Stimulus is a part of Morgan Stanley’s latest Multicultural Innovation Lab

CIC Philly-based relationship intelligence SaaS platform maker Stimulus has been accepted into Morgan Stanley’s Multicultural Innovation Lab.

Through the New York-based program, Morgan Stanley boosts post-seed, pre-Series-B tech startups that are led by women and people of color. Over six months, the global financial services firm offers access to programming through its own internal resources, and others outside the company. It also invests $250,000 in the startups.

“With the support of Morgan Stanley and their Innovation Lab, we can leverage their expertise, resources, and global reach to achieve our goals including hiring for some key roles, double our customer base, and expedite product development,” founder Tiffanie Stanard told Technical.ly in an email on Friday.

Earlier this year, Stimulus closed a round of funding with participation from Gabriel Investments, Campus Apartments’ David Adelman and Ben Franklin Technology Partners Board Member Osagie Imasogie, as well as other angel investors, Stanard said.

Stimulus was also awarded $50,000 through Google’s Black Founders Fund last fall. Stanard told Technical.ly in October that the Google funding was well timed with Stimulus’ flagship product launch, the Stimulus Relationship Intelligence Platform, for the reimagined company mission of allowing people to make better vendor purchasing decisions. Stanard founded Stimulus in 2016, but pivoted to the data analytics relationship platform in early 2019.

After a year of building out the rethought company, and adding some team members, Stanard said then that Stimulus had to pause some of its funding plans because of the pandemic. It allowed her eight-person team the time to get a lot of back-end work done, and to get comfortable with the engineering team, members of whom were mostly hired that February.

“2020, as hard as it is, the topic of supply chain this year became very mainstream. We had the opportunity of reaping the benefits, and people reaching out to us,” Stanard said then. “Our value proposition was already established, but the value proposition was really emphasized in 2020 when people needed to change vendors quickly, find different means and avenues.”

The Lab kicked off this week and includes a mix of in-person and remote programming through January, with the Stimulus team traveling to New York one week per month starting in September as COVID-19 restrictions allow, Stanard said. The accelerator ends in January with a demo day and pitches to investors.

This is the program’s sixth cohort, with the other seven members hailing from London, Atlanta, Palo Alto and New York. Fellow Philly woman-founded startup Jenzy was a member of a previous Lab cohort.

Stanard wrote in a LinkedIn post about the announcement that she was proud to have an investor as storied in the financial services space as Morgan Stanley.

“The expertise, resources, and network that Morgan Stanley will bring to Stimulus will help enable us to accomplish and surpass our goals,” she said. “We are proudly representing Philadelphia. I’ve been building Stimulus for a while now and I get emotional to finally have the support we deserve to grow faster, support the hard work of my team and continue to build a great product for our amazing customers.”