Undeterred by the failure of his Jawfish Games, which closed earlier this year after a planned $20 million acquisition by an unnamed company fell through (see previous report), poker ace Phil Gordon has embarked on another enterprise titled Tetrapod Software.
The title was chosen because it is a “natural evolutionary step one up from Jawfish.”
The start-up is based in Seattle and has just raised $2 million in fresh seed funding to develop its Chatbox product. Gordon has attracted a total of $2.35 million in investments this year from influential financial sources like former Yahoo president Sue Decker, a board member for companies including Berkshire Hathaway, Costco and Intel; Paypal veteran Scott Banister; Gotham Capital principal Robert Goldstein; Rick Rudman of Vocus; Michael Bronfein of RemediRX; and Mattias Westman of Prosperity Capital.
Goldstein and Doug Miller, experienced financial executives, are both joining the company’s board. Tetrapod currently employs six people, but Gordon has intimated that further software engineering hires are planned for 2015.
In his non-poker life, Gordon, who has taken the CEO position at Tetrapod; he is an entrepreneur and computer scientist.
Chatbox has yet to launch, but appears to provide the facility of being able to quickly activate an online communication exchange and chat session as a tributary of an email thread.
The website at Tetrapod.io explains that the company has open-sourced the core server architecture, a lightweight, scalable, resilient service-oriented architecture with client support for all mobile platforms as well as desktop.
Explaining the functionality, the site claims:
“Getting a group of people together to collaborate online is hard. Everyone knows email is broken. Chatbox can help.”
It will apparently do this by creating a private, instant, rich-featured chat room available free to a multitude of endeavours.