Yornest has raised more than $100,000 in under a month through a crowdfunding campaign.
The Louisville-based startup, which developed a messaging platform for large groups, raised the fresh capital via Wefunder last month. Its largest investor is Keyhorse Capital, which contributed $50,000 to the campaign. Render Capital matched the first $20,000, through a program several other area startups have taken advantage of as well. Garrett French, founder of Louisville-based Citation Labs, is also an investor.
Yornest's campaign is still ongoing, said co-founder and CEO Michael Brizendine, and he is seeking to raise an additional $75,000 to $100,000 on a $3.25 million valuation cap by June. Prior to the crowdfunding effort, the company raised $200,000 from angel investors.
In an interview Tuesday, Brizendine said he hadn't considered crowdfunding until Kelby Price, managing partner of Keyhorse Capital, suggested it.
"When I started looking into the Kentucky landscape, I found a lot of people would like to invest in stuff, but they aren't able to write $25,000 checks," Brizendine said. "Wefunder gives them an easy way to invest $1,000 or $2,000 and all of the due diligence is taken care of."
As I previously reported, the idea for the Vogt Award-winning company came from Brizendine's experience using group messaging to communicate with classmates at Bellarmine University. The smartphone application, now available for both iPhone and Android users, enables people to create "nests" for specific groups, such as a private group just for friends and family, semi-private groups for school campuses and larger groups that are open to the public.
It's had some early success with college campuses and is currently being used by groups on the campuses of University of Louisville, Bellarmine, Western Kentucky University, University of Kentucky, Indiana University, Northern Kentucky University and Eastern Kentucky University. It's also recently grown from 1,000 monthly messages to 5,000 monthly messages, Brizendine said.
The majority of the capital from the crowdfunding campaign will be used to jumpstart Yornest's marketing efforts to reach more college and university campuses. Brizendine said he intends to hire a marketing strategist in addition to launching a student ambassador program.
This fall, Yornest will be launching at Purdue University, Arizona State University, University of Alabama, Florida State University and University of Arizona. ASU is of particular importance, Brezendine said, noting that he will be moving to Arizona for the fall semester.
"We want to find a way to blow Yornest up within that campus because of its connection to GSV [Ventures]," he continued. "They're investing into edtech and future of work products, and we would fall into edtech because we've been heavily focused on making college communication easier."
