M.io, a startup that links together a variety of workplace messaging apps, raised a $5.75 million round of funding led by Goldcrest Capital, Eniac Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and others, the startup announced Wednesday.
M.io, founded in 2015 as Message.io, helps connect popular messaging apps like Slack, Spark and Stride to let businesses talk across platforms with customers and collaborators.
“We created an M.io universal channel to enable our founders to chat with each other,” Hadley Harris, founding general partner at Eniac Ventures, said in a news release. “It’s a simple and convenient way to bring people from many companies together, even when they’re using different messaging apps."
M.io CEO Tom Hadfield told me via email that this is his startup's first round of funding, and it also includes participation from Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator and Capital Factory.
"We're really happy to have Capital Factory as an investor because, as the center of gravity for entrepreneurs in Texas, they have been so helpful in getting us plugged into the Austin startup scene since we moved here from San Francisco in 2016," he told me via e-mail.
The startup, which is in the SXSW Accelerator this year, currently has 11 people, and it's recruiting for engineering and enterprise sales roles.
"Interestingly, the majority of our team in Austin are non-Americans: our technical co-founder James Cundle, our VP Engineering Ian Hannaford, and myself are all British," Hadfield wrote.
M.io looks particularly useful to enterprise scale businesses because it makes it easy connect Hipchat, Slack, Spark and other services and send and receive messages across platforms.
Hadfield told me M.io has developed close relationships with those messaging companies to get early access to product updates and changes to the API.
He's bullish on Austin's future for communications technologies, noting the presence of Botkit CEO Ben Brown and Conversable's Ben Lamm.
"It's a huge advantage being based in Austin, which has been at the forefront of messaging for the past several years," he said in the email. "There's a real hotbed of messaging talent here."
Learn more about M.io in this explainer video:
