use to improve myself as a leader,” Dickerson says. Furthering her education was also an opportunity to set an example for her team of care-
givers, whom she has urged to do the same. “I needed to put my effort where my words were.”

Dickerson’s nontraditional career path has given her a unique perspective that informs the toolkit she deploys while leading more than two-thirds of VHC Health employees across various departments. In her first 90 days as chief nursing officer, she sought to address retention rates, particularly among nurses, by setting the expectation that people could grow their careers within VHC. The strategy worked; recruitment and retention rates have increased significantly under Dickerson’s leadership.

She’s also “really proud” of efforts she’s helped lead to increase access to care, including the 2023 opening of a new outpatient pavilion in Arlington. “This organization aligns so well with my personal values and beliefs,” Dickerson says. “I love going to work every day. It sounds cliche, but it’s really the truth.”

RELATED STORY: 2024 Virginia Women in Leadership Awards

MONICA SCHMUDE

A key performance indicator is a metric used to gauge a company’s performance, and, for Monica Schmude, the KPIs that matter most are the mental and physical well-being of her employees. “A company’s greatest asset is the health of its workforce,” she says, a particularly apt belief for the Virginia head of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, who is responsible for 9,000 employees serving about 3 million Virginians.

Schmude started out wanting to be a dentist, but a college course in industrial psychology “just cooked for me,” she says, leading to a 30-plus-year career in health insurance, rising through a series of increasingly impactful leadership roles before becoming Anthem’s Virginia president in 2023. She has garnered many honors, including being named one of the most powerful women in the Washington, D.C., region three times by Washingtonian magazine and being named to Virginia Business’ Virginia 500 list of the state’s most powerful executives last year.

Schmude often found herself to be “a party of one” in the executive ranks of the health care industry, which are overwhelmingly male, and she credits a series of mentors for helping her break through the glass ceiling. “Find that mentor who speaks for your strengths when you aren’t in the room and always be that person for someone else,” she says.

Throughout her career, as a sponsor of executive women’s forums, she has been that someone many times. “There couldn’t be anything more important,” she says, “than the support of other women.”

RELATED STORY: 2024 Virginia Women in Leadership Awards

AMY SEBRING 

The Virginia Tech motto — Ut Prosim (from the Latin for “that I may serve”) — was made to order for Amy Sebring, who describes herself as “a servant leader.” In her dual roles as the university’s executive vice president and COO, the Tidewater native and daughter of two civil servants has to keep many plates spinning.

Her lengthy list of responsibilities includes oversight of the school’s administrative, financial, physical, technological and operational infrastructure, as well as support for its teaching, research and outreach missions. And although Sebring didn’t arrive at Virginia Tech until late 2022, she already has chalked up several accomplishments, including helping to secure state support for the expansion of the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and has generated significant legislative interest in expanding clinical trials at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC.

During her 25-plus-year career in government and higher education, Sebring has held a series of positions of increasing responsibility that included stints at both Virginia Commonwealth University and William & Mary.  

“It’s easy to get focused on a to-do list,” she says, but to be successful requires “looking for opportunities to step beyond and bring things forward to decision makers.” Being able to make complex matters readily understandable also has been crucial to her career development.

“Communication,” she says, “is a skill you can never overdevelop.”

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MARGARET SHAIA 

Margaret Shaia trained as an accountant, but says she had zero interest in being “a bean counter who sits in an office all day. I wanted to know what the numbers were saying.”  

That curiosity led her to a series of jobs at Virginia manufacturing companies, where she became involved not just in financial oversight but got onto the floor to see how to better manage and improve operations. In her 16-year tenure at Richmond’s AMF Bakery Systems, for example, Shaia helped double revenues and transform the company into a global leader in industrial baking equipment. 

Since 2019, Shaia has been CEO and co-owner of ASC, where, she says, she has put to use “everything I’ve done, times 500.”

Under her leadership, ASC, which builds enclosures for power generation equipment for facilities such as data centers, has undergone exponential growth. Revenues have expanded sixfold, she says, and ASC has added 235,000 square feet of manufacturing space. 

Shaia is proud ASC has been able to provide a career track for its employees, many of whom
are immigrants from the Philippines. These workers have been able to develop skills that lead
to higher wages, and that increased earning power has allowed many of them to buy houses and bring their families to this country. 

“I work long hours,” Shaia says, “but, end of the day, I am helping the community by giving people the opportunity to improve their lives.” 

RELATED STORY: 2024 Virginia Women in Leadership Awards

JULIE COONS

About 10 years ago, Julie Coons took up quilting, which, in addition to providing the necessary benefits of any hobby, also offered some surprising parallels to her professional life. “Quilting involves seeing patterns and requires problem-solving in putting the pieces together,” she says. “It draws on the same skills I bring to work.”

Work for Coons has been leading the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce since 2018. In that time, she’s prioritized increasing the diversity of the chamber’s board, membership and speakers. But there’s still more work to be done ensuring that Northern Virginia and the greater Washington, D.C., metro area remain a business-friendly environment, she says.

“We work on issues that span the entire region, with an eye on growth,” Coons says. One such example? Advocating for reform of the Metro transit system that’s critical for getting employees to and from work.

Since Coons moved to the region in the mid-1980s, she’s watched its evolution from being largely a “company town” to a complex, business-driven environment. “It is a much more diversified business center than ever before.”

Next year, the chamber will celebrate its 100-year anniversary, a milestone that will usher in a next phase defined by “substantial growth,” Coons says. While challenges remain that require more attention and support, Coons is confident the chamber and its members are up for the task, due to their mutual commitment to improving their community. “It’s incredibly inspiring.”

RELATED STORY: 2024 Virginia Women in Leadership Awards

DALAL SALOMON 

When Dalal Salomon first went to work in the financial sector in the 1980s, compensation was strictly on a commission basis. That meant no vacation, no sick leave and no paycheck unless she could drum up clients. At her first firm, where she was a novelty as the first and only female financial planner, she was expected to make cold phone calls. Instead, although she describes herself as an introvert, and, although it almost got her fired, she went in person to local businesses “to look the owners in the eye and show them that I was a genuine person who wanted to help them achieve financial independence. 

“You don’t have to always follow the existing rules on how to be a success,” she says. “Perseverance is underestimated, but perseverance is huge.” 

That perseverance led her to a job at Wells Fargo and, then, in 2009, to partner with Dan Ludwin to establish wealth management firm Salomon & Ludwin. This year, both Forbes and Barron’s ranked Salomon among the top wealth advisers in Virginia. 

Salomon & Ludwin’s co-founders and their staff have donated their time to local causes such as building houses and tutoring, but Salomon says the most gratifying part of her career has been the cards and calls she’s received from women who heard her story and realized they, too, could succeed on their own terms.

“I showed them that they could do it, too,” she says. “I helped change their lives.” 

RELATED STORY: 2024 Virginia Women in Leadership Awards

MELISSA FRYE

When Melissa Frye found out her third child would be her third daughter, that news reshaped her focus at General Dynamics Information Technology. “It became very crystal clear that I was not only here to empower the current workforce but that I had to lean in, making the future workplace the best destination for my girls,” she recalls.

Frye co-leads GDIT’s employee resource group called ForWARD (For Women’s Advancement Recognition and Development), and she recently helped plan and execute the annual Women + Technology event for the fourth year, bringing together experienced and aspiring tech professionals to empower career growth and close opportunity gaps. That’s in addition to her day job: leading a multibillion-dollar program that supports the Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security and overseeing a team of more than 300 employees.

In her 13 years at GDIT, a subsidiary of Fortune 500 aerospace and defense contractor General Dynamics, Frye has worked both in contracts and operations, and led the creation of new methodology to execute the project management lifecycle for a client that yielded more than $250 million in growth over a three-year period.

Frye aims to be a servant leader in her workplace. That may mean being empathetic with her team, approaching new projects with humility, leading with integrity and giving back. “Living a life of service is important to me,” she says.

RELATED STORY: 2024 Virginia Women in Leadership Awards

JACQUELINE ROGERS 

Jacqueline Rogers’ career arc has included executive stints at marquee companies such as Amazon.com and Lyft, as well as handling marketing, advertising and strategy efforts for brands like Marriott and Hilton.

“These experiences were thrilling and highly educational,” she says, “but they also made me realize that I craved a role where I could create a deeper, more enduring impact.”

As COO of the real estate investment company founded by her father, Capital Square co-CEO Louis J. Rogers, Jacqueline Rogers has been able to create that impact. Capital Square “is not just about business growth but about creating sustainable value that enriches lives,” she says. “It is committed to something bigger than itself.”

Rogers is especially proud of her leading role in five major mixed-use projects in Richmond’s Scott’s Addition area, where Capital Square has been the largest multifamily property developer, investing more than $260 million. The projects, including luxury apartment buildings Ink, Viv and Gem, have generated 1,483 construction jobs, 63 full-time jobs and $17.4 million in annual local tax revenue.

She also has been instrumental in developing Capital Square’s charitable arm, Capital Square Cares, which largely focuses on supporting children and teens through partnerships with charities such as the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, March of Dimes, Little Hands Virginia, and World Pediatrics. 

“Being a woman in leadership is not just about being a leader — it’s about leaving a lasting, positive impact,” Rogers says. “With each door we break open, we aren’t just paving the way for future women leaders, but encouraging societal shifts towards acceptance, inclusion, and respect.”

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SARAH STRASSHEIM

One of Sarah Strassheim’s University of Mary Washington professors once told her that if she started out in finance and understood the numbers, she could go anywhere in an organization.

“As a result, I started out as a finance analyst and haven’t really ever left,” says Strassheim, who now serves as chief financial officer for the newly formed global data and technology group at international advertising and public relations company Dentsu.

After spending more than a decade at Accenture, where she held several global financial and reporting systems roles, she also served as global CFO for media company Merkle, which was acquired by Dentsu in 2016. But what’s helped her stand out and move up in leadership roles over the years is that she doesn’t have a traditional finance and accounting attitude.

“I don’t enjoy the routine, predictable aspects of the financial calendar like forecasting and budgeting,” she says. “However, I’m good at understanding how the business works, what story the numbers are telling, and I can translate this to the other business leaders effectively to help them make decisions or evaluate the strategy.”

Outside of work, Strassheim stays connected to her alma mater as a member of the UMW Foundation Board of Directors and leads Mary Washington’s Charlottesville Alumni Network. She also serves on the budget advisory committee for Albemarle County Public Schools.

RELATED STORY: 2024 Virginia Women in Leadership Awards