A graduate of the Longhorn Startup class for undergraduates at the University of Texas, LanternCRM just landed $250,000 in angel funding.
The Austin-based startup received funds from angel investors Jason Cohen of WP Engine, Rob Taylor or Black Locus, Mikey Trafton of BlueFish, Bill Boebel of Pingboard, Pat Matthews, formerly of Rackspace, and Joshua Baer of OtherInbox and the Capital Factory Fund.
“The funding comes as user signups increased 300 percent over a period of three months, which included the Austin Chamber of Commerce,” according to a news release.
The company plans to use the money to hire more employees and to market its software to more customers.
LanternCRM provides automatic email tracking, phone service and integration with hundreds of existing business services in its software. Those features make it different from competitors like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, according to the company.
“We found that a vast majority of users either hated their current CRMs or didn’t use them because they required too much manual data entry,” Alex Smith, CEO and co-founder said in a news release. “By focusing on automatically importing from existing systems like email, calendar, and phone, our users can focus on building their business instead of maintaining information in their CRM.”
LanternCRM is part of the Capital Factory’s accelerator program.
“The CRM market for enterprises may be maturing, but the market for small businesses is wide open and growing, fueled by the popularity of mobile and tablet computing. Entire industries that still operate on pen and paper or email and spreadsheets are going to be transformed over the next few years,” Baer said in a news statement.
