• Knowmail

  Participated · Equity · Dec 2016

  Knowmail offers an AI engine that installs on top of Outlook to study users' email habits, time management, and preferences, then surface messages based on urgency and importance. The product automatically categorizes emails as ‘urgent’, ‘important’, or other, and includes features like one-click filing, email deferral, and intelligent auto-complete search. It also provides a Knowmail bot and announced support for Microsoft Cortana. The company positions its technology as a solution to communication and information overload in the workplace. Knowmail recently closed $3.5M in new funding to continue developing functionality. The startup is preparing for a full launch early next year. Knowmail offers a personal-assistant SaaS that uses deep-learning algorithms to navigate users’ inboxes, surface immediate priorities and reduce email overload. The product is designed to understand each professional’s goals and work habits to provide personalized guidance and boost productivity. Knowmail emphasizes privacy and data security, keeping user data private and secure. The company says its technology can free up time by distinguishing urgent items from less important ones, improving corporate communication and collaboration. Knowmail plans to use its recent funding to scale its sales and development teams, expand partnerships, and broaden the product’s capabilities. The company positions itself as a solution for time management, prioritization, and work/life balance for professionals.

• FICX

  Led · Equity · Jun 2016

  FICX (fka CallVU) is a San Francisco, CA–based CX automation company that provides enterprises a no-code software platform to automate customer processes and deliver them over any customer channel. Its platform lets companies add custom digital workflows in websites, apps, chat, IVR, call centers and in-store, and integrates with existing enterprise technology via prebuilt connectors and APIs. These integrations sync front-end experiences with backend CRM, contact center, service desk and payment systems. Customers named in the article include National Bank of Canada, Bank Leumi, Banca Transylvania and the Israeli Ministry of Health. Led by CEO Michael Oiknine, the company raised $8M in a Series B round led by NAventures with participation from Prytek and Liberty Global Ventures. It plans to use the funds to expand its core platform and drive market adoption of its CX automation tools. CallVU develops a Mobile Digital Engagement Platform that combines rich digital and interactive media with the voice channel to deliver engaging and collaborative customer experiences for contact centers. The platform creates a new customer service channel for smartphone users. Customers include banks, credit card companies and telecom carriers. The company is led by president and chairman Tuval Lava and CEO Ori Faran. CallVU recently raised $3M in funding. It intends to use the proceeds to expand its global reach, strengthen marketing, open offices abroad and grow its workforce by hiring sales, product management, software development and marketing experts.

• Bizzabo

  Participated · Equity · Aug 2014

  Bizzabo provides an end-to-end platform to plan and run both virtual and in-person conferences, covering registration, sponsorships, attendee interactions, and event provisioning. The company leverages cloud architecture and integrations with productivity and communication tools, and added streaming capability via a partnership with Kaltura. Founded in 2011 and operating from Tel Aviv and New York, Bizzabo saw rapid usage growth as events moved online. This year its revenue grew 100%, events organized via Bizzabo rose 65%, attendee registrations increased 500%, and overall usage jumped 150x. Bizzabo plans to use the new capital to build more technology to integrate virtual and in-person experiences, triple its engineering, product, and experience teams, and open two new offices in Europe. CEO Eran Ben-Shushan said the company will double down on product, technology, and user experience to lead the hybrid events market. Bizzabo began in 2012 as a networking app for event attendees and has evolved into a cloud-based, end-to-end Event Success Platform described as a “Salesforce for events.” The SaaS automates event tasks across email, social, web marketing and contact management while adding analytics to crunch event data. That data play aims to drive registrations, increase revenue and personalize attendee journeys using hundreds of data points. The company says it personalizes experiences—e.g., tailoring recommendations and introductions at an 800-person conference—based on actions before, during and after events. Bizzabo serves customers including Inbound, SaaStr, Forbes, Dow Jones, Gainsight and Drift and operates offices in New York and Tel Aviv with more than 120 employees. The company plans to use new funding to expand platform capabilities and grow its R&D and marketing teams. Bizzabo is a cloud-based events management platform that automates time-consuming tasks related to email, social media and web marketing, manages contacts and analyzes data to help organizers increase registrations, make more revenue and improve attendee experience. The company positions itself as doing for events what Salesforce did for sales and marketing. It was founded in 2012 as a networking app and by 2015 shifted focus to events management as the number of events apps grew. Bizzabo counts customers including WeWork, HubSpot, GitHub, EA Sports, Bank of Ireland and Teach for America. The company says its annual revenue is in the millions and that annual recurring revenue grew more than 200% last year. Management says it will use the new capital to scale faster and expand its cloud-based event software platform to meet market demand and bring its event innovations to more brands. Bizzabo cites Cvent as a main competitor but argues its post-mobile, cloud and social origins allow it to adapt more quickly to organizers' evolving needs. Bizzabo offers a cloud-based platform that streamlines event marketing by automating promotional emails, registration sites, agendas, promotions and tracking attendee engagement, ticket revenue and attendance. The company launched in 2012 as a networking app for conference participants and pivoted in 2015 into a CRM-style product for event organizers. Bizzabo focuses on small and medium-sized businesses and digitizing more of the organizational process. It reports having customers in the “high hundreds” and counts GE, Virgin, USAA and The Lean Startup among its users. The company is based in Tel Aviv and New York City and plans to continue developing and adding functions to its platform. Its main competitor cited in the article is Cvent, which was acquired and merged into the world’s largest event management software. Bizzabo provides a networking and event-management platform used to organize professional events. The app has been used to organize roughly 4,000 professional events and emphasizes faster, easier attendee and organizer interactions. The company plans to add more features with the new funding and to roll out a new event management platform later this year. Bizzabo’s product aims to help event organizers better monetize events and improve engagement among participants, sponsors, exhibitors, speakers and organizers. The company launched in 2011 and faces competition from other event-management and location-based networking apps.

• SalesPredict

  Led · Seed · Aug 2013

  SalesPredict provides a predictive-analytics product that grades prospects A–D and recommends the best pitch, likely pain points, vertical, and buying persona. The product ingests past deal outcomes plus web data (Wikipedia, Google and Yahoo APIs), public social profiles, and commercial lists from providers such as Alexa and ZoomInfo. It currently ships as a Salesforce.com plug-in available on the Salesforce AppExchange, with a Marketo version announced as coming soon. The company was founded by CEO Yaron Zakai-Or and CTO Kira Radinsky and is roughly two years old. SalesPredict is based in Israel and has opened an office in San Francisco. The company recently closed financing to expand sales and marketing and to scale the business. SalesPredict builds a SaaS predictive analytics platform aimed at sales and marketing teams that scores leads and helps prioritize follow-up. Its algorithms, developed by CTO Kira Radinsky (formerly of Microsoft Research), are tightly integrated with the Salesforce AppExchange. The service enriches leads with Salesforce data, social data and external sources such as Alexa and data.com. SalesPredict analyzes past data to characterize attributes of productive leads and updates its models over time to reflect changes in the lead pool. The company plans to make its app available on AppExchange in the next few weeks. It recently raised $1M in seed funding to support development and go-to-market efforts.

• Todacell

  Led · Equity · Jun 2012

  Todacell operates a mobile advertising network and offers campaign optimization technology that analyzes attributes such as publishers, creative, device, location, geo-targeting and demographics to find and amplify where campaigns perform best. Its system optimizes toward clicks, click-through rate and/or conversions and automatically reallocates spend while using past performance to help forecast results. The company claims a network of 10,000 publishers and “billions of impressions.” Todacell reported a doubling of revenue in the first half of 2012, which the company says catalyzed the latest investment. The Israel-founded, U.S.-headquartered company has expanded in Europe, opening a Berlin office and doubling headcount in its London office. Leadership has changed: Mark Lehmann was appointed CEO and founder Moshe Vaknin moved to the board as a strategic advisor. TodaCell offers a mobile ad inventory optimization technology that analyzes users' click patterns across campaigns spanning category verticals and age groups to recommend the best-performing campaigns for publishers. The system requires roughly a month or two to analyze a publisher's inventory before it can make intelligent recommendations. Campaigns run through TodaCell provide advertisers with advance transparency about where ads will be served, distinguishing it from blind networks. The company reports reaching 26 million unique mobile users per month (60% US, 40% Europe), which it says places it among the top 10 mobile ad networks if accurate. TodaCell plans to use its latest funding to market the solution and expand its reach across publishers and advertisers. The company is led by founder and CEO Moshe Vaknin, who previously co-founded ad-server company Checkm8 and online targeting firm AdWise.

No current team members are available.