Participated · Equity · Feb 2019

2nd Address operates an Airbnb-style marketplace focused on business travelers seeking month-plus furnished rentals as an alternative to hotels. Its footprint covers the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC, and the company works with roughly 650 hosts offering about 3,200 listings. The startup says properties on its platform are typically about 40% cheaper per night than business or extended-stay hotels. Corporate customers include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, SAP, Deloitte, KLM and several universities. 2nd Address plans to use new funding to improve its technology, add host tools and analytics, expand integrations with corporate booking tools like Concur, and roll out reporting and billing services. The company shifted from a consumer relocation focus (formerly HomeSuite) to business travel in 2017 and has raised $42 million to date.

Participated · Equity · May 2013

YCharts provides a cloud-based investment research, visualization, and analytics platform focused on equity, mutual fund, and ETF data for wealth management professionals. The platform supports security research, portfolio construction, idea generation, and market monitoring and serves as a user-friendly alternative to terminal-based tools. YCharts reports more than 6,000 clients across RIAs, broker-dealers, and asset managers who use its comprehensive data and visualization tools. The company completed a growth recapitalization to support continued organic growth and increased investment in product and sales and marketing. Management also intends to pursue complementary acquisitions as part of its next-stage growth plan. The business emphasizes time savings for users and enhanced client communications through its analytics and presentation capabilities. YCharts offers a web-based financial terminal that provides sophisticated, easy-to-use analytics across asset classes and extensive datasets (20,000+ equities, 2,500 ETFs, 40,000 mutual funds, 400,000 economic indicators). The platform is positioned as a lower-cost alternative to established terminals and is used by RIAs, wealth managers, portfolio managers, hedge funds, VCs, private equity funds and consultants. YCharts reports roughly one million users per month and is on pace to deliver an end-2015 revenue run rate three times its 2014 level. The company has formed strategic distribution partnerships with Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Commonwealth and Dynasty to expand reach to investment advisors. YCharts says it will continue adding functions and features monthly and is focused on scaling its sales organization to capture professional-market share. The company was founded in 2010. YCharts computes more than 2,000 metrics for every listed stock and tracks over 350,000 global economic indicators, aggregating data from public sources and partnerships. It sources data through deals with other firms, including investor Morningstar, and offers an Excel plug-in to pull YCharts data into spreadsheets and financial models. The company provides a limited free plan and two paid plans for professionals: $49/month and a $199/month plan that includes data export, the Excel plug-in, and data verification. YCharts’ pro product is performing well ahead of expectations, and the team reports it is seeing larger deals than anticipated. The company says it has more than 1 million monthly users and is increasingly the choice of professionals seeking sophisticated financial information. Following the new funding, YCharts plans to scale more aggressively by investing in engineering and expanding its sales force to grow its institutional business. YCharts offers stock research tools, charts and analysis that let investors compare dividend yields, total returns and around 75 other metrics over time. It aggregates long-tail historical public data—P/E ratios, R&D spending, cash flows—and graphs these metrics to provide objective, non–opinion-based insights. The company offers three products: YCharts.com, YCharts Pro and a chart creator tool for third-party sites, journalists and bloggers; Pro users access quantitative analysis strategies for a monthly fee. The service has grown from 30,000 users to more than 400,000 users in slightly more than a year. YCharts emphasizes comprehensive long-term outlooks and comparisons (for example, total returns not offered by Yahoo Finance). The funding will be used to build out the team, scale infrastructure, increase marketing, and expand the scope of its financial research and analytics. YCharts is a Chicago, IL-based online fundamental stock research engine that provides individuals, business partners, and investment professionals with research on corporate performance. The company offers an online service for fundamental stock analysis and corporate-performance research. It has completed a Series A financing; the amount raised was undisclosed. Participants in the round included Hyde Park Angels, the Illinois Innovation Accelerator Fund (I2A), Amicus Capital and Social Leverage LLC. The investment will be used to expand marketing activities and accelerate development of the service. As part of the financing, Sam Guren (managing director of Hyde Park Angels), Kapil Chaudhary (partner of I2A Fund) and individual investor Brian Hand joined YCharts’ board of directors.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2007

Attributor provides a solution that continuously monitors the Web for copies of content and removes those that violate publishers’ anti-piracy policies. The company’s core product helps publishers stop piracy by locating and removing infringing copies. It closed a $3.2M financing round to advance its technology. Investors in the round include existing backers Sigma Partners, JAFCO Ventures and Selby Venture Partners. The new capital will be used to expand the company’s infrastructure and continue product development. Attributor plans to use these improvements to address the growing needs of book, newspaper and magazine publishers around the world. Attributor provides a service that ingests publishers’ content and scans the Web to identify copied material, report how much is copied, and show whether pages link back to the original. The system indexes text at scale (about 100 million pages per day, 15 billion pages total to date) and currently handles text matching; images are in beta and video matching was slated for beta the following year. The company highlights which copying sites are ad-supported and which ad networks drive revenue, enabling publishers to target remedies (from asking for links to pressuring ad networks). Attributor had been testing its enterprise product with Reuters and AP for roughly six months before the enterprise launch, and it demonstrated the product to publishers. Pricing for the enterprise service ranges from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year; a limited self-serve product for smaller publishers and bloggers was planned at roughly $6–$7 per month. The company uses empirical studies (lyrics, recipes, and publisher posts) to quantify copying, linking rates, and ad support across the Web.