Coming off the Labor Day weekend, startups are gearing up for a busy fall!
Here are the top headlines from the week that you need to know:
The Big Story
Five startups have been named as the finalists for InvestTN Pitch Competition, presented by Amazon, which will take place next week week at the 3686 Conference in Nashville. The selected startups include:
— North Carolina-based MasRefund revolutionizes tax filing for the Spanish-speaking community
— Nashville-based Fathom PBC makes it easy to find, employ, and track talent in the world of work.
— Knoxville-based Perseus Materials invents new ways to build our largest load-bearing structures reliably, quickly, and at low-cost.
— Nashville-based TuneHatch, Inc. is an end-to-end show management platform for live music and entertainment. They make show management easy — empowering venues, promoters, and artists to do more shows in less time and sell more tickets.
— Knoxville-based Onrise is the first-to-market, athlete-specific telehealth solution with a full mental health care offering of peer support, therapy and psychiatric care. Onrise is care that athletes trust and want to use.
Funding and M&A News
* Arkansas-based Laravel raised an impressive $57 million Series A round from Accel. Laravel is a popular web application development frameworks are foundational to many of the products and services that underpin modern work (for example, Square’s commerce engine, a Fortune 10 retailer’s internal CRM, and the Milwaukee Bucks website are all built on Laravel). You can read more about the Series A round on Accel’s blog.
* Angel Kids AI, an AI-powered browser designed to provide children with a safe and age-appropriate internet experience, today announced that they have raised an additional $1.1M of funding in an extended Seed round. The new contributions from three investors – Magnify Ventures, City Light, and Atland Ventures – bring Angel Kids AI’s total amount raised to $5.85M. The additional funding will be used to accelerate Angel Kids AI’s investments in hiring, product development, and marketing initiativesm according to a press statement. You can read about Angel AI’s previous feature on Hypepotamus here.
* Atlanta-based The Cloud Minder, an AI and GPU startup, raised a $3 million seed round, per Crunchbase.
In Other News
* Kennesaw State University ranks among the best in the nation for the quality of its campuses and its on-campus dining, according to the 2025 Best Colleges report by the ranking and review site Niche. Read more about the rankings here.
* Stephanie Van Meter has just been promoted to Chief Operating Officer at Ammunition, an Atlanta-based integrated ad agency. Full announcement can be found online HERE.
* CBRE released its 2024 Scoring Tech Talent report, which names Atlanta as the #11 large tech market in the country, based on a number of factors including job growth.
