San Diego-based Everyone Counts, founded to provide secure, software-as-a-service voting systems that eliminate the need for outdated voting machines or paper ballots, has raised $4 million from investors in a round led by Draper Associates, the venture firm based in Menlo Park, CA.
The company also raised $16 million in a mezzanine debt round led by Falcon Investment Advisors, a Boston private equity firm, according to a statement Tuesday.
CEO Lori Steele-Contorer, a former technology fund manager who started Everyone Counts in 2004, told me just over a year ago that the company had raised more than $15.3 million in previous years. So the latest financing deal brings total funding to more than $35 million for the company, which has grown to about 60 employees.
Tom Tullie, who joined Everyone Counts 10 months ago as executive chairman, said today the new round will enable the company to expand its sales and marketing operation and accelerate the federal certification of the company’s eLect Quad Audit voting system.
Tully, who was previously the CEO of San Diego-based EcoATM (the mobile device recycling company acquired by Outerwall for $350 million in 2013), said he led the effort to raise capital for Everyone Counts shortly after joining the company last December.
“When I looked at what the company needed, there was a lot of stuff going on between then and the elections in 2016,” Tullie said. “We needed to be funded in a pretty big way.”
Everyone Counts closed on the $4 million in equity funding at the beginning of the year, and on the debt financing more recently, Tullie said. The company provides three distinct Web-based products: software used for voter registration; software used for polling place management, and electoral management software. While some states might buy the software for the U.S. presidential election in just over a year, Tullie said he’s expecting that Everyone Counts will get more orders immediately following the national election in November, 2016.
“We needed to get our product out there, and get it fully certified through the federal certification process,” which is done by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, he said.
Everyone Counts has developed systems for managing both governmental and private digital elections, enabling voters to cast ballots from laptops, tablets, and phones.
The company’s eLect brand encompasses a suite of election products that includes the Quad Audit voting system, Electronic Poll Book, Voter Registration and Central Scan systems, as well as Election Night Reporting technology.
