Arlington-based startup Brazen has raised $4.7 million in a funding round led by Osage Venture Partners. The funding comes at the same time as a rebranding for the company, changing its name from Brazen Careerist to simply Brazen to mark a shift in its focus beyond just career-based help. The company, which has now raised over $10 million in total, has developed a software platform for real-time messaging and collaborations, somewhat like Slack or Go2Meeting, but with a different focus and design than either.
"It's a way to help stakeholders interact freely and easily," said Ed Barrientos, Brazen's CEO. "People can still use it for recruiting and hiring but it's useful for other kinds of engagement too, like conferences or getting in touch with fundraisers."
Brazen already has more than 150 corporate, educational and other clients including Amtrak, Dartmough, AT&T and the University of Virginia. The clients subscribe to the software to use for one or two years at a time. Although the model was originally designed specifically to help organizations find new talent, the software is flexible enough that customers were already able to use it for other purposes, so the team decided to make the broader appeal more intentionally evident by changing the name of the company. Intentionality is one of the main draws of the platform according to Brazen's executives.
"It's built around an event model," said Brazen president Ryan Healy. "We can use it to match people up to talk and then end it formally. It doesn't just hand in the background, it's efficient."
Healy described in detail how the platform could be used by alumni associations for fundraising or by companies looking for a straightforward but appealing way to hold sales meetings. Extending the kind of intuitive chat system companies use internally into a format usable for groups that aren't talking to each other every day makes sense as the general idea for text-based meetings and plannings via a software platform has caught fire among a growing segment of the business community. If Brazen can offer something that Slack or Yammer can't and can convince more groups that the text-based meeting systems in general are the wave of the future, the $7.4 million it just raised could put it out ahead of a fast-growing pack of competitors.
"More people than ever want to use integrated communication programs like Brazen," Healy said. "We know our customers have an interest in seeing Brazen's product offer more than just recruiting help and now we are making it happen."
