Adrienne St. Clair 
Digital Air Strike, a Scottsdale-based startup designed to help car dealers improve marketing and customer engagement, has received awards in six different consumer technology categories as part of the 17th annual Dealers’ Choice Awards program from Bobit Media. This is a record number of awards for Digital Air Strike (DAS), and the company was one … Read more
GitKraken (formerly Axosoft), a Scottsdale-based Git productivity and collaboration company, has acquired GitLens, a Git extension for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code). The acquisition is GitKraken’s second in less than a month, as it acquired Git integration for Jira in September. GitLens was created by Eric Amodio in 2016. It’s a free, open source … Read more
Venture Madness, an annual conference put on by Invest Southwest, happened this week and we’ve got the winners of the Venture Madness competition. Venture Madness brings together investors and some of Arizona’s stand out startups for two days of networking and pitching. Earlier this year, Invest Southwest announced 25 finalists — five companies in five … Read more
It’s fun to see all the exciting wins for many Arizona tech companies. We continue to see more investments, more national attention and more semiconductor and EV activity. Here’s just some of what happened last month: Botco.ai launches AI chat and live agent support solution BotcoLive with major urgent care franchise Botco.ai, a HIPAA-compliant chatbot … Read more
Genetic sequencing startup Tesis Labs has announced a $20 million of growth equity financing, marking the company’s first external raise since it was founded in early 2020. This financing put the company at a post-money valuation of $520 million. The round began and ended in September of this year and it was led by Xcellerant … Read more
Botco.ai, a Scottsdale-based artificial intelligence chatbot platform designed to support enterprise healthcare organizations, closed a $3.6 million seed round led by VamosVentures, a venture capital firm based in Los Angeles. This win is another in a string of achievements this year for botco.ai. Botco.ai will use the funds to speed up the company’s product development … Read more
The third annual Don Pierson III Memorial Classic, a golf tournament hosted by the StartupAZ Foundation, on behalf of the Don Pierson Memorial Fund, will take place Monday, Oct. 4. The tournament is designed to raise money to provide scholarships and resources for entrepreneurs across Arizona. The fund was set up in honor of Don … Read more
Arizona leaders have launched the National Semiconductor Economic Roadmap (NSER), a new initiative to advance U.S. competitiveness in the international semiconductor industry. Global demand for semiconductors has reached an unprecedented high, but these chips, which have become a precious commodity, are also in short supply. This shortage comes in part because of the massive impact … Read more
Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) service providers Skynetwest, based in Chandler, and Soaring Eagle Imaging, based in Brandon, Miss., have joined forces to create a drone data collection and processing company called Soaring Eagle Technologies. The goal for this new company is to become the leading resource for gathering and processing data provided by drones. Soaring … Read more
Cyber Dive, a tech startup that focuses on helping parents monitor their child’s social media and cell phone activity, has released Aqua One, a fully functional smartphone to provide an additional tool to keep children safe when interacting online. The company’s mission is to “stop social media from becoming a social disaster,” Cyber Dive co-founder … Read more