accelerator program in 2016. However, toward the end of the 12-week program, Exis withdrew from Gener8tor and was replaced by Curate.
Since graduating from Gener8tor nearly two years ago, Curate has worked to develop its technology, identify industries which would benefit most from using the tools, and persuade investors that Curate is a company worth backing.
On Tuesday, the startup announced it had raised a $450,000 seed round. The Idea Fund of La Crosse, a fund created under the public-private Badger Fund of Funds program, led the round, says Dale Willis. Other participants included a few individual investors, including Inventure Capital managing director Michael Thorson, Willis says.
Curate currently has four full-time employees and plans to use some of the proceeds from the funding round to expand its technical team, he says.
Some of the new money will also support further product development. Specifically, Curate plans to build and fine-tune “artificial intelligence components that will help us automate a lot of the process of discovering what’s useful for customers,” Willis says. “It will start to become less about keywords, and the A.I. will actually start driving more of what’s valuable.”
Curate also plans to add features to its software that will allow clients to do more analysis of the data they receive in weekly reports from Curate than is possible today, he says.
