Participated · Series A · Dec 2020

Arthur.ai launched in 2019 to help companies monitor models in production and has expanded its product to include explainability and bias mitigation. The company offers tooling that detects model drift, explains model outputs, and automatically adjusts outputs to meet customers' fairness constraints. Arthur.ai’s research team has published papers and the company emphasizes diversity in its research and hiring to help prevent bias in its software. The startup has grown headcount from 17 at Series A to 55 employees today. Over the last four quarters the company averaged 58% ARR growth. Recent fundraising and board additions indicate continuing investor interest and support for product and team expansion. Arthur.ai provides a monitoring tool that detects when machine learning model performance deteriorates in production and surfaces bias and other risks. The product is designed to alert data-science teams when models stop measuring what they were trained to measure, addressing drift and fairness issues. The company says demand has increased this year and points to competition/validation from AWS’s SageMaker Clarify. Arthur.ai reported 300% revenue growth over the prior six months and has 15 customers. Headcount grew from eight to 17 over the past year, and the company expects to double again by the end of next year. Leadership emphasizes diverse hiring and partnerships with groups such as AI for All and Black Girls Code as part of its hiring and culture plans. Arthur offers a platform-agnostic monitoring and explainability product for machine learning models in production, positioned as an analogue to New Relic or DataDog for models. The product tracks model performance, helps explain model behavior, and surfaces issues like bias or degradation after deployment. The company emerged from stealth with a public product launch and says its tool works across stacks, which it views as an advantage against vendor-specific offerings from AWS and IBM. Arthur was launched in 2018, is based in New York City, and currently has a 10-person team. The company recently closed a $3.3 million seed financing to support its development and go-to-market efforts. CEO and co-founder Adam Wenchel leads the company.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2019

Whole Biome is building clinically validated probiotic interventions that use specific microbial strains to restore missing elements of a person’s gut flora. Its proprietary bioinformatics platform analyzes microbiome sequencing data across diverse populations to identify beneficial bacteria that are absent or depleted in targeted diseases. The company’s lead product focuses on managing Type 2 diabetes by releasing tailored probiotics that reduce post-meal glucose spikes, and it has already completed double-blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials showing efficacy without the side effects common to existing diabetes drugs. Funds from the latest raise will be used to launch this diabetes management product, which is slated for release in early 2020. Co-founder and CEO Colleen Cutcliffe, formerly of Pacific Biosciences, leads a multidisciplinary team spanning research, development and commercialization. Backers such as Sequoia and Khosla praise the startup’s integrated approach to microbiome biology. Including the new capital, Whole Biome has secured a total of $57 million in funding to date.

Participated · Series A · Jan 2017

Leflair, founded in December 2015 in Vietnam, is positioned as the country’s first premium e-commerce site focusing on branded products for women, men, kids and homes. The company sells merchandise from more than 1,500 brands and reports average gross merchandise value (GMV) growth of over 100% year‑on‑year since launch. Leflair plans to continue bringing international brands into Vietnam and pursue regional expansion across Southeast Asia in 2019. The new capital will be used to leverage a strategic partnership with GS Shop to increase Korean product inventory. Management said funds will also be invested in hiring and deploying resources in fulfillment, delivery, and technology. To date Leflair has raised US$11.8M across four rounds. Leflair is a Vietnam-based online premium consumer goods retailer. It operates an e-commerce platform focused on premium consumer goods. The company closed a $3 million Series A funding round led by Capital Management Group. That transaction brings its aggregate equity financing to close to $5 million. The article does not provide operating metrics (revenue/users) or specific product roadmaps. No further details on use of proceeds or strategic plans were disclosed. LeFlair operates an online platform focused on branded fashion and beauty products offered at steep discounts. Founded in 2015 by Loic Gautier and Pierre Antoine Brun, the company runs its own production studio, warehouse and fulfillment centre and ships orders across Vietnam. It employs around 80 people and emphasizes brand trust and higher margins to avoid price wars with other e-commerce players. The company reports an average monthly revenue growth rate of 23% and delivered about 40,000 orders in its first year of operation. LeFlair plans to use new financing to expand cross-border operations and offer a wider range of foreign brands that are hard to acquire locally, supporting regional scale.

Participated · Series B · May 2016

Boston-based AtScale provides software that lets enterprises create a universal semantic layer, eliminating inconsistent data labels across disparate systems and ensuring uniform calculations for business intelligence tools like Excel and Power BI. By pushing queries down to the underlying data platform rather than copying data out, the product improves performance and governance simultaneously. Snowflake, Databricks and Google BigQuery are among the cloud data warehouses it supports, and the company stresses it will continue multi-platform compatibility. With more than a billion Excel users still relying on spreadsheets, management sees enduring demand for tools that blend traditional BI with modern cloud architectures. The new investment from Snowflake’s venture arm formalizes a deeper technical collaboration intended to simplify analytics for their shared customers. Prior to the latest financing, the company’s second-largest round came in 2018, when it raised $50 million. While revenue or user counts were not disclosed, analysts view AtScale as having a strong footprint among Microsoft-centric data teams, offering Snowflake an on-ramp to those customers.