• AboutOne

  Participated · Equity · Oct 2013

  AboutOne is a Chester County-based family planning platform. The company was listed among 11 recipients in Benjamin Franklin Technology Partners' latest funding allocation. BFTP announced a total of $1.9 million spread across those companies but did not disclose per-company amounts. The announcement noted that just more than half of the $1.9M was allocated to new companies, with the remainder reserved for follow-on funding for previous BFTP portfolio companies such as Cloudmine and Grassroots Unwired. The article does not provide details on AboutOne's product roadmap, operating metrics, or specific use of the funds. AboutOne provides an online family-management system with mobile apps on iOS, Android and Windows that let users store memories, addresses, health histories, education summaries and home inventories. The company emphasizes health features—about 75% of its user base uses those tools—and offers prescription reminders, cancer patient support, allergy management and care coordination. Data protection is provided via VeriSign, McAfee, and TRUSTe. Earlier this year AboutOne finished its cloud platform and plans to open an API so third parties can build apps and white-label the service for employers. Management says the firm will use the new funding to finish development of a mobile app slated to launch at CES, and that several partner companies will be revealed at that launch. CEO and founder Joanne Lang framed the product as a consumer-first personal vault for family and benefits communication. AboutOne offers a patent-pending cloud platform that lets parents store digitized photos, video and text, build photo albums, keep insurance contracts and calendars, and create contact lists and babysitter instructions. Information is backed up hourly and the system supports data entry from smartphones, scanners or any web-enabled device. The platform can automate creation of hard-copy memory books, family newsletters, online health summaries and greeting cards that can be mailed to recipients. AboutOne charges about $30/year for the service and has partnered with Microsoft and Suze Orman of IDSafe for an updated platform release. The company plans product updates over the next six months and will launch an AcornPoints rewards program in January to incentivize parents to complete organization goals. The recent financing will fund increased marketing and expansion of the engineering team to support those product initiatives. AboutOne offers a secure online family management system that lets parents store appointments, photos from cell phones, to-do lists, school information, scanned documents and profiles for children (including medical and emergency details). The product includes tools for family newsletters, digital scrapbooks, greeting cards, invitations and shareable templates for college applications, school forms and tax documents. The company launched a beta in October and reports almost 4,000 users; it offers 17 free days of service, then charges $5 per month or $30 per year. AboutOne has partnerships with Zillow and WebMD to help centralize information-gathering. The service initially targeted Millennial Moms but has expanded to teenagers going to college, caregivers, military families and corporate customers. The company was founded in 2008 by CEO Joanne Lang, is based in Bountiful, Utah, and has 11 employees.

• Estify

  Participated · Seed · Sep 2013

  Estify provides software for the automotive collision industry that automates estimate-data integration between insurers and body shops. The company is led by Jordan Furniss, Derek Carr and Taylor Moss and is based in Los Angeles, CA. Its Transfer tool eliminates manual rekeying of estimates and can import estimates from CCC, Mitchell, or Audatex and output them into whichever estimating platform is needed. Estify raised $6.3M in Series A funding and intends to use the proceeds to continue expanding operations. The article does not disclose other financial metrics, user counts, or prior financing rounds. Estify offers software that automates the transfer and integration of insurance damage estimate data for repairs between insurance companies and body shops. The company built the product after studying body shops’ workflows and tested the service through the end of 2013, launching it at the beginning of the following year. Estify operates a subscription model (shops typically pay $299 per month) and is live in about 400 shops, which the company says is the fastest adoption of any web-based service in the industry. The team has about 30 employees across two offices in California and Utah and uses outsourced engineering/support centers in Peru (about 10 people) and India (about 5 people). Founders began the project while in college in 2012 and co-founder Jordan Furniss left school to join the AmplifyLA accelerator in summer 2012 to focus on the company. Current plans described in the article focus on rolling the technology out to market. Estify offers a suite of web-based services—accessible via a dashboard—that address three core pain points for collision repair shops: rekeying estimates, reconciling insurer/shop estimates and sourcing parts from local providers. Its products aim to eliminate manual rekeying (saving up to two hours per estimate), speed reconciliation down to seconds, and automate parts requests to nearby dealers. The startup completed a limited beta with a handful of early customers and received interest from over 100 shops during testing, with some offering to prepay a year in advance, but it does not yet have many paying customers. Estify prices its service on a monthly subscription between $99 and $500 and says a few thousand customers would meet its initial revenue targets. The company’s immediate plans include a full-scale launch, expanding the team (currently six people) and building out mobile offerings while broadening functionality beyond repair shops to a larger pipeline of insurers, appraisers and parts providers.

No current team members are available.