Chris Rouland (right) and his wife, Rebecca (left), are two of three cofounders of Phosphorus Cybersecurity Inc.
Adam Sichko
Nashville's tech scene is about to radically change with the arrival of Oracle and as Amazon and other firms fill their downtown hubs. But there's plenty of action right now. Tech Bytes is a recurring roundup highlighting news on startups, capital raises, acquisitions and other activity in the region's tech sector.
- Insight Partners, a New York-based venture capital and private equity firm, is sending someone from its early-stage team to Nashville next week to meet with founders in the areas of software and consumer deals, per Haley Zapolski, creator of the NashTech group.
- Fresh off a $38 million raise, new-to-Nashville startup Phosphorus Cybersecurity Inc. has made a C-suite hire. The company announced Brian Contos as its chief security officer, citing his 25 years of industry experience and being part of seven acquisitions and two IPOs in his career. Investors valued Phosphorus at $120 million in its Series A raise, according to PitchBook.
- Nashville was one of many metro areas whose tech worker headcount accelerated in 2020 even faster than it had been growing in the years leading up to the pandemic, according to a new analysis from the Brookings Institution. Nashville's compound annual growth rate was 6.2% from 2015 to 2019, and it ticked up to 6.5% in the first year of the pandemic. Still, Nashville fell outside of the "superstar" and "rising star" categories in the Brookings study, which can be found here. The report focused on the extent to which the pandemic dispersed tech job growth across the country. "Some of the data suggests tech could be on the brink of spreading out, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and remote work. … However, what is equally striking is the persistence of the sector's superstar geography," the authors write.
- In a similar vein, PitchBook has mapped how the pandemic redirected venture capital investment across the nation. While the vast majority of states saw growth in the number of deals and total investments, Tennessee had mixed results — a 3% gain in dollars and a 7% decline in the number of deals. "At the onset of the pandemic, many expected, or hoped, that the Bay Area's grip on venture capital activity would wane," PitchBook writes. "More than two years later, the picture shown in the data is murkier. Some states with small startup ecosystems grew substantially, but the largest also continued to flourish, further cementing their place at the top of the regional hierarchy." The study compared the two years before the pandemic with what's happened since February 2020.
Tech talk
Raven Hernandez, founder of all-electric ridesharing service Earth Rides, posted a photo of herself with Mark Cuban at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin. "If I learned one thing from my previous life at Red Bull, it was don't ask permission and always sneak backstage," she wrote.
