Can young Palo Alto founders beat the odds with Entefy?
- By Azadeh Rongere
If they succeed, Entefy will render redundant your current apps for email, text, social messaging, voice calls, video and file storage.
“If DropBox, Gmail, and Facebook all had a baby, it would be Entefy,” Alston said.
It’s an aggressive vision — the kind of big idea that Silicon Valley worships. Twenty-year-old Alston and 17-year-old Brienne fit a profile that investors — and journalists — love.
Entefy has taken funding from a dozen angel investors. So far, the Palo Alto company has raised about 70 percent of the funds it wants, Brienne said.
Brienne, who says she could be the youngest college grad to raise $1 million in venture funding before she turns 18 on April 29, is pushing her story with a video.
Teens raising millions for startups in Silicon Valley is unusual but not unheard of. Three recent graduates of the Y Combinator accelerator program, ages 18 and 19, on Monday announced that they had raised $5.5 million for their airport car-sharing service, FlightCar.
The Ghafourifars, who decline to say specifically how much they have raised, plan to take more angel money before seeking venture capital.
The siblings plan to make money on Entefy through a freemium model, with higher end services like cloud storage available for a fee. Other premium feature fees and business-to-business subscriptions will also generate revenue. They’re aiming to release Entefy for private testing in December.
It’s an aggressive schedule completely in keeping with their own life experiences. Alston and Brienne both finished four years of high school and four years of college in three years.
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