Exclusive: Ampersand raises pre-seed round to grow …

[Pages:2]Exclusive: Ampersand raises pre-seed round to grow intern placement platform

By Chris Mathews - Reporter

September 14, 2021

Houston-based Ampersand raised a $1.75 million pre-seed round to scale its internship recruiting and training platform.

Allie Danziger, former president and founder of Houston-based public relations and social media agency Integrate, co-founded Ampersand last year and left Integrate earlier this year to focus full-time on the startup. During her tenure with Integrate, Danziger hired and onboarded around 200 entry-level employees.

"I had some really amazing successes from hiring at such an entry level, whether it was an intern or right out of college," Danziger said. "But I constantly was frustrated by the education-to-employment skills gap I was seeing at Integrate."

But Integrate was not the only company seeing those entry-level skills gaps. Hiring managers in companies big and small are seeing the same disconnects.

Ampersand aims to bridge the skills gap between companies and young professionals. The free platform can give professionals one-on-one mentorship, courses on must-knows in the workplace and assistance finding paid internship opportunities.

Ampersand's first pilot program last fall included 10 young professionals -- seven of whom received paid job offers, Danziger said. The second program included 30 professionals; the third had 150. Now, the company is placing interns in 27 states across the country.

To support its growth, Ampersand raised a $1.75 million pre-seed round. The round was led by Houston-based Curate Capital, a venture capital fund led by Carrie Colbert that focuses on investments into female-led businesses.

Ampersand plans to deploy the pre-seed capital into hiring and building out its platform. The company is looking to hire employees in sales, marketing and technology roles, Danziger said.

Also, the company plans to develop new tech capabilities, including machinelearning capabilities, to better serve the needs of professionals with more curated content and more partnerships to guide them in their careers.

"We're really focused on democratizing access to that first internship, which can be really hard for people in underrepresented communities who have all these student loans, don't have the opportunity to get an unpaid internship or the connection to get that first internship," Danziger said.

Danziger co-founded Ampersand with Kathrin Applebaum and Scott Greenberg. The company has nine employees.

After it was founded in 2009, Integrate was acquired by Austin-based Wellington Group Marketing & PR in 2018. The combined firm kept the Integrate name, and Danziger remained in the president role.

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download