Stratos ramps up staff for new Ann Arbor office

The startup formerly known as Protean Payment (freshly rebranded at Stratos) has a new name, a new pool of money to draw from, and is looking for a new home in Ann Arbor to accommodate its growth.

Stratos announced last week that it raised $5.8 million in a Series A round. Silicon Valley-based Toba Capital Partners led the round with Ann Arbor-based Reasonant Venture Partners participating, along with two other venture capital firms.

Stratos is working on disrupting the way people pay for everyday purchases, but not too much. It is making a new card that combines all of the cards in your wallet (credit, debit, loyalty) into a bluetooth enabled device. The idea is to simplify how a person pay for things without having to build a whole new payment infrastructure (and learning curve) around it. It is also the reason behind the larger-than-usual-by-local-startup-standards initial capital raise.

"We're a software company and a hardware company, so we have an increased capital requirement," says Thiago Olson, co-founder & CEO of Stratos.

Stratos is still working on developing its technology and Olson declined to give some details about it, such as when it's anticipated to launch and how many people work for the startup today. He did say the company is looking to hire 10 people right now and expects to keep hiring for the foreseeable future.

"We're scaling on all fronts," Olson says. "It's going to be constant hiring on all fronts."

Stratos currently works from an office building in Kerrytown that it shares with Duo Security and Reasonant Venture Partners. Duo Security, also in the midst of a hiring spree, is moving to a bigger office in downtown Ann Arbor this fall. Stratos is evaluating whether his firm will expand into the newly vacated space or elsewhere as it looks for a space that could house between 40-50 people.

"We're expanding and we're going to be moving into a new office and that's one of the places we're looking at," Olson says.

Source: Thiago Olson, co-founder & CEO of Stratos
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.