Participated · Equity · Feb 2020

ZeroFOX offers a SaaS platform that provides visibility, detection and automated remediation for threats across social, mobile, surface, deep & dark web, email and collaboration platforms. Its AI capabilities include deepfake detection (Deepstar), scalable object detection, OCR for image-driven platforms, and business-email-compromise detection. The platform analyzes millions of content pieces per day and protects thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of digital brands and accounts. ZeroFOX cites industry metrics (its 2019 Financial Services Digital Threat Report) showing large increases in digital threat activity and positions its technology to address scale and sophistication gaps left by legacy vendors. The company has integrated Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit to accelerate detection and remediation. It plans to use new funding to accelerate global expansion, advance its AI roadmap, and strengthen its intellectual property. ZeroFox offers a platform designed to catch malicious links, prevent account takeovers, and stop social-media scams like coupon fraud. It sells primarily to security teams and CISOs, as well as risk and fraud groups, marketing teams that manage social accounts, and ISPs. Named customers include Rogers Communications and Comcast. The company operates on a subscription model, charging on a per-account basis starting at $20 per month. CEO James Foster has emphasized that social media is an information-sharing channel where users are more likely to "trust and click," creating a growing attack vector. The $40 million Series C was announced to help companies manage social-media risk. As part of the deal, Alastair Cookson of Redline Capital Management joined ZeroFox's board. ZeroFOX is a Baltimore, MD–based provider of social media security solutions offering a detection and defense platform that continuously monitors social platforms for cyber attacks, account compromise, fraud, information loss and social engineering campaigns. The company leverages its technology and security practices to protect organizations from next‑generation digital threats. James C. Foster serves as Chairman and CEO. ZeroFOX raised an additional $27M in funding to support its operations. The company plans to invest the proceeds into engineering, expand global sales and marketing efforts, increase M&A activity, and focus on intellectual property protection and defense. In conjunction with the round, Highland Capital general partner Corey Mulloy is joining the ZeroFOX board. ZeroFOX offers a cloud-based Social Risk Management platform that provides real-time risk management, threat intelligence, and security analytics to detect social-based cyber attacks, fraud, phishing, social engineering, and impersonations. The platform is aimed at enterprise and government customers to give visibility into an extended attack surface created by social media. The company emphasizes proactive mitigation of social-media–driven threats and plans to scale its presence with NEA’s support to become a global brand for Social Risk Management. ZeroFOX highlights industry recognition and awards, including multiple regional and industry honors. Financially, the company announced a $10.7M Series A and reported total funding of $13M over the prior 12 months, including a $450K non-dilutive incentive from the State of Maryland. ZeroFOX was founded in January 2013 and is based in Baltimore. Riskive offers a cloud-based Social Risk Management platform that leverages predictive analytics to identify, monitor and prevent social-media–based cyber threats. Its technology is deployed in beta and is designed to provide real-time protection for users, applications and social brand assets. The company targets government and enterprise customers and emphasizes preventing attacks before they occur. Riskive has assembled a team of more than 12 security experts who continue to enhance the proprietary platform. The leadership has signaled ongoing research and development of innovative defense technologies to keep ahead of emerging social threats. The company recently raised seed funding to support product development and deployment.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2019

Stardog provides an Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform that makes real-world context machine-understandable, enabling organizations to unify data without changing underlying sources by endlessly linking concepts. Its semantic data layer connects data silos across data lakes, warehouses, and other enterprise sources to accelerate insights. Coupled with fine-tuned large language models, Stardog’s knowledge graphs enable contextualized question-answering and help extract structured data from documents. The platform is positioned to help enterprises customize foundation models using curated domain data and to enhance productivity for data engineers and data scientists. Customers referenced in the article include Boehringer Ingelheim, Schneider Electric, and NASA. The company is presented as a tool for enterprises to advance data unification and take advantage of generative AI advancements. Stardog provides an Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform used by enterprise customers to integrate data via combined graph storage and virtualization capabilities. Its platform supports use cases such as operational resilience, pharmaceutical R&D, and situational awareness. Customers named in the article include Morgan Stanley, NASA, Schneider Electric, Bayer and Bosch. The company is led by CEO and founder Kendall Clark. With the announced extension to its Series B, Stardog plans to scale go-to-market operations, expand EU operations, strengthen work in the public sector, and develop tools and partnerships to broaden access to knowledge graphs. The article frames the company as focused on broadening adoption of knowledge graphs across industry and government customers. Stardog provides an enterprise data unification platform that leverages knowledge graph technology to unify and manage enterprise data. The platform supports deployment on-premise or in customers' private cloud instances. Led by CEO and founder Kendall Clark, Stardog plans to expand its offering to include a Knowledge Graph as a Service to enable hybrid cloud environments and improved data control and management. Customers include Morgan Stanley, Dow Jones, Siemens and the U.S. Air Force. The company has raised a total of $20 million in equity financing to date, including a $9 million Series B. It intends to use the new funds to launch product offerings, scale go-to-market initiatives and add roles across engineering, customer success, sales and marketing. Stardog Union offers an enterprise knowledge graph platform that combines a graph database with a knowledge toolkit to unify all enterprise data sources and databases of every type, regardless of structure. Led by CEO and co‑founder Kendall Clark, the platform is designed for simplicity of implementation while allowing customers to query massive, disparate, heterogeneous data. Enterprise customers include Fortune 500 companies across finance, healthcare, life sciences, energy, media, and government. The company raised additional capital as part of its Series A, expanding the round to $9M. New funds will be used to expand operations, including sales and marketing, and to accelerate product development. Stardog Union provides an enterprise knowledge graph technology platform that enables customers to query across disparate, heterogeneous, and massive arrays of siloed data regardless of structure. The platform emphasizes flexibility and reusability and is led by CEO and co-founder Kendall Clark. Enterprise customers include Fortune 500 companies across finance, healthcare, life sciences, energy, media, and government. The company plans to use new funding for product development and to accelerate sales and marketing growth for its platform. Stardog serves large enterprises seeking to unify and query siloed data and is headquartered in Arlington, VA.

Led · Equity · Mar 2018

Staq is an NYC-based automated reporting platform as a service for digital advertising that automates and unifies reporting and analytics across the ad technology stack. Led by CEO Andy Ellenthal, the company’s proprietary platform connects to over 400 ad servers, exchanges, social media platforms and CRM workflow tools, eliminating manual spreadsheet work while driving higher yield and ROI. Staq closed a $2M funding round to support product and team growth. The company intends to use the funds to enhance its software platform by creating an expanded back-end with a flexible data-lake architecture. It plans to introduce features and services including industry-wide data normalization, benchmarking and descriptive analytics, and to grow its sales and engineering teams. Staq offers a SaaS-based integrations and reporting automation platform for digital advertising, unifying analytics and automating operations across the ad technology stack. Led by CEO James Curran, the platform integrates the technologies publishers, brands, and agencies use to transact and monitor business performance at scale. The solution contains over 350 integrations with ad servers, exchanges, CRM and workflow tools. The company closed a $5M venture capital round to support growth. Staq plans to use the funds to add integrations between digital advertising technologies, expand the scope of advertising analysis and optimization available through the platform, and hire additional personnel. Staq develops a collection, reporting, and integrations system for advertising technology that consolidates campaign, inventory, audience, sales pipeline, and analytics data across ad stacks. Its product enables users to view campaigns, inventory, audience data, sales pipeline and analytics from across all of their advertising technology. The system has integrated into more than 175 technologies among publishers and marketers, including ad servers, RTB exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, audience targeting systems, analytics, CRM and workflow tools. The company was founded in 2012 by James Curran (CEO) and Mike Subelsky (CTO) and is based in New York City and Baltimore. Staq recently secured $2.5M in Series A financing and intends to use the funds to expand adoption of the product.

Participated · Series B · Dec 2016

Spark Capital acted as the lead investor on a $20 million Series B for the author’s software company. The round included participation from the company’s existing backers: Battery Ventures, Core Capital, Contour Venture Partners, IDEA Fund Partners and Salesforce Ventures. The financing was announced as a Series B round; no breakdown of instruments beyond the round type or debt was disclosed. The portfolio company referenced is based in North Carolina’s Research Triangle and had previously completed a Series A. The article frames Spark Capital’s role in the context of fundraising for startups outside the Bay Area and highlights the firm leading this growth-stage round. No operating metrics such as revenue or user counts were disclosed in the article.

Participated · Series C · Jan 2016

Fugue provides a dynamic, software-defined cloud orchestration and enforcement system that enables users to manage cloud infrastructure at scale. It supports customers through the entire cloud journey, from migrating legacy applications from the datacenter to deploying container-based and serverless workloads. The company is preparing to launch new enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure automation products that offer enhanced team collaboration, dynamic infrastructure control, and continuous enforcement of regulatory compliance. Fugue plans to use the newly raised funds to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and to speed product development. The company closed an approximately $41m Series D round, bringing total funding to more than $75m. Fugue is led by co-founder and CEO Josh Stella and is based in Frederick, Md. Fugue (formerly Luminal) builds what it describes as an operating system for the cloud, enabling businesses to declare their desired cloud infrastructure and set policies for accessing it. The product also helps organizations migrate datacenter workloads to the cloud and is currently focused on AWS as its main target platform. Fugue's core product was in closed beta at the time of the report, and the company rebranded and updated its logo to reflect that focus. The company positions itself alongside IT automation tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible but emphasizes infrastructure and can be used in parallel with existing DevOps tooling. Josh Stella is the founder and CEO. Fugue is based in Frederick, MD and Washington, DC and recently secured new funding to support its development. Luminal offers a cloud management service that automates deployments and configuration using declarative control and ephemeral, immutable infrastructure patterns to reduce configuration drift and improve security. The product is targeted at businesses moving infrastructure to the cloud and will first be available on Amazon Web Services. The service is currently in private beta while Luminal works with early customers. With the new funding, the company plans to grow its team and expand its beta customer base ahead of a full launch. Competitive peers mentioned include RightScale, Platform9, large vendors like VMware, and projects such as CoreOS. Financially, Luminal has raised a total of $13.8M to date.