• North Technologies

  Participated · Seed · Jan 2015

  North Technologies is an incubator for mobile and social apps that has launched two products, ephemeral photo-sharing app Tiiny and Watchville. Watchville has seen rapid adoption, with more than 2.2 million screenloads and over 750,000 sessions in the six weeks following its launch. When North officially launched in August 2014, Kevin Rose downgraded his role at Google Ventures; after the new funding he stepped away from investing to work at North full-time while remaining an advisor to GV. North recently raised $5 million in a seed round led by True Ventures. The funding is intended to support the company's continued development and launch of mobile and social apps.

• Wit.ai

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2014

  Wit.ai offers developers an API for building natural language interfaces and streaming audio to power voice-driven apps and devices. The company positions itself as an open, distributed, community-based network where developers can opt in to share training data. Alexandre Lebrun, the founder and a Y Combinator alumnus who previously sold another NLP startup to Nuance, leads the team. Developers initially adopted the alpha rapidly—1,100 signed up with 99% agreeing to share training data—and the service has now signed up over 4,5000 developers and powers hundreds of apps, wearables, and home automation systems. Wit.ai says it has assembled engineers specialized in natural language processing, machine learning, and speech. The company signaled plans to be the platform for messenger-based and audio-first apps arriving in the next generation of wearables and smart devices. It also announced its first conference, Listen 2014, scheduled for November 6 in San Francisco.

• UrbanSitter

  Led · Equity · Jun 2014

  UrbanSitter is an online and mobile (iOS and Android) service that enables parents and childcare providers to connect through the people they know and other trusted sources. The platform lets parents search, book and review sitters within minutes. Led by CEO and co-founder Lynn Perkins and launched in 2011, the company is based in San Francisco. UrbanSitter has expanded to serve more than 500,000 members in 65 cities and has facilitated over 450,000 babysitting jobs. The company has raised $40m in total financing to date, including a $17m Series C. It plans to use the new capital to expand into additional U.S. cities — including Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Portland and Sacramento — and to introduce features for finding, screening and booking recurring caregivers such as nannies. UrbanSitter operates an online and mobile marketplace that helps parents find and book trusted babysitters by leveraging social connections. The platform uses Facebook Connect to show how parents and sitters are connected and displays sitter reviews, skills, certifications, experience, photos, video, availability, hourly rates and response times. UrbanSitter facilitates real-time booking and payment through its service. The company emphasizes social trust and convenience as its core differentiators. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company is led by CEO Lynn Perkins and was founded by a group of internet veterans. Financially, the company has raised multiple rounds and recently reported a $15M Series B prior to the latest investment, bringing total funding to $22.95M. UrbanSitter is an online parent-sitter marketplace that leverages social recommendations to help parents find trusted childcare. The platform uses Facebook Connect so parents can see sitters known and recommended by friends and by affiliations such as schools and parent groups. Profiles display reviews, skills, certifications, education, response times, number of repeat families, photos and video, hourly rates and availability. Parents can search by date and time and book sitters or interviews in real time, and the platform manages payments and post-job reviews. UrbanSitter offers mobile apps and is available in a dozen U.S. cities. The company has raised $15 million in a Series B round to continue scaling in its market, where competitors such as Care.com indicate a large opportunity. UrbanSitter operates an online marketplace that lets parents find, book and pay sitters, using Facebook Connect so parents can see sitters recommended by friends and affiliations. The platform supports search by availability and filters (part-time, full-time, etc.), enables real-time booking or interviews, and collects reviews, ratings and Facebook Likes on sitter profiles. UrbanSitter launched in San Francisco in September 2011 and has expanded to about a dozen cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Denver. The company also released an iOS app to allow parents and sitters to connect and book jobs on the go. Since launch, sitter bookings have grown at an average rate of 35% per month. The company plans to use new funding for product development, to advance mobile efforts and to expand into new markets. UrbanSitter operates a time-specific babysitter-booking marketplace that requires users to sign in via Facebook and surfaces sitter connections through the Facebook social graph. The product is built around searching and booking sitters by availability, analogous to booking a restaurant reservation. The company was founded in 2010, is headquartered in San Francisco, and launched officially in August 2011. As of the article, UrbanSitter had about 2,000 sitters and roughly 3,000 parents on the platform. The team is targeting sitters—especially in college towns—and encourages sitters to solicit recommendations that then alert parents to the service. The company planned to begin charging parents in about six weeks, though the fee amount was not yet decided.

• BitGo

  Participated · Series A · Jun 2014

  BitGo is a cryptocurrency custody specialist focused on institutional custody of digital assets. The firm supports backup of fragmented master keys and the use of hardware security modules (HSMs) to secure client holdings. Brink's has made a strategic investment in BitGo; financial terms were not disclosed. BitGo intends to leverage Brink's global secure logistics network and footprint of secure locations to support expansion into regions like Asia Pacific and EMEA. Company leaders say the partnership will bolster security protocols and locations and provide peace of mind to BitGo’s growing client base. Brink's prior work with Swiss custody firm Metaco in 2022 underscores its ongoing move into digital assets. BitGo offers wallet solutions and custody infrastructure focused exclusively on institutional clients. The company operates a qualified trust company (launched in 2018) and established a New York Trust in 2021, and has expanded into institutional-grade staking, DeFi, NFT and Web3 services. BitGo supplies the security and operational backbone for more than 1,500 institutional clients across 50 countries, including regulated entities, cryptocurrency exchanges, and customers such as Nike. Founded in 2013 and led by CEO Mike Belshe, the company intends to use new capital to pursue strategic acquisitions and further consolidate its global position. Financially, BitGo recently completed a $100M Series C at a $1.75 billion valuation. BitGo provides institutional investors with security, compliance and custodial solutions for blockchain-based currencies and is led by CEO Mike Belshe. The company is a large processor of on-chain bitcoin transactions, handling about 15% of global bitcoin transactions and roughly $15 billion per month across all cryptocurrencies. BitGo serves the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges and customers across more than 50 countries. It recently launched BitGo Trust Company, described as the first qualified custodian purpose-built for storing digital assets. The company intends to use the new funds to support development of its $1 trillion crypto wallet. BitGo is based in Palo Alto and also maintains offices in Sioux Falls, London, Singapore and Tokyo. BitGo provides a technology platform that enables custodial institutions and businesses to integrate digital currencies into existing financial systems. The company is led by CEO Mike Belshe and Chairman Bill Lee. BitGo processes more than $8 billion monthly and counts customers such as Kingdom Trust, CME Group and The Royal Mint. Kingdom Trust, a federally approved custodian, is cited as an example customer that uses BitGo to offer Bitcoin IRAs and custody services. The company intends to use new funding to accelerate enabling businesses to integrate digital currencies into their financial systems. BitGo is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. BitGo builds a web-based, multi-signature Bitcoin wallet that uses a 2-of-3 key model to reduce single-point-of-failure risk. Its wallet requires three keys — an online transactional key that lives in the browser, a backup offline key (vault or paper), and a third key retained by BitGo — to sign transactions. After creating the multi-signature wallet, BitGo has been branching out and calls itself a security-as-a-service platform for Bitcoin. On top of the consumer wallet it offers BitGo Enterprise, a multi-user, multi-signature product for corporations and financial institutions. The company recently raised $12 million in a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures and has attracted a broad group of investors. BitGo has recruited talent such as Ben Davenport (from Facebook Messenger) and faces well-funded competitors like Coinbase, Xapo, and Circle, who have each raised roughly $20M or more.

• Timeful

  Participated · Series A · May 2014

  Timeful is a stealthy startup developing a mobile app that serves as an intelligent time manager for tasks and scheduling. The app is designed to "speak to everything that manages your time" and to help users efficiently organize time and tasks. The company is still in stealth and preparing for a public launch. Co-founders include Yoav Shoham, behavioral economist and Duke professor Dan Ariely, and Stanford grad student Jacob Bank. The team has hired Chris Weeldreyer as VP of User Experience and has added board members Keith Rabois and investor Don Mattrick. Timeful disclosed a Series A funding round that provides early financial backing as it readies the product.

No current team members are available.