Participated · Series C · May 2022

Point has built a platform around the Home Equity Investment (HEI) model, giving homeowners cash today in exchange for a share of their home’s future appreciation rather than requiring a traditional loan. The company says it has already originated more than $2 billion of HEIs and served over 20,000 homeowners nationwide. Management positions this traction as evidence of a broader shift in how consumers view home-equity financing. Looking ahead, Point expects its 2025 performance to exceed 2024 by more than 3×, signaling rapid growth in demand. The newly announced funding capacity should enable the firm to support tens of thousands of additional households. By eliminating monthly payments and extra debt, Point aims to make home equity more flexible and accessible. The company also emphasizes creating long-term value for both homeowners and institutional investors through scalable, responsible underwriting.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2022

Pavilion Data Systems is a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of a data analytics acceleration platform and a pioneer of NVMe-oF. Its Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform, powered by Pavilion HyperOS, targets GPU-based computing and delivers high performance, density, ultra-low latency, scalability and flexibility. The platform complements AI/ML, HPC, analytics, edge and other data-driven workloads and serves enterprises seeking faster, scalable data I/O. Pavilion reported expanded deployments within federal agencies and increased analytics penetration at multiple Fortune 500 customers, including a top-20 bank, a top credit agency, and a large hedge fund. The company says it doubled new customers and opened new sales offices in Atlanta, Boston, and London while expanding into life sciences, financial, and media and entertainment verticals. Pavilion intends to use new funding to continue expanding operations and broaden its business reach. Pavilion Data Systems develops an ultra-fast, rack-scale NVMe-over-Fabrics storage platform and an OPENCHOICE Storage business model that lets customers reuse standard NVMe SSDs or buy drives directly from makers. Its platform targets massively-parallel modern applications and is used in AI, machine learning, and deep learning workloads across IBM Spectrum Scale, MySQL, NoSQL, and Pivotal Greenplum, and supports Kubernetes, VMware and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. The company reports repeat sales and said it delivered a large number of systems in 2019, with many customers purchasing additional arrays as they scale out. Pavilion has received industry recognition (Flash Memory Summit Best of Show – Most Innovative Startup 2019), been named an IDC NVMe over TCP Innovator, and holds 16 patents to date. The company is active in standards and research groups including NVMexpress, SNIA, STAC Research, and TACC's STAR Program. Pavilion is based in San Jose, Calif., and plans to use new funding to accelerate product delivery, expand into new markets (including Asia), and grow its team to meet customer demand.

Participated · Series D · Jul 2021

Algolia is best known for its search-as-a-service product that provides developer-friendly, real-time search via an API with results that load with each keystroke. The company serves over 10,000 customers including Slack, Stripe, Medium, Zendesk and Lacoste, and handles more than 1.5 trillion search queries per year. Algolia has expanded beyond its core search API into other real-time APIs such as Algolia Recommend and Predict to deliver product recommendations and to analyze visitor intent. Financially, Algolia reported annual recurring revenue growth of 180% year-over-year, though it did not disclose absolute revenue figures. The company was originally founded in France and has recently shifted leadership, with co-founder Nicolas Dessaigne moving to a non-operational role and Bernadette Nixon serving as CEO. Algolia has also recruited several senior executives over the past 18 months as it focuses on building a long-term enterprise business. Algolia provides an API-based search-as-a-service that enables sites and apps to add fast, customizable search without building search infrastructure in-house. The company offers supplementary tools such as search analytics and A/B testing to help customers optimize results and understand user behavior. Algolia plans to invest this funding into R&D—including work on voice search—and to further expand globally across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. It has more than 8,000 customers (up from about 3,000 in June 2017) and has been active in Asia since 2014, recently doubling down in Japan. Algolia was founded in France and is now based in San Francisco. The company is positioning itself for enterprise-focused growth and deeper integrations with platforms such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Algolia is a software-as-a-service company offering a hosted search engine API that returns fast, relevant results with minimal integration. Developers feed their search data to Algolia and customize ranking, after which Algolia’s servers return results as users type. The company reports annual recurring revenue doubling every year and serves 3,000 customers while handling 25 billion searches per month. Product additions include Algolia Offline for weak/no-signal situations and optimizations for places. Algolia positions itself as the turnkey search layer for sites and apps and aims to expand its customer base and feature set. The company operates offices in Paris, San Francisco, New York City and Atlanta and plans to open a London office. Algolia provides developers, product managers, and end users with a hosted Search-as-a-Service API that can be set up in hours or days and returns relevant results in milliseconds. The product targets websites and mobile apps and is designed to handle high volumes of data quickly. The company says it serves over 600 paying customers across 50 countries, including CrunchBase, Genius.com, Vevo, Medium, WeWork, Teespring, Arc’teryx and Product Hunt. Algolia plans to use its recent funding for product development, international expansion and hiring. Founded in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, the company is based in San Francisco and Paris. Philippe Botteri of Accel Partners will take a seat on the company’s board following the financing. Algolia builds a hosted real-time search engine and API used to replace or augment site and app search. The team has search experience (some engineers previously worked at Exalead) and initially sold a $99 mobile SDK before moving to larger website customers. Customers named in the article include Vestiaire Collective, USA Today’s Reviewed.com, Hacker News and Product Hunt; the company grew from 0 to about 200 customers in the reported year. Algolia recently launched analytics features to make the product more appealing to bigger clients and to support further growth. Financially, the company is not yet generating significant revenue according to investors, though backers see a clear path to millions in revenue. Algolia was accelerated by Y Combinator and TheFamily.

Participated · Seed · Mar 2021

Polkadex is an orderbook-based decentralized exchange that aims to combine the functionality and performance of centralized exchanges with the security of decentralized systems. Its product features include on-chain market-making, perpetual liquidity mining, feeless transactions that aim to eliminate frontrunning, and support for high-frequency trading through synchronous operations. Polkadex also enables AMMs to pool and interact with an orderbook, and offers advanced trading tools such as bots, custom algorithms, APIs, and advanced market orders. The team intends to leverage Substrate/Polkadot infrastructure to scale, support cross-chain transactions, and eventually become a parachain to bridge liquidity and de-risk security and consensus. Proceeds from the fundraise will be used to fuel growth and to position Polkadex as the first orderbook DEX in the Polkadot ecosystem, and the company plans an initial token offering (PDEX) in the first half of 2021.

Participated · Series C · Dec 2020

Rec Room offers a user-generated, immersive social gaming platform that runs on iOS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation, Oculus, and Steam, letting players build and hang out in virtual “rooms.” The company focuses on tools that enable creators to build games and social experiences, and its platform supports both casual meetups and more structured events like virtual weddings and meetings. Rec Room has seen rapid user growth — from 2 million creators/players in March to 37 million users overall, with 12 million rooms on the platform. Monthly user count grew almost 450% since November 2020, and mobile users increased tenfold in that period. The company does not disclose revenue figures but said it paid out about $1 million to game creators in March. Rec Room plans to expand to new platforms, build more experiences, invest in trust and safety systems, and continue enhancing creator tools. Rec Room launched as a VR-only platform and later expanded to traditional game consoles, PC and mobile to broaden its reach. The product emphasizes creator tools and an on-platform economy, with 2 million players having created content. The company reported surpassing 15 million lifetime users and showed 566% year-over-year revenue growth; CEO Nick Fajt said the player base has tripled in the past 12 months. Rec Room is on track to pay out more than $1 million to creators this year. Venture interest has been driven in part by investor FOMO following Roblox’s public debut, as Rec Room follows similar paths around creator monetization. Rec Room is a social gaming platform that started as a VR-centric social hub and gaming platform for virtual reality users. In recent years the company has expanded beyond VR to reach every major gaming platform and scale for a young user base. CEO Nick Fajt says the company has tripled its total audience year-over-year; Rec Room has about 10 million registered users, with more than 1 million engaging creator tools and 4 million distinct rooms. The console user base grew substantially in 2020, and Fajt expects mobile to become the most common point of entry by the end of next year, though Android remains one of the last major platforms without the app. The company plans to scale its creation tools and creator payments, targeting $1 million paid out to creators by the end of 2021. Despite slow VR market maturation, Rec Room remains committed to VR and recently updated its Rec Royale battle royale for Quest 2 and iOS. Financially, the company has raised just shy of $50 million to date and continues to pursue cross-platform growth. Against Gravity builds Rec Room, a cross-platform social VR world where users create and share rooms and multiplayer experiences without coding. The platform supports a wide range of hardware and is about to add iOS support to expand its user base. Rec Room is approaching one million user-created rooms and the studio employs 35 people. Monetization is currently light, but the company plans to let creators charge in-game tokens to play certain user-made experiences later this year. Timing for expansion has been tied to maturation of standalone VR hardware like Oculus Quest. The studio was founded in 2016 and is based in Seattle. Against Gravity develops augmented and virtual reality social experiences, with its flagship product Rec Room. Rec Room is a virtual reality social club where people can play active games against competitors around the world. The app is available for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch. The company raised $5M in venture capital to support hiring and expand operations. Founded in April 2016 and based in Seattle, WA, Against Gravity focuses on growing its VR social platform and team.