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Booksy Is Making Appointment Scheduling Easier and More Efficient
Last week, Chicago based Booksy announced that it had raised a large Series B2 round ($28.5 million) from existing and new investors. The company is the largest mobile marketplace for appointment-driven beauty services in the country. In short, Booksy is focused on disrupting the beauty booking market. Beauty services are a $90 billion market in…
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Brian Ardinger Talks IO Summit, Nelnet, and Innovation
Last week, SPN caught up with the Director of Innovation at Nelnet, Brian Ardinger. Brian is also the founder of InsideOutside.io, makers of the IO Podcast and the IO Summit. The Summit is coming to Lincoln on October 20 as part of the Startup Week festivities. The interview covered a number of topics and includes…
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Meet a VC: Firebrand Ventures from Kansas City
In August of 2016, John Fein started the process of raising a venture capital fund in Kansas City. He had a target of $7 million as his fund size and as he describes – “zero connections” to the high net worth community in Kansas City. However, he had a mission to raise and invest the…
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Buildertrend: 500 Employees and Still Growing
This week, Buildertrend announced that it had hired its 500th employee. This is a tremendous achievement for the company. Buildertrend provides cloud-based software to home builders, re-modelers, and other construction related companies. It is the largest provider of this type of software in the United States. The company currently has more than one million users…
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Lawn Buddy Continues Strong Growth
Lawn Buddy is a software company based in Wichita, Kansas. The company provides software and mobile tools to more than 10,000 users in the lawn care business. We sat down with Steven Werner the CEO of Lawn Buddy to ask him about the new round and about the company. When asked why Lawn Buddy exists,…
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Kingland Systems Raises Another Round of Capital
Last week, Kingland Systems which has offices in Clear Lake and Ames filed paperwork with the SEC that it had received $1 million in angel capital. September 2019’s $1 million is in addition to the $1.5 million that was raised in 2018. Kingland Systems was founded in 1992 by David Kingland. The company provides a…
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Research: State Funding Report for the Silicon Prairie
2018 was a terrific year for the Silicon Prairie regarding venture dollars deployed. More than $6.1B was deployed in the region. While the number of companies receiving funds was about 8% lower (approximately 1450 companies were venture backed in the region), the amount of funding was up more than 34.5% from 2017 to 2018. Thus,…
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Sidewalk Labs Spins Out Replica, Announces Series A
On Thursday, Kansas City based Replica announced via blog post that it had moved from a product of Sidewalk Labs (in the Model Lab) to a separate company, called Replica. The company also announced that it had raised $11 million in venture funding. In the blog post, Nick Bowden, Replica’s CEO and co-founder explained how…
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Editorial: Connecting Activities, an Appeal
As some of you may know, I write many articles for Silicon Prairie News and have been a regular part of the Omaha and regional ecosystem for almost two decades. I know many of the readers of Silicon Prairie News personally. I appreciate your readership. SPN is a critical way that we connect with the…
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Meet a Venture Firm: Innova Memphis
The Innova Ag Innovation Fund IV has invested in five of the Silicon Prairie’s leading startups. However, its origin suggests just how unlikely this was. In 2007, Innova Memphis was founded by Ken Woody as part of the Memphis BioWorks Foundation. This foundation was part of an effort in Memphis, Tennessee to jumpstart the region’s…