Participated · Equity · May 2023

ClearMotion builds CM1, a patented high-bandwidth active suspension technology that cancels unwanted motion in the car and integrates with infotainment systems to deliver an immersive in-cabin experience. The company says CM1 improves ride comfort, productivity, and safety and is positioned for consumer deployment after a recent production order. ClearMotion received a $32M investment to advance commercialization and bring its technology to market. The production order from an EV automaker will facilitate the transition of CM1 units into the industrialization phase and make the system accessible to consumers next year. Led by CEO Christian Steinmann, the company was founded out of MIT and maintains locations in Boston, Birmingham (UK), and Shanghai. The new funding is intended to support product industrialization and market entry. ClearMotion develops software-controlled actuators and an electrohydraulic unit to replace traditional shock absorbers, using vehicle sensors and predictive software to counteract road disturbances. The company has spent over a decade on external motion cancellation and is now introducing coordinated in-car 4D motions that integrate with infotainment, movies, games, and the metaverse. ClearMotion positions this tech as a way to transform vehicles from transportation tools into mobile living spaces and to create new in-cabin entertainment experiences, such as synchronized 4D movies during charging. The company is pursuing a China expansion and is setting up a plant to assemble actuators around Shanghai, with a plan to begin mass production in China by the end of 2024. ClearMotion has started hiring in China for engineering, software development, hardware, and customer relationship roles to support industrialization. Its CEO, Christian Steinmann, says Nio Capital’s backing is critical to building a footprint in China. ClearMotion develops a proactive ride system that pairs road‑sensing technology with software and hardware to reduce vehicle movement across uneven road surfaces. The company has completed development programs on multiple car lines and has commissioned a pilot production facility for its first OEM launches. It was founded out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is based in Boston, MA, with an additional development center and proving grounds in Birmingham, UK. ClearMotion holds over 10,000 patent claims issued or pending worldwide. Led by founder and CEO Shakeel Avadhany, the company is positioning its technology for commercial OEM deployments. The recent financing will support its transition toward production and market rollout. ClearMotion designs and builds digital motion control systems that use road-sensing software and hardware to improve ride performance in cars. Its "proactive ride" technology leverages proprietary software algorithms to make traditional dampers intelligent and responsive, aiming to improve comfort, performance and safety. The company was founded out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by CEO Shakeel Avadhany and is based in the Boston area. ClearMotion received a strategic investment from Bridgestone Americas, though the amount was not disclosed. As part of the investment, Bridgestone will have opportunities to integrate and leverage ClearMotion’s technology to engineer new and innovative solutions for the automotive industry. The article did not disclose operating metrics, valuation, or funding totals. ClearMotion develops an alternative chassis that replaces physical shock absorbers with software-driven adaptive actuators. The company says it has created the "world's first digital chassis," using proprietary algorithms to monitor road conditions and adapt in real time for optimal comfort and performance. Its technology is distinct from autonomous driving and driver-assist systems, focusing instead on in-cabin ride quality. ClearMotion positions its platform as especially useful for improving the passenger experience in a self-driving future, where in-cabin stability and comfort matter more. The company acknowledges that physical suspension has advantages like fewer bugs but argues its digital approach better serves vehicles-as-living-spaces. ClearMotion has secured $100 million in a Series C to advance its product and commercial applications.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2022

RKVST offers a SaaS platform that enables organizations to build verifiable digital supply chains, allowing partners to track, trace and share provenance of enterprise assets via a simple API. Since introducing the RKVST platform last year the company has added Free and Team tiers and is powering verifiable digital supply chains for a growing customer base. Cited use cases include tracking nuclear waste, ingesting data from connected devices, and managing software bills of materials (SBOMs). The platform is underpinned by distributed ledger technology and integrates with existing software and zero trust security systems to reduce cost and risk and improve operational resiliency. RKVST positions its service to replace manual, redundant and error-prone supply chain processes and to speed decision-making. The company plans to use recent funding to accelerate go-to-market, support developers using the RKVST API, grow partner ecosystems and accelerate feature development.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2022

InsightFinder AI builds an AI observability platform that detects, diagnoses, remediates, and helps prevent failures across data, models, and infrastructure. Its newest product, Autonomous Reliability Insights, combines unsupervised machine learning, proprietary large and small language models, predictive AI, and causal inference in a data-agnostic base layer that ingests and correlates full data streams to arrive at root causes. The company traces its origins to 15 years of academic research and has been applying ML to infrastructure monitoring since 2016 under founder and CEO Helen Gu. InsightFinder serves enterprise customers including UBS, NBCUniversal, Lenovo, Dell, Google Cloud, and Comcast and reports revenue that has grown over threefold in the past year. The team is currently fewer than 30 people and plans to hire its first dedicated sales and marketing staff as part of its go-to-market expansion. It competes with incumbents and peers such as Grafana Labs, Fiddler, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and BigPanda.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2021

Gluware provides a platform for network orchestration and automation that identifies and automatically remediates configuration anomalies across multi-vendor environments. The product originated as a Cisco-focused orchestration solution and now integrates via APIs with more than 30 different platforms and operating systems. Its tools span device management, OS management, configuration modeling and workflows, and the company positions itself as “RPA” for network operations with ties into security operations. Gluware’s customer base includes large, regulated enterprises—Mastercard, EY and Merck are named customers—and it targets sectors like healthcare and finance. The company reports 400% ARR growth in the last year (no raw ARR disclosed) and its CEO estimates a $10.8 billion addressable market. Gluware is headquartered in Sacramento, California, and plans to use the new funding to continue building out the business and its technology.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2019

VidMob provides an end-to-end Intelligent Creative platform to help brands produce, track, measure, score and optimize the performance of their creative advertising across major digital advertising platforms. Its platform integrates with channels including Google, Meta, Amazon Ads, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snap, Pinterest, Hulu and Reddit. Led by CEO and Co-Founder Alex Collmer, the company highlights the breadth of its solution. VidMob raised $110m in a Series D funding round. The company will use the funding to continue to invest in sales and marketing, accelerate platform development and expand its global presence. VidMob is based in London, UK. VidMob operates the Intelligent Creative platform, which uses AI to measure creative performance and unifies creative and data to help marketers optimize ad design. The platform connects brands to a global network of elite content creators trained on best practices for digital channels and next‑gen ad formats. Originally focused on major social platforms, VidMob has expanded distribution into the programmatic web and CTV/OTT. The company says it will use new capital to support global expansion, new e-commerce initiatives, and ongoing investments in advanced technology and data science. VidMob counts clients including Johnson & Johnson and Colgate Palmolive and highlights certifications as a creative partner across major social and digital platforms. A portion of revenue funds its 501(c)(3) VidMob Gives, which has supported 84 nonprofit organizations across 63 countries. VidMob began as a marketplace connecting marketers with professional video editors, animators and designers and has expanded into a broader product called the Agile Creative Studio. The platform lets marketers find talent and, with a single click, send hundreds or thousands of custom ads to partners like Facebook, Google/YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. VidMob analyzes how different creative elements affect audience response and uses that data to iteratively improve campaign performance; the CEO says the decay curve can invert as ads improve over time. Brands using VidMob include Bayer, InterContinental Hotels Group, Ikea, Neutrogena and startups like Acorns. The company has raised $25 million in a Series B and more than $45 million in total funding. Founder and CEO Alex Collmer describes a vision of VidMob as an "API for creativity" that could expand beyond social video into future media types such as augmented reality. VidMob is a video creation platform that combines proprietary technology and a network of trained creators to develop insight-driven, personalized, and scalable marketing video content across social and digital channels. Founded in 2014 and led by CEO Alex Collmer, the company produces video content across every channel, format and language. VidMob serves global brand clients including InterContinental Hotel Group, Mondelez and BMW, and works with agency partners such as Mindshare, Wavemaker and Universal McCann. The company recently opened a London office and plans to use new capital to support continued international growth and to expand its creative insights platform. VidMob has now raised $20m in total funding after an additional extension to its Series A round. VidMob is a New York-based video creation platform and network that connects brands and advertisers with a global network of professional creatives. Clients use VidMob to collaborate with expert creatives to develop suites of video assets optimized for every digital channel. The company, led by founder and CEO Alex Collmer, operates offices in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Massachusetts. VidMob plans to use the Series A proceeds to grow headcount across its four offices, expand technology capacity and tools, and deepen agency and brand partnerships. Earlier in 2017 the company was awarded official marketing partner badges by Facebook and Snap and won innovation awards from Instagram and Twitter for its creative solutions. VidMob has raised more than $13m in total since its 2015 founding.