Portland tech startup HighByte raises $875K in pre-seed financing
Courtesy / Elle Darcy
The three co-founders of HighByte, from left: John Harrington, Tony Paine and Torey Penrod-Cambra.
HighByte Inc., a Portland startup creating industrial operations software, has received $875,000 in pre-seed financing to support the company’s continued product development work.
HighByte received $625,000 in convertible debt from independent angel investors and venture capital firms including the Maine Venture Fund and Switzerland-based Momenta Ventures, according to a news release. The company also received a $250,000 long-term, low-interest loan from the Maine Technology Institute.
The MTI loan follows $100,000 in grants HighByte has already been awarded by the nonprofit, publicly funded institute to support development of HighByte’s first platform. Released in January, HighByte Intelligence Hub is a data operations solution built specifically for industrial settings, with the goal of improving data quality, efficiency in preparing data and its cross-functional use.
The pre-seed financing will fund the next round of product development as well as research hiring, according to the news release.
Angel investors include Corson Ellis, founder and former chairman of another Portland software developer, Kepware, and Brett Austin, the previous president of Kepware. Kepware was acquired in 2016 for $100 million by PTC Inc. (Nasdaq: PTC) a Boston-based enterprise software company.
HighByte co-founders John Harrington, Tony Paine and Torey Penrod-Cambra are all former employees of Kepware. Paine served as CEO of the company from 2009-16.
"These are challenging times for our manufacturing community as we start to understand the impact COVID-19 and other global factors will have on safety, productivity, and supply chain," Paine said. "This makes it more important than ever to find partners who believe in our team, vision, and ability to execute in order to make industrial transformation a reality for our customers.”
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