Tampa startup hits a major win in pre-seed funding round
Tech startup Archslate, which recently relocated to Tampa from Silicon Valley, has raised an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round of $700,000.
Archslate, a startup that connects employers and candidates in the architecture industry, was initially set to raise a pre-seed round of $450,000.
The funding round was co-led by Tampa Bay Ventures and St. Petersburg-based Seedfunders, along with participation from New York Angels, a venture capitalist firm in New York.
“The need for top-talent hiring and skilled workforce has been booming, only further accelerated by the pandemic and Archslate brilliantly taps into this market,” founder and CEO Vaishnavi More said in a news release about the platform.
In addition to the current platform’s offerings, the new funding will be used to bring additional eLearning to the platform, launch a freelancers marketplace and grow various teams.
More, a Harvard grad who majored in architecture and design, founded the platform as a result of her own frustrations in the architecture industry, where finding a career and experience proved to be difficult.
Archslate is an algorithm-based platform that connects architects seeking employment to employers and vice versa. The company has two different revenue streams – one is from the employer who pays a subscription fee and the other is a subscription fee for the candidates (along with software tutorials).
Archslate was one of the companies selected for the Venture Incubation program by Harvard’s Innovation Lab, out of thousands of submissions. Archslate landed its first paying user within one day of its Beta launch. It then saw week-over-week growth of 150% in the following weeks.
More and her husband, who is an application engineer for fintech startup Fast, simultaneously made the big decision to move to Tampa last year as Fast was opening its East Coast hub in Tampa. But More already had her eyes on Tampa.
“Silicon Valley is all built out. There’s no more space left,” More previously told the St. Pete Catalyst. She was also considering Colorado and Austin, as they are destinations with architecture and engineering industry; however, the new hi-rise towers and projects in downtown Tampa caught More’s attention during a site visit.
Startup Report: Vaishnavi More
Since relocating to Tampa, More was one of the participants in Tampa Bay Wave’s TechWomen Rising Accelerator.
Archslate has an office in the Embarc Collective co-working space. The startup has 16 employees and plans to double its team by the end of this year.
