Former TrendKite Founder and CEO Matt Allison has raised $6.3 million in seed funding to launch Handraise.
Austin-based Handraise will create a platform powered by artificial intelligence to help companies increase the impact of their press coverage.
Allison built TrendKite into a top media monitoring and analytics platform, which Cision acquired in 2019 for $225 million.
“As we worked with the world’s foremost PR and communications professionals at TrendKite, I realized there is a massive opportunity to help everyone involved – brands, communications professionals, journalists, and news consumers – get more out of the news by connecting the right audience to the right content,” Allison said in a news release.
“TrendKite was known in the industry for delivering on its promises of being consultative thought partners to its customers,” Allison said. “We helped our customers prove their value through our intuitive analytics and domain expertise. We’ll deliver on those same promises at Handraise while using generative artificial intelligence to help our customers measure their business impact and amplify it.”
Handraise is leveraging large language models to deliver simple yet profound insights without manual effort. This allows users to focus on strategy and impact.
“We were excited to learn that Matt and his former TrendKite colleagues are back together building a new product in the PR technology market,” Morgan Flager, Managing Partner at Silverton Partners, said in a news release. “Matt and his team of industry veterans are experts in the space, and we’re thrilled to back them again.”
Silverton Partners, Floodgate, Bill Wood Ventures, Firebrand VC, Aperiam Ventures, Active Capital, Sputnik ATX VC, Capital Factory, and a handful of world-class angel investors back Handraise.
“The ongoing advancements in generative AI are creating opportunities we’ve never seen before in the earned media space,” Mike Maples, Jr., Co-Founding Partner at Floodgate and early investor in Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, and others, said in a news release. “We believe the Handraise team is best suited to leverage their industry expertise and unique implementation of AI to unlock the power of news for everyone.”
