Participated · Series D · Dec 2018

Pindrop builds deepfake-combatting and multi-factor authentication products aimed at businesses in banking, finance and related industries. The company says its tools can identify contact-center callers with higher accuracy than rival solutions and offers fraud prevention, authentication and liveness capabilities. Pindrop trains models on a dataset of over 20 million utterances—both synthetic and genuine—and has trained more than 330 TTS models to help detect synthetic speech, emphasizing acoustic and spectro-temporal features to mitigate bias. The team publicly acknowledges bias risks in audio models and aims to address representation and dialect issues in its training data. Founded in 2011 by Vijay Balasubramaniyan, Paul Judge and Mustaque Ahamad, the Atlanta-based firm employs around 250 people and has previously raised $234.77 million in venture capital from investors including Vitruvian Partners, CapitalG, IVP and Andreessen Horowitz. Pindrop plans to use recent financing to accelerate product development, hiring and expansion into sectors such as healthcare, retail, media and travel and into countries facing significant deepfake threats. Pindrop offers a platform that creates a voice "fingerprint" by analysing nearly 1,400 acoustic attributes to identify tone, speaking patterns, device and environment to verify callers and voice commands. The company’s product is used primarily to prevent voice fraud in customer-service interactions but is being expanded into any voice-interface use cases, including connected cars, home security, smart offices and smart speakers. The growth strategy for the funding round targets international expansion (starting in Europe and then Asia) and extension into IoT device integrations. Pindrop reports customers that include eight of the 10 largest U.S. banks and five of the largest U.S. insurers, protecting more than 200 million consumer accounts. Management says the customer-service business was on the path to profitability by Q1 2019 and that Pindrop had stopped over $350 million in voice-based fraud and attacks so far in 2018. The company was founded in 2011 in Atlanta, GA, and has raised $212 million to date. Pindrop provides voice-security and authentication solutions for enterprise call centers using its patented Phoneprinting technology to identify, locate and authenticate phone devices from call audio. Its Phoneprinting system detects roughly 80% of fraudulent calls and protects hundreds of millions of calls annually. Pindrop counts broad adoption among enterprises, including eight of the top 10 U.S. banks and two of the top five insurance carriers, and has expanded into retail, healthcare, e-commerce and government verticals. In 2016 the company doubled its customer base, grew revenues by more than 100% year-over-year, achieved a 500% increase in calls protected year-over-year, and ended the year with 255 employees. Pindrop opened a London office and won its first European customer, Lloyds Banking Group. The company says it will scale and expand in the voice security and authentication market with new board additions and investor support. Founded in 2011, Pindrop is venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz, CapitalG, Citi Ventures, Felicis Ventures, GV and IVP. Pindrop helps businesses avoid phone scams by analyzing call audio and caller metadata to generate a risk profile for each call. The system examines call origin, line type (landline, cell or VoIP) and audio artifacts such as frequency filters, codec artifacts, packet loss and dropped frames to detect fraud. When the system flags a call as potentially fraudulent, agents can ask additional security questions. Its technology is in use at insurance companies, government agencies, retailers and three of the four largest U.S. banks, and the company has screened more than 360 million calls. Pindrop raised a $75M Series C led by Google Capital and had previously raised $47M since launching in 2012. The company plans to use the funding to expand internationally—building on a ten-person UK office and planned moves into EMEA, Latin America and Asia Pacific—and to increase investments in research and new product development. Pindrop Security provides enterprise solutions to secure phone and voice communications, focusing on phone fraud prevention and call center authentication. Its Phoneprinting technology can identify, locate and authenticate phone devices from call audio, detecting fraudulent calls and verifying legitimate callers. The company sells solutions intended to reduce fraud losses and authentication expense for banks, brokerages and retailers. Pindrop is led by executive chairman Paul Judge, Ph.D., and CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan, Ph.D. The company is based in Atlanta, GA. In February 2015 it closed a Series B financing to support its commercial efforts.

Participated · Series C · Feb 2018

Mist provides an AI-driven wireless platform designed for the Smart Device Era that makes Wi-Fi predictable and measurable by providing visibility into the user experience and replacing manual IT tasks with proactive automation. The platform brings enterprise-grade Wi-Fi, BLE, and IoT together to deliver personalized, location-based wireless services without requiring battery-powered beacons. Led by CEO and co-founder Sujai Hajela, the company has over 150 reseller partners worldwide, including distributors in North America, EMEA, and Japan. Mist closed a $46m Series C, bringing total investment in the company to approximately $88m. The company intends to use the funds to grow global sales and marketing, continue investing in engineering—especially in AI—develop a channel of managed service providers (MSPs), and collaborate with ecosystem and OEM partners. Its product focus remains on automation and improved visibility into user experience to support large-scale enterprise deployments. Mist offers a wireless platform that lets organizations "think centrally and act locally" via a combination of cloud-based intelligence and on‑premises enterprise-grade access points. The solution is built on a modern microservices cloud architecture and uses machine learning to automate tasks such as event correlation, location, and clustering. Mist’s platform is aimed at simplifying wireless operations and delivering personalized services to mobile users. The company is led by CEO and co-founder Sujai Hajela. Mist will use new funding to grow sales and marketing resources, continue investing in engineering and product development, and build a channel of Managed Service Providers. It also plans to collaborate with ecosystem and OEM partners to expand adoption.

Led · Series C · Feb 2018

Highfive builds an integrated software and hardware video conferencing solution for business meetings. Its current customers include Paperless Post, The Atlantic, Warby Parker, and the Girl Scouts of Northern California. The company reports annual recurring revenue grew by over 100% in the last year. Users hold more than 140,000 meetings that total 16 million minutes per month. Highfive has expanded its global data center presence to 18 AWS regions to support growth and distribution. The company will use the new funding to scale sales and marketing and fuel global expansion. Highfive builds an $800 video conferencing unit that connects to any TV and includes a 1080p camera, a high-fidelity mic array, and a wireless chip, paired with cloud-based conferencing that streams to desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. The system is designed to make it easy to equip conference rooms for video meetings. Early traction has been strong: more than 500 companies signed up in the first 90 days, including Patagonia, Slack, Warby Parker, and Zenefits. Of registered users, 80% use Highfive weekly, and the company was on pace to stream more than a million minutes of video per week within its first six months. Founded in 2012, Highfive has raised more than $45 million to date and is using new funding to scale. With the new capital, Highfive plans to double its workforce from about 50 to 100 by year-end and invest heavily in engineering, sales, and marketing. Highfive is developing a new mode of enterprise communication that runs on desktop, web and mobile and aims to simplify how distributed teams share information. The company is currently in beta and has signed up several enterprise clients who are paying for the product while it is being validated. Highfive plans a public launch in mid-2014 and is using its beta customers to refine the product. The team is about 25 employees and is aggressively hiring to double headcount over the next six months across engineering, sales and support. The founders, Shan Sinha and Jeremy Roy, previously built Docverse and sold it to Google; that pedigree is cited as part of the company’s credentials. Financially, Highfive has raised a total of $13.5 million to date and is funding its growth through that capital and customer payments.

Participated · Series B · Dec 2017

ShieldX builds APEIRO, a cloud-native security platform that combines network-based security concepts with application and infrastructure innovations to deliver scalable, automated threat prevention and micro-segmentation across multi-cloud environments. The product emphasizes fast deployment, fully automated security controls, on-demand micro-segmentation and cost-effective operation for enterprises. ShieldX cites growing customer adoption and lists customers and trials including Alaska Airlines, Iowa State University and Park Holidays. The company says it has seen strong revenue growth this year and has received its first foundational patent from a portfolio of 19 filed. Leadership highlights include CEO Dr. Ratinder Paul Singh Ahuja, and the company was named a Gartner 2017 Cool Vendor in Cloud Security and an "Innovator" in a MarketsandMarkets microsegmentation report. ShieldX is based in San Jose, California and was founded in 2015; it plans to use funding to expand marketing and sales while continuing product development with increased automation and intelligence across popular cloud environments.