Transpose, a new Seattle startup that bills itself as a holistic information management platform, today announced a $1.5 million funding round. Seattle-based venture capital firm Founder’s Co-op led the round, which also included participation from Alliance of Angels and New York-based The Gramercy Fund.
Formerly known as KustomNote, the nine-person company has developed software that helps customers create structure and pull intelligence from large sets of data across all devices.
The startup, which graduated from Seattle-based B2B accelerator 9MileLabs this past November, originally built structured note-taking templates that helped customers record, store, retrieve, and share custom-structured notes.
Now, Transpose has evolved to also pull insights from unstructured data, files, and voice recordings by using cloud-based data retrieval technologies and text analytics.
Tranpose CEO Hussein Ahmed said there are more than 90,000 users on the platform, including employees from companies like Apple, Walmart, and Heineken. Clients use the system to do everything from storing and tracking wine collections, to organizing schedules and vaccinations for children.
“It’s a complete do-it-yourself solution for consumers and teams in enterprises to build their very own solution to track assets, manage leases, or sales leads,” Ahmed explained.
Chris DeVore, General Partner at Seattle-based Founders Co-op, noted that while “database is one of the most powerful software tools ever created,” actually using and building a database to help increase business has been limited to technically-trained administrators who have extensive knowledge about SQL, table structure, and other data-related tools.
“Transpose is making database functionality — both read and write — available to anyone, and we’re very excited to see how that changes the market for database-driven business processes,” DeVore said.
Ahmed said that given its unique offering, Transpose does not have any direct competition.
“In our case, we are beating a new path, building a new category,” he noted.
Ahmed was a software development manager at Amazon for one year before launching Transpose. He and his co-founder, Samah Gad, both earned a Ph. D in computer science from Virginia Tech University.
The fresh funding will be used to bolster the product and hire more employees.
