12/2/2014, Cincinnati, OH CincyTech announces our newest portfolio company: Strap, the premier software and analytics platform for wearable technology. CincyTech led a $1.25 million seed round of investment with participation from Mercury Fund, Vine Street Ventures, Danmar Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners, and New Coast Ventures and angels including Wendy S. Lea. The funding will fuel the company’s growth through product development while increasing partnerships with developers, enterprises and brands.
With Strap Metrics, the world’s first analytics platform for wearable tech, Strap makes it easy to view and optimize the unique sensory data that wearables capture. Strap also offers Strap Kit, a powerful toolkit that allows developers to write their wearable application once, in JavaScript, and deploy it across multiple platforms, with Strap Metrics built right in. Strap is available now for Pebble, Android Wear and Glass, and will soon add support for Tizen and Apple Watch.
“Strap has created an important layer of software that has to exist for wearable tech to work,” said CincyTech Managing Director Mike Venerable. “Developers need it, big companies need it. It allows developers to focus on functionality for the end user.”
“We are very fortunate to have a great group of investment partners on board with us,” said Steve Caldwell, co-founder and CEO of Strap. “The wearables market is poised for hockey-stick growth in the next 12 months, but challenges of fragmentation and increasing data points make it very difficult for existing app developers and stakeholders to jump in with both feet. We are in a perfect position to grow our world class suite of tools and platforms to lower the barrier to entry in the growing wearables ecosystem.”
Strap is a 2014 graduate of The Brandery, one of the nation’s top seed stage accelerator programs in Cincinnati, Ohio. Its founders include Caldwell, a veteran IT professional and software developer, and Patrick Henshaw, a West Point engineering graduate and former US Army Ranger. The founders have moved from Mississippi to locate their headquarters in Cincinnati, taking advantage of a robust startup ecosystem that features growing access to capital, a network of Fortune 500 companies and lower business costs.
“The startup community is strong here and has been validated. Modulus, Roadtrippers and other Brandery graduates have been successful here,” said Henshaw. “It goes without saying that costs are lower, but what really attracts us to Cincinnati is the energy around the startup tech community. Just like OTR is experiencing a revitalization, the tech industry here is getting a ton of care and attention as it grows, attracting the right talent and money along the way.”
