Participated · Equity · Sep 2024

Sister Pitch is an event run by not-for-profit Global Sisters in partnership with Dentsu Australia that connects diverse, emerging women-led founders with investors and business leaders. In the most recent Sister Pitch, twelve Australian women-led businesses received more than $1 million in financial and strategic backing. The support comprised funding pledges alongside mentorship, industry connections and strategic advice intended to help ventures scale. Corporate supporters and funders named in the article include Afterpay, Meta, MECCA, The Iconic, Bunnings, American Express, KPMG and AMP. Global Sisters was founded by Mandy Richards in 2016 and focuses on supporting women who are often excluded from traditional business pathways. The programme leverages corporate partners to provide both capital and non-financial resources to participating founders.

Participated · Series E · Nov 2021

OpenWeb provides a B2B2C platform that powers end-to-end user experiences, including user activation and management, first-party data aggregation and management, AI moderation, and social experiences. Its proprietary technology is used by top publishers such as The New York Times, Hearst, Yahoo!, Penske Media Corporation, and News Corp. The company works with more than 1,000 top-tier publishers and hosts over 100 million active users each month. OpenWeb has more than 265 employees across New York City, Tel Aviv, Kiev, San Diego, Canada, London, and Paris. The business partners directly with publishers and brands to build and monetize communities rooted in conversations. It plans to use recent funding to continue expanding, pursue new publishers and advertisers, and develop innovative partnerships and applications. OpenWeb provides a technology platform that enables publishers to build direct relationships with their audiences. Led by co-founder and CEO Nadav Shoval, the company was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in New York City with teams in Tel Aviv and Kiev. OpenWeb works with more than 1,000 top-tier publishers, including Hearst, Yahoo!, Penske Media Corporation, and News Corp., and hosts more than 100 million active users each month. The company has over 150 employees across its offices. OpenWeb plans to expand its global presence with new offices in Canada, the APAC (China) region, and the EMEA region, and to explore strategic acquisitions to enhance its product offerings. Financially, the company has raised capital to support growth and scale its platform. Spot.IM started as a commenting platform and is expanding into a broader community platform that includes commenting, moderation, community pages and tools to highlight and monetize user-generated content. The company positions these tools as ways for publishers to focus on loyal readers rather than transient users. Spot.IM provides data to help publishers understand user behavior and value; the CEO said that for some publishers a Spot.IM user delivers five times the lifetime revenue of a non-Spot.IM user. Customers mentioned include Hearst, Refinery29, Fox News, Engadget and AOL.com. The company has attracted institutional capital and remains venture-backed, having raised a total of $63 million to date. Leadership changes announced alongside the funding include the appointment of Itzik Ben-Bassat as president and a member of the board. Spot.IM builds a comments and community platform for publishers, aiming to keep readers on-site and increase advertising revenue. Its clients include Time Inc., NBC, HuffPost and Engadget. The company offers additional ad units and operates on a revenue-share model with media partners. Spot.IM uses machine learning to moderate comments, removing illicit content and spam. CEO Nadav Shoval says the company provides technology “like a social network” and aims to build communities across the open web. Spot.IM plans to invest in R&D and hiring and is preparing to launch a major new platform. Spot.IM provides a social engagement platform that lets digital publishers curate their communities' social interactions and keep ad revenue rather than ceding it to third-party social networks. The company partners with publishers to encourage organic site engagement and claims to enable over 3 billion monthly page views. Spot.IM works with 4,600 active sites and serves more than 300 million unique monthly users for its media partners. Its publisher customers include News Corp., Meredith Corporation, Time Inc.’s The Drive, Little Things and Advertising Age. Founded in 2012 by Nadav Shoval and Ishay Green and based in New York, Spot.IM intends to use new funding to expand R&D, hire additional staff, and further disrupt the online publishing industry by building capabilities that foster social interactions within partners' communities.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2021

Sivira is a blockchain venture headquartered in Osaka that develops unWallet Enterprise, an IDaaS product for the Web3.0 era. unWallet Enterprise implements decentralized identity technologies such as DIDs, Verifiable Credentials, and WebAuthn (FIDO2) and is offered in a SaaS model. The company plans to accelerate R&D and new product development, expand marketing and sales-partner channels, and grow headcount. Sivira has an established collaboration history with Dentsu Group on non-financial applications of blockchain going back to 2016. In June 2021 the company signed a financing contract to support those initiatives and expand commercial adoption of its IDaaS. The reported purposes of the funding are R&D, promoting the IDaaS business, and hiring to support business expansion.

Participated · Series E · Nov 2019

SmartNews operates the SmartNews news app in Japan and the United States, using algorithms and a mobile-optimized interface to surface quality information. The company was founded on June 15, 2012 and frames its mission as delivering high-quality information to those who need it. SmartNews is investing in product evolution and user experience improvements across Japan and the U.S., including launching a paid subscription service, SmartNews+, in December 2023. Recent corporate moves to support growth include hiring Cory Ondrejka (former Google VP of Product Management) as CTO in October 2023 and announcing a business partnership with NTT Docomo in November 2023. The company plans to use new funding to strengthen its U.S. operations, expand its advertising business, and make business growth investments to enhance product features and user experience. SmartNews operates a news aggregation app and website that uses machine learning to personalize article selection and a “News From All Sides” feature to surface diverse political perspectives. Its product suite includes SmartView (a quick-reading, offline-capable format), a COVID-19 vaccine dashboard, a U.S. election dashboard, and recent trackers for hurricanes, wildfires, and crime/safety. The company monetizes primarily through advertising—selling inline and video ads and sharing revenue with publishers—and reports relationships with more than 3,000 global publishing partners; over 75% of partners use SmartView and more than 70% of pageviews originate from SmartView. The app has about 85 million lifetime downloads (14 million in the past year), with Japan accounting for 59% of installs; the company said U.S. monthly active users doubled over the last year but declined to share current MAUs. Founded in 2012 and launched in the U.S. in 2014, SmartNews has grown its headcount to roughly 500 people globally and plans to expand further in the U.S., aiming to double its U.S. staff. The company says new funds will be used to develop more U.S.-focused consumer health and safety features and to expand its team. SmartNews is a global news discovery company that leverages machine learning and relationships with over 400 U.S. publisher partners to deliver quality information. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Ken Suzuki and maintains offices and employees in Tokyo, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Shanghai, and New York. In September 2019 SmartNews released its “News From All Sides” political slider, and in October 2019 it launched SmartView First, a licensing program that includes more than 30 major content providers such as BBC, Business Insider, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, and Reuters. SmartNews completed a $92M Series E financing, bringing total funding to $182M and valuing the company at $1.2B. The round will fund expansion of global engineering teams across mobile, backend, and machine learning and support accelerated growth in the U.S. and worldwide. SmartNews is a Japan-founded news-aggregation app that curates articles from roughly 1,500 publications and surfaces stories based on users' reading activity via machine-learning algorithms. The app has approached 20 million downloads and counts about 10 million users in Japan, which remains its largest market. In Japan SmartNews monetizes through inline advertising, video ads, and deals with publishers around its 'SmartViews' fast-loading format; U.S. and other international markets are still advertising-free. The company intends to use new funding to grow its user base, expand revenues outside Japan, hire talent, and further develop its machine-learning news-combing technology. SmartNews differentiates itself with bottom-up algorithmic curation rather than human editorial selection and has become a prominent ad network for news publishers in Japan. SmartNews is a news recommendation and aggregation app built around machine-learning algorithms that surface articles based on clicks, pauses and reading patterns. The app has about 10 million downloads, roughly 1 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the U.S. and around 4 million MAUs in Japan, and is present in over 150 markets. SmartNews works with more than 150 publishers globally and has begun a small ad rollout in Japan; subscriptions and paywalls are planned for later. The company says ads will not launch in the U.S. until it grows its U.S. MAUs, and it is focused on building publisher monetization tools. The new funding will be used to expand its U.S. presence and staff up a San Francisco office, with hires targeted at machine-learning and data-science specialists.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2019

NewsCred provides an enterprise content marketing platform (CMP) that combines technology, content, and services to help marketing teams ideate, plan, create, govern, and measure integrated campaigns. The company recently launched the Integrated Marketing Edition of its CMP, adding campaign planning and project management functionality to unify global marketing organizations. NewsCred says it is the leader in its category and has been positioned highest and furthest to the right in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms for two consecutive years. It serves hundreds of enterprise customers, including Twitter, Fidelity, and Cisco, and claims to be the largest in its category in terms of revenue. Future plans include increasing R&D investment in integrated marketing and work management capabilities, broadening integrations with the marketing tech ecosystem, and expanding field operations across the US, EMEA, and APAC. The company intends to bolster support for its growing enterprise customer base as it scales globally. NewsCred, founded in 2008, offers a “SaaS platform plus marketplace” that lets brands plan and manage content-marketing campaigns and source content from licensed publications and freelance writers. Customers include Barclays, Cisco, NASDAQ, Pepsi, Toyota and Visa. CEO Shafqat Islam says the company’s software has been a major driver of growth and that the platform and marketplace complement each other. The company reports its annualized revenue run rate has tripled in the past year, and pieces of content created on the platform have increased by 182 percent. NewsCred plans to continue expanding the software so it can serve as the planning and orchestration tool for a brand’s entire marketing efforts, including planning for channels such as TV advertising (though not buying TV ads). The company argues its background in content gives it an edge because every marketing channel requires content as fuel. NewsCred operates an end-to-end content marketing platform that combines a content-licensing business with a freelancer network called The NewsRoom and workflow/analytics tooling. Its content-licensing partners include publishers such as The New York Times, Reuters, and Getty Images, which NewsCred says remain the foundation of its services. The NewsRoom supplies custom-written pieces from freelancers paid at premium rates (about $500 for a blog post and $1,000 for a researched article). The company counts clients including Procter & Gamble, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sprint, Xerox, Visa, Bank of America, AIG, The Hearst Corporation, and Time Inc. NewsCred employs more than 120 people and plans to more than double the size of its sales team; management intends to use new funding for sales hiring, marketing, and positioning against larger competitors. CEO and co-founder Shafqat Islam emphasizes building a full "content marketing stack" spanning planning, approvals, and analytics. NewsCred licenses articles, images, and videos from publishers including The New York Times and The Economist and packages them for brand marketing campaigns. Its platform combines technology and an editorial team to select and distribute content via web, email, and social networks for clients such as Pepsi, Toyota, and Johnson & Johnson. The company works with more than 2,500 news sources and reports that 60% of its customers are Fortune 500 companies. Revenue has grown 11-fold over the past year, and NewsCred reports a 540% increase in customers. Founded in 2008, the company has shifted product focus over time and acquired publishing startup Daylife as it moved toward content licensing for brands. Next steps include international expansion and partnering with smaller publications to broaden its content supply. NewsCred has repositioned itself as a B2B newswire, licensing content from more than 700 premium media brands and offering access through a paid news API. Its in-house editorial team filters and curates thousands of articles for each client, and the company uses proprietary semantic and natural language processing technology to organize 215K full-text articles from 700+ sources across 50 countries, in eight languages, into 20 categories and 47K topics. The platform is delivery- and platform-agnostic, providing content, images, and multimedia in XML, RSS, or JSON for web, mobile, tablet, and social integrations. Revenue is generated via monthly API licensing fees based on story volume and licensed sources, and all revenue is shared with content providers; the company is already paying some sources six-figure amounts. Target customers are publishers and brands seeking fully licensed full-text articles, photos, video, targeted editorial sections, and related advertising opportunities. The company pivoted twice previously and is positioning this model as a reinvention of the traditional newswire service.