A software startup led by a co-founder of high-profile fitness company Peloton (NASDAQ: PTON) has made St. Louis a hub of its operations, with the city being home to a cluster of its software development employees and its only office.
The New York-based startup, Avise, operates locally in CIC St. Louis coworking space at 4240 Duncan Ave. in the Cortex innovation district and has six employees in the St. Louis region. While Avise is a remote-first company, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Edgar Thomas said Avise has its largest concentration of employees in the St. Louis area and its only physical office here.
Founded in 2020 by Thomas and CEO Graham Stanton, Avise has developed accounting software it says helps companies more quickly analyze and track financial data. It says its technology aims to provide an alternative to “severely outdated software and processes” for accounting professionals. It has been backed with $5.5 million in seed funding from investors.
Thomas and Stanton launched Avise following previous experience with technology startups. Stanton is a co-founder of exercise company Peloton and was general manager of Peloton Digital segment before leaving the company in 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. Thomas is a certified public accountant and previously was controller of agriculture technology company CIBO Technologies. CIBO is based in Minneapolis and has an office in St. Louis.
“I would come out to St. Louis and really enjoyed meeting the (software) engineers out there,” Thomas said. “When I co-founded Avise and we were looking for engineers, I came back to St. Louis and started there.”
Avise’s growth in St. Louis comes as its business expands. It launched last year with beta users of its software and has started to sign contracts with clients. Its accounting software is currently designed for privately owned companies, but it plans to make it available for publicly traded firms by year’s end.
“2022 is a big year for us in terms of going from pre-revenue to revenue and then going from private companies only to publicly traded companies,” Thomas said.
Avise said users of its software range in terms of size and industry, and include financial technology startup Glean AI and cannabis wholesaler Nabis. Avise has 31 employees. Its St. Louis team includes Senior Software Engineer Katie Skiba-Mathews, who said the region has a strong pool of technology talent from which to hire.
“We were late to the tech game, but I think there is a lot of young talent in St. Louis that we can really take advantage of here,” she said.
Thomas expects St. Louis will continue to house the largest number of Avise staffers for the longterm, saying the startup has worked with an external recruiter to find local hires and plans to use the nonprofit Venture For America fellowship program to add talent locally.
