Insider Brief
- Handraise, an AI company specializing in enhancing press coverage impact for brands, has secured $6.4 million in funding to develop a platform aimed at improving the effectiveness of PR and communications professionals in measuring and driving business impact from earned media.
- The company, founded by Matt Allison who previously built TrendKite, a top media monitoring and analytics platform, plans to use generative AI for intuitive analytics and to amplify business impact, making insight gathering simpler and less manual for users.
- Backed by investors like Silverton Partners and Floodgate, Handraise aims to revolutionize the PR and communications field by leveraging AI to offer sophisticated yet user-friendly tools for amplifying press coverage and delivering business impact.
PRESS RELEASE — Austin, Texas/November 12, 2023 — Handraise, an AI company poised to help brands dramatically increase the impact of their press coverage, announced today it has secured $6.4 million in funding to develop a groundbreaking platform that will fundamentally improve the ability of PR and communications professionals to understand and drive business impact from their earned media.
Matt Allison, the company’s Founder & CEO, brings a track record of innovation and expertise, as he previously started and built TrendKite into the top media monitoring and analytics platform in the world, which was acquired by Cision in 2019 for $225 million.
“As we worked with the world’s foremost PR and communications professionals at TrendKite, I realized there is a massive opportunity to help everyone involved — brands, communications professionals, journalists, and news consumers — get more out of news by connecting the right audience to the right content,” said Allison.
“TrendKite was known in the industry for delivering on its promises of being consultative thought partners to its customers,” continued Allison. “We helped our customers prove their value through our intuitive analytics and domain expertise. We’ll deliver on those same promises at Handraise while using generative artificial intelligence to help our customers not just measure their business impact, but also amplify it.”
Handraise is leveraging large language models to deliver simple, yet profound insights without the manual effort. This allows users to focus on strategy and impact, rather than wasting time on the curation of mind-numbing Boolean logic and digging for insights in multiple dashboards and excel spreadsheets.
The same combination of sophistication and simplicity informs Handraise’s NewsAmp product’s ability to publish assets derived from press coverage to targeted audiences — without the complexity typically associated with building audiences in digital marketing.
“We were excited to learn that Matt and his former TrendKite colleagues are back together building a new product in the PR technology market,” said Morgan Flager, Managing Partner at Silverton Partners. “Matt and his team of industry veterans are experts in the space and we’re thrilled to back them again.”
“The ongoing advancements in generative AI are creating opportunities we’ve never seen before in the earned media space,” added Mike Maples, Jr., Co-Founding Partner at Floodgate and early investor in Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, and others. “We believe the Handraise team is best suited to leverage their industry expertise and unique implementation of AI to unlock the power of news for everyone.”
Handraise is committed to driving success in the PR and communications community as well as the Austin startup ecosystem, and invites industry professionals to join them in this exciting new chapter of PR evolution.
For more information about Handraise and to stay informed on the latest updates, please visit www.handraise.com or follow Handraise on LinkedIn.
About Handraise
Founded in 2023 in Austin, Texas, Handraise is the AI PR platform that helps PR and communications professionals deliver business impact through insights and amplification. Handraise is backed by Silverton Partners, Floodgate, Bill Wood Ventures, Firebrand VC, Aperiam Ventures, Active Capital, Sputnik ATX VC, Capital Factory, and a handful of world-class angel investors.
Media Contact
Russ Somers, Chief Marketing Officer
russ@handraise.com
512–827–9015
