sales and marketing efforts, including advertisements and hiring a handful of people in sales, marketing, and software engineering, Acworth says.
“This is the first real amount of money [we’ve] put toward promoting what we do,” Acworth says.
Artaic, an alum of the MassChallenge Boston startup accelerator program, has raised a total of $3.1 million from investors to date, Acworth says. It has also received $5.8 million in grant funding from the National Science Foundation and other groups, he says.
Artaic will also make a sales push in Asia with the help of its new investors. Cambridge, MA-based InTeahouse is a global firm that runs a $30 million venture fund, a startup accelerator, events, and other programs geared toward entrepreneurs. InTeahouse was started two years ago by entrepreneur and investor Xin Liu, a China native, and the firm has offices in China. Acworth was part of a group of executives from 11 New England robotics firms that traveled to China on a 2016 trade mission organized by InTeahouse and MassRobotics, a Massachusetts nonprofit industry group.
Lesso, meanwhile, is a publicly traded China-based company whose global businesses primarily sell a variety of home building materials and services.
With Artaic, “I think Lesso saw an interesting product that they could sell in China,” Acworth says, noting that no such deals have been made yet. “They’re kind of known as the Ikea or Home Depot of China.”
