Oros, an outdoor apparel company that uses NASA technology in its wares, has raised a $5 million seed round, the Cincinnati Business Courier reports.
Chicago's Listen Ventures, Columbus' NCT Ventures and Boulder's Break Trail Ventures, as well as serial entrepreneur Patrick O'Brien, Eric Dobkin, Misfit Wearables founder Sonny Vu (who also serves as an adviser to the company) and James Ryan all invested in the round.
Many of these investors were with the company from the beginning, which started when founders Michael Markesbery and Rithvik Venna were students at Miami University in 2015.
"As we scale, we had an idea of the challenges we're going to go through, so it's important to have people who have been there before," Markesbery said in the report.
Markesbery told the Courier it will use funding from the round to continue to scale. It's reported that the company has experienced 250 percent growth since 2015 and increased its team to 14, with plans for and additional 16 employees to come on board by 2019.
This isn't the first accomplishment for the team, who initially launched Oros with Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. Markesbery and Venna were named on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, raised $4 million over three funding rounds, had their product featured on Mashable, Runner’s World and Digital Trends, among other media outlets and were recently featured in Cincy Inno's 25 Under 25 list.
“Outerwear apparel is a sea of sameness, where brands are all using the same materials and technologies to make the same products,” Markesbery said in a previous Cincy Inno profile on the company. “We’re bringing something truly different to the table: we’re using NASA-inspired insulation to deliver an amazing piece of gear.”
