The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Aug 2024

Photon builds a full-stack prescription infrastructure combining digital prescribing and routing infrastructure, a pharmacy network, and a consumer-facing marketplace that surfaces real-time price and stock information. The platform includes capabilities such as prior authorization and clinical decision support and relies on AI to process complex pharmacy, benefits, and formulary data in real time. Photon began in direct-to-consumer digital health and has expanded into health systems, integrating with in-house pharmacies and provider workflows. Since its founding in 2021, the company says it has helped millions of patients make more informed pharmacy decisions. Photon plans to deepen marketplace integrations and expand health system partnerships to increase in-house pharmacy utilization and reduce administrative burden across the medication journey.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2024

CruxOCM develops a co-pilot platform that provides real-time automation, optimization, and data connectivity for control-room operators across pipeline and energy networks. Its product suite includes pipeBOT™, maxOPT™ and leanOPT™ to drive operational and business decisions. The platform integrates cross-domain, real-time, AI-driven software to help energy organizations improve financial, sustainability, and QHSE outcomes. The company is led by CEO Vicki Knott and targets energy-industry clients. CruxOCM intends to use the new funding to deliver additional value to its energy customers and expand deployment of its co-pilot capabilities. CruxOCM builds RIPA-enabled operations control management software that automates control-room tasks for oil and refined-products pipelines, helping maximize flow rates, streamline startup/shutdown procedures, and improve safety and asset utilization. The company claims its software increases revenue and safety for critical energy infrastructure and counts early customers including Phillips 66. CruxOCM plans to refine its user experience to deliver a more off-the-shelf product and to expand into additional energy verticals. Its near-term product-market focus is on US pipelines, with plans later to enter gas pipelines, gas plants, and offshore facilities. The company has seen rapid growth over the past two years, currently has 18 employees and plans to grow to 25 by year-end to support product development and deployments.

Participated · Series B · Mar 2024

Lily AI provides a retail AI platform that leverages generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing, and machine and deep learning to bridge merchant-speak and customer-speak. The platform interoperates with eCommerce, marketplace, and product management systems to optimize existing technology investments and lift revenue through better product attribution, descriptions, discovery, and conversion. Lily AI serves retailers and brands including Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, J.Crew, ThredUP, Abercrombie & Fitch, ALC, Living Spaces, and Arhaus. Led by CEO Purva Gupta, the female-founded company focuses on injecting human-centered language throughout the retail ecosystem. The company plans to use the new funding to extend its leadership into international markets, expand social and eCommerce platform integrations, and accelerate its engineering team to ship enterprise-grade AI solutions across the retail value chain. To date the firm has raised $62M in total capital. Lily AI offers a plug-in, SaaS product that trains algorithms on curated product taxonomies and customer interactions to improve onsite search, recommendations and discovery carousels. The company builds detailed product attribute data (style, fit, occasion, etc.) with a team of fashion, home and beauty experts to convert attributes into a mathematical language for its models. Lily emphasizes configurability and a privacy-preserving approach, avoiding names, addresses and transaction data in favor of anonymized user interactions. It pivoted from a consumer-facing app to an enterprise-focused solution and now serves customers including Macy’s, The Gap (and its brands), Bloomingdale’s and thredUP. Lily declined to disclose revenue figures; the company has 87 employees and says it is well-positioned to expand despite macroeconomic headwinds. Product and roadmap plans include expanding into enterprise and mid-market retail e-commerce across home, beauty and fashion, extending the solution deeper into the retail stack, and building a richer analytics suite for customers. Lily AI develops deep‑learning software that extracts rich product attributes from retailer catalogs and combines them with hashed customer data to predict individual customers’ affinities. The platform maps traits like style, fit and occasion to create personalized recommendations intended to increase conversion and spend. Co‑founders Purva Gupta and Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan pivoted the company from a consumer iOS app to an enterprise product in early 2018. Lily charges customers on a volume basis and its website claims a 10x ROI on customer spend; the CEO also says 100% of customers have seen a step gain in metrics. The company plans to use the new capital to accelerate development and adoption of its e‑commerce recommendation technology. The approach emphasizes privacy through use of hashed customer data and is framed around an empathy‑driven product philosophy.

Participated · Series A · Feb 2024

Founded in 2022 by ex-Pivotal CEO Rob Mee, Mechanical Orchard uses AI-enhanced tooling and cloud instances to create modernized copies of companies' aging apps and services. The company leverages generative AI as a "pair programmer" while keeping developers in the loop to debug and review output. Its process maps legacy system behavior and dependencies, then writes cloud-hosted code that replicates the old system’s functionality; customers own the resulting code and can deploy it where they choose. Mechanical Orchard positions its approach around risk reduction and continuous proof of migration to build IT leader confidence. It says it has enterprise customers in retail and logistics in the pipeline and sees demand across manufacturing, transport and financial services. The San Francisco–based company has about 90 employees with offices in the U.K., Ireland, Italy and Germany. New funding will be used to expand the company’s AI capabilities through R&D. Mechanical Orchard offers a platform that moves large enterprises off legacy mainframe systems onto cloud-based applications using iterative, AI-enhanced and reverse-engineering approaches. The technology gives CIOs and CTOs enhanced visibility and control to reduce migration risk while keeping critical systems online. Successful migrations produce faster speed to market, improved R&D capabilities, and easier integration of new revenue models. The company says recent funding will support continued investment in platform research and development and a comprehensive global sales and marketing program, and it expects further hires across the business in the next year. Launched in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, Mechanical Orchard now totals 50+ employees and has an international presence in the UK, Ireland, Italy, and Germany. Leadership includes founder and CEO Rob Mee, co-founder and COO Matthew Work, and Chief Scientist Kent Beck.

Participated · Seed · Jul 2022

Pebble is a Cambridge-based fintech that allows users to tailor passive investment strategies by selecting exactly what they want to own or avoid and specifying an investment amount. The platform employs direct indexing to translate those preferences into fractional holdings that mirror an index while honoring individual constraints. After users set the parameters, Pebble handles all calculations and routes trades to a brokerage for swift execution. Founded by Jason Whitehead, the company positions itself as an easy on-ramp for retail investors seeking customization beyond traditional ETFs. The newly secured seed funding will be directed toward expanding operations and broadening market reach. The article does not disclose revenue, user numbers, or other operating metrics, underscoring Pebble’s early-stage status. Overall, Pebble aims to use technology to democratize customized, tax-efficient investing once reserved for high-net-worth clients.