Participated · Seed · Sep 2019

Axuall operates a workforce intelligence platform that aggregates clinician data through a national, real-time practitioner data network. Its Workforce Intelligence Network pulls clinician information from nearly 7,000 data sources and directly from physicians, advanced practice providers, and nurses via an integrated digital credential wallet with smart applications. The platform is used to reduce onboarding and enrollment time for healthcare systems, staffing firms, telehealth providers, and health plans while supplying data insights for network planning, analytics, and reporting. Axuall’s technology connects to the systems, vendors, and processes that customers already use. Led by co-founder and CEO Charlie Lougheed, the company has raised over $41M from more than two dozen healthcare organizations. It most recently announced an undisclosed Series B-1 that added Frist Cressey Ventures following a $20M Series B in May 2023. Axuall provides workforce intelligence powered by a national real-time practitioner data network, enabling healthcare systems, staffing firms, telehealth companies, and health plans to reduce onboarding and enrollment time while offering data insights for planning, analytics, and reporting. Led by CEO Charlie Lougheed, the company’s technology integrates with credentialing and recruiting workflows to streamline practitioner management. Axuall’s network today consists of over 6,800 primary data sources. The company recently raised $20M in a Series B to support growth. Axuall intends to use the funds to grow its product, sales, and marketing teams and to develop its data partnerships across its network. It also plans to accelerate API integration into planning, recruiting, credentialing, enrollment, CRM, and electronic medical record systems. Axuall operates a national digital professional identity network that enables clinicians, healthcare systems, staffing firms, telehealth groups, and health plans to share and manage authenticated provider credentials and qualifications in real time. Built on a provider-centric model, the network aims to eliminate onboarding delays, reduce physician burnout, and enable workforce intelligence across the healthcare industry. The solution was developed and piloted with University Hospitals, MedStar Health, and MetroHealth and launched commercially in late 2020. Axuall was formed in 2018 and initially raised $3 million of venture funding to develop the network. The company plans to use new capital to accelerate R&D, implementations, sales, and marketing as it grows its customer base of healthcare organizations. Management positions the product as addressing provider data delays and blind spots that drive billions in annual costs and care inefficiencies. Axuall operates a real-time digital network for verifying identity, credentials, and authenticity to eliminate waste, prevent fraud, and manage risk in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, government, and other sectors. The network enables healthcare providers to request and receive digitally signed credentials from primary sources and securely share them with employers, health systems, and insurance plans. Axuall proactively monitors conditional events such as expirations and dependencies so practitioners can address issues as they arise, keeping credentials up-to-date and aligned with standards. Led by CEO Charlie Lougheed and based in Cleveland, OH, the company is preparing for commercial release. Axuall recently closed a $3M seed financing to support its near-term plans. The company intends to use the funds to hire additional software engineering and product personnel, run several large-scale pilots, develop its partner network, and complete R&D for commercial release.

Participated · Seed · Mar 2019

Hammerhead makes the Karoo, a mountable, shockproof cycling computer with a high-resolution, anti-glare touchscreen. The device runs Karoo OS, an Android-based, regularly updated operating system that includes cycling-specific mapping and turn-by-turn navigation. The company plans an app store to allow third-party software on the device and intends to license its software to bike manufacturers and other partners. Founder and CEO Piet Morgan launched the business after crowdfunding its first product, the H1, and positions software as the key differentiator versus incumbents like Garmin. Hammerhead says future opportunities include smart range projections for e-bikes, bike-share fleet management, social training integrations, and theft and crash alerts. The Karoo device is currently sold for $399.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2017

Astronomer builds Astro, a unified DataOps platform centered on Apache Airflow that combines orchestration with observability, lineage, data quality, integrated dbt workflows and cost optimization. The company has recently expanded its product beyond orchestration to address data observability and governance needs for production AI and MLOps. Astronomer reports strong operating metrics: 150%+ YoY Astro ARR growth, 130% net revenue retention, 90%+ product utilization, and a two-year path to profitability. Astro is trusted by more than 700 enterprises and the underlying Airflow project is used by over 80K organizations and saw 324M+ downloads in 2024. Engineering contributions from Astronomer helped enable the general availability of Airflow 3.0, which the company says improves security, usability, and production AI support. Astronomer plans to use new capital to accelerate R&D and expand its international presence. Astronomer develops commercial data orchestration tools powered by Apache Airflow that enable teams to build, run, and observe pipelines-as-code. The company says Airflow is used across hundreds of thousands of data teams and records about 8 million monthly downloads, up from 180,000 in 2018, and Astronomer represents 16 of the top 25 all-time contributors to Airflow. Astronomer has grown its headcount roughly tenfold over two years to more than 250 employees and maintains hubs in Cincinnati, New York, San Francisco and San Jose. Management plans to launch a product and scale field teams, while using new capital to grow engineering and customer success, advance technology development, and scale go-to-market operations. The company recently acquired Datakin to add data lineage capabilities and to better connect lineage and orchestration end-to-end. The $213 million Series C closing provides what the CEO described as a cash cushion to advance these strategic plans. Founded in 2018 by Joe Otto and based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Astronomer develops data orchestration solutions built on Apache Airflow. The company offers a multi-tenant, multi-cloud Airflow-as-a-Service product alongside a Kubernetes-native platform to deploy, manage and scale distributed Airflow services. Astronomer targets organizations using Airflow — an open-source project originally developed at Airbnb and adopted by thousands of companies including Lyft, PayPal, Twitter and Apple. The company raised a $5.7M seed round and intends to use the proceeds to continue expanding operations. Leadership changes accompanying the round include Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures joining the board. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Astronomer provides a solution that eases the pain around data analytics by assembling and organizing data after collection, freeing engineering resources to focus on analysis. The platform reduces the time data teams spend on data capture and management, allowing users to obtain needed data on demand with light configuration. According to the company, data scientists spend roughly 90% of their time capturing and managing data, a core problem Astronomer targets. The company was founded in 2015 and is based in Cincinnati. Astronomer recently raised $3.5M in new capital led by Wireframe Ventures and CincyTech, with debt financing participation from Silicon Valley Bank; other investors include Frontline Ventures (UK), Grand Ventures, Drummond Road, Core Network, and M25 Group. It previously raised $1.9M in seed funding from AngelPad, 500 Startups, Social Starts, First Ascent and several midwestern funds. The new capital will be used to expand the company’s sales and engineering operations. Astronomer builds a platform to connect disparate SaaS systems via their APIs and integrate their data into an actionable body of information. The stack is built on open-source technology and its components are designed to interoperate with other open-source tools; job code written to the Beam API can swap execution engines such as Spark or Flink. The product targets use cases including business intelligence and marketing, event-triggered automation, and optimization of large fleets of machinery. The company is working on tooling to help clients who aren’t sure where to start and is actively building out additional features. Astronomer began in 2014 as USERcycle and is based in Cincinnati. It reports $550,000 in annual recurring revenue and says it has processed billions of events.

Led · Seed · Oct 2016

ExpenseBot is a software-as-a-service platform that automates expense management for businesses with between 50 and 50,000 employees. It integrates with credit card, calendar, email and GPS data and uses machine learning to automatically create and populate expense reports. The platform also lets businesses establish spending rules and data requirements to improve control and transparency of spend. The company was founded in 2013 and is led by CEO Ed Buchholz. ExpenseBot has offices in Cleveland, Ohio and Denver, Colorado. Its investors include JumpStart, Drummond Road Capital, Techstars Ventures, Foundry Group, 500 Startups and Kima Ventures.

Participated · Equity · May 2015

Ahalogy provides a Pinterest-focused marketing solution that helps brands source, optimize and scale content on the Pinterest platform. The company is an official Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner and positions itself as the "Marketer’s Solution for Pinterest." Ahalogy serves several of the U.S.’s leading consumer brands and operates from a headquarters in Cincinnati with additional offices in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Stuttgart. To support its next stage of growth the company recently hired senior executives to lead engineering and revenue (including a former Netflix engineering lead and a veteran sales leader). Ahalogy announced $8 million in new funding to accelerate growth and scale its engineering and data science teams. The funding mix includes debt financing and increased investment from existing backers. Ahalogy provides a Pinterest-focused marketing platform that sources content, schedules pins with an optimization algorithm, and drives traffic for brands on a pay‑per‑performance basis rather than subscription SaaS. The company operates a content network of over 1,000 creators and maintains roughly 140,000 pieces of categorized content that brands can use. Ahalogy works deeply with a little over two dozen brands, including Kellogg’s, Gap, Piperlime and other consumer names, and reports 80% re‑pin rates and 1–2% average click‑throughs. The company says it is seeing a million‑plus run rate with pricing typically at a minimum of $5,000–$10,000. Ahalogy launched in fall 2012 after its founders pivoted from a fashion startup concept. With the new funding it plans to grow its 23‑person team and expand efforts around Pinterest as Promoted Pins goes live, while broadening its content network to support Facebook and Instagram.