Azuna Inc. has had a busy start to the new year.
The Buffalo-based company, which makes all-natural odor removal and cleaning products based on tea tree gel, started raising a $4 million Series A funding round and, as of early this week, had investors committed for about $2.5 million of it, according to CEO Scott Dancy.
Public filings show the startup closed on $486,000 last week. Dancy expects to finishing raising the $4 million round within the next few months.
“I think it’s a testament to the fact that we’ve shown a lot of growth and we’re bringing in the right people,” said Dancy.
So far, the lead investor is Paul Cifelli, managing director at Kinderhook Industries, a private equity firm. He’s also a childhood friend of Dancy’s (they both grew up in New Jersey). Other investors are owners of private equity companies, all but one of whom have invested in Azuna before.
Cifelli is the one that introduced Dancy to Michael Younger, former chief marketing officer at Thermacell, a Massachusetts-based mosquito repellent business. Younger also worked at Procter & Gamble for over a decade. (Kinderhook used to own Thermacell.)
Younger started working in December as advisor to the CEO at Azuna.
“It’s important I trust the person I’m bringing in,” Dancy said. “He’s very methodical. He has big corporate experience and high growth experience.”
Azuna, which employs about 25, started this year working with OneStone Consulting Group, which has also worked with Thermacell, to help with its Amazon business – a point of weakness for Azuna, according to Dancy.
The consulting business will help reorganize Azuna’s Amazon listings, add products and strategize.
The startup tripled year-over-year revenue in 2022 and expects to quadruple revenue this year. Dancy expects Azuna to hit its first $1 million revenue month this spring or early summer. The startup also recently opened a new headquarters and content studio at 410 Main St., Buffalo. Previously, employees worked remotely and just did shipping at a Amherst site and manufacturing at an East Side facility.
Azuna’s focus, including how it will use the $4 million Series A round, is marketing, creating new products and building up business-to-business clients.
The startup recently launched glass jars and glass bottles with refillable concentrate, which look better and are more economical for the customer, as well as wipes. Azuna has six more products it’s rolling out by the end of this year.
This year, the business started getting its products into cannabis dispensaries and real estate like apartments and recently sold homes. The former works because Azuna’s products help get rid of smoke smells, and the startup has product in about a dozen dispensaries and counting.
The latter make good house-warming gifts from real estate agents to clients, and Azuna has affiliate codes, so the agent gets some of the profit from those customers’ future Azuna sales.
“It makes a lot of sense as a business-to-business deal,” Dancy said.
Azuna is the first local company to acknowledge a private, growth-oriented round of funding this year.
