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Venture Capital News: Textio Announces $8M Series A Round

2015-12-17
SEATTLE, WA, Textio, the platform for intelligent text, announced today that it has raised an $8 million Series A investment led by leading enterprise cloud investor Emergence Capital.
The round includes additional funds from existing investors, Cowboy Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Upside Partnership. Gordon Ritter, Founder and General Partner at Emergence Capital, will join Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures on the company's Board of Directors.

Founded in 2014 in Seattle by two highly-respected Microsoft alums, Textio's platform analyzes business documents as they're being written to forecast and improve their performance. The company's first product, Textio Talent, optimizes job listings, recruiting email, and other talent content so that open roles fill up to 20% more quickly and draw 15% more candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. Clients include Twitter, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Broadridge Financial, MLB.com, and many others worldwide.

'In less than a year, Textio has demonstrated how it can help recruiters and managers improve hiring by starting with the Textio platform,' said Gordon Ritter. 'Emergence Capital is thrilled to support the Textio team as they help companies improve additional forms of written communication.'

'Emergence Capital is uniquely situated as a partner to help us scale,' said Kieran Snyder, Co-Founder and CEO of Textio. 'As Textio moves into performance feedback and other document types next year, we're privileged to have an investment partner with so much depth of experience in domain-specific cloud technology. We will build our customer and technology teams significantly as we extend our platform.'

Textio is a highly quantitative system that uses a proprietary combination of machine learning and natural language processing to model document performance with an easy-to-use interface. Snyder, who holds a PhD in computational linguistics, is widely renowned for her work on text analytics for business documents, including performance reviews, resumes, and job descriptions. Co-Founder and CTO Jensen Harris is a 16-year Microsoft veteran who led the user experience of Outlook, Office, and Windows during his tenure at the company.

'If you can type, you can use Textio,' said Harris. 'You don't need to be an expert in machine learning or statistics to use Textio's powerful insights.'

About Textio
Founded in Seattle in 2014 by Kieran Snyder and Jensen Harris, Textio (@textio) is an artificial intelligence platform that predicts the performance of business documents as they're being written. Textio Talent, the first platform application, focuses on job listings, recruiting email, and other talent communication. In a short time, Textio has been widely adopted by enterprises looking to fill roles more quickly with qualified and diverse candidates. The gender bias component of the platform has received particular attention. The company closed a seed round earlier this year and has recently closed its Series A with Emergence Capital.

About Emergence Capital
Emergence Capital (@emergencecap), based in San Mateo, Calif., is the leading venture capital firm focused on early and growth-stage enterprise cloud companies. Its mission is to invest in the cloud visionaries who are building the most important business applications. The firm's investments include companies such as Salesforce.com (CRM), SuccessFactors (SFSF, acquired by SAP), Veeva Systems (VEEV), Yammer (acquired by Microsoft), and Box (BOX). More information on Emergence Capital can be found at http://www.emcap.com.
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