CapStar Bank has beefed up its commercial finance division with the hiring of experienced account executives in Atlanta and Charlotte. The duo of Larry Hawk and Tebin McDowell have several decades of combined experience. In Georgia, Hawk joins Jim Ward, who came on board earlier this spring.

CapStar Bank has brought on or promoted more than 10 people in recent weeks. One of the notables among them is Bruce Von Almen, a former treasury management officer at First Horizon who has joined CapStar as vice president of treasury management sales. Von Almen, pictured at left, began his career with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Nashville Branch. He is a member and past president of the Downtown Nashville Lions Club.

Also coming on board at five-year-old CapStar is Jim Ward, who has been named senior account executive for the bank's commercial finance team and will work from Atlanta. Ward, pictured on the right, has more than 30 years of experience in the commercial finance middle market and has worked at, among others, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp and Southern Community Bank. In addition to Georgia, he will cover Florida, Mississippi and Alabama for CapStar Commercial Finance, which also is active in Charlotte, Louisville and St. Louis.

Check out details on all of CapStar's recent personnel moves here.

An Atlanta company marketing software that helps doctors with their billing, coding and compliance work has opened an office in downtown's Cummins Station complex. Ingenious Med, which two years ago was recapitalized with the help of local investment firm Council Capital, has more than 22,000 users around the country. Somewhat cryptically, the company says its Cummins Station outpost "will initially serve as a customer support hub, though it may serve other functions in the future."

Tennessee-based Philip Welker is teaming with some New York developers in an effort to transform Atlanta’s languishing Clermont Motor Hotel into a boutique hotel.

Welker, a University of Tennessee and New York University graduate who specializes in historic rehab work, is founder of Nashville-based BNA Associates. He is known in some circles for having bought the St. Oliver Hotel Building in Knoxville and transforming it to what is now called The Oliver Hotel.

Welker worked with Ethan Orley on the Oliver project, and the two will partner once again on the Clermont (a photo of which, courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is seen below).

Read more here.
 

The company that recently purchased a prime piece of SoBro property has completed two hotel projects in Nashville during the past few years — begging the question: Is another hotel in the offing?

Atlanta-based North Point Hospitality Group created NP5TH LLC to buy for $5.9 million about .9 acres from Fifth Avenue Land Investments. Bert Mathews, president of Nashville-based commercial real estate company The Mathews Co., served as managing partner for the latter.

Mathews declined to speculate whether North Point will build a hotel on the site, which fronts Korean Veterans Boulevard between Fourth and Fifth avenues south.

Of note, the company developed in Midtown both the Home 2 Suites by Hilton that fronts Division Street and the Hilton Garden Inn that fronts Broadway. The two hotels share a structured parking garage.    

North Point President and Chief Executive Officer Jay Patel could not be reached for comment regarding his company’s plans for the SoBro site.

Check out North Point’s properties here.
 

Clayton Associates’ FCA Venture Partners has placed $1.5 million with Catavolt Inc., an Atlanta-based mobile application software development company. Also in on the deal was angel investor and Clayton advisory board member George Salem, according to a statement.

Catavolt’s creation, dubbed Catavolt Extender, is a “hybrid cloud service” package that connects a client company’s enterprise data — large-scale blocks of information — to specified mobile phones in real time. To put it in the company's words: “The idea is to deliver mobile phone applications without the expensive need to develop proprietary software to process information on the client end. Catavolt's unique approach, based on its patent-pending Dual Model Architecture, enables organizations to rapidly create and deliver mobile applications to business users without the need for costly and traditionally resource-intensive software development projects.”

Mobile application software development has of late captured the interest of local investors. We reported just this week on the launching of Streamweaver, a split-screen mobile video application company initially funded by two TNInvestco participants, Mountain Group Capital’s Limestone Fund and the Tennessee Communities Venture Fund. Funding levels weren’t specified for either fund.