throwaway12983

Without giving away too much information, due to my company's financial backing and long-term goal(s), I'm very doubtful that this is something they would be looking to build and sell, or invest in (outside of their use case).

Good point about checking for strings attached to the seed money though, I don't know off the top of my head but will need to find out.

You're probably right about the money saving value proposition... the flexibility to customize the service in-house may outweigh cost savings.

I'm not really sure how convincing them I will grow this to something big is relevant. It's a very niche service that isn't something my employer would be interested in making money off of. They do not intend to sell the tool they are thinking about building in house. I am financially independent and would like to bootstrap this business, so I have no interest in bringing in VCs. Even if I did, it's such a niche problem that no VC would be interested, unless I sold the problem as a gateway into a much bigger and more profitable domain. I don't really have any interest in this though.