DURHAM — LaunchNotes may be a new software startup based in California, but it has some serious North Carolina ties.

Let’s start with funding.

Today, the Los Angeles-based firm confirmed it raised a $1.8 million seed round co-led by Bull City Venture Partners (BCVP), the Durham-based venture firm led by VC veterans Jason Caplain and David Jones, and Palo Alto-based Cowboy Ventures.

It’s only the fourth time in BCVP’s 20-year history that it has invested in a California company, and the first time it has partnered with Cowboy Ventures.

To date, the firm has invested “about 70 percent of its capital” in North Carolina companies, according to BCVP.

“While BCVP is a national firm, given where we sit and our activity in the community, most of the companies we partner with are in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions,” explains Caplain.

LaunchNotes software

Even so, the firm won’t shy away when an opportunity presents itself. Such as the case with LaunchNotes, where Caplain and Jones had a “long-term trusted relationship” with one of its founders, Jake Brereton.

While Brereton is now based in San Francisco, he got his early start a few years back working as the director of marketing at e-receipt startup Shoeboxed, headquartered in Durham.

That’s when he first met BCVP.

“We’ve kept in touch ever since, and it was this ongoing relationship that led to our initial conversation with them two months ago when we were thinking about raising a seed round,” Brereton says.

“They were the only non-Silicon Valley and New York City-based venture capital firm we spoke with,” he adds. “We couldn’t be more excited to have their investment and support, as well as their ‘outside the Silicon Valley bubble’ perspective.”

Relatedly, one of the angel investors in this round is Scot Wingo, co-founder of Get Spiffy and another Triangle fixture and serial entrepreneur.

“In short, our decision to bring on North Carolina partners was very deliberate and, as we see it, very strategic for our business,” says Brereton.

Keeping teams connected

Brereton founded LaunchNotes with business partners Tony Ramirez and Tyler Davis in 2019. All had met while working in California for the Australian software firm Atlassian.

While there, they stumbled upon a common theme: the majority of non-technical teams are completely out of sync with their businesses’ product development process and release pipeline.

“It was also clear that this problem is rapidly getting worse, not better,” says Brereton.

Enter LaunchNotes, a software platform that is meant to serve as “single source of truth” for software teams to communicate product change, internally and externally, in real time.

After three months in private beta, the startup officially launched in May.

Within 24 hours, more than 300 users signed up — “from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between.”

The founders believe they’ve struck a chord and have now decided to offer LaunchNotes’ core external communication platform — for free.

Beginning today, they are removing all subscriber limits, bundling in a new embeddable pop-up widget, and giving teams more control over the look and feel of their public release streams.

“We founded LaunchNotes with a belief that the future of software delivery is transparent. No one should ever be surprised by any product change — rather, all users must know what’s coming down the pike and be eagerly waiting to give it a try. With this announcement, we hope we’re one step closer to that reality.”

To find out more, go here.