Two Boulder-based startups with ties to Twitter raised seed funding rounds last week — one pulled in $3.25 million and another secured $3.5 million. Both companies have plans to hire.
Freeplay launched the public beta of its large language model development platform last week alongside raising a $3.25 million seed round.
The beta launch comes when more companies are building artificial intelligence tools and features.
“Generative AI has transformed what’s possible to build — but it requires an equally transformative way of building,” Freeplay co-founder and CEO Ian Cairns said in a statement. “For seasoned product development teams who might be new to AI, we provide a suite that helps them adopt best practices used by industry-leading ML teams.”
Freeplay was co-founded in 2022 by two former Twitter employees. Cairns worked as Twitter’s head of product and Eric Ryan was the company’s senior director of engineering. The duo spent the last decade building developer products for Fortune 500 companies and startups.
Freeplay offers product teams an all-in-one tool to build, test, improve and ship their LLM-powered products. The software development kit also allows teams to experiment with model changes in their product without code deployment while receiving real-time insights.
The startup’s seed round, co-led by Matchstick Ventures and Conviction Ventures, will help it grow its Boulder-based team. Freeplay is currently looking to fill two revenue positions and hire a full-stack software engineer.
The other company — Zephr — also had a good showing.
A Boulder startup, Zephr aims to make users’ GPS location more accurate and consistent. It raised a $3.5 million seed round to further its tech and grow its team.
Zephr, which is short for “Zephyr” and is a Geek wind god, uses a computationally networked solution to improve GPS accuracy on a mobile phone. The startup said it has achieved an accuracy of sub-60 centimeters.
Rather than installing a piece of hardware to improve mobile GPS signals, Zephr operates as a software development kit that can be installed on a phone or platform.
Zephr was co-founded in 2022 by Sean Gorman, Pramukta Rao, Kostas Stamatiou and Scotty Nelson. This is Gorman and Rao’s fourth startup together. The co-founders have worked in the digital mapping and augmented reality industries for years, with experience ranging from Maxar, Snap, Twitter, Gnip and DigitalGlobe.
Since launching, the startup has been doing field testing but will now begin pilots with customers. Zephr plans to work with location-based apps, such as rideshare services, fitness tracking companies and delivery businesses. Gorman said the startup’s future applications include augmented reality and autonomous vehicles and robotics.
“[We raised funding] to be able to scale up the team to be able to do this in the real world,” Gorman said. “Just simulating things like computers is pretty straightforward with a small team. But to go into the field testing and then support pilots, where we have essentially hundreds, thousands of people, providing devices, providing data that we need to test in and see the validity of the corrections. It just requires a much bigger infrastructure of people and compute.”
Zephr has already hired three people but plans to bring on additional engineers, business development and product roles.
Gorman said he anticipates generating revenue and moving into production in Q2 or Q3 2024 and being cash flow neutral by the end of next year.
