The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Oct 2012

Branding Brand builds mobile-optimized e-commerce sites and native apps for retailers, transforming desktop sites into mobile experiences and licensing APIs for in‑house app development. The company powers mobile sites and apps for more than 200 top retailers, including American Eagle, Costco, Ralph Lauren and Sephora, and is the top mobile platform provider to the Internet Retailer top 500. Branding Brand reports nearly $1 billion in transactions running through its platform (up from $60 million in 2011), has seen 100 percent year-over-year growth, and was named to the Inc. 500 for three-year growth of 1,302 percent. Its proprietary technology transcodes desktop sites (using retailer APIs when available), outputs native experiences managed from a single dashboard, and the company has patented the process that translates site data into its APIs. Since its $7.5 million Series A last fall the company has seen a more than 100 percent increase in valuation and is expanding beyond online retail into transportation and hospitality with clients like Hilton Honors and San Francisco BART. Branding Brand also works with leading mobile shopping aggregators, provides in-house analytics to improve conversion, and licenses its APIs to retailers that want to build apps internally. The company plans to use additional capital to support vertical expansion and to enhance mobile and in-store products and partnerships. Branding Brand provides a mobile commerce platform that enables brands to extend their presence to smartphones, tablets and in-store channels. The company powers mobile sites and apps for major retailers including American Eagle Outfitters, Anthropologie, Costco, Sephora, Ralph Lauren, Dick’s Sporting Goods and others. Founded in 2008 by three Carnegie Mellon University friends, the team launched its mobile platform at the end of 2009 and has grown to become the largest m-commerce provider to the Internet Retailer Top 500. Headcount has expanded rapidly to over 100 employees, up from 10 two years earlier. The company recently hired Jeffrey R. Hennion, the former head of e-commerce at GNC and Dick’s Sporting Goods, as President to lead global marketing and e-commerce. The business will use new capital to fund customer acquisition, technology development, and operations.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2012

Ensighten provides an omni-channel data and tag management platform comprising enterprise tag management, mobile app deployment and optimization, and customer profile creation and activation. It has launched a patented, real-time, no-SDK mobile app optimization and deployment platform that lets marketers boost in-app conversion, engagement and loyalty without repeating app certification. The platform integrates with nearly 1,000 digital marketing vendor integrations across analytics, advertising, e-mail, marketing automation, personalization and search. Clients include Microsoft, Capital One, United Airlines and T-Mobile. The company is led by CEO Josh Manion and has offices in San Jose, San Diego, London and Sydney. It intends to use the newly raised funds to accelerate innovation and sales of its platform. Ensighten offers an Agile Marketing Platform that serves and manages website tags and enables customers to own, collect, and act on data in real time. Its platform processes tag requests from 30,000 web domains representing $30 billion in annual e‑commerce transactions. Customers include Microsoft, Safeway, and Wal‑Mart. CEO Josh Manion says the market is evolving from tag management to data activation, with demand for real‑time data action. The company was previously described as a CDN for tags that makes tag serving faster and more scalable. Ensighten raised a $40 million Series B and plans to use the proceeds to expand global sales and marketing and continue product development; it had raised a $15.5 million Series A in 2012. Ensighten delivers tags (cookies, pixels, JavaScript snippets) as a service, operating a CDN-style platform that serves only the right tags when needed. This approach reduces page load times and simplifies tag management across many properties. The company also offers mobile-specific solutions to handle inconsistent data connections on mobile platforms. Ensighten targets large enterprise customers managing thousands of tags, enabling marketing teams to make changes without lengthy IT involvement. CEO Josh Manion says the product improves marketing agility and speeds deployment of new tools. The company announced a $15.5M Series A and plans to use the funding for continued global expansion and increased marketing, having opened European offices in April.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2012

Drilling Info offers SaaS-based data intelligence tools and analytics to large global enterprises, independent drillers, service providers and investors in the oil and gas sector. Its services supply timely research and information including land title, leases, well completion and well production data. Led by Chairman and CEO Allen Gilmer, the company supports workflows to help customers make business-critical decisions and maximize returns. Drilling Info has more than 2,700 accounts globally and over 20,000 users. It maintains offices throughout the U.S. oil patch and in the UK, Southeast Asia, and South America. The company intends to expand its data and analytics offerings with new products and features. Drilling Info provides an integrated land, production, and well information platform for the domestic upstream oil and gas industry. The company serves a base of over 10,000 users in the energy sector. It is based in Austin, Texas. Drilling Info completed an acquisition of HPDI, LLC, a data service company that supplies data products and web-enabled, decision-support applications to energy industry users. Main Street Capital provided financing to support that acquisition. The financing included debt and an equity-warrant component tied to Drilling Info’s capital structure.