Participated · Series A · Jul 2022

XSET is a gaming organization and lifestyle brand that fields some of the world’s top competitive esports teams across titles including Valorant, Rocket League, Rainbow Six, Fortnite, Warzone, Apex Legends and eNASCAR. Founded in 2020 and based in Boston, MA, the company partners with brands such as Ghost Lifestyle, SCUF Gaming, Roots Canada, HyperX, Quality Control Music, Respawn, Fanshark and Wahlburgers. Since launch it has attracted talent from music, sports and entertainment including Swae Lee, Ozuna, Ezekiel Elliott, Nigel Sylvester, Tee Grizzley and Minna Stess. XSET raised $15M in a Series A to support growth. The company intends to use the proceeds to hire executive talent, expand marketing, and create content. It is opening a west coast office, gaming and content studio in Compton, CA and works with socially positive causes including Big Brother Big Sister of America. XSET is a gaming and lifestyle organization founded in 2020 that fields competitive esports teams and builds culture-driven merchandise and content. The company emphasizes diversity and equity, aiming to elevate representation of communities of color, women, and other underrepresented gamers. XSET partners with consumer brands such as Ghost Lifestyle, HyperX, SCUF Gaming, Roots Canada and Wahlburgers, and attracts talent across music, sports, and gaming. Its roster and collaborators include Grammy-nominated artists and pro athletes, and it fields top competitive squads including an all-female CS:GO team. XSET pursues content and brand collaborations alongside competitive play and merchandise as core offerings. The company announced a strategic partnership with QC Media Holdings/Quality Control that includes an investment and planned joint initiatives across content, music, talent recruitment, events, merchandise and licensing.

Led · Series B · Jun 2017

Oath Craft Pizza is a Boston-based fast-casual pizza company founded in November 2015 and led by CEO Patrik Hellstrand. The chain emphasizes a proprietary pizza crust, sustainably sourced toppings and community support through local causes and events. At the time of the article the company operated multiple locations including four Boston-area restaurants and the original Nantucket location. It was planning additional openings in 2017: a Central Square (Cambridge) restaurant later that summer and a Fenway location in the fall. The company also planned its first restaurant outside the Boston area later that fall in the Mosaic District in Fairfax County, VA. Total funding to date stood at $16M. Oath Craft Pizza is a Boston-based fast-casual restaurant operator offering chef-inspired craft pizzas with unique flavor profiles served on a trade-secret crust. The company emphasizes quality ingredients, minimal wait times, and a branded guest experience across its four Massachusetts locations. Oath positions itself to transform the fast-casual space by combining culinary artistry with smaller footprints and new technologies. The brand says it exists to serve great food while enriching its community. The new capital will be used to accelerate growth in the Boston metro and to expand into New York and Washington, DC. To date Oath has raised $9 million since inception, including the recent $4.5M Series A.

Participated · Series B · Nov 2015

M.Gemi is a direct-to-consumer accessories and footwear brand founded in 2015 by Ben Fischman, Cheryl Kaplan and Maria Gangemi. The company combines craftsmanship with technology to release new products—mainly shoes—for men and women each week. Each piece is handmade in Italy by craftspeople at family-owned workshops, with new styles released each Monday. M.Gemi operates offices in Boston, New York and Florence and maintains storefronts in New York City’s Soho neighborhood and Boston’s Prudential Center. The company plans to use recent funding to accelerate investment in technology to enhance predictive analytics and to strengthen its supply chain in Italy. Following the new round, M.Gemi has raised $47.2M in total funding. M.Gemi is a luxury shoes brand that partners with Italy’s specialty factories to produce handcrafted, limited-edition styles. Launched in March 2015 by CEO Ben Fischman, the company releases new styles every Monday and adjusts its supply chain weekly based on client reactions. Its core product is artisanal footwear sold through a model that emphasizes rapid feedback and limited runs. The company intends to use the new funding to build out the team, develop data-centric inventory management systems and invest in innovative marketing strategies. M.Gemi closed an $18M Series B, bringing total funding to $32M. It operates between Boston, MA and Florence, Italy. M.Gemi sells handcrafted Italian women's footwear directly to consumers online and via mobile, positioning its products at lower price points than traditional luxury brands. The company was created out of Launch, a Boston-based venture-building studio, and was officially founded around nine months prior to the article. It partners with Italian factories to cut out wholesalers and showrooms, using workflow, logistics, materials sourcing and prototyping tools to flatten the supply chain and reduce costs. M.Gemi launches new collections weekly (new styles every Monday), had 28 styles at launch, and prices its shoes from $128 to $298. Shoes ship anywhere in the U.S. with free shipping and hassle-free returns, and the company plans a mobile app and has discussed lower-cost brick-and-mortar pop-ups for the future. The founders note the main near-term challenge is building brand awareness in a crowded shoe market, but say their factory relationships enable a steady product flow that is difficult for competitors to copy.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2015

True Fit is a Boston, MA-based consumer experience data platform that decodes fit and size for the apparel and footwear industry. Led by President & CEO William R. Adler, its platform organizes footwear, apparel and consumer data to provide fit recommendations across brands and styles. The platform is leveraged by leading footwear and apparel retailers and represents 17,000 brands and 82 million active members. True Fit provides shoppers the opportunity to personalize the online buying experience. The company raised $30M in growth funding and intends to use the proceeds to expand operations and its business reach. The platform covers the industry’s brands and styles to deliver fit recommendations for apparel and footwear. True Fit is a Boston-based personalization platform for apparel and footwear that helps online shoppers find clothes that fit and match their tastes. The company built a data platform that matches the data of clothes customers have purchased with items they are considering, pulling in 100+ data points per clothing range and employing machine learning/AI. It began by solving the fit problem to reduce returns and has expanded into a broader recommendation engine offered via an API. The API is intended to help retailers personalize search, email marketing, retargeting and, in future, chat and voice applications. True Fit's data also powers analytics and insights for retailers and brands to inform merchandising, marketing, and manufacturing decisions. The company works with retailers and partners across North America, the U.K., the E.U., and has recently expanded into Asia and South America; it says registered users with True Fit profiles have surpassed 55 million. True Fit is a discovery platform for footwear and apparel that has mapped a Genome™ of fit, style, and consumer preference data. The Genome defines millions of styles from 10,000 brands with 100–200 detailed attributes per item and powers its Confidence Engine, Discovery Engine, and True Insight analytics. Through advanced machine learning the platform delivers personalized recommendations and curates catalogs to match consumers’ fit, personal style, and performance needs, producing a reported 5 percent site‑wide lift to retailers’ net revenue. Retailer demand for its SaaS solution has risen sharply, with bookings and enterprise retail partnerships tripling year‑on‑year. True Fit's registered user base exceeds 20 million, adds about 1.5 million new users monthly from 300 million monthly page views, and is projected to surpass 30 million by year‑end. The company plans to use new funding to serve rising demand, drive continued innovation, and accelerate market growth of new products from the Genome platform. True Fit’s Discovery Engine aggregates fit data from 1,500 brands and anonymized transaction data to determine what clothing and shoes shoppers actually keep or return. When a user visits a retailer site (for example Macy’s or Nordstrom) they can create a True Fit profile by answering a few quick questions about items in their closet, a process the CEO says takes about 30 seconds. Once a profile is established, True Fit recommends the best size for an item and refines recommendations as the profile is used across retailers and categories. CEO Bill Adler says the recommendations reduce purchase hesitation, improve conversion for retail partners, and help shoppers pick items they’ll actually continue to wear. The company passed 5 million user profiles in 2014, added 1.2 million of those during the recent holiday season, and is currently adding roughly 150,000–200,000 users per week. True Fit raised $15M to fund further expansion. True Fit Corp., operating as My True Fit, is a Woburn, MA e-commerce site that uses proprietary True Fit software to match individuals to clothing and shoes tailored to their personal style and unique body type. The company says its software has been perfected over years of work directly with leading apparel brands. My True Fit reports hundreds of thousands of registered users. Financially, the company has secured $4.36 million of a planned $4.5 million equity funding round. Breakaway Ventures and Guggenheim Partners are listed as investors in the round.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2014

Drizly Group operates an online marketplace for beer, wine and spirits that provides a transparent shopping experience where consumers can compare stores on price, delivery time and overall rating. The company is led by CEO Cory Rellas and is based in Boston, MA. It operates in 235 markets across North America through a network of 3,300 independent and chain retail partners. Drizly also houses Lantern, an independently operated online cannabis commerce company launched in March. Lantern is currently operating in Massachusetts and Michigan. Drizly intends to use new funds to further accelerate product and customer growth. Drizly operates an on-demand delivery app that displays local store prices and delivery or pick-up options for beer, wine and spirits. The company partners with approximately 1,000 brick-and-mortar liquor stores across the U.S. and Canada and says deliveries arrive in less than an hour. Drizly recently completed a $34.5 million financing, roughly doubling its prior $33 million in total funding. Over the past year it has added a CMO, CFO and head of HR and in late summer shifted co-founder Nick Rellas into an advisory role while Cory Rellas became CEO. The company made its first acquisition in July, absorbing Buttery and integrating that startup’s backend technology and employees. Drizly says Cory’s operational experience and time at Bain Capital position him to lead the company through its next stage of growth. Drizly operates a marketplace and commerce platform that lets local liquor stores list beer, wine and spirits, showing shoppers local prices and delivery or pickup options via web and mobile. The company has shifted from an on-demand delivery model toward a metasearch‑style marketplace for alcohol e-commerce. Stores pay a monthly licensing fee to use Drizly’s software and sell through its platform; Drizly sets prices per market based on local spend and delivery costs. The company is using recent capital to build new features and services, expand into more US regional, suburban and rural markets, and roll out in-store pickup nationwide. Drizly also plans to develop personalized recommendations to engage different customer segments, such as corporate bulk buyers and wine enthusiasts. The business faces competition from general food e-commerce players and other alcohol-focused apps but cites legal and infrastructure advantages from four years of work. Drizly provides technology infrastructure and an e-commerce platform that enables liquor retailers to offer on-demand delivery and manage orders. Users can browse a wide variety of beer, wine and spirits and see delivery windows and prices from retail partners. Retail partners receive orders through Drizly and fulfill deliveries with their own staff, paying Drizly a slice of each transaction. Drizly Connect, launched earlier this summer, offers longer delivery windows up to 48 hours and positions the company as an Amazon Prime–like option for alcohol. According to CEO Nick Rellas, around 40% of orders on the platform are placed at least 36 hours in advance. The company currently serves 23 markets and is on pace to be in 30 markets, including some in Canada, by the end of the year. With this round, Drizly’s total funding stands at $32.8 million. Drizly operates a mobile app that lets users order spirits, beer and wine from local liquor stores and have them delivered. The system integrates with liquor stores' POS so orders flow directly to vendors for fulfillment, avoiding the need to build Drizly-owned delivery infrastructure. Drizly intentionally partners with stores that already offer delivery and charges vendors a monthly licensing fee that varies by location and transaction volume. The service is handling orders in the low tens of thousands each month and is reporting roughly 25% month-over-month growth across major markets. Drizly is currently live in multiple U.S. cities and aims to expand to about 30 markets by year-end. A partnership with the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America gives Drizly access to a network of wholesalers to help onboard more vendors.