Two more South Florida companies are diving into equity crowdfunding.
LinguaSys, a Boca Raton-based emerging enterprise software company that solves human language challenges for global blue-chip companies by helping computers better “understand” and respond to human text, announced it is conducting an equity investment offering for up to $1.5 million on EarlyShares, an equity crowdfunding platform.
Kleo, a Miami-based e-commerce business, also recently opened a crowdfunding campaign on EarlyShares, joining the peer-to-peer boating startup Boatsetter, the first South Florida company to do so. Kleo is raising a $1 million seed round. It has already raised $635,000.
Kleo is an early stage technology company with an online only banking SaaS solution for schools and teachers to manage discretionary funds. Kleo offers virtual wallets for school administrators, teachers, PTA administrators (and even students) with companion debit cards, an integrated ecommerce marketplace and crowd funding tools. The company is headed up by James Rosenberg who started the nonprofit Adopt-A-Classroom 14 years ago that raised more than $25 million for classrooms across the United States.
LinguaSys offers proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications for understanding, analyzing and translating digital content in multiple languages. These include cost-effective solutions for clients building natural language user interfaces between computers and people, plus enterprises generating ROI through text analytics of multilingual Big Data and social media, the company said.
"To attract angel investors in the past, I had to drive up and down the Florida coast going to angel group meetings to pitch and find one angel at a time. Not a very smart way to find angel investors, but the only one available until last fall. Now we can use a website, and a marketing plan to reach the eyeballs of 'accredited investors' in the hopes that they will come to EarlyShares and read our story, watch our video, and, hopefully, make the decision to invest," said LinguaSys CEO Brian Garr in his blog post. (After all that driving, though, Garr later attracted a large investment from Mark Cuban.)
EarlyShares, founded in 2011, is a Miami-based equity funding platform that posts investment offerings and rewards-based crowdfunding campaigns. By leveraging technology and social media, EarlyShares connects entrepreneurs to accredited investors. Due to current SEC regulations, only accredited investors who are registered users of EarlyShares are able to invest in any of these offerings and other equity investment opportunities on the platform.