We have a new Austin Inno Tech Madness champion, and it's a bit of a repeat Cinderella story.
MeBeBot is a relatively small Austin startup founded in 2018 that has developed an AI-powered assistant that provides automated question-answering to respond to employee queries across human resources, operations and information technology. It's used by companies including E2open, Epicor Software Corp. and RetailMeNot.
The company was runner-up in the 2020 Tech Madness bracket. And, this year, it emerged victorious from a bracket packed with 64 local startups.
In its final round, MeBeBot was matched up with the larger and more heavily funded legal-tech company Disco. MeBeBot rallied its team, friends, family, customers and fans to win with 67% of the vote. The victory capped off this year's bracket, which had a total of more than 14,000 votes from Austin Inno readers.
MeBeBot founder Beth White said her team was thrilled to be the company that the most readers voted for as the company they'd most want to invest in.
"We admire and look up to so many of the companies represented in this competition (congrats to Disco on 2nd place!)," she said via email. "We are fortunate to have such a talented community of Austin tech startups developing solutions that are valuable to the industry."
After landing in second place last year, White said the team was determined to build its brand. And it amplified its support by sharing links to vote in Tech Madness on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other channels.
"This is a huge morale boost for our team and last year was a challenging time as an emerging company (during the pandemic)!" White said.
MeBeBot was bootstrapped since its founding until it raised a $500,000 angel round last summer. And the startup has big ambitions for the rest of the year.
"MeBeBot just launched a new version of our AI Intelligent Assistant to automate answers to employees' commonly asked questions," White said. "Additional functionality will be launched to increase personalization and adoption to further elevate the employee experience ... in a time when the workplace is dynamically changing. We're off to a great start in 2021, having added some new customers, renewed contracts with existing customers, and we'll be raising a round of funding in Q3 2021."
The Tech Madness bracket was assembled based on reader nominations, as well as editorial input from the Austin Inno team, and seeding was based largely on total funding raised. The bracket included private venture-backed and bootstrapped companies based in the Austin area.
The goal of Tech Madness has been the same since the annual competition began in 2016: spotlight 64 fast-growing tech companies in Austin and provide some lighthearted competition for the city's startups and our readers.
MeBeBot joins past winners Rocket Dollar (2020), ClaraPrice (2019), Opcity (2018), Pivot3 (2017) and Spredfast (2016) as Austin Inno Tech Madness champs.
Big congrats to MeBeBot!
