Participated · Equity · Dec 2022

MessageGears offers a hybrid customer-engagement platform that accesses first-party data in place (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake) to power segmentation, personalization and cross-channel message orchestration. The platform executes campaign filtering and segmentation within customers’ data environments and only passes minimal, decrypted data to the cloud for message personalization; PII is encrypted in transit and at rest and redacted after delivery. Its features include customer segmentation, marketing message personalization and orchestration across channels such as email and SMS. Early adopters and customers include Expedia, T‑Mobile, Rakuten and Chick‑fil‑A; the company reports an over‑50‑company customer base. MessageGears was founded in 2011 and currently has a 102‑person workforce; leadership declined to disclose revenue or burn rate. Management says it has no plans to grow headcount by the end of the year but is positioned for growth given enterprise demand for first‑party data solutions. Led by CEO Roger Barnette, MessageGears offers a customer marketing platform that enables large enterprise brands to leverage all of their customer data in real time to send personalized messaging across multiple marketing channels at scale. The platform connects directly to modern data warehouses including Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and Microsoft Azure. Enterprise customers using MessageGears include Expedia, Rakuten Rewards, Chick-fil-A, T-Mobile and OpenTable. The company closed a $12m growth financing to support its operations. Proceeds from the financing will be used to expand engineering, customer support, sales and marketing resources. In conjunction with the round, Argentum’s Walter H. Barandiarán joined MessageGears’ board of directors.

Led · Series B · Oct 2022

Impact Analytics is a NYC-based provider of an end-to-end AI-native platform for pricing, merchandising and supply chain. It delivers AI-native SaaS solutions and consulting services to help companies optimize profitability and customer satisfaction through data insights and predictive analytics. The platform integrates planning, forecasting, merchandising, pricing and promotions to enable real-time decision making. The company plans to advance its AI-native platform with a focus on agentic AI innovation and to scale go-to-market operations across sales, marketing and client success globally. It also intends to deepen partnerships across cloud, data and analytics ecosystems and strengthen financial flexibility to support product and geographic expansion across Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. The company is led by CEO and Founder Prashant Agrawal. Impact Analytics offers a complete, fully integrated planning and merchandising software suite for retail, grocery, CPG and supply-chain teams, built with native AI. Its SaaS products cover demand forecasting, pricing optimization, assortment alignment, inventory management and financial planning. The company has continued development of GenAI and highlighted three Google Cloud partnerships including Marketplace availability, GenAI technology sharing, and recognized Supply Chain ISV Partner status. Impact Analytics reported strong customer recognition—ranked a Fortune top 100 Most Innovative company, named by The Financial Times as an America’s Fastest-Growing Company for four straight years, and voted #1 Targeted Solution Vendor by 300+ retailers in the 2024 RIS Software LeaderBoard. The company plans to use new funding to expand sales, marketing and customer service in the U.S. and abroad, advance its platform and AI capabilities, deepen strategic partnerships, and strengthen its balance sheet for future growth. Founded in 2015 and based in Linthicum Heights, Md., Impact Analytics emphasizes continued commitment to technology innovation and customer success. Impact Analytics is a Linthicum Heights, MD-based provider of AI-led SaaS solutions for strategic and unified planning across retail, CPG, manufacturing and supply chains. Its SmartSuite and forecasting products support assortment planning, inventory optimization, markdown optimization, and promotion planning. The company reports deployments at 10 of the top 25 retailers, three of the top 10 CPG companies, and five leading global manufacturers. Impact plans to use the new funding to expand its AI-led retail solution suite and to scale customer success, sales, and marketing organizations to meet demand across North and South America, Europe, EMEA and Asia. The company will open offices in London and Dubai in 2023. Led by CEO Prashant Agrawal, Impact positions itself as an enterprise AI SaaS leader helping retailers make data-driven decisions and transform operations. Impact Analytics, based in Linthicum, Maryland and led by CEO Prashant Agrawal, provides a next-generation AI-driven technology platform that powers SaaS solutions for forecasting, planning and merchandising. Its SmartSuite and Forecasting products support assortment planning, allocation optimization, markdown optimization and promotion planning. The company’s decisioning systems are deployed at retailers including Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Puma, JoAnn and Belk. Impact says its technology helps retailers make more precise merchandising and allocation decisions, which also supports sustainability by reducing waste and carbon footprint. The company closed an $11M growth financing in February 2021 led by Argentum Capital Partners IV, L.P.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2022

Kyverna Therapeutics is a clinical-stage cell therapy company focused on engineering a new class of therapies for autoimmune diseases. Its lead programs, KYV-101 and KYV-201, are anti-CD19 CAR T-cell therapies that target CD19 on B cells. The company is advancing clinical studies in the U.S. and Europe and intends to use recent financing to accelerate those trials. Kyverna specifically highlights applications in autoimmune conditions including lupus nephritis. The company has attracted investment from biopharma and life-science investors backing its clinical-stage programs. Kyverna Therapeutics engineers a new class of cell therapies for serious autoimmune and inflammatory diseases using advanced T-cell engineering and synthetic biology. Its platform includes next-generation CAR T therapies in autologous and allogeneic settings and synReg T cells, a synthetic version of regulatory T cells. The company holds exclusive worldwide licenses from the NIH to use a novel anti-CD19 construct across autologous and allogeneic CAR T therapies. Kyverna intends to advance KYV-101, an autologous anti-CD19 CAR T candidate, into clinical development for B cell-driven autoimmune diseases in the first half of 2022. It is also developing KYV-201 in collaboration with Intellia, combining its CD19 CAR construct with Intellia’s ex vivo CRISPR/Cas9-based allogeneic platform. Kyverna has a strategic collaboration and license agreement with Gilead to develop engineered T-cell therapies based on its synReg platform and Kite’s synNotch technology and is led by CEO Dominic Borie in Emeryville, California. Kyverna Therapeutics is a Berkeley, Calif.-based cell therapy company engineering a new class of therapies for serious autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. It raised $25 million in a Series A equity financing from Vida Ventures and Westlake Village BioPartners. The company’s platform combines advanced T cell engineering and synthetic biology technologies, including a synthetic Treg platform and synNotch™ technology from Kite (a Gilead company), to target autoreactive immune cells at the root cause of disease. Kyverna intends to use the proceeds to advance its therapeutic strategy and to conduct research activities and initial clinical studies through proof-of-concept for programs covered by its collaboration. Kyverna entered a strategic collaboration and license agreement with Gilead under which Gilead paid an upfront $17.5 million and Kyverna may earn up to $570 million in development and commercialization milestones; Gilead has an option to assume further clinical development and commercialization upon exercise. Leadership and board changes accompanied the financing: Fred Cohen of Vida Ventures will serve as chairman; Dominic Borie, M.D., Ph.D., was appointed CEO and will serve on the board; Jeffrey Greve, Ph.D., remains CSO; and investor representatives from Westlake Village BioPartners and Vida Ventures were named to the board. Kyverna will also continue to advance proprietary programs beyond the Gilead collaboration.

Led · Equity · Apr 2021

SmartCommerce provides a data-centric, AI-assisted SaaS platform (Click2Cart®) that ingests and optimizes real-time CPG product data—availability, location and pricing—to enable frictionless online commerce. Its Click2Cart® applications let consumers save/cart products from digital impulse points into carts at a network of over 500 retail partners, including Amazon, Walmart, Target and Instacart. The company emphasizes a data-core-first approach, having built a continually-updating data engine for two years before signing its first client. SmartCommerce says consumers used Click2Cart to drive over $1 billion of products into carts in the last 12 months. Management includes former Channel Intelligence leaders and the company plans to use new capital to build its sales team, accelerate product development and expand market reach. The release is datelined Atlanta.

Participated · Series B · Mar 2020

OnBeep is a San Francisco–based startup developing “beautiful wearable communication devices” that let groups talk and collaborate without relying on smartphones. The hardware is designed to replace aging Push-to-Talk solutions and targets use cases such as music festivals, sporting events, vacations, and family outings. Co-founders Jesse Robbins, Greg Albrecht, and Roger Wood lead a 20-person team whose résumés include Apple, Google, Motorola, iRobot, and Amazon. The company has partnered with PCH International’s Access accelerator to move the product into production within the year and expects to unveil a public preview in the fall. Wood’s prior work on iDEN, often described as the first mobile social network, informs the product’s push-to-talk functionality. While the company has not yet shared revenue or user figures, the fresh capital will fund manufacturing and go-to-market efforts.