Led · Series A · Jul 2023

Aktivate offers a scholastic sports management and communication platform that centralizes pre/post-season registration, scheduling, communication, and related tasks. The solution is used by athletic directors, coaches, state athletic associations, athletes, and parents to manage organizational and funding mechanics of scholastic sports and student activities. Led by CEO Hesky Kutscher, the company aims to reduce the time, energy, and resources athletic departments need to manage participants. Aktivate plans to use its new funding to enable integration of new features and to release new products and services throughout the year and into Q1 2024. Financially, the company announced a $3.7M Series A that brought its total funding to $14M. Aktivate delivers a comprehensive SaaS administration and engagement platform aimed at modernizing scholastic sports and school activities. The product centralizes operations and builds a community connecting student‑athletes, families, schools, and partners in the $35B+ youth sports market. Aktivate plans to continue developing a market‑leading sports administration platform and a marketplace community to reduce financial barriers to participation. Through acquisitions and integrations of Register My Athlete and Sportz Ventures, the company now powers administration for over 1,300 K‑12 schools and 1.5 million athletes across 30 states. The founding team includes Hesky Kutscher and Dhruv Singh, with Jon Miller serving as chairman, and recent senior hires in commercial, product, and technology roles. Founded in 2021 and publicly launched from New York, Aktivate is positioning to scale product, partnerships, and community engagement.

Led · Series A · Jan 2022

Verofax is an Abu Dhabi, UAE-based Web3 services company that applies patented Web3 technologies—blockchain, augmented reality and artificial intelligence—to provide elevated tourist, shopper and brand marketing experiences. Its core product combines AI-powered guides, AR experiences and blockchain-enabled engagement to turn destinations, retailers and sports stadiums interactive and drive conversion and social virality. The company leverages gamification and direct brand-to-customer engagement to increase consumer intimacy and measurable results from AI and AR experiences. Verofax serves retail, tourism and sports sectors and is used by brands such as Anheuser Busch Inc and Emirates Airlines. Led by CEO Wassim Merheby, it raised $3M in bridge funding to execute a pipeline of projects across the Middle East and EU, including AI-powered guides in the GCC and sports fan guides in the EU and North America. The funding is intended to support commercialization and deployment of its solutions across venues and brands. Verofax provides asset digitization and 'Traceability as a Service' using patented technology that incorporates blockchain, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Its platform enables brands to turn offline products interactive, manage supply chains, fend off counterfeit activity and improve manufacturers' productivity. Brands can extend reach directly to end consumers, increase consumer intimacy through direct engagement, and leverage NFTs and metaverse experiences. The company's solutions target industries such as retail and CPG and are already used by leading brands including Anheuser Busch Inc. Verofax is a Microsoft Gold partner, has a global network of distributors and resellers, and co-sells on enterprise platforms including Microsoft Appsource, Amazon AWS and Ant Group Antchain. Led by CEO Wassim Merheby, Verofax closed a $1.5M pre-Series A round and plans to use the funds to expand global sales and marketing ahead of a planned Series A later in 2022. Verofax provides an automation and traceability platform that enables Item ID serialization, traceability, and transaction certification on a private blockchain to prevent counterfeiting, boost manufacturer-consumer engagement, and increase staff productivity through data insights. Founded in 2018 and led by Wassim Merheby and Jamil Zablah, the company is headquartered in Abu Dhabi and also maintains an office in Kuala Lumpur. Verofax has established partnerships with a sustainable retailer in Asia and set up joint ventures across Asia, Africa and the GCC. It has been approved as a co-sell partner by Microsoft, Oracle and AntGroup. The company secured $1.2M in seed funding and intends to use the proceeds to serve its pipeline of projects, launch a marketing campaign targeting the food, healthcare and apparel industries, and hire 20 additional team members, mainly software developers and business development managers.

Participated · Series A · Apr 2021

Zengo Wallet provides a secure, self-custodial cryptocurrency wallet built on multi-party computation (MPC) that eliminates seed-phrase vulnerabilities. The company reports over 2 million individual and business users across more than 180 countries, and no Zengo wallet has ever been hacked since its launch in 2018. Its product line includes Zengo Pro, which offers advanced features such as Bitcoin Vaults, inheritance-style recovery, and discounted trading fees, as well as Zengo Business, which delivers institutional-grade security and team wallets for SMBs and enterprises. Recent product plans focus on deeper payment integrations and upcoming feature launches enabled by its partnership with MoonPay. Zengo’s security-first positioning is designed to make digital asset ownership both safer and easier, supported by a simple user interface and broad asset support. Existing investors include Insight Partners, Tether, and other notable backers, and the company is now bolstered by a new strategic investment from MoonPay Ventures. The expanded collaboration with MoonPay also provides users with diverse on-ramp options such as Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo, cards, and bank transfers, further enhancing wallet usability.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2021

S’More’s core product deliberately blurs profile photos (and initially blurs video chat) so users must interact before images fully reveal, aiming to foster more meaningful relationships. The startup recently launched a completely rebuilt app with real-time conversation prompts and a paid option to promote profiles. New features include blurred video chat and other multimedia elements on the product roadmap such as video, audio, and games. The app has seen early traction with 160,000 downloads in its first year and “thousands” of paying users, including a 50% increase in subscriptions after the January relaunch. Funding has been used to assemble a named “founding team” (chief architect, head of operations, head of product and design, senior developer). S’More is also pursuing content strategy, producing “anti-superficial” dating content and running a celebrity dating show on Instagram Live with 60 episodes so far. S’More is a relationship dating app that blurs profile photos and unlocks images and private content as users engage, prioritizing personality, values, and conversation over initial looks. Its matching algorithm recommends profiles based on location, age, sexual orientation, interests, opinions, values, hobbies, gender identities and learned attraction preferences. Profiles support more than 20 criteria with interactive icons and multimedia, and the app uses required photo verification and a publicly visible behavior-based rating score to reduce catfishing and encourage higher-quality community behavior. The company positions itself as a disruption to swipe-based dating apps and aims to elevate online dating standards toward relationship-focused experiences. S’More currently has a public waitlist of over 8,000 singles and has opened national sign-ups at smoredate.com. Founder Adam Cohen Aslatei brings experience from Chappy (Bumble’s gay app) and The Meet Group and has consulted for several social discovery companies.

Led · Series A · Oct 2019

Become (formerly Lending Express) operates an online lending marketplace designed to improve small-business access to capital. The platform analyzes applicant data to generate a LendingScore that gauges fundability and then produces a personalized plan to help businesses qualify for better financing. Once scored, owners receive real-time, competing loan offers from more than 50 integrated lenders, including PayPal, OnDeck and Kabbage, with funding possible in as little as three hours. The company claims 200,000 SMBs have registered and more than $165 million in loans have been facilitated to date. Revenue specifics were not disclosed, but the volume of loans originated indicates meaningful marketplace traction. Become plans to deploy new capital to expand operations in the United States and Australia while continuing product development around automated funding discovery. Headquartered in Tel Aviv with a San Francisco office, the startup positions itself against marketplaces like Fundera and Lendio and credit-profiling tools such as Nav by offering an end-to-end digital experience.