New High Alpha company takes on meeting management
INDIANAPOLIS (Inside INdiana Business) — Another new company has launched from Indianapolis-based venture studio High Alpha. Docket, which has developed an intelligent meeting management software platform, has completed a $1.5 million seed round of funding from local investors, including High Alpha Capital, Elevate Ventures and Simon Equity Partners.
The company says it will use the funding to its engineering, marketing and customer success teams.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Darin Brown said having the support of local investors is critical for a startup.
“It’s a tremendous time to be in the Midwest and Indianapolis, specifically, to have this type of support available to you as we started this company,” said Brown. “The investors are local; they’re literally just down the road. (They’re) easy to get a hold of, not having to wait for quarterly meetings or anything like that. The investors have a lot of experience in different types of startups and they’ve seen and worked with a lot of different types of companies that have different go-to-market strategies and to be able to leverage that kind of relationship in a very intimate fashion is just awesome.”
Docket says its Software-as-a-Service platform provides tools to create more efficient meetings in the workplace by maximizing the time spent before, during, and after meetings. Brown says there are 55 million meetings every day in the U.S.
“Studies show that a majority of people attending those meetings think that most of them are ineffective or sometimes just a complete waste of time and this results in companies spending over $400 billion annually in the U.S. on inefficient or wasted meetings. So there’s a prime opportunity to help individuals and teams and, eventually, companies to become much more productive in their daily meeting habits.”
Brown is a former chief technology officer of Angie’s List and vice president at Salesforce and ExactTarget. He says being a startup company creates advantages when looking for talent in a competitive environment, but Docket is looking everywhere to fill positions as they are needed, but keeping a keen eye on central Indiana to help boost the tech community.
Brown says Docket’s short-term goals include focusing on key areas to help grow the platform.
“We are seeing quite a bit of success with companies that have customer-facing meetings and so we have a robust set of features that we are developing that really enhances that experience and makes that easy to provide a quality meeting for those customers. The second area that we’re really focusing on from a product perspective is really around software teams and enabling those traditional software meetings to be as easy and automatic to do as possible.”
He says, long-term, Docket wants to be known as a leader in best meeting practices.