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Telecom software company Telnyx has added $1.1 million to its seed funding total.
The startup, which develops tools for voice capability within software applications like sales management programs and mobile apps, received financing from a collection of local investors. Pritzker Group Venture Capital led the round, with contributions from Chicago Ventures, Corazon Capital, Math Venture Partners, and LinkedIn executive Mike Gamson.
“We...met a number of fantastic investors here in Chicago and were able to build relationships and a series of real data points with them over the course of a couple months,” said Ian Reither, COO of Telnyx.
The company’s recent gains follow its graduation from this year’s Chicago Techstars accelerator program in August and a subsequent $1 million investment (the first rolling close date of the round, which now totals $2.1 million with the newest addition), which allowed “enhancing [and] distributing our network and ramping up our customer facing APIs and web presence with the increased resources,” Reither said.
“We feel the program really helped to identify a couple of key holes that needed to be patched in order to continue scaling,” he continued. “The entire experience, including the raise, nailed home the importance of customer focus for us; if you lose track of them, you lose track of the whole thing.”
According to Reither, Telnyx’s fundraising efforts were structured around a number of essays by Paul Graham focused on “convertible notes, seed rounds, and high-resolution fundraising.” Reither attributes the startup’s swift financial progress to the traction and technology it had developed prior to the seed investment process.
The new funds will be used to bolster development and sales hiring efforts, Reither explained (the company currently employs 14). “We have expansion plans on the tech side and are actively hiring for DevOps, Rails, Python, and Java engineers. We will also be investing in growing the sales and community teams in Q1 of next year.”
Concurrent with the search for new employees, Telnyx will open a new office in River North (“early next year,” Reither said).
