Participated · Seed · Mar 2019

Osano provides a privacy platform and suite of products to help organizations build, automate and scale privacy programs, with integrations for websites, Android and iOS. The platform uses AI to locate and classify protected information across data stores and offers tools for cookie consent and subject rights. Osano also offers regulatory guidance via a dedicated team of attorneys and provides frameworks to identify gaps and improve privacy programs. The company says it serves many industries, including financial services, e-commerce, healthcare, media, retail and CPG. Osano plans to use new funding to expand engineering, product development, sales, increase R&D investment and build a channel program. The startup reports more than 40,000 users and delivers over 1 billion cookie consent banners per month, and has raised $44.4 million in total capital to date. Osano is a software-as-a-service platform that helps companies monitor and manage their risk and compliance with privacy laws like Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA. The platform tracks changes to the rules and laws it covers to help customers avoid falling out of compliance and facing fines. Osano is rolling out an AI-powered data discovery tool to automatically find and classify dozens of types of personal and nonpersonal data. It offers integrations with dozens of apps and services, including AWS, Dropbox, Google and Oracle. The company plans to use new funding to double headcount with a focus on sales to meet growing demand. To date the startup has raised a total of $22.3 million, including a $5 million Series A in 2019. Osano is a risk and compliance startup offering a privacy platform to help businesses understand and address compliance with state and international privacy laws. One of its flagship features provides cookie and consent management on customer websites, allowing users to choose privacy settings in their own language. The turnkey platform is used by more than 750,000 companies — including some Fortune 500 companies — to secure over 3.5 million websites. The Austin, Texas-based company raised $5.4 million in a Series A led by LiveOak Venture Partners and Next Coast Ventures, bringing total capital raised to date to $8.4 million. Osano plans to use the new funds to further invest in research and development, marketing, and hiring to meet growing demand. Co-founder and CEO Arlo Gilbert said the company is moving quickly to add talent and deepen its position as a leading data privacy platform. Osano, founded in 2018 by Arlo Gilbert, builds tools to increase data-privacy transparency for consumers and businesses. Its core product, Privacy Monitor, is a free browser plugin (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and a mobile app (Android, soon iOS) that analyzes thousands of online privacy policies and surfaces a proprietary privacy reputation score. The score reflects how companies collect, use, share and store data and whether they comply with regulations such as GDPR. The company emerged from stealth alongside the launch of Privacy Monitor and intends to use new funding to launch and expand adoption of its Privacy Monitor tools and privacy reputation scoring system. Osano operates as a B Corporation and positions purpose alongside profit in its business decisions. The company recently completed a seed financing to support product rollout and user growth.

Participated · Series C · Jul 2017

Lastline offers an advanced malware defense platform that inspects network traffic, attachments and URLs in an elastic, cloud-centric sandbox analysis environment. Its next-generation sandbox uses full system emulation and cloud-based threat analysis to detect zero-day threats, advanced persistent threats (APTs), advanced targeted attacks (ATAs) and advanced malware that evade signature-based antivirus and first-generation sandboxing. The platform is deployed with Global 2000 enterprises and managed security service providers across North America, Europe and Asia. Lastline emphasizes protection against threats entering networks via web, file and email channels without relying on traditional signature-based approaches. The company plans to continue serving a rapidly growing global enterprise customer base and to advance partnerships to improve information security and threat intelligence worldwide, including expanded reach into Japan and the broader Asia‑Pacific market. Financially, the company has raised capital across prior rounds and announced additional funding to support growth. Lastline develops advanced malware protection and breach-detection solutions, with its flagship product Lastline Enterprise positioned as an industry-leading automated malware analysis platform. The product is used directly by Global 5000 customers, through managed security service providers, and integrated into other vendors' solutions. Independent tests cited in the article (NSS Labs 2016 and The Forrester Wave™) recognize Lastline for high detection effectiveness and strong market standing. The company reports 100% annual growth since Lastline Enterprise was introduced in 2013 and expanded its distribution in 2016 to include direct enterprise sales. Lastline says it will use new capital to accelerate go-to-market efforts, expand sales and marketing, and bolster its development organization to advance its breach-detection vision. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California, with offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. Lastline is a malware protection service offering solutions to protect businesses from persistent threats (APTs), targeted attacks, and zero-day threats in real time. The company uses a "correlation engine" that correlates, aggregates, and prioritizes security events to provide situational awareness and actionable threat intelligence. Founded in 2012 by computer science professors from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Northeastern University, Lastline positions itself as a direct competitor to FireEye. The company announced a $10 million funding round led by Redpoint Ventures and e.ventures and said Redpoint partner John Welecka will join its board. Lastline plans to use the new capital to focus on its sales strategy and to further develop the malware and threat-detection technology at the core of its products. In its announcement the company argued that malware authors are becoming increasingly sophisticated at evading automated analysis and signature-based tools, and that its technology is designed to address those evasion techniques.

Participated · Seed · May 2017

Meta SaaS provides software that analyzes a company’s SaaS subscriptions to show which tools are used and which are not, helping customers cancel unused products. The product is compared to offerings like Cardlife and Cleanshelf and focuses on managing “phantom IT.” Founded by Arlo Gilbert and Scott Hertel, Gilbert previously created the first VoIP platform for iOS (iCall) and Hertel worked in Dell’s e-commerce division. Meta SaaS supports 10,000 employees across six customers, including RetailMeNot, and manages millions of SaaS apps. The company targets mid-market and larger companies where license management drives meaningful financial impact. It differentiates from many early-stage competitors by not relying on third-party data sources such as Okta, allowing broader tracking than login-based approaches.

Led · Equity · Sep 2014

Expensify is a Portland-based payments superapp used by more than 10 million people worldwide. Its app bundles free corporate cards, expense tracking, next-day reimbursement, invoicing, bill pay and travel booking into a single product. The platform integrates with major accounting software, HR, tax and practice management systems as well as travel platforms such as Uber and Lyft. The company has been pursuing product expansion and rapid growth. CIBC’s expanded credit facility is intended to support those growth plans as Expensify scales in the public markets. CIBC has provided creative and flexible financing to Expensify for several years and increased an existing relationship with this $100 million facility provided in October 2021. Expensify offers an automated expense management platform used to streamline expense reporting. The company is led by founder and CEO David Barrett. Its product includes patented mobile receipt transcription technology, SmartScan (Patent #US8861861). Expensify raised a $17.5M funding round led by OpenView Venture Partners. Concurrently it launched Expensify Ventures, a strategic investment fund for early-stage fintech startups. The new fund has already backed Piper, whose receipting solution integrates with Expensify to automatically capture receipt details. The company said it will be announcing more investments in the coming months. Expensify is a six-year-old expense-management startup offering web and mobile apps and SmartScan OCR that scans receipts and auto-populates expense reports. The company launched an integration allowing Concur users to create and manage expenses in Expensify and export them into Concur. Following SAP’s acquisition of Concur, Expensify is targeting Concur customers and is offering organizations free use of its service for the length of their remaining Concur contracts to encourage switching. To support a ramp in sales and marketing, Expensify quietly raised a $3.5 million strategic round that included Barracuda Networks. That funding brings total capital raised to just over $10 million, and the company is already profitable. CEO David Barrett said the raise was intentionally minimal to minimize dilution to employees and existing investors and that Barracuda’s involvement could help establish a reseller relationship. Expensify builds online software to create and act on expense reports. The product imports expenses and receipts from credit cards and mobile phones, allows report submission through email, and supports reimbursements online via QuickBooks and direct deposit. It offers mobile apps on iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm WebOS and Android. Expensify launched at TechCrunch50 and won DemoPit 2nd Place. The company raised $5.7M in a second financing round led by Redpoint Ventures to further develop the product. Earlier it raised $1M in a May 2009 seed round led by Hillsven Capital, Baseline Capital, and Travis Kalanick.