Notetaking app startup lands $1.4M local investment

Twos, a startup that has developed a notetaking app and sharing platform, has raised a $1.4 million pre-seed investment round led by TampaBay.Ventures. 

Twos incorporates a calendar, planner, task manager and journal into one place where it can become organized. Twos currently has over 12,000 total users, 5,000 of which were active in the last 30 days.  

“Twos is like Notion for normal people,” Andreas Calabrese, general partner for TampaBay.Ventures, said in a statement. “With the sheer magnitude of information and responsibilities the average person has to manage every day, Twos’ simple system of capturing ‘things’ (the innovative technology behind Twos) is a truly innovative approach.” 

Twos was founded in 2021 by former Google engineer Parker Klein and his co-founder, Joe Steilberg. The duo met at a tech conference in Austin. Steilberg had a background in real estate and understood Klein’s frustrations with messy notetaking apps. The pair then decided to collaborate and bootstrap Twos, an app that condenses lists and thoughts all into one place – and Tampa became the launch site. 

“As someone with ADHD, I used to forget everything. My dad suggested I start writing things down to ease my overactive mind and I quickly realized the benefits. I was using notebooks, reminders, a calendar and would email/text myself, and was still forgetting things. Parker had a similar experience and developed Twos based on that insight,” Steilberg, COO and co-founder of Twos, said in a news release. 

RELATED: Startup Report: Twos 

In an interview with the St. Pete Catalyst earlier this year, the co-founders said they would be seeking investments for either a pre-seed or an entire seed round in the near future.

Steilberg said they initially reached out to Calabrese at TampaBay.Ventures long ago and started forming a relationship with him. 

While TampaBay.Ventures led the round as the institutional investor, angel investors and others also participated in the round.  

Twos plans on using its newly acquired funds to grow its user base and reintroduce the public side of the platform dubbed “Twos World,” a social marketplace of personal information such as family recipes and restaurant recommendations, according to the announcement. 

The pair said they will likely pause on raising additional capital for at least a year from now so they can fully concentrate on growing the platform. 

Steilberg and Parker are also considering how they may integrate Siri’s voice command technology into the app, as they’ve experienced demand for that feature. 

Twos operates out of the University of Tampa’s Lowth Entrepreneurship Center. Twos was accepted into the university’s entrepreneurship program, which allows them to occupy physical space in the incubator.  

The startup is also a member of Tampa Bay Wave and Embarc Collective.

The duo plan on hiring engineers and potentially graphic designers and contractors as part of their team.