Participated · Equity · May 2021

TargetDocs offers a visual board for construction project files built with Angular, Node.js and Postgres that organizes users’ files, tracks current or missing documents, provides invoice-payment reminders, and supplies a collaborative workspace. It targets six- to 24-month contract projects ranging from roughly $10 million to a few billion across private and public builds such as shopping malls, commercial and industrial buildings, multifamily apartments, bridges, roads and highways. The company was founded by Joseph Leiva, who created the product from firsthand construction-industry experience; the team is four people and serves about 20 clients. Many clients are in the government space, so the product includes additional cybersecurity protections and compliance-focused features; TEDCO’s investment came from its Cybersecurity Investment Fund. Financially, TargetDocs completed an $850,000 funding round in April and plans to use the proceeds to hire three team members in sales, marketing, and engineering. Leadership aims to grow organically and may pursue a larger round in the first or second quarter of next year.

Participated · Equity · May 2019

Retrium builds a SaaS-based cloud platform that helps agile software development teams run more engaging retrospective meetings. The company is based in Silver Spring, Md. Its platform is designed to help teams learn from past work and make process improvements. Retrium secured a $400,000 investment from the University System of Maryland’s Maryland Momentum Fund to advance its cloud platform. That investment is part of a $1.6 million funding round led by the Maryland Momentum Fund, with participation from members of the Dingman Center Angels. Company leadership says the product aims to make development teams more effective and empower each member to address new features, security fixes, and bug removal. Retrium provides an enterprise-ready solution for agile retrospectives that facilitates engagement and collaboration through a set of prebuilt facilitation techniques to drive organizational continuous improvement. The company is co-founded by David Horowitz (CEO) and Ryan Detweiler (CTO). Its client list includes GE Healthcare, Navis, PointClickCare, Ticketmaster and more than one hundred other customers spanning Fortune 500 brands and startups. Retrium closed over $1M in funding. The company plans to use the funds to build additional features in the retrospective tool, implement security features required by large enterprise customers, and grow its distributed team.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2015

Yet Analytics is described in the article as a data-driven company based in Baltimore and led by CEO Shelly Blake-Plock. The piece does not detail specific products but frames the company around data-driven work and includes an interview referencing work with the U.S. Department of Defense. The company closed $1 million in new funding in early 2017. That raise brought Yet Analytics' total disclosed funding to $2.3 million following a seed round in November 2015. The article does not report revenue, user metrics, or specific product roadmaps. Yet Analytics offers a data-driven training platform for companies built on the DoD-developed xAPI standard. Its Yet Core standardizes job-training data from multiple sources to support integration with wearables, beacons, augmented reality and IoT. The company says the standardized data will gain value as those technologies develop. Yet has won recognition including Nielsen’s Data Visionary Award at TechCrunch Disrupt and a local pitch-win at Beta City. CEO Shelly Blake-Plock said the new capital will support hiring and execution. The company operates out of the Emerging Technology Centers’ Eastern Campus on 33rd Street in Baltimore.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2015

Snobswap operates a curated "luxury online mall" that helps brick-and-mortar consignment shops list and sell high-end secondhand items through a centralized e-commerce platform. The company vets boutiques for authentication and customer service and charges shops a 10% commission plus initiation and marketing fees. Since shifting from a peer-to-peer model to focusing on stores, inventory has grown 13x, inventory is growing 25% month-over-month, order sizes rose from about $200 to $325–$450, and the site has seen 1.5 million uniques with repeat business representing 40–50% of sales. Snobswap says it currently captures roughly 1–2% of its addressable market of high-end consignment shops (about 25,000 U.S. stores, 40% addressable) and is growing overall revenue at about 20–25% month-over-month. With the new funding the nine-person D.C. team plans to expand headcount and continue development of an iOS application arriving soon. Popular brands on the platform include Chanel, Christian Louboutin, Cartier and Louis Vuitton, and a partnership with Affirm has increased sales by 30–40%. Snobswap operates an online resale marketplace focused on luxury and designer secondhand clothing and accessories, combining peer-to-peer listings with inventory sourced from brick-and-mortar consignment boutiques. Its retail partnerships distinguish the service: boutiques represent under 10% of sellers but account for about 30% of sales, and the platform is working with roughly 100 consignment shops across the U.S. (and Canada). Since its official launch in spring 2013 after a year in beta, the site has attracted over half a million shoppers, with average transactions around $200 and top brands like Coach, Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Chanel making up 65% of sales. Snobswap charges boutiques a 10% commission and peer-to-peer sellers 15%. The company is a Fortify accelerator graduate, is run by co-founders Elise Whang and Emily Dang, and currently has seven full-time employees. Planned use of new funding includes hiring an engineer, a designer, a business development hire, building a mobile app, and bringing more brick-and-mortar stores online.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2011

Veenome provides ad networks with a platform to monitor and audit publishers and gives publishers tools to understand their own video content. The company offers a data-as-a-service product that translates video into machine-readable data. Its core API automatically identifies visual content in video and returns tags, keywords, categories and other metadata. The output is designed to increase ROI for video platforms, publishers and advertising networks. Led by CEO Kevin Lenane and based in Arlington, VA, Veenome intends to use new funds to continue expanding its business and tech development headcount. The company has raised $2M to date. Veenome analyzes video content to translate it into machine-readable, actionable data for ad targeting, analytics and SEO. Its technology divides videos into IAB-based categories, identifies objectionable or copyrighted content, and tags brands, products and faces. That data enables smarter ad targeting and campaign analytics; the company says it more than doubles CPM revenue for its customers. Veenome counts BrightRoll, Adtheorent and Videofy.me among its customers and has announced a partnership with BrightRoll. The startup has shifted strategy from selling to publishers toward working with video ad networks to achieve wider reach, according to CEO Kevin Lenane. Financially, Veenome announced $600,000 in new funding, bringing total disclosed funding to $1.1 million. Veenome builds proprietary automated video-recognition technology that scans video clips for products, brands and objects and tags and indexes them. Once identified, items can be linked to associated content such as e-commerce storefronts or social media to enable in-video purchases. The company differentiates itself by automatically crawling sites and overlaying ads via a plugin rather than requiring manual tagging, with plugins planned for major blog platforms (WordPress, Drupal) and some custom channels. Veenome is running a beta test with participants that include major global publishers and video providers. It says the new funding will be used to enhance its recognition algorithms and APIs for early customers. The business model resembles AdWords: advertisers bid on tags and revenue is split 70% to publishers, 25% to Veenome, and 5% to video creators. Founded by CEO Kevin Lenane and CTO David Geller, the founders bring prior product and CEO experience.