Austin Startup Vyopta Nets $5M Series A from AVX Partners
Austin, TX-based Vyopta, which provides a video conferencing system dashboard for businesses, has raised $ 5 million as the startup seeks to expand its reach.
Vyopta helps businesses ranging from Stanford Health Care to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs better manage the many Internet-enabled conference calls their employees participate each year.
Ivan Montoya, Vyopta’s vice president for marketing and business development, likens the company’s vAnalytics software to “Google Analytics” for such video conferencing and calling systems. “Someone in the IT organization, they log into the system … and they can see what’s up, what’s down, and fix it faster,” he says.
So far, the company says its has more than 70 large enterprise customers with a combined total of 3 million employees who use the service.
Vyopta says it will use the new funds to improve its product and expand its current workforce from 26 to 61 in the next six months.
CEO Alfredo Ramirez says the software is designed to work across industries. Currently, Vyopta has the most traction in healthcare—think telemedicine—and financial services, where banks are trying to provide “in-person” service without necessarily having a physical storefront. “This is for when it might not be adequate to use the Internet or do it by phone,” he says.
The Series A round was led by Austin investment firm AVX Partners, which Chris Pacitti and three other Austin Ventures partners set up last year.
Vyopta, Pacitti says, is part of a “marginalized middle” of growth companies that need funding to scale—a niche that AVX has targeted. “Growth investors are largely managing billion-dollar funds,” he says. “It’s hard to attract true growth capital to a company that is scaling but in the single-digit millions in revenue.”
Looking forward, Vyopta is working on a security feature that it plans to release later this year. “One of the biggest areas of concern is around toll fraud,” Ramirez says, saying the issue costs businesses $ 50 billion a year. “Someone breaks into their network and uses the network for calls.”
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