Participated · Seed · Jun 2024

LOST iN is a travel-media site built on an existing 10-year-old publisher and focused on disrupting the travel-media business with content from prominent online travel creators. The new owners acquired guidebooks for 25 countries that are distributed in about 50. The company will produce ad-supported digital video and partner with established travel-focused creators to generate additional material. Leadership consists of former Jukin executives Jon and Mike Skogmo and Anton Reut (Jon Skogmo is CEO, Mike Skogmo chief marketing officer, and Reut COO). LOST iN plans to target younger, online-savvy travelers seeking “premium economy” experiences and to diversify revenue through events, memberships and other initiatives alongside direct-to-consumer guidebook sales. Financially, the company has completed a $4 million seed round to support these efforts.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2024

Hark provides a Voice of Customer (VoC) platform that captures video and audio customer feedback, offers AI-driven sentiment and data analysis, and streamlines customer support. Its platform opens pathways for customers to communicate with companies and, with AI, speeds resolution of issues. The solution performs detailed sentiment analysis across multiple customer touchpoints and gleans customer insights at scale. The platform is already in use at a number of companies. Hark intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach and to continue building additional platform features. The company is led by CEO and Co‑Founder Fran Brzyski and Co‑Founder and Chief Product Officer Matt Ring and is based in New York City.

Participated · Convertible Note · Feb 2024

tvScientific is a performance advertising platform for connected TV (CTV) that focuses on driving measurable outcomes for advertisers. Its core product is a patented suite of technologies around identity, outcome measurement, and ML/AI-driven TV outcome optimization. The company has been issued six patents to date and says it has helped hundreds of advertisers, including Foot Locker, Rare Beauty, EA, Scopely, Dream, Brightside, Earnin, Britbox, Gorjana, and Weight Watchers. The CTV market is growing rapidly by tens of billions of dollars compared to linear TV, and tvScientific aims to position CTV as a performance rival to search and social. With the new funding, tvScientific plans to scale its go-to-market teams and continue building its technology to make performance capabilities table stakes in CTV. The company raised $25.5 million in a Series B to support these plans and expand its customer base. Management targets a tenfold increase in customers within two years as part of its strategy to expand the Performance TV category. tvScientific is a Pasadena, CA–based performance advertising platform for connected TV that enables advertisers to buy and execute performance CTV campaigns with major inventory partners including Paramount+, Hulu, Discovery, ABC, CBS and NBC. The platform introduced the ability to buy CTV campaigns on a Cost-Per-Outcome basis, enabling advertisers to purchase media based on CPA, ROAS, sales and post-CTV campaign traffic rather than simple reach & frequency or MMM models. Customers include Experian, MoneyGram, Crocs, Groupon and Fender. Led by co-founder and CEO Jason Fairchild, the company raised $9.4M in convertible note financing in February 2024. Backers included S4S Ventures, BDMI, Progress Ventures, NBCU/Comcast, Norwest Capital Partners, Aperiam Ventures and Hearst Ventures. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and accelerate development and product efforts. tvScientific provides a performance advertising platform built for connected TV (CTV) that aims to make TV advertising accessible and measurable for brands and apps of all sizes. Its self-managed solution is custom-built for performance marketers, simplifying and automating TV buying and optimization. The platform leverages large-scale data to prove the actual value of TV advertising. The company plans to use new funding to grow its customer base and continue innovating the product. It also intends to hire across engineering, product, data science, marketing, sales and other departments to support expansion. tvScientific was founded by Bill Gross, Jason Fairchild, Kent Wakeford and David Koye and is based in Pasadena, CA. tvScientific launched a Connected TV buying, measurement, and attribution platform designed to make TV advertising accessible and measurable for businesses of all sizes. The self-serve platform combines fully optimized buying with comprehensive measurement and proprietary deterministic ID technology to match CTV ad exposure to site visitations and performance. It offers advanced audience targeting (over 15K unique customer segments), direct access to more than 90% of premium CTV publishers, and real-time optimization based on direct attribution. tvScientific connects buyers to hundreds of premium CTV inventory sellers and data providers across partners such as SpotX, Magnite, OpenX and Samsung and runs on devices including Samsung, Vizio, and Roku. The company positions itself to capture a portion of the $72 billion TV advertising market and cites 200 million CTV viewers in the U.S. as part of its market opportunity. tvScientific is an Idealab company co-founded by Bill Gross and Jason Fairchild and has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2023

Letterhead is a software platform that automates creation, distribution, and monetization of email newsletters for publishers and marketing teams. It uses AI to let users manage multiple newsletters with the workflow of one while preserving personalized and bespoke content. The product integrates with a customer's existing content management system and email service provider to minimize switching costs. Letterhead is trusted by publishers of more than 1,800 newsletters and counts customers such as Techstars and Salon. The company aims to streamline audience engagement and help teams create targeted content products at scale. Following the new funding, Letterhead plans to further develop its platform, expand its team, and accelerate growth. Letterhead is a product spinout of Miami community publisher WhereBy.Us and offers a hosted software solution that combines ad systems, paid-subscription features and newsletter content tools in one product. Its core features include a self-service ad/payment system, paywalled subsections for subscriptions, text editing and template formatting, with analytics and additional ESP options planned next. The product is modular so customers can use parts of it alongside other email service providers and existing tech stacks. Since soft-launching earlier this year, Letterhead has signed a range of customers including startups, nonprofits, political groups and local news publishers, and is a partner in WordPress’ News Pack program. WhereBy.Us’s five city newsletters are described as comfortably profitable via ads overall (having recovered from a pandemic dip earlier this year), and the team is leveraging that operational experience to sell Letterhead.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2023

Certa provides an orchestration engine and platform that centralizes third‑party data, risk scoring, validations, templates, questionnaires and integrations to help enterprises manage vendor, partner and client risk. The company recently launched an ESG suite for supply‑chain requirements and a no‑code studio that lets users personalize risk‑exposed business processes via drag‑and‑drop. Certa emphasizes automation to reduce manual tasks, improve speed‑to‑market and standardize data that often lives in silos. Founder and CEO Jag Lamba frames the product around third‑party onboarding and continuous monitoring across privacy, finance, climate and regulatory risk types. The company employs around 200 people and claims roughly 170,000 users. Management declined to disclose burn rate but said the new funding will provide several years to accelerate the business. Certa provides a low-code/no-code platform that automates the entire third-party lifecycle, reducing onboarding time and increasing transparency across procurement, compliance, information security, privacy, and finance workflows. Its software orchestrates end-to-end workflows and enables procurement teams to build automations without IT support. The company reports more than 100 integrations and says it has helped clients onboard over one million companies across 120 countries in 17 languages, enabling roughly 3x quicker third-party vendor onboarding. Certa’s customers include large retailers, aerospace firms, credit card companies, and major tech organizations. The company positions itself to eliminate enterprise onboarding bottlenecks so customers can focus on core business and scale integrations more efficiently. Certa is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and was founded in 2015.