The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Aug 2020

MikMak provides e-commerce marketing, analytics, and retail insights that give traditional consumer brands real-time views of activity across online retailers such as Amazon, Target, and Walmart. Its platform helps brands like Colgate, Dreyer’s, and Hershey’s manage online retail strategies and capture sales intelligence. Founder and CEO Rachel Tipograph launched the company in 2014 as a “QVC for Snapchat,” and the business pivoted to its current model in 2017. MikMak has been cash flow positive since 2018 and reported that consumer demand during the pandemic boosted its revenue by 50% from March to the present. With roughly 60 employees today, the company plans to triple headcount by year-end while advancing its product roadmap, expanding its retail footprint, and offering services to international companies. Following increased VC attention during the global pandemic, MikMak is positioning to gain market share. MikMak creates and distributes short-form “mini-mercials” that let users shop directly through video content. The company launched in May 2015 and initially offered SMBs and retailers the ability to list products on the MikMak app while MikMak handled all production costs and took a small percentage of each sale. MikMak produces videos by hiring up-and-coming comedians and actors and operating a studio production-line that shoots back-to-back on multiple products. Its distribution network includes publishers such as BuzzFeed. MikMak plans to launch a SaaS product in the coming months to let retailers own customer data, integrate with preferred shopping carts, select SKUs for mini-mercials, and customize videos to their brand voice. Pricing for the SaaS product has not been disclosed.

Participated · Series A · Jan 2016

Canvs builds semantic and natural-language technology that analyzes social media text to classify statements into 56 distinct emotional categories. The product generates timelines showing the emotional breakdown around a piece of content and can link reactions to the exact moment in a show or ad. Canvs currently ingests Twitter plus customers' Facebook and YouTube pages and claims robustness to slang, misspellings and emojis. The company maintains a data team led by Chief Scientist Sam Hui and an editorial team that curates language nuance. Customers include Sony Pictures, SMG, NBCU and Viacom. With a recent Series A, Canvs is expanding its platform coverage and moving toward 24/7 social tracking rather than only measuring audience response during broadcasts.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2015

Affinio provides an interest analytics platform that applies machine learning and a graph engine to analyze and visualize massive consumer data sets and uncover naturally‑forming interest segments. The platform is designed to help marketers uncover new audiences, inform content strategy, and better connect with consumers by identifying interests and affinities. The company is led by CEO and co‑founder Tim Burke and counts customers including BBC Worldwide, Unilever and Lionsgate. Affinio raised $9M in a Series B and intends to use the proceeds to accelerate global expansion, hire key executives and expedite consumer data integrations. The Series B brings the company’s total funding to nearly $14M to date. The company is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Affinio is a marketing intelligence platform that leverages the social graph and proprietary algorithms to group audiences into interest‑based communities and data‑driven personas. Its platform analyzes social connections to reveal what audiences like, consume and share and how they communicate, helping brands and agencies create targeted paid and owned content strategies. The company’s technology is described as proprietary, deep‑learning based social and content affinity technology and graph technology. Clients include BBC Worldwide, SABMiller and L’Oréal, and early adopters have praised the platform’s insights. Since launching the platform in October 2014 Affinio has experienced double‑digit monthly revenue growth. Affinio plans to use its new capital to fund ongoing global expansion and continued product development. Founded in 2013 and based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the company sells its marketing intelligence platform to brands and agencies. Affinio develops Tactics Cloud, a SaaS network-intelligence product that applies graph data analysis and machine-learning to billions of strands of public social and business data to identify individuals and groups with shared skills, interests, and relationships. Tactics Cloud emphasizes social network connections rather than conventional social media monitoring to generate unique sales and marketing insights across the customer life cycle. Affinio describes its underlying graph-analysis and ML engine as among the fastest in the world and positions Tactics Cloud as its first commercial product. The company is targeting small and medium-sized businesses and will offer a trial during its beta starting in November, with a full launch expected in early 2014. CEO Tim Burke and co-founder Stephen Hankinson began developing the product over a year prior to the announcement. The company announced a $1.5 million seed financing from Build Ventures to advance product development and go-to-market efforts.

Led · Seed · Jun 2015

DIDiT operates a mobile-first marketplace for consumers seeking to discover, collect, plan and accomplish offline experiences. The platform enables users to early discover experiences, post-experience share, and re-live moments using its patent-pending technology. DIDiT plans to use machine-learning capabilities to provide customized recommendations throughout users' lives. The company envisions partnerships with publishers, celebrities and global brands to broaden reach and content. DIDiT is led by CEO David Paschkes and is focused on leveraging online technology to drive offline experiences. Financially, the company announced a seed fundraising round reported in June 2015.