Get details below on recent funding deals that caught our attention. In the past week-plus, four Austin companies reported a combined $34 million in funding deals.
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Zello Inc., an Austin company with a push-to-talk voice communications app, has made a name for itself during disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in Texas, and among frontline workers in a wide variety of roles, from construction workers to grocery store clerks, who need to communicate without breaking stride. It acts as an alternative to handheld radios, but you only need a smartphone and a cellular or WiFi connection.
Now, after being bootstrapped since its founding in 2011 and achieving profitability along the way, Zello is taking on venture capital funding for the first time.
The startup announced June 8 it raised $20 million in equity and debt funding, the majority of which is equity, according to CEO Bill Moore. The round was led by two Austin firms — Virgo Capital and Recurring Capital Partners.
Zello plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and expand its team of 65 full-time employees to about 75 by the end of the year.
HackNotice, an Austin-based threat awareness platform, said June 6 it raised a $7 million series A funding round. The company, which legally operates as Hack Notice Inc. and is led by co-founder and CEO Steve Thomas, said the round was led by Strategic Cyber Ventures. The startup sells a security platform that has analytics and reporting tools to give IT teams a closer look at employee risk exposure.
“Traditional security training and awareness is an established industry with questionable ROI. HackNotice democratizes threat intelligence about employees by providing that data straight to the employee themselves. This leads to better alignment of incentives between employee and employer and is the start of a new market: Threat Awareness,” stated Chris Ahern, principal at Strategic Cyber Ventures.
Austin's Colorcast Inc., which has developed a social media app for following live spots, said June 7 it raised a $3.5 million seed round to help it continue to grow. The funding came from Austin's Next Coast Ventures and Capital Factory, as well as New York-based Tribeca Early Stage Partners, Los Angeles-based VoicePunch, Denver's Hilltop Venture Partners and others.
The startup, led by co-founder and CEO Evan Kirkham, also announced it inked partnerships that will let users place bets via BetMGM, Caesars, PointsBet and others without leaving the Colorcast app.
Austin's Double A Labs Inc. said June 7 it closed a $3.5 million round of friends and family funding to build up its team and expand its metaverse platform. On the team side of things, the company has been growing its engineering, sales and customer success teams. The startup also acquired MerTech, a tool for building scalable software platforms. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company said it has played a role in 1,500 hybrid events, including work with AT&T, Dell, Google and Warner Bros.
"The pandemic forced companies to shift their thinking around employee retention, customer acquisition, and overall client satisfaction — and these areas are precisely where we're concentrating all of our solutions," stated Double A Labs CEO Amber Allen.
Get ABJ's latest list of local venture capital firms here, and see the list of angel investors here. A list of local startup incubators can be found here.
