Participated · Equity · Jan 2023

Unifyr delivers a comprehensive partner-experience platform that centralizes data from channel, reseller, and alliance relationships, then applies AI-powered analytics and automation to give enterprises real-time insight into partner performance. Its tools predict revenue impact, surface recommendations, and streamline workflows so organizations can optimize partner-led growth at scale. The company positions itself as the “foundation for real, connected growth,” aiming to become a global category leader in partner ecosystem management. A newly secured $20 million growth investment will accelerate Unifyr’s product roadmap, particularly around advanced AI capabilities, and fund international expansion. The business currently operates from locations in Cary, North Carolina, Oxford, England, and Munich. No revenue, customer, or user figures were disclosed in the article. The fresh capital strengthens Unifyr’s balance sheet and supports continued innovation as partner-centric revenue models gain importance in B2B markets.

Led · Series C · Feb 2022

Clickatell builds a chat commerce and mobile messaging platform that lets businesses communicate and transact with customers via SMS, USSD and WhatsApp. Its core offerings include messaging APIs, payments-in-chat (it was among the first to launch payments initiated out of WhatsApp), and integrations such as Chat2Pay launched with Visa/Cybersource. The company reports double-digit profitable growth for more than a decade and says it has processed over 30 billion interactions and 2 billion commerce transactions since 2020. In Nigeria Clickatell reaches 17 million end customers and handles up to 1.3 million payment transactions daily. Clickatell intends to use new capital to expand its U.S. footprint, scale sales and marketing, and accelerate development of its chat commerce offering across South Africa and Nigeria. Founded in 2000 in South Africa and now headquartered in California, the company also maintains offices in Nigeria and Canada. Clickatell operates an SMS gateway that enables businesses to send bulk text messages for marketing, notifications, and transactional use cases. The company also provides mobile financial-transaction solutions and is developing new transaction services for developing countries. Clickatell serves roughly 13,000 enterprise, government, and SMB customers and employs about 120 people. It is profitable and generates "double-digit millions" in revenue. The company is launching a new web-based SMS messaging package for U.S. small and medium businesses and plans to expand in emerging markets. Clickatell was originally founded in South Africa in 2000 and is now based in Redwood City, California.

Led · Series A · Feb 2022

Protecht provides governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions, including the Protecht ERM platform, serving clients across government, financial services, education, and other industries. The company operates offices in Sydney, Los Angeles, and London and helps organizations transition from spreadsheets and manual processes to integrated risk-management systems. Protecht emphasizes strong client retention and aims to scale its product offering by incorporating AI-driven risk management capabilities. Management says the new capital will fuel global expansion and accelerate innovation in response to growing regulatory scrutiny and operational complexity. The company points to market tailwinds — the global risk management market is projected to reach nearly US $22 billion by 2029 — and cites data and third-party risk statistics to underscore demand for its solutions. The announced US $280M investment from PSG is positioned to support these growth and product initiatives. Protecht Group, founded in 1999 and headquartered in Sydney with offices in London and Santa Monica, provides enterprise risk and compliance management software and services. Its flagship product, Protecht.ERM, is a single interconnected SaaS platform complemented by training and advisory services. The company serves more than 300 clients across APAC, EMEA, and North America and helps customers move away from spreadsheets and email to manage risk more effectively. Protecht supports financial services, government (including regulators), tertiary education, and businesses across a wide range of industries. To accelerate product development, maintain high service levels, and support global expansion, the company has secured new funding to add features, expand resources, and enter new markets and verticals.

Led · Series C · Jan 2022

Appvance is a Santa Clara, CA–based AI-driven software testing technology company led by CEO Andre Liao. Its core product is Appvance IQ (AIQ), a Level 5 unified test automation system that uses an AI/ML engine to design, generate and independently execute tests for sophisticated web and mobile applications with no human intervention. The platform is designed to improve application quality, performance and security while transforming the efficiency and output of testing teams. The company has additional offices in Costa Rica and India. Appvance raised $13M in a Series C financing and intends to use the funds to accelerate growth and expand operations. Appvance develops Appvance IQ, an AI-driven unified test automation platform that autonomously generates and executes end-to-end tests for web and mobile web applications. The system combines 19 machine-learning algorithms and a proprietary code generator to create open-source JavaScript tests, and the company claims the ability to create 6,000 unique scripts in under 10 minutes. Appvance models testing autonomy in Levels 0–5 and says it has achieved Level 5 true testing autonomy with features such as self-healing scripts and automatically generated data-driven regression tests. The product integrates with CI/CD and developer tools including Jenkins, TeamCity, CircleCI, TFS, GIT and Jira, and is available to select enterprise-class customers via an exclusive engagement process. Appvance reports customer-measured benefits including up to 90% reductions in QA time and 20x improvements in real-world test coverage. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with additional offices in Costa Rica and India. Appvance has raised a total of $12M to develop and deploy its AI-driven testing technology. Appvance offers a unified platform for enterprise software and application testing that consolidates multiple testing modules into a single solution. Its platform combines functional, performance, load, application penetration, compatibility, database, DDoS, mobile and other testing modules. Test teams can write or record use cases once and test applications the way users encounter them, including UX and API-level tests. The company plans to use new funds to expand operations, including product development, sales and customer support. Appvance was founded in 2012 and is led by CEO Kevin Surace, with additional offices in Costa Rica and India. Financially, the company has raised $7M in total to date. Appvance provides enterprise-grade performance validation and testing for Web, Mobile Web, HTML5, Ajax and RIA applications, and builds and runs test suites for SOAP and REST services. Its Appvance Enterprise platform offers a 100% graphical environment and can simulate up to millions of concurrent requests, enabling reuse of tests for functional, performance and production monitoring. The company emphasizes finding complex performance bottlenecks other platforms miss and targets large customers including Fortune 1000 accounts. Appvance reports rapid adoption within large enterprises and says the recent financing will support growth of features and customer support. Appvance was founded in 2012 as PushToTest Inc., acquired the assets of the TestMaker open-source project, and rebranded to Appvance in March 2013. The company is venture-backed and headquartered in San Jose, CA.

Led · Equity · Dec 2021

Ayla Networks is an enterprise Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider based in Milpitas, Calif., that helps consumer brands and Internet service providers accelerate digital transformation. Led by CEO Jonathan Cobb, its software platform includes device, cloud, application, analytics and machine-learning capabilities to support the development and launch of differentiated connected products and services. The company powers IoT initiatives for brands including SharkNinja, Owlet, Canadian Tire, Kenmore, Hunter Fan, Fujitsu and Schneider Electric, and is deployed in some of the world’s largest ISPs. Ayla intends to use new financing to further its strategic positioning in key IoT markets through incremental sales and marketing, product innovation and geographic expansion. The reported $20M financing represents recent growth-equity capital to support these initiatives. Ayla Networks is a global Internet of Things (IoT) platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider that helps manufacturers turn products into smart connected systems. Delivered as a cloud PaaS, the platform emphasizes security, privacy, data policy and management while offering a configurable capability to ingest data from any sensor or IoT cloud. Ayla says it has amassed more than 100 large enterprise customers and that data flowing into its platform is growing 5x year over year. Early focus markets included HVAC, large and small appliances, water management and home control, and the company has expanded into retail, industrial, telco and service provider, and medical markets. The company plans to use new funding to expand product capabilities to help large enterprises extract IoT data and transform it into business intelligence and to grow its ecosystem of partners and application providers. Ayla is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., and is pursuing accelerated growth in China through a partnership and joint venture with Sunsea Telecommunications. Ayla Networks delivers a cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) IoT solution that helps manufacturers turn products into smart connected systems. Its Agile IoT platform supports device, cloud and app environments and includes mobile tools such as the Ayla Agile Mobile Application Platform (AMAP), Ayla Insights and mobile beacon integration. Ayla has established IoT clouds in North America, China and Europe and holds an ICP license to operate in China with WeChat integration for user sign-in. The company has expanded globally with offices and operations in Santa Clara, Taiwan, Shenzhen and Japan and has doubled headcount in the past year. Ayla lists customers across appliances, HVAC, water heaters, fire and safety and other OEM categories, and reports expanded or new relationships with manufacturers including Changhong, Dimplex, Fujitsu General, Hunter Fan, Kidde, TCL and UTEC. Ayla Networks is a Sunnyvale, California-based provider of an agile Internet of Things (IoT) platform. Its platform enables companies to develop, support, and enhance smart connected solutions end-to-end and supports Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Linux, Android, iOS and others. Built-in analytics enable real-time learning and a virtual device management system lets manufacturers quickly react and modify products. Platform features include multi-tiered role-based access control, remote firmware update management, and customer service visibility tools. Ayla has partnerships with chip and system suppliers including Broadcom, Murata Americas, NXP, STMicroelectronics, and United Scientific Industrial Co. The company plans to use recent financing to expand its business in China and other emerging markets. Ayla Networks builds an ecosystem and platform for the Internet of Things that enables manufacturers of household products—appliances, thermostats, switches, refrigerators—to turn them into connected devices. Its platform comprises WiFi-enabled modules and IP gateways, a cloud service for hosting and managing devices, and application libraries meant to work together to minimize integration work for manufacturers and consumers. Ayla works directly with OEMs and chip makers to embed its software, charges manufacturers a one-time fee for connectivity, and hosts the Internet service on its cloud to enable scalable mass production. The company positions this business model as a differentiator from competitors that charge ongoing subscriptions, naming Arrayent, Electric Imp, Digi, and Cisco. Ayla launched out of stealth with $5.4 million in financing and announced its first major customer, Sina, which ships a WiFi weather station in China. The company is based in Sunnyvale, California, has 21 employees, and its leadership includes CEO David Friedman and cofounders Adrian Caceres, Tom Lee, and Phillip Chang.