Two Wave companies received funding from non traditional investors, which was very unique. It has been a goal in mind for a long time for startup investing in Tampa, and to access investors beyond the usual investors, said Allen Clary, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Wave.
Phonism is a cloud service that provides easy to use tools to manage Voice over Internet Protocol-phones that was founded by Steve Lazaridis, and Harness is an app that has the technology to enable users to make small donations to non profit organizations of their choice. The company is co founded by three University of Florida graduates, Andrew Scarborough, Miraj Patel, and Matthew Gates.
Phonism is a non brand specific service that provides a centralized online portal that allows companies to manage all their VoIP devices in a single web-based interface. Unlike many existing solutions, all phones in the organization can be managed from a single interface.
Harness’s featured product is its “round-up” technology. Any time a user makes a purchase with a linked credit or debit card, the charge is rounded up to the nearest dollar and the change is automatically donated to their designated organization. Co-founder Patel said that this was designed to improve efficiency for nonprofit fundraising.
Both companies received six digit investor funding from non traditional investors. Entrepreneur-in-residence Allen Clary stated that, while investing in tech startups is high risk, it takes less capital to go far and brings the potential for high rewards.
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