InfoReady Completes $1.1 Million in Seed Funding
Company’s Social Media Technology Addressing $650 Billion Information Overload Problem
Ann Arbor, MI – Startup software company InfoReady Corp. has raised $250,000 in seed capital from Automation Alley, closing out $1.1 million in first-round funding.
InfoReady’s core technology helps knowledge workers find relevant information quickly with advanced search techniques, fosters communication with project peers via social-networking collaboration, and facilitates automated workflow management in one centralized project interface. The company’s flagship product, In4Grants™, helps grant seekers better manage the complex pre-award process.
Tom Anderson, Senior Director and Director of Entrepreneurism at Automation Alley, Michigan’s largest technology business association, said InfoReady’s leadership and interactive solutions were an attractive draw.
“InfoReady’s experienced management team has developed a sound product that improves how data-driven organizations conduct business,” Anderson said. “The company’s core technology transforms data into actionable knowledge and supports the ability for multiple people to work together in a single workspace. It all boils down to better collaboration.”
The round will immediately help fund the expansion of sales, marketing and new product deployment. The company recently rebranded In4Grants from InfoReady4Grants and launched a new website. Longer-term developments include new products to address the $2 billion—and growing—search, discovery and collaboration segment of the information-management market.
InfoReady is led by veteran technology entrepreneurs Bhushan Kulkarni, founder of telecom InTouch as well as IT solutions and services company GDI InfoTech, and Jim Diggs, an original executive team member at the successful startup BlueGill Technologies. Kulkarni said grant seekers in particular are in need of new search and collaboration tools to contend with competitive pressures.
“Organizations realize grant funding is no longer a luxury,” said Kulkarni, CEO. “Grants are now mission critical, and administrators say they are spending too much time searching for opportunities and managing the pre-award process. In4Grants makes their jobs easier and gives them substantially more time to craft winning proposals.”
In4Grants is being used by more than 25 universities, economic-development organizations and local governments including Eastern Michigan University and Ann Arbor Spark.
For organizations such as these, social-media functionality is an integral part of limiting information overload. Each year, emails and other distractions cost the U.S. economy $650 billion in lost productivity and waste 28 percent of workers’ time, according to a recent report from research firm Basex. InfoReady addresses this problem with information filtering and social-media collaboration—which drastically reduce confusing email threads and other distractions.
Skip Simms, President and CEO of Ann Arbor Spark, an economic-development organization, said In4Grants is offered to member companies because the product helps startups win funding more efficiently.
“Many companies get their start with grant funding, and In4Grants is focused on this process,” Simms said. “Companies that have been seeded with grant funding are attractive to investors because risk is reduced. And anything that can positively impact the ratio of fund seekers to fund recipients is a boon for Michigan and the startup community as a whole.”
Founded in 2010, InfoReady has received investments from Michigan’s three major seed funds and is now over-subscribed. Investors include $250,000 from the Ann Arbor Spark-administered Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund, $50,000 from First Step Fund, and advisory board members Ted Dacko and Terry Cross. The advisory board has deep experience in relevant areas of InfoReady’s strategy, including Dacko, who headed HealthMedia’s successful sale to Johnson & Johnson in 2008.
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About InfoReady Corp.
InfoReady deals with information overload…so you don’t have to.
An information-management innovator backed by decades of deep IT know-how, InfoReady’s core technology helps knowledge workers find relevant information quickly, fosters communication with project peers via social-media applications, and facilitates automated workflow management in one centralized project-based interface. The Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company’s flagship product, In4Grants™, helps grant seekers better manage the complex pre-award process.
To see how InfoReady and In4Grants are changing how the world manages data, go to www.in4grants.com.