Four local startups and an Austin venture firm announced that they raised new funds in the early days of May.
And there was a bit of a theme with a couple of the deals. Both Humanaut Health and GoodDay Software represent new businesses created by repeat founders who built their companies around opportunities they saw while running previous startups.
While that's not uncommon in startup land, the new funding rounds speak to a well-known dynamic of launching new businesses: Founders who have had prior successes tend to have a significantly easier time raising new money.
Alright, let's check out the top deals from early May.
Austin cybersecurity startup RunReveal said May 1 that it raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Bay Area firm Costanoa Ventures. The threat detection startup was founded last year by Evan Johnson and Alan Braithwaite, who previously worked together at Cloudflare and Segment. The founders say the new money will fuel hiring and additional product features.
“Today’s security teams are overwhelmed with data from dozens of cloud services they need to collect security telemetry from,” Johnson stated. “Legacy SIEM platforms like Splunk have become too complicated, too expensive and too noisy for even the most sophisticated security teams to operate — many companies [are] even forgoing SIEM altogether because it's too big of a lift."
Austin-based Scout Ventures kicked off the month by announcing it has closed on $94 million for its fourth fund.
And the firm isn't wasting any time. It has already made nine investments from the new fund for its portfolio companies. And it's also coming off a nice win for its third fund investors, when its Florida-based portfolio company Tomahawk Robotics was acquired by Washington, D.C.-area company AeroVironment for $120 million in cash and stocks.
Scout has made a name for itself by specializing in startups that are developing technologies with both commercial applications and use cases in the national security sector. The firm was founded in 2012 by Brad Harrison, a West Point graduate and U.S. Army ranger.
"We are humbled by the overwhelming support we've received for Fund IV," Harrison stated. "The continued trust from our existing investors, like the New Mexico State Investment Council, is invaluable. We're also excited to welcome a distinguished group of new partners to the Scout family, including J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Vanderbilt University Endowment, USAA and many others."
After founding and leading Austin-based cryotherapy and wellness franchise Restore Hyper Wellness, serial entrepreneur Jim Donnelly is back at it. Donnelly and a group of co-founders with deep backgrounds in health and wellness have launched membership-based longevity clinic startup Humanaut Health and raised an $8.7 million seed round.
The funding, announced May 7, was led by a group of investors in California operating as The Kabech Fund. Also in on the round were Austin-based Midnight Venture Partners, the company's co-founders and other individual investors.
Kyle Hency keeps churning out new businesses. After co-founding Chubbies Shorts in San Francisco in 2011 and then moving it to Austin in 2019, he went on to co-found a software startup focused on retail returns called Loop Returns in 2016. It was an instance of an entrepreneur building a new startup to solve a problem he encountered in his prior startup.
Now Hency and two other co-founders, Dave Wardell and John Gully, are back with a new company called GoodDay Software, which is focused on enterprise resource planning, or ERP. The startup announced a $6 million seed round May 8 that was led by FirstMark, Ridge Ventures and Flex Capital. GoodDay pitches itself as an easy-to-use interface to help brands manage inventories.
Austin fintech startup Greenboard Inc. said it has locked in a $4.5 million seed round led by San Francisco-based Base 10 Partners.
Other investors include Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Wayfinder Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, Twenty Two Ventures, Rogue Capital and Transpose Platform.
Greenboard was founded last year by CEO Dave Feldman and Chief Technology Officer Ed Schembor. Before founding the new startup, Feldman was a senior product manager at Guideline. He also held product roles at Hive and was a consultant at Accenture. Schembor, meanwhile, previously was head of product at Amazon in its Amazon Registry wing. He's also held senior product roles at Amazon.
Their new startup helps financial institutions with AI-powered compliance systems that eliminates gaps between policy and practice. The all-in-one system helps review content and policies and synchs up with calendars and other back office systems.
