• Backed

  Participated · Seed · Dec 2015

  Backed connects borrowers who have thin or no credit files with sponsors (backers) who can vouch for them to reduce interest rates and enable access to loans. Borrowers bring in sponsors who act as backers rather than traditional co-signers; backers are notified after a borrower's credit is damaged rather than being immediately responsible for the full loan. The company offers loans ranging from $3,000 to $25,000 with interest rates averaging roughly 11%. Co-founders George Popescu and Gilad Woltsovitch position the product to help millennials and "credit invisibles" build credit; Popescu notes his own lack of a credit score when he arrived in the U.S. Backed is accepting loan applications in New York, New Jersey, and Florida. The company has raised over $2 million in seed financing to date (including a $1.5M raise reported) from a collection of angel investors, iAngels, and Cyhawk Ventures, and will use roughly half the new funds for product development and hiring and the remainder for customer acquisition.

• Appoxee

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2013

  Appoxee offers a mobile engagement platform that helps app publishers build automated campaigns aimed at increasing retention and in‑app purchases by working backwards from customer goals. The product targets product and marketing managers and emphasizes automation to simplify campaign creation. The company reports thousands of developers and apps using the platform, including Playtika, Social Point, Sygic, and Win.com. Install metrics grew from 3 million devices in 2011 to 60 million in 2012 and to 275 million installs today; it sends over half a billion push notifications per month. Revenue is reported as up 800% since the beginning of the year; the company offers a free tier (unlimited push up to 250,000 users) and premium plans starting at $500/month. Appoxee plans to open a San Francisco office by year‑end, expand sales and marketing in the U.S., grow its Tel Aviv engineering and product team, and hopes to double its 15‑person team by next year.

• BIScience

  Led · Equity · Oct 2012

  BIScience is the developer of AdClarity, a digital media intelligence platform that delivers cross-channel monitoring, planning, and optimization across Display, Video, Mobile Web, Mobile Apps and Social channels. Its platform processes over 100 TB of digital media data daily and monitors more than 500,000 publishers and mobile apps across 22 million publisher pages worldwide. BIScience conducts monthly monitoring of over 14.5 million campaigns across more than 35,000 ad platforms and covers over 120 geographies. The company’s competitive intelligence portfolio provides actionable insights such as share of voice, impressions and ad spend, unique publisher audience and traffic data, aggregated RTB rates, and ad platform usage. BIScience enables online media professionals to make data-driven strategic decisions and to improve ROI on media expenditures. The company is collaborating with Kantar Media to expand channel coverage and deliver enhanced programmatic and real-time intelligence and optimization services to clients. BIScience, founded in 2009 and based in Tel Aviv, offers AdClarity, a competitive intelligence product that provides a birds-eye view of competitors' online advertising. Its technology monitors over half a million Internet pages across eight regions to unveil competitors' campaigns for sales, marketing and media-buying teams. The company was originally built as a business intelligence and analytics tool, but AdClarity resonated most with customers. BIScience competes in a market with players such as InfoArmy and Dun & Bradstreet. The product is currently in beta and the company plans to launch its media intelligence tool in New York next month. With new funding, the founders intend to invest in research and development and expand to new channels like mobile and video.

• Pluralis

  Led · Seed · Sep 2012

  Pluralis runs a crowdsourced contest platform that lets businesses solicit redesigns and copy from a network of creative optimizers to improve landing-page conversion rates. Businesses post contests with tiered payments tied to measured conversion improvements and entrants use Pluralis’s tools to modify text, images, and headers. After submissions, clients select revisions to A/B test live; a submission only wins if it outperforms all others and the incumbent page, and clients pay only for proven gains. Pluralis completed beta tests with customers including SysAid and Jottix Media and has opened the service to the public. During beta the company reported average conversion improvements of 17–27 percent. Financially, Pluralis has raised $1 million in seed funding from Thetime and Cyhawk Ventures.

No current team members are available.