Trey Allison, co-founder and CEO of Austin startup Kronologic, is checking out new office spaces for his company's small, but growing, team.
Make no mistake, he said there won't be a return to office life until it's safe -- and even then it will be optional and include social distancing measures.
"But our team seems to want to go back to the office,” he said.
And there's good reason.
The startup has seen its sales pipelines expand; its revenue has grown significantly three quarters in a row; and it just capped off a new round of funding -- closing a $3.5 million seed round. The investment was led by Austin's Silverton Partners, with participation from Austin's Next Coast Ventures and San Antonio-based Geekdom Fund.
Kronologic, founded in 2016, has developed a calendar-based, AI-powered software platform that automatically sets meetings between sales representatives and potential clients and estimates the likely value of those meetings. It's all about improving conversion rates and solving what the company describes as "the last mile" problem where leads sit idol awaiting meetings between both parties that could lead to a sale.
And that is, like many things, getting trickier amid the Covid-19 pandemic as sales cycles have slowed and sales teams have lost productivity with work-from-home complications.
“The last mile has gotten wider than ever and longer than ever,” co-founder and CRO Aaron Bollinger said. “The problem we solve is bigger and scarier than ever.”
While the startup's big name clients, including Dell, CDW, Thomson Reuters and BigCommerce, helped open the doors for many investment conversations with VCs, the company's timing also helped.
Allison said he started flying to San Francisco and New York to pitch his startup for new funding deals in January. They had hoped to close a round in June or July. Just as he started making trips, Silverton Partners said it wanted to invest.
“Then this damn pandemic hit and the Dow dropped,” he said. "Pretty much overnight venture came to a halt."
But with Silverton Partners interested, the team was able to continue finding investors in Austin, using its existing networks from its pre-seed round, which was led by Geekdom and included backing from Austin-based Trammell Venture Partners, Long View Technology Ventures, Stumberg Family Fund and the Marfa-based Complete Growth Investor -- as well as angel investors Don Douglas, Justin Siegel and Andrew Busey.
Kronologic currently has nine employees, including two people it recently hired for sales roles. It plans to hire for a few engineering roles soon.
Meanwhile, the startup has already been expanding use cases for its software from its core demos, roadmapping and consultation calls to employee onboarding, training, support calls and other types of meetings. It's also working on new features that could help provide more real-time insights to sales teams.
"This company solves a big and complex problem in a graceful way -- pioneering an ew category of technology with an immediate ROI to customers," Roger Chen, a partner at Silverton Partners, said in a news release.
As part of the deal, Chen joined the company's board of directors.
