Twos, a Tampa-based company that’s part social media, part note-taking app, has closed a $1.4 million pre-seed round led by TampaBay.Ventures.
The company announced Wednesday it closed the slightly-oversubscribed round and did not disclose additional investors. The funding will primarily be used for marketing, design and fleshing out Twos’ social-sharing capabilities, along with a few key hires.
“We want the early employees to run through walls with us,” said Joe Steilberg, Twos’ co-founder. “We want people who are best in class, but it’s also really important that they have the same passion for Twos that we do — which we know is a very big lift to add to the pirate ship.”
The company launched in March 2021, providing a digital platform for users to write down a litany of things ranging from to-do lists to a child’s allergic reaction. The platform is free, with premium upgrades users can either pay for or earn access to through using the app itself.
“When we asked, the majority of people said, ‘I wish I wrote things down’ — [Twos] is how you can,” Parker Klein, Twos’ co-founder, said. “This isn’t just a notes app or a calendar; it’s for things, and we all have a lot of things to remember. It’s crazy, but we think we’re building something new here that we haven’t had before.”
Klein and Steilberg are the company’s sole employees, joking that they plan to only hire in integers of two to stick with the company theme. The high-energy pair are also known for passing out $2 bills at events they attend.
Their rapport played a role in TampaBay. Ventures’ investment in the company, along with the use-case far beyond the traditional business walls.
“We wanted to lead the round because seeing the ways in which plumbers, construction workers, nurses, stay-at-home-moms — the ways they write and organize things is not super clear, and a lot of people can benefit tremendously from a system that helps you remember things,” said Andreas Calabrese, general partner at TampaBay.Ventures. “A lot of products are built for business or enterprise purposes and being hyper-productive. And while Twos is very valuable to them, helping the entire world remember things and improve their life is an incredible mission.”
Despite the wide-reaching goals, Klein said the company’s mission boils down to three things: writing, remembering and sharing. There’s also a focus on keeping data private, unlike other tech giants that have gotten into legal hot water over selling user data.
“We’ll be bigger than social media because it’s also for private use,” Klein said.
Twos is based at the University of Tampa’s Lowth Entrepreneurship Center and is also a member of local innovation hubs Embarc Collective and the Tampa Bay Wave. They currently have 5,000 users, with the goal to hit 10,000 by February and 50,000 by the end of next year.
“I legitimately feel we got so lucky with Tampa — being surprised by the tech community and the fact TampaBay.Ventures even exists,” Steilberg said. “Because there are a lot of big hubs we could’ve been in, but we ended up here, and our wildest dreams came true.”
