Participated · Equity · Jul 2018

Wicket Labs provides an audience insights platform for subscription video services, led by CEO Marty Roberts. Its core product, the Wicket Scorecard, gives online video providers a deep analytical view of current and future audiences and includes a CHI (Customer Happiness Index) score. The platform helps media and entertainment companies gain visibility into customers, understand how initiatives impact the business, and drive engagement. The company reports nine customers and pilots with partners including MOTOR TREND, Pure Flix Entertainment, and UP Entertainment. Wicket Labs intends to use recent funding to expand its software development team and move into new digital video business verticals serving OTT video services. Wicket Labs builds data and business-intelligence tools aimed at helping media companies understand new forms of viewing and platform fragmentation. The company was founded last year by former executives of Comcast-owned thePlatform and initially acted as a middleman between premium video producers and third-party API vendors. Its mission evolved to focus on arming media firms with the data and insights needed to compete across streaming, social and traditional channels. Wicket Labs plans to use the $2M seed financing to build out its engineering operation. The firm has seven employees and has raised $2.2M in lifetime funding. Leadership changes include CEO Marty Roberts adding Ian Blaine, co-founder of thePlatform, as chief strategy officer.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2017

Socedo provides a demand generation platform for B2B businesses that leverages intent data from the social web to engage and communicate with target audiences. The system integrates with marketing automation and CRM systems including Marketo, HubSpot, Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce. The company plans to use the new capital to further develop its platform by adding predictive intelligence, richer data insights and new data sources from the broader web. It also intends to build out new solutions aimed at B2B marketers. Founded in 2012 and based in Seattle, Socedo employs 25 people and serves over 170 paying customers. Notable customers include Microsoft, Lenovo, Sterling Talent Solutions, Google and Extreme Networks.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2016

CloudCoreo builds a next-generation platform to deploy, manage and secure cloud infrastructure for enterprise customers. The company targets cloud-native, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud applications and aims to bring agility and control across microservices, serverless, containers and the entire cloud stack. The founding team is led by industry veterans Tom Hull (CEO), Paul Allen (CTO) and Jason Needham (CMO); Hull and Needham previously founded Union Bay Networks (acquired) and held senior roles at F5 Networks, while Allen led DevOps efforts at Convio and Blackbaud. CloudCoreo is currently in stealth mode and is headquartered in Seattle’s South Lake Union district. It raised a $2.9 million Series Seed round led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Divergent Ventures, Aristos Ventures and Data Collective (DCVC). The company will use the funds to build out product development and is actively recruiting software and DevOps engineers.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2016

BlueTalon provides a policy engine that delivers dynamic user access controls to data across Hadoop, Spark, and SQL-based data platforms, along with an audit engine that gives a full audit trail at user and data detail levels required for compliance. Led by CEO Eric Tilenius and based in Redwood City, Calif., the company focuses on data-centric security for big data and new data initiatives. BlueTalon raised over $16M in a Series A financing and has raised over $25M in funding to date. In conjunction with the funding, Matthew Kinsella, Managing Director at Maverick Ventures, joined BlueTalon’s board of directors. The company intends to use the funds for continued expansion of its development and sales teams. The product and go-to-market appear centered on enabling compliant, auditable access controls across modern data platforms. BlueTalon’s core product is the BlueTalon Policy Engine, which enforces fine-grained, data-centric access policies for Hadoop with real-time authorization at the row, column and cell level for each query. The Policy Engine integrates with existing enterprise infrastructures and multiple enforcement points including Hive, Impala, JDBC and ODBC, with HDFS enforcement planned for release at the end of Q2. It offers role- and purpose-based provisioning via a graphical user interface, on-the-fly masking of sensitive data, and full auditing of successful and denied access to support compliance and security. The company positions the product for regulated industries such as finance and healthcare to enable enterprise-scale Hadoop adoption. BlueTalon was selected for the Strata + Hadoop World Startup Showcase and is exhibiting at the conference. Financially, BlueTalon announced $5 million in follow-on venture capital funding and is backed by investors including Data Collective and Signia Venture Partners. BlueTalon offers a virtual database delivered via a SaaS model that catalogs data from contributing databases but contains no data itself. The product maintains virtual connections to back-end databases to enable on-the-fly analysis without months-long ETL processes. BlueTalon positions this capability as a way to combine internal and external data sources, including competitors' data, while avoiding proprietary data-warehousing and large ETL projects. The company says virtual databases can be up and running in weeks and at a fraction of the cost of traditional ETL, and it emphasizes security benefits. BlueTalon has paying customers including United Healthcare and Eli Lilly. The company was founded in July 2013 by Pratik Verma, a Stanford PhD and veteran data scientist.

Participated · Equity · Jun 2016

Appuri offers a data platform that collects customer usage data and applies a "churn score" to predict when customers are likely to leave, removing the need for companies to hire dedicated data teams. The platform is positioned as a data‑centric approach to proactively retain users. The company launched in 2012 and graduated from the 9Mile Labs accelerator in 2013. Appuri plans to use the new funding to fuel marketing and sales and to grow its team, targeting about 20 employees by the end of 2016. The CEO, Damon Danieli, previously served as CTO and founder of mobile games company Z2, which was sold to King Digital. Co‑founder Bilal Aslam is a former Microsoft employee who ran the Windows Azure Store. Appuri is a Seattle-based provider of a customer data platform that helps online businesses track customer data and movement. The platform enables users to quickly join disparate sources of customer data and make smart decisions through a single interface. Founded in 2012 by Damon Danieli and Bilal Aslam, Appuri targets online businesses seeking unified customer insights. In June 2015 the company raised $2 million in seed funding. The round was led by Divergent Ventures with participation from Baseline Ventures and Vulcan Capital. Appuri intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations.