Led · Equity · Dec 2023

B-Robotics was spun out as an independent company in February and is 100% owned by Woowa Brothers, the operator of Baemin. Its flagship product, the Baemin Robot S model, handles serving and integrates with table-order systems and robot-control software. To date the company has deployed about 2,200 robots across roughly 1,600 stores. It is pursuing domestic localization and accelerating deployments while expanding distribution channels beyond restaurants into screen-golf venues, PC bangs, billiard halls, and logistics centers. The company secured a ₩3 billion investment from China’s Cheetah Mobile and plans to collaborate with Cheetah’s subsidiary OrionStar to enter global markets. Management says it aims to raise industry standards and scale its product and customer-data capabilities.

Led · Series A · Sep 2019

星巡智能 develops embedded AI vision products and has refocused from home security toward maternal and infant scenarios, concentrating on intelligent baby dynamic monitoring. The company released its first embedded-AI home camera, SIMCAM, in 2019 and later launched the Haima Babi AI baby monitor in April focused on 0–3 year sleep monitoring. SIMCAM secured Amazon orders at the ten‑thousand‑unit level, and Haima Babi sales rose from about 400 units in June to 5,000 during Double Eleven on e‑commerce platforms. Haima Babi is sold mainly on Tmall and JD and promoted online via Xiaohongshu, Weibo and Douyin, while offline partnerships include maternal‑child medical and early‑education institutions such as United Family (和睦家) and NYC. The company is planning a maternal‑child product matrix centered on children’s daily life and big data, and intends to launch a smart playpen and a smart highchair in January 2021. The firm received a recent A1 financing round for tens of millions of RMB and previously raised an $8M Pre‑A round in August of the prior year. SimShine's flagship product, SimCam, is a line of home security cameras that run computations on-device using edge computing to keep data — including face recognition data — local. The edge-first approach is intended to protect user privacy, reduce latency and false alarms, and remove the need for subscription-based cloud services, lowering device costs. SimCam currently integrates with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, and the company is working on Apple HomeKit support. SimShine's team spent five years developing computer vision and edge computing software for enterprise clients before launching SimCam. Earlier this year the company ran a Kickstarter campaign that raised $310,095. The company plans to release more smart-home products that use edge computing and ultimately build an IoT platform to connect devices.

Led · Series B · Jul 2016

Kika Tech develops Kika Keyboard, a third-party Android keyboard app offering fast typing and swiping, natural language prediction, theme and layout customization, emojis, and other personalization features. The app has achieved over 150 million downloads and 50 million monthly active users in less than two years. Led by co-founder and CEO Bill Hu, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Kika Tech completed a $33M Series B+ financing to support growth. The company intends to use the funds to expand into top markets including the United States, India, Brazil and Mexico. No revenue figures were disclosed in the article. Kika Tech develops a smart keyboard app for Android and is based in Sunnyvale, California. Led by CEO Bill Hu, the Kika Keyboard features emoji and emoticons, themes, GIFs, fonts, swipe-to-type, word predictions and suggestions, auto-correct, voice input, multiple layouts and dictionaries. The app is available in the Google Play Store and has over 130 million downloads and an average of 20 million daily active users. The company completed a Series B funding round to support its strategic plans. Kika intends to use the funds to consolidate its market share in the United States, Europe, Brazil and Mexico and to introduce the product to a wider overseas audience.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2015

GOQii operates a smart-health ecosystem combining wearable fitness trackers, a mobile app, real-time personalized coaching, diagnostics, and an online health store. Its platform includes tools such as a health locker, scheduling for health checkups, and the GOQii Cash program that rewards healthy behavior with cash and insurance discounts. The company also offers insurance services and is building digital therapeutics across areas including women’s health, diabetes, and radiology. GOQii says it aims to drive a permanent shift to healthier lifestyles by integrating advanced wearable technology with expert coaches. Founded in 2014 by Abhishek Sharma, Sachin Janghel, Champ Alreja, and Vishal Gondal, the company is headquartered in California with offices in Mumbai and Shenzhen. In India it competes with HealthifyMe, Cure.Fit, and Fittr. GOQii sells its own fitness trackers but centers on a cloud-based platform that sends users’ wearable data to real coaches who provide daily feedback. Subscriptions include a free wristband, and the platform is compatible with over 35 tracker brands, including Fitbit, Jawbone, and Misfit. GOQii uses big-data analytics to streamline coaching, enabling coaches to scale from handling about 5–10 clients a day to as many as 60–70. The company says it is the leading fitness tracker company in India and aims to reach one million users there. GOQii launched a U.S. beta in January and plans a public U.S. release by the first quarter of next year; it raised a $13.4M Series A to fund expansion in the U.S. and China. The company has not disclosed user or revenue figures but reports strong engagement on its coaching platform.

Led · Series B · Mar 2015

Nanigans builds ad-optimization and analytics software that automates and analyzes social and digital advertising, initially focused on Facebook. The company has been transitioning from a services-and-commission model to a year-long subscription SaaS model, with about 70% of customers already on annual subscriptions and an expectation of 100% by the end of June. Nanigans manages roughly $500 million in annualized ad spend and had been essentially bootstrapped and profitable before this round. It operates from headquarters in Boston with offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney, and an Asia-Pacific team in Singapore. Product roadmap includes expanding beyond Facebook (it added support for Twitter-owned MoPub last fall) while continuing to prioritize and improve the Facebook product. CEO Ric Calvillo has tied the SaaS strategy to longer-term liquidity plans, including a possible public offering in the next two to three years. Nanigans provides a licensable, self-serve tool that lets advertisers buy, intelligently target, and A/B test large Facebook ad campaigns while predicting customer lifetime value to optimize ROI rather than just minimizing CPA. Its predictive modeling engine can deduce and track how much a customer spends, enabling advertisers to prioritize higher-LTV cohorts even if acquisition costs are higher. The platform is used by social gaming and e-commerce customers including eBay, Fab.com, Rue La La, Zynga, GSN, Wooga, Kixeye and Kabam, and it runs hundreds of millions of dollars of Facebook ad spend per year. Revenue grew 6x in 18 months since its prior funding round, and headcount expanded from 15 to more than 100 within a year. Nanigans plans to invest the new funding in R&D—hiring PhD data scientists, advancing its predictive algorithms, and building intuitive UIs on top of Facebook's Ads APIs—and to expand into verticals such as retail and travel. The company reports that over a third of ad spend on its platform targets mobile users, is opening a Singapore office for global expansion, and has $8.85M reported in the bank. Nanigans operates a real-time bidding platform for Facebook that optimizes advertiser spend for downstream actions and lifetime customer value. The company's Ad Engine automates campaign management at scale and optimizes for actions such as Likes, app installs, registrations, virality and purchases. Nanigans is one of the first Official Facebook Ads API Partners and delivers social ads for over 200 customers including Bonobos, CrowdStar, EA, Gilt Groupe, PopCap Games and RockYou. The company serves tens of billions of ad impressions per month and will use the financing to expand its team, product development and partnerships. Nanigans recently made several executive hires to accelerate product development, including a SVP Product, VP Engineering and SVP Operations. It closed a $3M Series A to scale the Ad Engine and expand the team.