Fresh from a three-month stint in California, Tawheed Kader, founder and CEO of New York’s ToutApp, is back home to build the ranks of his startup and pursue his next round of funding. Last Wednesday he and the other graduates from this summer’s 500 Startups business accelerator program in Mountain View, CA, showed off their products at demo day. Now Kader is on the hunt for new talent to help his company continue its efforts to make e-mail more efficient.
ToutApp has already secured early stage funding, thanks in part to the accelerator program. “It’s not just for first time entrepreneurs,” Kader says. “It’s for any company looking for that extra edge in connections and mentorship.” He says one-year-old ToutApp raised a seed round, under $1 million, with participation from Owen Davis, managing director of NYC Seed; Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups; Esther Dyson; and Eric Ries. “We are already making money,” Kader says. “We don’t need to raise a tremendous amount at this point.”
From late May through last week, Kader fine-tuned his company’s plans with the help of McClure and other mentors 500 Startups. On August 31, he and others from the summer session will present their companies at another demo day in New York.
Finding early stage funding was initially difficult in New York, Kader says, because the local startup community is still growing. He demoed his product at such local groups as NY Tech Meetup in an effort to to connect with potential investors, but he found more customers than backers. “There aren’t enough entrepreneurs who ended up getting a huge exit and are now investors that understand what is like in the early stages,” he says.
Kader spread the word about ToutApp at March’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX, and met McClure, who invited him into the accelerator program.
ToutApp is a Web-based service that lets subscribers create form letters they can personalize and send to multiple recipients. Kader says ToutApp is not bulk mail software; rather the users create templates for reaching out to specific types of contacts. For example, if
