• Catalog Spree

  Participated · Series A · Nov 2011

  Catalog Spree is an iPad-focused digital catalog shopping app offering interactive, personalized shopping experiences for consumers and a rich engagement platform for retailers. Since its late‑April 2011 launch the app has grown to include more than 100 retail catalogs and is the highest-rated, reviewed and used catalog shopping app in the App Store. Usage data cited by the company shows shoppers spending more than 30 minutes per session and viewing over 100 pages per session. The company says it will continue evolving its personalized shopping experience and delighting retailers with high consumer engagement. The new funding is intended to fuel continued innovations in tablet-based user experiences and provide a new platform for retailers to express their brands directly to consumers. Catalog Spree also announced additions to its executive team, including Claudia Carpenter (VP of User Experience), Lee Bieber (VP of Engineering and Operations) and Maggie Athoe (VP of U.S. Sales).

• mDialog

  Led · Series A · Sep 2011

  mDialog provides a Stream Mediation Platform that lets broadcasters and operators deliver traditional lean-back TV commercial experiences as well as interactive brand engagement on tablets, smartphones and other devices. The platform is designed to work with customers' existing ad operations workflows so publishers and operators can extend TV ads to new endpoints. The company says its technology supports a range of mobile and connected devices including the iPad, iPhone, Android devices, Roku and other platforms. mDialog plans to use new funding to expand its offerings across these mobile and connected devices. The article frames the company as addressing changes in viewing driven by tablets, smartphones, over-the-top boxes and cord-cutting. No operating metrics or revenue figures were disclosed in the article.

• Copious

  Participated · Seed · Jun 2011

  Copious operates an eBay-like online marketplace that requires users to connect via Twitter or Facebook, creating a socially savvy backbone for buying and selling new and used items. The site launched in beta to the public in June 2011 and is led by co‑founder and CEO Jim Rose. Copious reports hundreds of thousands of users, with a primary demographic of women aged 18–40. The team consists of about 12 staffers. The company plans to use new funding to build out its team, expand its feature set and demographic base, and eventually extend its reach to international markets. Financially, Copious has recently completed a Series A following an earlier seed round. Copious operates an eBay-style marketplace in which every buyer and seller is linked to their Facebook identity and social graph. The site uses a proprietary set of signals — pulling data from Facebook likes, Twitter accounts, other marketplaces like eBay, product forums and blogs — to surface trust and relevance, plus recommendations. Sellers can integrate social proofs, offer social-pricing discounts for sharing or following, and the platform holds payments in escrow until buyers verify shipment. Copious launched with a select group of handbag sellers including eBags, Malababa and Ritzy Ragz and plans to expand into electronics and clothing. The marketplace charges no listing fee and applies a flat transaction fee of 10 percent (discounted to 3.5 percent for a limited time after launch). Copious was founded in January 2011 by Jim Rose, Rob Zuber and Jonathan Ehrlich and has raised outside funding.

• Fuse Powered Inc.

  Led · Seed · May 2011

  Fuse Powered is an iOS publisher and analytics provider that delivers real-time app usage analytics to developers. The company uses those analytics to advise partners on how to spend their marketing budgets. As a publisher it holds several licensed properties, including Jaws and Dawn of the Dead. Fuse won an accelerator program a few months prior, which secured office space at an incubator in San Francisco. The company announced a $2 million seed round led by BlackBerry Partners Fund and NFQ Ventures. The article states that with this investment Fuse Powered "should be set for some time."

• Prove

  Participated · Equity · Apr 2011

  Prove Identity builds mobile-first identity verification technology that links a phone’s SIM data with handset functionality (for example, facial recognition) to authenticate users and trigger actions like pre-filled forms, verification flows and password-free authentication. The company says the mobile handset remains central to its proposition and markets its tools as delivering faster onboarding, lower abandonment and reduced fraud (it cites 79% faster onboarding, 35% reduction in abandonment and a 75% reduction in fraud). Prove serves roughly 1,000 business customers, including major banks, retailers, insurers and firms such as FanDuel, Experian, Visa, Starbucks, BlueCross BlueShield and DocuSign. It reported 40% international growth in the last year and says it is cash-flow positive. Historically, the company (originally Payfone) reported processing 20 billion authentications in 2019 and was founded around 2008. Prove plans to use the new funding to build out more tools for digital payments and commerce and to expand its fraud-detection capabilities. Payfone provides a B2B2C platform that creates trust scores and tokens from telecoms and mobile-phone signals to identify and verify users without storing personal data. Its technology is used by carriers, banks, healthcare and insurance companies to authenticate transactions and logins, operating invisibly as a complement or alternative to other authentication methods. The company plans to build more machine learning into its algorithms, expand into 35 additional geographies, and pursue strategic acquisitions to broaden its technology stack. Payfone has discussed forming a consortium or clearing-house approach to share identity signals securely. It processed 20 billion authentications in 2019 and reported roughly 70% year-over-year growth, with a stated aim to reach 100 billion authentications in coming years. Payfone says it is already profitable and has raised $175 million to date. Payfone provides Trust Platform™ and Trust Score™ to enable businesses to instantly verify customers and thwart fraud and cyberattacks in real time. The company operates within a privacy-first, zero-knowledge framework that prevents consumer information from being passed, stored, or aggregated. In March it announced the next phase of its Zero-Knowledge architecture to enable identity verification partners, such as mobile network operators, to verify identities without sharing consumer information. Payfone serves six of the top ten US financial institutions and customers in healthcare, insurance, technology and retail. In 2018 the company authenticated 20 billion transactions for Fortune 500 companies and said it expected to double that number in 2019. The company is led by CEO Rodger Desai. Payfone operates a patented digital identity authentication platform that dynamically analyzes millions of signals to generate a proprietary Trust Score for each digital identity. Its product suite includes Fonebook, Instant Authentication for Mobile, Instant Authentication for Voice, Trust Score, and Identity Pre-Fill, all intended to accelerate revenue, improve conversions, and reduce fraud and operating expense. Payfone positions its technology to replace one-time SMS passcodes and knowledge-based authentication, thwart SIM-swap and porting fraud, and improve call-center authentication. The company says it is trusted by the world’s largest banks, insurers, brokerages and technology companies and targets sectors including retail, financial services, insurance, healthcare and technology. Payfone emphasizes delivering strong cybersecurity without sacrificing customer experience and aims to expand these benefits to more companies and customers. The company’s latest funding round totals $23 million; terms of the round were not disclosed. Payfone is a New York–based provider of mobile identity authentication for digital channels. It develops a patented mobile authentication technology that businesses use to protect customers from identity theft and social engineering attacks. The company's solution is positioned to limit fraud losses and reduce authentication-related expenses while driving customer engagement. Payfone is led by CEO Rodger Desai. In May 2017 the company raised $23.5m in a Series E financing. The round also included board additions tied to the financing.

No current team members are available.