Led · Equity · Aug 2023

Ocuco is a Dublin-based eyecare software specialist founded in 1993 that builds software for ophthalmic retail markets. Its core product is the cloud-based Acuitas 3 OmniChannel Edition, designed to integrate retail and clinical systems and improve omnichannel customer experiences. The company serves over 6,750 eyecare establishments and laboratories across 88 countries. Ocuco secured a €60M growth equity investment from Accel-KKR to support development of its cloud software and fund global expansion. With Accel-KKR’s backing, Ocuco plans to explore strategic mergers and acquisitions to further expand its market presence. Company leadership says the investment is a testament to strong performance and enhances its financial standing. Accel-KKR brings experience scaling vertical SaaS businesses and will support Ocuco’s next-generation SaaS product globally.

Led · Series C · Jun 2022

Submittable provides a platform used by thousands of corporations, governments, and philanthropic organizations to manage social impact programs, from grants and awards to government relief funds and corporate social responsibility efforts. The platform streamlines program management from first application to final report with workflow automations, funds distribution services, and reporting tools. Customers have launched more than 134,000 programs and the platform has taken in nearly 22 million applications to date. In the three years since its Series B, the company has nearly doubled in size and opened a second location in Bellevue, Wash., alongside its headquarters in Missoula, Mont. The new funding will allow Submittable to expand its products and features—especially for corporate social responsibility—while growing its team and platform to meet increasing demand. The company expects to double headcount again and expand its office space in the next 18 months. Submittable provides a platform to manage submissions and applications across multiple industries, originally focused on literary magazines and now serving corporate, academic, philanthropy and publishing verticals. The product lets customers collect, review and rank submissions using granular criteria such as sentence structure and voice. The company has signed customers including AT&T, HBO, Condé Nast, Harvard and MIT. Planned product work includes a mobile launch and a marketplace described as a "ZipRecruiter for Opportunities" that would match people and organizations based on Submittable data. Submittable is based in Missoula, Mont., and is led by co-founder and CEO Michael FitzGerald. The company reported a headcount of 88 and plans to expand to about 240 employees by the end of 2020. Founded in 2010 and based in Missoula, Montana, Submittable provides submission-management software used by more than 9,000 companies to track manuscripts, applications, résumés and contest entries. The company began focused on literary magazines and has expanded to serve organizations including TEDx, The New Yorker and Stanford University. Submittable’s product can algorithmically generate recommendations for writers and filmmakers, a capability CEO Michael FitzGerald frames as an "opportunities marketplace." The startup plans to build that marketplace further, enabling businesses to promote calls for submissions and offering a potential premium writer product. Its core business model remains selling submission-management SaaS to organizations, while exploring additional revenue from advertising and premium features. At the time of the raise the company was already profitable and employed more than 35 people. Submittable provides a platform for publications and businesses to receive, track, and manage submissions, with early customers including literary magazines and newer clients such as CBS, Simon & Schuster, and the NCAA. The company added an API last fall to allow customers to publish Submittable content directly to their sites and to build custom interfaces, and it launched a mobile version in January. Co-founder Michael FitzGerald, a published novelist, has described the company’s ultimate vision as becoming the on‑ramp for all content and media in organizations. Submittable was Y Combinator‑backed and remains headquartered in Missoula, Montana. FitzGerald says the company is profitable, and the product development and client wins suggest continued organic growth. Submittable is a Y Combinator–backed software-as-a-service platform that helps publishers and other organizations collect and manage submissions. Its file-agnostic forms accept documents and media, including YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud links, and each submission is organized in a dashboard for teams to assign, label, vote, and track progress. Submitters have an interface to monitor the status of their submissions. Customers include literary magazines such as The Colorado Review, The American Scholar, The Believer, and Ben Trovato, as well as MIT (for its Clean Tech business plan competition), literary agents, SMBs, and organizations running contests. The company offers simple SaaS pricing and an optional small per-submission fee (usually $2–$5), a feature used by "hundreds" of customers. Submittable generated $1 million in its first year and was on track to do $2.5 million in the current year. The company was founded in Montana.

Led · Series C · Mar 2022

Birdeye, based in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, California, provides a Customer Experience platform for enterprise and small businesses. Its Experience Marketing platform gives multi-location businesses the data and tools to deliver strong experiences at every step of the customer journey. The platform helps manage the complete customer lifecycle from acquisition to retention across multiple digital channels, including collecting payments, automating reviews and referrals, and managing communications. Over 80,000 businesses in industries such as healthcare, retail, hospitality and automotive use Birdeye to attract new customers and drive revenue. Led by CEO Naveen Gupta, the company says it will use new funding to accelerate development of a full suite for local businesses. Birdeye also plans to expand into Australia and the United Kingdom. BirdEye offers software that collects and analyzes customer feedback from social media and review sites, and automates ticketing to drive operational fixes. Its platform integrates with about 250 content providers and sites including Yelp, Twitter, and Google’s review system. The product aims to detect experience anomalies and surface them for marketing and operations teams. The company competes with social-data players like Sprinklr and customer-retention platforms such as Medallia. BirdEye reported it was already profitable and had 110 employees working from offices in Sunnyvale, Denver, Dallas, and Delhi. Investors and executives have described a growth path that could lead to a public offering in 2019. BirdEye provides an "intelligent reputation marketing" platform that collects signals from unstructured sources (Twitter, Yelp, Urbanspoon, Facebook and others) to measure business health and amplify positive feedback. Its feedback mechanisms include SMS prompts, tweets, surveys and other simple review-creation fields. The company sells to a range of customers with pricing from about $2,400 per year to several hundred thousand dollars annually. BirdEye has worked with more than 10,000 customers and had 40 employees at the time of the report. Prior to this fundraise the company was bootstrapped and had turned profitable. Founders include CEO Naveen Gupta (formerly RingCentral’s chief product officer) and his brother Neeraj (a longtime technical lead at Yahoo); the plan is to build the next-generation platform and move upmarket to serve larger enterprises, including Fortune 100 companies.

Led · Series B · Jul 2021

FRISS offers AI-driven fraud and risk detection software that covers the complete P&C policy lifecycle, from automated underwriting risk assessment to claims fraud detection and case management. Its solutions integrate with core systems such as Guidewire, Duck Creek, Sapiens and Keylane and leverage many external data points to create a holistic risk view. The company says it serves insurers in over forty countries, has completed over 200 implementations, and has helped 200+ insurers grow their business. FRISS reports it was on track to deliver over $2 billion in fraud savings to insurers in 2021 and cites up to 10x ROI and an 80% increase in straight-through processing for customers. Headquartered jointly in Utrecht, Netherlands and Mason, Ohio, with regional offices across DACH, LatAm, the UK, France and Spain, FRISS plans to use new funding to accelerate product innovation, deeper market penetration and lines-of-business expansion. The company emphasizes faster implementations (insurers go live within four months) and next-generation AI to support digital transformation across underwriting and claims. Friss provides ready-to-use analytics solutions for underwriting, claims, investigations and compliance that leverage AI and machine learning to deliver the FRISS Score, a risk indication for insurers. The platform is used by over 130 insurers worldwide. Led by CEO Jeroen Morrenhof, the company focuses on fraud detection and risk mitigation across private and commercial lines. Friss raised €15m in a Series A to further strengthen its solutions and accelerate global expansion. The company plans to use the funds to facilitate the anti-fraud community by enabling cross-carrier and cross-border cooperation between insurers.

Led · Equity · Jan 2020

Partnerize’s AI-powered Partner Automation Platform supplies data-driven intelligence and industry-leading management tools for marketing partnerships. The platform manages relationships in 214 countries and territories for more than 300 clients, including Adidas, Ancestry.com, Kenneth Cole, PayPal and Verizon. Clients executed $6 billion in transactions through the Partnerize platform last year, generating $31 million in revenue. The company says it will use new funding to expand its product suite of automated marketing partnership tools, pursue acquisitions, hire additional staff, and grow its U.S. presence. Partnerize positions itself as a market leader serving top retailers, international airlines, large telcos and other global brands. Partnerize provides a SaaS Partner Management Platform (PMP) that enables brands to form, manage, analyze and predict partner marketing program results using artificial intelligence. Founded in 2010 by Mal Cowley, the company is based in Newcastle, UK and operates more than 200 employees across eight offices worldwide. Its ecosystem includes over 325,000 companies and more than 300 leading global brands. The company plans to use new funding to expand sales and marketing efforts and further develop a global partner ecosystem centered on its PMP. A small portion of the funds will be used for secondary purposes. The business focuses on enabling brands to build business partnerships for growth through its end-to-end platform. Performance Horizon provides marketing software that helps advertisers manage relationships with marketing partners and bypass traditional affiliate networks. Its platform includes campaign tracking and payments and enables brands and agencies to build direct relationships with publishers. The tools support sophisticated, granular-data campaigns that drive conversions and allow brands to reward partners based on revenue, profitability and acquisition of high lifetime-value customers. The company says it works with more than 200 clients. Performance Horizon is headquartered in England and has offices in San Francisco, New York, Sydney and Tokyo. After raising a $15.4M Series C (bringing total funding to $35M) it plans to expand sales and marketing teams globally—targeting the United States, continental Europe, China and Japan—and to double its headcount in the next 12 months. Performance Horizon Group provides a SaaS marketing-technology platform that connects companies directly to online and mobile marketing partners in over 170 countries. The platform serves enterprise clients across finance, travel, retail and telecommunications; notable clients include British Airways, Santander, Adidas and Sainsburys. Led by CEO Malcolm Cowley, the company has offices in the UK, USA, Japan and Australia. Financially, PHG received $2M in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank and had closed a $10M Series B the prior September. The company intends to use the new funds to invest in its global sales and marketing operations. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article. Performance Horizon Group (PHG) provides an affiliate marketing and partner management platform that enables large enterprises to connect with online and mobile publishers globally. The platform offers tools and services to support large-scale global affiliate and direct partner programs in real time, including tracking, partner management, data optimization, local language support and partner payments and settlement. PHG supports clients’ performance marketing strategies in over 150 countries and connects enterprise customers, including Adidas, British Airways, McAfee, Westfield and Westpac, to over 100,000 web and mobile partners. Led by CEO Malcolm Cowley, the company maintains offices in the U.S., U.K., Japan and Australia. PHG recently raised $10m in a Series B and intends to use the funds to expand its U.S. operations and global teams.