chrishopen
Chris Hopen.

Two Seattle entrepreneurs that pioneered “Internet-in-a-Box” technology back in the 90s are raising cash for a new startup called Switch Inc.

David Pool and Chris Hopen are co-founders of Switch, a two-year-old company that just raised $200,000 of a larger $1.5 million round according to a new SEC filing.

Hopen wouldn’t comment on the financing when contacted by GeekWire, only noting that the company plans to reveal more details later this year.

On Switch’s website, here’s how the company describes itself:

Here at Switch, we believe passionate people create world changing solutions. We are a “security first” team with a blend of young talented professionals as well as a few successful Internet veterans focused on leveraging patent-pending machine learning solutions to automate common tasks across tens of thousands of the most popular web sites, to radically improve your life.

Born from the daily hassles of web life, Switch is focused on reducing and eliminating as much of mundane operations users are forced to manually perform to keep their digital world up-to-date and in sync with their daily life and its frequent changes.

Based on examples shown on the company’s homepage, Switch is building technology that will help accelerate the process of certain tasks like switching banks, changing insurance providers, or making payments online.

Pool and Hopen previously worked together at Spry, a company that sold Internet connection software packages which allowed people to surf the web using a computer running Microsoft Windows. Spry sold to Compuserve for $100 million in 1995, the “largest acquisition yet in the Internet business” according to a New York Times article published at the time of the sale.

“Particularly critical are tools for browsing the World Wide Web, a system of viewing information, much of it containing graphics and video, stored on the tens of thousands of network servers connected to the Internet,” the Times wrote in March 1995.

Pool was later CEO of a Bellevue-based enterprise content routing solution provider called DataChannel, a position he held from 1998 to 2002. During that time, Pool also started a venture capital firm called XMLfund that invested in XML-based web services. Pool left XMLFund in 2012.

Hopen, meanwhile, left Spry in 1996 after the acquisition and eventually became the CTO at Aventail, a Seattle company that developed VPN technology. Aventail and DataChannel were business partners.

Hopen later founded a Seattle-based file-sharing startup called TappIn, which sold to GlobeScape for as much as $17 million in 2011.

A search on LinkedIn only shows two other Switch employees — a senior software engineer that was hired in October 2014 and a director of product operations hired this past February. The SEC filing notes former ImageX and SinglePoint CEO Richard Begert as a director, though Hopen told GeekWire that Begert is not an investor.

There is another company by the name of Switch, Inc. that offers a Tinder-like app, but instead for job searches. The year-old startup is based in New York and raised $2.5 million this past December.

Editor’s note: More information about Switch from its website was added.  

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