An East Liberty startup has surpassed an investment milestone of over $5.25 million in seed funding and it's now looking to increase its workforce by about 50% of its current headcount before the end of the year.
BlastPoint Inc., a software firm that provides companies with affordable and accessible artificial intelligence-powered data tools for market analysis and other metrics, employs 21 full-time workers across 10 states, but most are based in Pittsburgh.
According to CEO and Co-Founder Alison Alvarez, BlastPoint could hire as many as 10 people by the end of the year "and even more than that if we hit our sales numbers," she said.
The revenue-producing startup also posted positive cash flows for the past two quarters, "which is shocking," Alvarez said in the context of the unfavorable market conditions that have heavily affected tech startups across the country for the better part of a year now.
Those same hardships have also made raising capital difficult, and Alvarez expressed gratitude for her investors, which most recently included Detroit-area-based Muditā Venture Partners LLC and Ann Arbor, Michigan-based eLab Ventures. In the past, BlastPoint has also seen plenty of local firms support the startup financially, which have now seen their convertible notes transformed into an equity stake in the company.
"A lot of the dollars included in the round are notes converting from being convertible notes to actual shares, so that's part of the funds that are reflected there," Alvarez said. "I feel like almost every investor in Pittsburgh is currently on our cap table; they all have like a little piece, which is good because no one has a ton of money in us. It's been lots of smaller investments up until now, but it feels like we've had so many people who have been engaged in our success from the very beginning. And I feel like that's what this round really symbolizes to us."
Alvarez said the funds will ultimately support the company's growth going forward in addition to being used for the hiring of more employees.
"We feel extremely, extremely fortunate," Alvarez said. "Part of it's our own work; we've really been hitting our stride in a year when I think 2022 was a make-or-break year for a lot of our region and I think it's spoken a lot for our staff, how brilliant our engineers are that we've been able to grow in the number of contracts we have and in what our abilities are."
