Participated · Seed · Jul 2025

Cerebrium is a serverless AI infrastructure platform that enables engineering teams to build, deploy, and scale multimodal AI applications. It provides serverless CPU and GPU infrastructure that dynamically spins up and down so clients pay only for compute time used. The platform supports applications in Voice AI, real-time avatars, and healthcare. Founded in Cape Town by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin and headquartered in New York, Cerebrium counts customers such as Tavus, Deepgram, and Vapi. The company will use its recent funding to grow its engineering team and develop new platform features. Financially, Cerebrium raised an $8.5M seed round in July 2025 led by Gradient Ventures with participation from Y Combinator and Authentic Ventures.

Participated · Seed · May 2025

Carrot is a Lagos-based digital lending startup founded in 2020 by CEO Bolu Aiki-Raji that provides access to credit using users' digital financial assets. Its platform integrates with places where users already manage assets like stocks and ETFs to offer credit without forcing users to leave existing tools. The company has originated over $2 million in credit and served over 10,000 users since launch. Carrot plans to use new funding to grow its team, scale operations and accelerate product development. It specifically intends to invest in AI to enhance credit scoring, risk management and fraud prevention systems. The approach aims to improve convenience, drive adoption of credit solutions and expand financial inclusion in Africa.

Led · Series A · Oct 2023

Founded in 2019 by Swupnil Sahai and Richard Hsu, SwingVision uses patent-pending object-tracking AI to automatically track ball trajectory in 3D from a single device and generate pro-quality stats, highlights, and line calling. Its core product is a video-based analytics and officiating platform for tennis and similar racket sports. The system is used by more than 100 Division I college tennis teams across the U.S., including Harvard, Stanford, TCU, Florida and Yale. SwingVision plans to build tournament-grade officiating and remote coaching capabilities and to expand beyond tennis into pickleball and padel. The company recently raised $6M in a Series A to support those initiatives. SwingVision is a smartphone app that uses computer vision to deliver real-time shot tracking, automated line-calling/umpiring, and video analysis for tennis players. It tracks stroke type, spin, ball speed, shot placement, contact, rally length, footwork and posture, and builds player profiles and highlight reels to help users analyse shot patterns and scout opponents. The product was featured in Apple’s 2021 keynote and leverages recent smartphone ML advances (e.g., A15 Bionic) to enable on-device analytics. Subscriptions are growing 18% month-on-month and 70% of subscribers have been acquired organically, and the company is scaling via partnerships with clubs and federations. Partnerships include Tennis Australia installing 2,500 court mounts, access for 3,000 coaches, use at the Australian Open, and official ball-tracking relationships with the UK Lawn Tennis Association and the US Intercollegiate Tennis Association. Near-term plans focus on refining go-to-market via more partnerships, pre-installing mounts to reduce user friction, and key hires; technical challenges include battery drain and current incompatibility with less powerful phones and Android devices.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2023

SendOwl is a San Francisco–based technology company that provides the infrastructure to transfer, manage, protect and collect payment for digital products, including memberships, digital goods, and services. Led by CEO Matt Plotke, the platform empowers individual creators and businesses to sell and distribute digital products anywhere online. The company supports post-purchase delivery and management tools and integrates with third-party services to enable commerce for creators. SendOwl says it is used by tens of thousands of independent merchants and by large creative companies such as Bungie Inc. and Universal Music Group. The new funding will be used to accelerate the product roadmap, increase the number of third-party integrations, and invest in key creator partnerships. The company raised capital via a Seed round to support these growth initiatives. SendOwl provides tools for selling and delivering digital products—e-books, music, podcasts, online courses, memberships, coaching, live events and more—via payment links, Stripe and Shopify integrations, or its API. The company is remote-first with employees across three continents and serves customers in more than 50 countries. SendOwl reports having delivered nearly $2 billion of value in digital and virtual goods for tens of thousands of paying merchants across millions of transactions. Its customer base ranges from Universal Music Group and influencer Kayla Itsines to thousands of independent creators. The team says it focuses on enabling sellers to sell what they want and where they want across multiple platforms through a simple onboarding and checkout flow. Leadership describes the company as entering a “re-founding” moment as it builds new products and infrastructure for the creator economy.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2022

Namecoach offers a platform of name-pronunciation tools that combines user-generated audio, a pronunciation database, AI prediction and speech synthesis to deliver correct name pronunciations inside products like Salesforce, Canvas, Gmail, Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace. The company provides an API and SDK for third parties and emphasizes AI to predict pronunciations based on factors such as nationality, ethnicity, gender and location; it also synthesizes speech when recordings aren't available. Namecoach is developing additional AI to account for the speaker's native language and plans a consumer app delivered as a Chrome extension next year. The startup plans to expand its connectors and add capabilities beyond pronunciation, including prompts to enable warmer sales interactions and feedback to improve conversations. Namecoach serves more than 300 education and corporate clients worldwide and is a roughly 30-person Palo Alto-based company. CEO Praveen Shanbhag would not disclose revenue when asked.