Steve Elliott's last startup raised about $10 million, and when it went out to raise another round of funding, it found that being acquired might be the better route. That translated into a $166 million exit for AgileCraft, a software startup Elliott founded in 2013 that helps align agile development teams.
Now, he's hoping to repeat that success, though with a more ambitious product.
"At the risk of not being original at all, that is what we're trying to do," he said.
His new startup, Dotwork, has developed a software platform that leverages AI to cobble together unstructured data, software stacks and key metrics to give executives and employees a comprehensive view of their projects in development and how they align with company goals.
The startup, which was formed in 2022, said Nov. 7 that it has raised a $12 million series A funding round to make key hires and advance its product. The funding came from Elliott himself, along with a group of investors who also helped fund AgileCraft before its 2019 acquisition by Atlassian. Investors included Jim Crane, owner of the Houston Astros and CEO of Crane Capital Group, as well as Hunter Nelson, a partner at Houston-based Milton Street Capital LLC.
Elliott said he developed the idea for Dotwork over the course of more than a decade building software to help large companies find gaps and insights that help them scale operations and improve workflows.
"The more dynamic organizations become, the more technologically focused they become, and it actually becomes harder and harder to get your company aligned," he said. "It's just a really interesting problem of making sure that leadership understands what's happening, what's working, where should we keep investing, where should we stop investing. And then for the people on the teams and doing the work, understanding why they're doing it and how it's going to help the company, how it's going to advance the mission. So connecting all those dots is increasingly hard."
Dotwork's platform structures unstructured data using AI and human judgement, and it can be customized through low- or no-code development. Its native AI also incorporates generative user interfaces that help blend some of the hands-free elements of AI with more traditional data analysis. In a sense, the company helps do many of the things third-party consultants might be brought in to do, only in a more automated and ongoing way.
Many of Dotwork's features are things that Elliott said he had dreamed of creating years ago.
"We didn't have as many AI tools available as we do now. We didn't have knowledge graphs, we didn't have a lot of things that we're using now to solve the problem from a technology perspective," he said. "So, as a technologists, that part's really fun."
Dotwork currently has 10 employees, many of whom work out of the company's headquarters in a four-story office building in Georgetown that has views of longhorn cattle and open fields.
Elliott said he expects to hire about 10 more people by the end of 2024. So far, he said, the team mostly includes engineers who have worked together at previous companies. He also noted that some of the people he plans to hire for sales and marketing have also worked together in the past.
"We've got a really cohesive team that has gone through these phases before," he said.
He also hopes to find a strong exit, just like AgileCraft did a few years ago. That startup had raised $10 million and had 14 term sheets lined up for a series B round of investment.
"During that process, that's when several acquirers popped up," he said. "So that's the same kind of play we want to run again. We'll get up into the $15 million to $20 million range, and then we'll be looking for money to grow and, during that process, it will lead us to get acquired or we'll go to the next level."
An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of new funding Dotwork has raised. It has been updated.
