Participated · Series A · Feb 2024

Tracksuit provides an AI-powered, always-on dashboard that makes brand tracking intuitive and actionable for marketers, product teams, and executives. The platform tracks brand health metrics such as awareness, consideration, usage, preference, and perceptions across major global markets. Since launching in 2021, Tracksuit has scaled to serve 1,000 brands and is currently tracking 10,000 brands, including Athletic Brewing Company, Opendoor, Turo, Steve Madden, and The RealReal. The company positions itself at the intersection of renewed focus on brand-building and advances in AI-driven consumer insights, democratizing high-quality data for brands of all sizes. Tracksuit plans several new product launches later this year and aims to double its tracked-brand dataset to 20,000 by the end of 2025 to underpin those products. Tracksuit offers an always-on brand-tracking platform that surveys tens of thousands of consumers each week to measure awareness, consideration, preference, and sentiment, and to benchmark over 4,000 brands against competitors. The product targets growth consumer brands and provides marketers a single source of truth to understand and communicate brand health. Tracksuit plans to use new funding to officially launch into the US and UK, expand research and platform capabilities, and democratize previously unavailable market research data. The company highlights notable US customers including Athletic Brewing, Steve Madden, Opendoor, AWAY Luggage, Momofuku, Skillshare, and others. Founded in April 2021 by co-CEOs Matt Herbert and Connor Archbold, Tracksuit has grown to 60+ employees with offices in New York City, Auckland, Sydney, and London. Its team says the product is “always on” and designed to make brand metrics accessible and actionable for marketing teams. Tracksuit is a brand-tracking software-as-a-service launched in 2021 that provides an intuitive dashboard to monitor metrics such as brand awareness, consideration, preference and usage. The product measures performance against competitive sets and includes features like an "unprompted imagery" word cloud to capture unaided associations. The company charges a flat fee and says its service is roughly 10x cheaper than traditional market-research offerings, aiming to make brand insights accessible to smaller and mid-sized companies. Tracksuit currently tracks insights for more than 1,300 brands across New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. It targets mid-sized, growing consumer brands across food and beverage, FMCG, retail, direct-to-consumer and financial services, with customers including Made by Nacho, Charity: Water and Athletic Brewing Company. The startup recently raised $5 million in its first external round and will use the money to expand further into the U.S., including hiring in New York City and building a 10-person team there.

Participated · Series B · Aug 2021

#paid is a creator marketing platform that connects brands and creators and offers end-to-end workflow management for creator campaigns. The platform matches brands with creators, handles content approvals, automates payments and legal agreements, and reports on sales impact and ROI. It serves direct-to-consumer and Fortune 500 clients including Philips Hue, Everlywell, Unilever, and Sephora. The company recently launched a Creator Licensing Tool that allows brands to license creator content and gain advertising access to creators’ social profiles for whitelisted ads. #paid plans to use new funding to continue developing its platform offerings and expand into new digital channels to help brands scale creator marketing and enable creators to monetize more channels. Founded in 2014, the company positions itself as a leader in the creator marketing space. #paid operates an AI-driven platform that matches marketers with social media creators for integrated influencer marketing, content creation, and native amplification. The company plans to expand its platform with a SaaS offering that enables marketers to run influencer programs directly and to scale into new markets across North America and Europe. #paid will accelerate development of its Affinity Score™ matching algorithm, which uses image recognition, past campaign performance, and creator relationships to recommend authentic creator-brand fits. The company touts a network of over 15,000 creators and relationships with Fortune 500 advertisers such as Toyota, Coca-Cola, and Canon. Leadership includes co-founders Bryan Gold and Adam Rivietz; James Aitken is joining the board. #paid was founded in 2014 and has offices in New York and Toronto. The article notes the company has achieved traction and revenue growth, and it cites a global influencer ad-spend market exceeding $6 billion annually.

Led · Series D · Feb 2021

Hudson MX offers the MX Platform™, a fully cloud-based SaaS suite (including BuyerAssist™ and FinanceAssist™) that supports omnichannel media buying, billing, and paying and connects in real time via APIs and VendorAssist™. The platform is live at scale and is processing significant volumes of digital media spend for key customers; BuyerAssist™ has been used to process billions of dollars of media buys for 27 leading agencies across all 210 U.S. markets and more than 200 national advertisers. The company was founded in 2016 and operates with headquarters in New York City and Atlanta, with 148 full-time employees and over 300 contracted engineers. Hudson plans to scale initial customers and expand its solutions and client base to address growing demand from agencies and brands that inhouse media buying. Leadership and governance have been strengthened as part of the expansion, including a newly appointed CEO and additions from Ascential to the Hudson board. Ascential’s CEO stated the business is on a pathway to revenue growth and profitability following the new investment. Hudson MX offers a cloud-based SaaS platform for media buying and media accounting, including its BuyerAssist solution and AgencyCloud API suite. The company handles both digital and traditional media types and has processed billions of dollars of media buys for 27 leading agencies across all 210 U.S. markets, servicing over 200 national advertisers. Hudson MX says its platform enables real-time management of media planning, buying and accounting and is configurable for multiple media types and users. Proceeds from investors have funded product innovation, scaled its service offering, and supported a rapidly expanding client roster. The company is growing its team to about 400 people, including roughly 300 engineers, and operates dual headquarters in New York and Atlanta. Hudson MX plans to continue scaling its platform and organizational structure and to leverage advisor support to develop its enterprise engagement model and improve product, engineering, program management and implementation.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2020

InfoSum offers a decentralized data collaboration platform that uses patented technology to connect customer records between companies without moving or sharing data. The platform is compliant with current privacy laws, including GDPR, and was recently bolstered by InfoSum Bridge, which expands customer identity linking and connects advertising identifiers with bunkered datasets. The company says its growth accelerated during the pandemic as businesses prioritized privacy-focused solutions. Since its prior round, InfoSum has tripled revenue, doubled its employee base, and added more than 50 customers, including AT&T, Disney, Omnicom and Merkle. The company currently has about 80 employees across offices in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany and says it is poised for exponential growth in 2021. InfoSum plans to use new funding to accelerate hiring across the business, expand into new regions, and further develop its platform. InfoSum has built a federated, decentralized architecture that uses mathematical representations to organise, read and query data so organisations can collaborate without passing raw data to each other. The company initially targeted the marketing industrial complex and released its first product two years ago. Its solution aims to reduce data leakage and devaluation by keeping data private while enabling analytics and matching. InfoSum plans to use new funding to continue fueling growth with a specific focus on the U.S. market and to expand into other verticals such as finance and healthcare. Leadership includes founder and CEO Nick Halstead and incoming executive chairman Brian Lesser. Financially, the company has raised a Series A and has $23 million in total funding to date. InfoSum builds decentralized technology that lets companies join thousands of siloed data sets to gain collaborative customer insight while avoiding the commercial and regulatory risks of centralized platforms. The company is led by founder and CEO Nick Halstead and Chief Commercial Officer Nicola Walker. InfoSum raised $5M in seed funding to support its launch. Backers mentioned in the raise include LocalGlobe and Mosaic Ventures. The firm plans to use the funds to build its senior management team and bring its first products to market. InfoSum is based in Basingstoke, UK. CognitiveLogic is a three‑week‑old startup founded by Nick Halstead to provide big‑data insight directly to enterprises using their own data. Its core product is a system that joins data between multiple companies to analyze combined datasets without either party sending raw data, addressing privacy concerns. The company intends to leverage technologies Halstead encountered at DataSift to enable research while avoiding exposure of individuals' private information. Initial target verticals are government, health, and finance. CognitiveLogic currently has four employees and plans to grow to ten in the next six months. Financially, the company has just closed a $3M seed round to kickstart operations.