Before Carolyn Rodz was a co-founder and CEO, she was an investment banker who left finance to build and eventually sell her own marketing analytics firm, Cake. That first company taught her exactly what a founder can’t do alone — find funding, find the right people, find someone who’s already solved the problem you’re stuck on — and that there was no single place to go for any of it.
So in 2017, Rodz and co-founder Elizabeth Gore built one: Hello Alice, a free, multi-channel platform that helps small-business owners access funding, mentorship, and services in one place, with a particular focus on owners who’ve historically been shut out of traditional small-business capital — women, people of color, veterans, and first-time founders without a network to lean on.
The platform has scaled fast. Hello Alice now serves more than 350,000 businesses in its network, with roughly 500,000 people using the platform weekly, and raised a $21 million Series B led by QED Investors. Rodz has described year-over-year growth north of 1,100% for the company and over 600% revenue growth — the kind of numbers that read like a Silicon Valley pitch deck but are backing a company literally headquartered in Alice, Texas.
The recognition has followed: Rodz has been named to Inc.’s “17 Women to Watch,” was named Hispanic CEO of the Year by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and has testified before the U.S. House Small Business Committee on the actual, on-the-ground state of small-business funding access — a level of policy credibility most startup founders never reach.
Rodz has said the whole company traces back to one gap in her own founder journey: “I started Hello Alice as the answer to what I wish I had when I was starting my first company fifteen years ago.” It’s a rare kind of founder-market fit — she isn’t guessing at what small-business owners need, because she was one, stuck, with nowhere to turn.