Austin startup M.io, formerly known as Message.io, announced the closing of a $5.75 million funding round today.
Led by Goldcrest Capital, Eniac Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures, the round will be used to expand the company's enterprise clientele base by hiring sales reps and engineers. This round of funding brings M.io’s total VC support to nearly $14 million since its launch in 2016.
Real-time messaging has changed the way companies communicate internally.”
In conjunction with the funding news, the digital messaging startup announced the launch of a universal chat network that allows for different chat services to communicate on the same channel. This enables cross-platform group conversations across an unlimited number of organizations, including vendors, partners and clients.
“Real-time messaging has changed the way companies communicate internally, but once the conversation involves someone from outside the organization, it reverts back to email,” said CEO and founder Tom Hadfield. “We believe making chat apps interoperable will enable much more collaboration between companies to happen via messaging.”
While other companies in the past have developed chat platforms that unite various networks — like Trillian and Adium in the early 2000s — they have often required opening separate chats with individual logins.
“M.io is different because users can stay within their preferred messaging app rather than needing to switch to a new universal chat app,” said Hadfield.
By connecting outside chat services’ APIs to M.io’s network, the result is a fully interoperable chat community, Hadfield said.
M.io’s universal messaging tool is now available for integrations with popular messaging apps like Slack, Spark and Stride. Hadfield and co. said they plan to sync with all major workplace and consumer chat apps by the end of 2018.
“We created an M.io universal channel to enable our founders to chat with each other,” said Hadley Harris, founding general partner at Eniac Ventures, in a statement. “It’s a simple and convenient way to bring people from many companies together, even when they’re using different messaging apps. This is one of the many reasons we are excited to work with Tom and the M.io team.”
M.io is based in Austin with a growing team of 11 employees. Hadfield said the team is celebrating the funding news by promoting their services at SXSW next week.
