With 2015 being such a monumental year for all of us at Synap, we couldn’t say goodbye without taking a minute to reflect on our journey. So, in the spirit of the holidays, we wanted to take a look at a few things that brought smiles to our faces.

Springing into the startup life

In Chicago, March can often be viewed as a month full of potential. Potential to give us a few days of respite from the typically vicious winters, where we don’t have to go outside wearing two pairs of long underwear, hat, gloves and winter coat. For us, March was a month of much greater potential. It was the month Jeremie, Matt and Michael officially launched Synap Software Labs. They left their full-time jobs and jumped, head-first, back into the crazy and wonderful Chicago startup world.

Growth is good

At the start, Synap was a modest size with just three co-founders. However, our motley crew has quickly grown to a powerful team of seven people, grinding away to make our product something we are incredibly proud of. And with big plans in the future, we are looking forward to welcoming more talent. Spoiler alert: We will be a team of eight on January 4th when we welcome our newest member, our VP of Customer Success!

Funding

This August we made the exciting announcement that we closed $2M in seed funding from a group of fantastic Chicago entrepreneurs and investors, including Baird Capital and KGC Capital. The funding has enabled us to grow our team and in turn, expand our product development efforts, making our product more robust and valuable for our customers. We can’t thank our investors enough for their confidence in us and the support they’ve provided so far.

Product Launch

Our first real “moment of truth” arrived in October when we completed our first integration with Gmail and started onboarding our first beta customers (a lot of firsts, right?). All of the hours we had spent (and continue to) developing and testing the product paid off! Our beta customers have become a wealth of information for us as they’ve provided excellent feedback, gleaned from their daily interactions with our software. With myriad integrations to come, we have continued to bring on new beta users and will do so through the new year. 

Celebrations all around

It’s a rare accomplishment when you truly enjoy both your work and the company of your colleagues. For us, our successes aren’t just limited to what happens within the four, glass walls of our TechNexus space. This year three of our team members were married and another welcomed his first child. Our extended family is growing and we couldn’t be happier!

We’ve been incredibly fortunate that this past year was full of so many successes, accomplishments and celebrations but we're looking forward to an even more exciting 2016. We can't wait to launch our new Journeys podcast, a raft of powerful product integrations and new features, and of course, onboard a lot more teams onto Synap.

*This was originally posted on blog.getsynap.com