• TrackR

  Participated · Series B · Aug 2017

  TrackR built its business on circular Bluetooth fobs such as the TrackR Bravo and Pixel that help users locate lost items. The company has faced operational challenges including layoffs, natural disasters, and its co‑founders stepping away from executive roles. TrackR is rebranding to Adero and has filed trademarks for Adero and a brand called Activefield, signaling a move toward cloud‑based software and larger connected‑home or asset‑management offerings. Sources say the company has discussed selling a larger connected home solution to retailers, and it has been discounting existing stock. A spokesperson said TrackR will continue to support all sold products and that its battery replacement program and Crowd Locate network remain active. Financially, the startup quietly raised $10 million in July at a $40 million valuation, a substantial decline from its prior valuation when it raised $50 million. The company’s public filings and domain transfers indicate it has been working on the rebrand and strategy since at least mid‑2018. TrackR produces Bluetooth-based item trackers and companion software, including the TrackR pixel and the TrackR Crowd Locate network. The company runs a Works with TrackR program and a partner platform that lets manufacturers and app developers (for example Cross Pens) integrate TrackR technology, and it also offers a home-mapping product called TrackR Atlas. TrackR is integrated with Amazon Alexa so users can locate items via voice commands. Founded in 2009, the company has shipped more than five million devices to date. TrackR says it will expand its community features like Crowd Locate to improve personal organization and maintain its leadership in intelligent tracking. Financially, the company has raised a $50M Series B and had previously raised more than $10M from some of the same investors and angels. TrackR develops app software, cloud databases and wireless devices to help users track and manage personal items. Its hardware lineup includes the TrackR bravo thin tracking device plus sticker and Wallet products sold online and at Target. TrackR bravo leverages a crowd-sourced GPS network of active users to locate items beyond Bluetooth range. The company was founded in 2009 and is based in Santa Barbara, California, with a team of 15. It recently crowdfunded $1,676,369 on Indiegogo to launch bravo. TrackR plans to use new funding to scale production and expand customer support teams.

• Influitive

  Participated · Series B · Jul 2015

  Influitive provides a cloud-based customer advocacy community platform and services to help companies discover, nurture, and mobilize customer advocates. The company practices ‘Advocate Marketing’ to create engaged customer communities that convert prospects and increase customer lifetime value. Influitive’s platform supports departmental objectives across marketing, sales, customer success, product, and beyond. The company is led by CEO Mark Organ. Influitive says it will invest in growing its pool of expert community managers and advocate marketers. It also plans to expand its Canadian presence to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The recent financing positions the company to continue building Customer-Powered Enterprises through its software and services. Influitive, founded in 2010, provides the AdvocateHub software that enables marketers to build advocate communities where members gain recognition and status in exchange for activities that promote a brand. The platform is used by customers including Acquia, Atlassian, DocuSign, HireVue, Hootsuite, HP Software, Marketo and Oracle. The company is headquartered in Toronto and also maintains offices in Boston, Palo Alto and San Francisco. Influitive announced the acquisition of Ironark Software; Ironark’s founders and lead developer will join Influitive’s product division to help expand the power of advocate communities to mobile through Ironark’s apps Hub and Workbase. Financially, the company raised an $8.2M extension to its Series B, bringing the Series B to more than $38M and total capital raised to approximately $50M. Influitive builds advocate marketing software that encourages customers to make positive reviews and referrals. Its platform uses a gamified interface where advocates compete for rewards, badges and high rankings on a leaderboard. Businesses using Influitive include HP, Intuit, LinkedIn and Optimizely. The company announced a $30.5 million Series B led by Georgian Partners with participation from a range of investors. That round brings Influitive’s total funding to more than $40 million. The article does not disclose operating metrics such as revenue or user counts. Influitive builds AdvocateHub, a platform that helps brands identify, recruit and mobilize customer advocates to share product experiences across social networks, forums and communities. The product tracks advocate activities on networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Quora and rewards contributors; the company has also released a mobile app. Influitive operates a freemium business model with about 24 paying customers and many more using the platform for free. Named customers include Dell Kace, Eloqua, Ektron and Demandbase. Since launching in August 2012, Influitive reports active advocates increased by 180% and sales rose 145%. The company says it will continue developing AdvocateHub and build out its sales and marketing teams. Influitive provides an "AdvocateHub," a branded portal where customer advocates can learn how to market a company and help build referral ecosystems. Advocates earn rewards (for example, wine or conference access) and points through gamified actions such as filling surveys or following the company on Twitter. The product targets online customer advocacy driven by blogs, Facebook, Yelp and other read/write web channels. Founder Mark Organ, who previously founded Eloqua, positions the company to tap enterprise marketing needs. The company has raised a $3.75 million seed round from 11 investors and Organ says the first institutional round is yet to come. Influitive emphasizes affordable distribution and community-driven referrals as its growth levers.

• Quantance

  Participated · Series D · Apr 2013

  Quantance is a San Mateo, CA-based manufacturer of 4G/LTE envelope tracking (ET) power supplies. Its flagship product is the Q845 qBoost™ ET Power Supply, built on the company's patented qBoost™ Envelope Tracking technology. The technology is designed to improve data upload speeds, network capacity and service coverage for smartphones, tablets, WiFi hotspots and other high-speed mobile data devices. The company intends to use the capital to support production of the Q845 and to fund planned product innovations and enhancements. Quantance raised $12m in a Series D round backed by TD Fund, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and DoCoMo Capital. Vikas Vinayak is CEO and co-founder. Quantance develops power management products and ultrafast power supplies aimed at improving speed, performance and network coverage for smartphones, tablets and data cards. The company has patented and field-tested technology and is led by CEO and co-founder Vikas Vinayak. Quantance raised $11M in a Series C financing to support product expansion and hiring. The firm intends to expand its family of power management products, including ultrafast power supplies for 4G devices. Management plans to grow the employee base by at least 50% this year. Quantance has offices in San Mateo, CA, plus locations in Beaverton, OR and Flagstaff, AZ. Quantance designs analog radio-frequency chips intended to boost the output of power amplifiers in cell phones, increasing signal strength and data throughput. Its Q100 chip is available in engineering samples and is designed for use in current 3G handsets and future 4G (WiMax/LTE) devices. The company says carrier‑audited tests in the U.S. and Europe show improved coverage and faster data networks. Quantance completed the Q100 with a very small team (8 engineers at that time; 13 employees total now), and holds patents in “radio frequency transmit chain efficiency.” Management expects the chip to be built into new phones next year and hopes to hit high‑volume production in the second quarter of 2009. The firm anticipates competition from established power‑amplifier vendors such as National Semiconductor, Maxim Integrated Products and RF Micro Devices. Quantance raised outside funding to commercialize the product and is preparing for broader market deployment.

• Stoke

  Participated · Series E · Jan 2011

  Stoke delivers gateway solutions that enable mobile operators to manage traffic growth and increase the efficiency, reliability, and scope of mobile data services. The company is led by President and CEO Vikash Varma and is based in Santa Clara, CA. Stoke received a US$5M strategic investment from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation to support its growth in the worldwide LTE market. The article identifies the investment as strategic but does not specify instrument details beyond that. Stoke is backed by venture capital firms and carriers including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, Focus Ventures, and NTT Docomo. No revenue, user metrics, or prior round financial amounts are disclosed in the article. Stoke, founded in 2004 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, designs and manufactures systems and hardware for mobile communications infrastructure. Its products support 3G, 4G and Wi‑Fi carrier networks and are designed to improve speeds and make networks more secure. The company’s hardware targets bandwidth efficiency as carriers face rapid growth in connected mobile devices and mobile data traffic. Keating Capital noted industry demand for 4G/LTE and Wi‑Fi over the next 5–10 years and said Stoke is well positioned to take advantage of that growth. Financially, the most recent transaction was a $3.5 million secondary purchase of common shares by Keating Capital from certain Stoke employees; Stoke did not issue new securities or receive new capital. Keating was the sole investor in the transaction and joins existing preferred-stock holders Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital and Docomo Capital as investors in Stoke. Stoke builds mobile broadband infrastructure solutions that provide 3G and LTE capabilities and help network operators transition to 4G. Its products are designed to reduce information overload on carrier networks by improving scalability, flexibility, and cost. The company cites strong demand driven by rapid smartphone adoption and forecasts of massive growth in connected devices. Stoke closed 2010 with revenues four times those of 2009 and was expecting triple‑digit growth in the following year. It plans to use the new funding to double its size in 2011. Total funding to date is $92 million. Stoke builds hardware that provides mobile carriers the technology to let phones access different wireless networks including 3G, GSM, CDMA, Wi‑Fi and WiMax. Its systems converge wireless coverage and let phones seamlessly detect different networks and automatically switch based on location and availability. The product targets carriers facing massive increases in mobile data traffic from applications, video, and music. Stoke says the new funds will be used to support continuing partnerships with mobile carriers. Financially, the company has raised $15M in a Series D, bringing total funding to $65M. Prior rounds include a $20M Series C in 2007, a $19.8M Series B in 2005, and a $10M Series A.

• Evernote

  Led · Equity · Sep 2009

  Evernote offers a note-taking and document-organizing app that surfaces contextual content alongside users' notes via features like Context. The company has been building a content discovery play to increase user engagement, similar to strategies used by Facebook and Twitter. Evernote has significant traction in Japan, with roughly 20% of users and 30% of revenue coming from that market, and says the Japanese aesthetic influences its long-term approach. Evernote has indicated it is considering an IPO within the next few years. The company is expanding language support for Context, with full Japanese-language support on Mac and iOS and planned expansion to Android and Windows. Evernote has partnered with media organizations to feed third-party articles into Context for premium and business subscribers. Evernote is a note-taking and personal data app used by 45 million users. The company aims to become a central repository for personal information and has launched Evernote Business alongside its consumer product. To support that platform ambition, Evernote released updated iOS and Android SDKs: the iOS SDK now natively supports the Yinxiang Biji China service and Evernote Business, while Android received a broad rewrite with Business and China support planned for the next update. The SDK updates include sample code for photo notes, Business APIs, shared notes, and multiple bug and memory-leak fixes. Engineers Mustafa Furniturewala (iOS) and Ty Smith (Android) led the respective SDK efforts, which add utility classes, Obj-C categories, migration to a Library Project, OAuth activity support, Maven integration, backgrounding of blocking requests, and UI updates. Evernote offers web and mobile apps for saving notes, web clips, files and images and syncing them across devices, with features that combine saved content for intelligent access. The company sells premium subscriptions for additional storage and has over one million paying customers among 25 million+ users; conversion to premium is under 0.5% in month one and rises over time, with the oldest users nearly 25% paid. Evernote has made acquisitions (including Skitch), opened offices globally, and has tripled registered and active users in recent months. Management plans to use new funding for international expansion (including a China push), strategic acquisitions, development of business accounts and other features, and hiring developers, designers, QA, and support. CEO Phil Libin says the financing is intended to prepare Evernote for an eventual IPO within a few years and to give the company room to take risks while focusing on product quality. The company also reported it still holds much of the $96M it had raised to date in the bank. Evernote provides a cross-platform note-taking and content-capture service that lets users snip pictures, save web pages, and type text notes, with heavy users organizing content later using tags and metadata. The product is used across devices—75% of users access Evernote on more than one platform and 50% on more than two—and new apps like Peek continue to drive awareness. User growth is steady: the company grew from 10 million users in June to 11 million by the time of the article. Evernote is already profitable and had not spent the proceeds from its prior $20 million round, giving it a substantial cash position. The company plans to use new capital to fuel growth, including upcoming acquisitions, and to support long-term aspirations articulated by CEO Phil Libin to create “a 100 year company.” Morgenthaler has deepened its involvement by assigning partner Ken Gullicksen to head Evernote’s corporate development efforts. Evernote is billed as a service that “helps the world remember everything,” offering about thirteen desktop, mobile and browser clients for capturing meeting notes, wine labels, shopping lists and more. The company had attracted close to 5 million users worldwide in less than two and a half years and was adding more than 10,000 new users per day in the two months prior to the article. Evernote has released major updates to most clients, added partners, and increased revenue from Premium subscriptions to the point where it can fund day-to-day operations. CEO Phil Libin said the company will build more features, fix bugs, add more devices, expand into more countries, and pursue corporate and educational users while exploring new markets and opportunities. Evernote describes a broader ambition to grow from a memory solution into a “global platform for human memory” and a trusted, permanent destination for lifetime memories.

No current team members are available.