Two more Dallas tech startups have closed new multimillion-dollar funding rounds to fuel their growth.
Zoom-rival Scoot closed a $12 million funding round for product development and scalability. Artificial intelligence hiring interview tool HireLogic secured $6 million in its funding round.
Founded in 2017, Scoot was previously called Preciate but rebranded to reflect “the importance of movement and energy” in meetings. Its new investment was led by Woodland Capital and brings the company’s total venture capital raised to $16.6 million.
“Scoot is a fun name, and it reflects the energy our product brings into meetings,” Scoot CEO Ed Stevens said in the announcement. “We think it will help more companies recognize that their virtual meetings can be more engaging, addressing employee detachment in the modern hybrid workplace.”
Scoot says its product is different because it allows attendees to move around the virtual room freely to different conversations, as opposed to Zoom where you are “stuck” in a tile in one meeting room. It also has extra features like the ability to play background music playlists during meetings and to set customized backgrounds for each Scoot room.
Scoot, which is used by more than 3,300 companies, has 14 employees, with six of them working out of its Dallas headquarters on McKinney Avenue. It plans to have more than 30 employees by the end of 2023.
HireLogic said its technology helps HR teams by using AI to listen to job interviews and provide insights on candidates, such as their aspirations and leadership experience. It can also determine how much of the job description was covered in the conversation and alert interviewers about potential question bias.
HireLogic has received $10 million in backing since it was founded in 2021. Leading the latest funding round was Joseph Landy, former co-CEO of New York-based global private equity firm Warburg Pincus. He spent 35 years at the company, helping to grow its assets under management to $56 billion.
“I have experienced first-hand how much time and money organizations spend interviewing candidates, the lack of objective data being gathered, and the impact quality of hires has on performance,” said Landy in a statement.
The company has more than 25 employees, including four in Dallas working out of its office on LBJ Freeway.
In the six months since it launched its product to the public, HireLogic has listened to thousands of interviews a month and analyzed over half a million interview minutes, according to the company. It has more than 1,500 users.
Two of the top three venture funding deals of 2023 have been in the AI industry, including a $10 billion investment from Microsoft in OpenAI, the startup behind chatbot ChatGPT that has started a craze on the Internet.
Microsoft’s large backing helped bring the total invested in startups worldwide in January to $31 billion, according to Crunchbase. That’s down 50% from the same time last year but up 27% from December.
