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A relationship-centric, growth-minded approach to investment banking and corporate advisory services

Rick Kohr is the CEO and founder of Evergreen Advisors, an investment bank and corporate advisory practice headquartered in Columbia, Maryland. The firm serves the needs of emerging growth and middle-market companies by offering a suite of investment banking and corporate advisory services throughout the various stages of the business lifecycle. They provide innovative and strategic solutions in the areas of Mergers and Acquisitions, Corporate Finance, Business Valuation, and Strategic CFO Advisory.

EDWIN WARFIELD: You talked about what’s going on with the healthcare industry in the region. What about the other space you mentioned earlier—cybersecurity?

RICK KOHR: Well, the cyber security world is fascinating. We've been blessed to connect with Ron and Cindy Gula. Ron serves on our advisory board. We were fortunate as part of the Howard County Economic Development Authority to get Cindy on the board, to help continue to expand what Howard County’s trying do in the cyberspace. It's a tremendous opportunity. You look at what's going on in the region: it's really starting to hit a very significant stride from that standpoint. Ron's played a key part of that. Ron's invested in over two dozen companies, not necessarily in the region, but here locally and more broadly. And the Tenable story is remarkable. You know, they raised hundreds of millions of dollars; started up in '02, without any funding, and now looking at another potential unicorn company from that standpoint with the amount of capital they've raised, and the 20,000 customers that they have at this point.

But, more broadly, you're seeing other unique opportunities as well start to evolve. You saw the RedOwl Analytics transaction earlier this year: a $54 million exit to a Raytheon-backed company. Guy Filippelli took $100,000 of investment in that company in 2013, and you can see the accelerated growth in just four years—how a company can go from nominal investment and nominal or zero revenues to a $54 million exit. That's a tremendous win.

You look at ZeroFOX, and the money that ZeroFOX has raised to date, and what [James] Foster’s done down there to get a lot of really incredible, strong funding; named VCs behind that company; and he continues to see accelerated growth.

Other things that we're seeing in the marketplace: DataTribe. We've been fortunate to develop a really good partnership with DataTribe, and that was an entity spun out of Allegis Capital that Bob Ackerman and Mike Janke are building down in Maple Lawn. They have a number of companies that they've funded to date. They've already had one exit. But companies like Enveil and ReFirm and Dragos. And it's not just the companies that they're spinning up; it's the amount of capital that's going into these companies right away. It's the C-suite talent that they're attracting.

We had dinner several weeks ago. It was Bob Ackerman and Mike Janke and Mike Gill and Andy Jones from Maryland Venture Fund, and they're bringing in talent like Dave DeWalt, former CEO of FireEye—that's the kind of talent they have hanging around DataTribe. And given Bob's connectivity and his focus in cyber and his successes in cyber with Allegis Capital down on the West Coast, having an East Coast presence like this, relative to what he has in Silicon Valley, is incredibly impactful in this region. So, we're fortunate. We were able to port some of our corporate advisory work into some of these companies that are standing up, and I think they can be incredibly impactful to the region in terms of growth, employment, new ideas.

And, what I really like about the region, Edwin, in particular, is the companies that are being formed are a lot more product-focused and service-focused these days. We've been in cyber for quite a long time—maybe a decade or more at this point—and largely what we saw, 5, 10 years ago were butts in the seats, government contractors filling roles on contracts over at NSA—whether it’s Tuscan Sun or whatever the project might be. More recently, we're seeing a lot of neat companies—FourV, Bandura, TrackOFF—these are all companies that are building products, and that's a fascinating involvement that we get to play with these companies here in the region.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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