Led · Seed · Aug 2021

Factors.ai builds analytics software for B2B marketing and sales teams, offering account intelligence, individual-account analytics, overall funnel visibility and revenue attribution. The platform uses visitor and account data to help sales teams identify sales-ready accounts and maximize pipeline generation. The company reports over 100 clients across the United States and India, including Courier.com, Chargbee, Clevertap, Plivo and Traceable. Factors.ai plans to use the new capital to scale go-to-market teams—sales, marketing and customer success—and to bolster product and engineering. Leadership has stated goals to expand the customer base and achieve profitability. The company was founded in 2020 and operates from the US and Bengaluru. Factors.AI provides a marketing analytics AI engine that analyzes consumer data to surface insights for better campaign decisions and increased ROI. Its platform helps marketing teams streamline operations and provides real-time visibility into marketing and sales funnels. The product automatically shows how marketing activities affect revenue and demand pipelines to improve planning. The company plans to use new funding to hire more people, accelerate go-to-market efforts, and continue establishing product leadership in its category. Factors.AI positions itself in the marketing analytics/AI space targeting marketing teams seeking automated, data-driven campaign optimization. As of August 2021 it has raised a $2.0M seed round to support these efforts.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2016

Upthere is a personal cloud service that aims to make the cloud the canonical location for users' files rather than just backups or sync. Its apps are generally available for OS X/MacOS, Android and iOS, with Windows and web apps in beta. The company built a new tech stack from scratch — servers, infrastructure, metadata extraction and indexing — to enable direct cloud reads and writes, fast access via thumbnail caching and a local cache for offline use. The client UX is minimalist with a timeline, separate lists for photos/videos, music and documents, and "loops" for tagging and sharing; it does not integrate into local file systems like Finder or Explorer. Roadmap items mentioned include image-recognition-style search and basic in-app text editing. Current pricing and go-to-market details: current beta users get free unlimited access for 12 months, new users pay $4.99/month for 200GB with $1.99/month per additional 100GB, and new users receive a three-month free trial. Upthere provides a cloud personal storage platform that helps users keep, manage, organize, and share photos, videos, music and documents. Its products are available on iPhone, Android phones, and Mac. The company, based in Palo Alto, CA, received a new credit facility from Square 1 Bank, a division of Pacific Western Bank. The amount of the facility was not disclosed. The proceeds from the facility may be used to support company operations or future growth. Upthere is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Elevation Partners, Floodgate, Google Ventures, NTT DOCOMO Ventures and Western Digital.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2014

Sharethrough operates a marketplace and the Sharethrough for Publishers (SFP) software platform that enables brands and media companies to create, manage and monetize in-feed advertising across connected devices. The company’s platform is used to drive engagement for original brand content on publishers’ websites. Led by CEO Dan Greenberg, Sharethrough has been adopted by over 300 premium publishers, including Men’s Health, Gannett, Forbes, Time Inc. and Business Insider. In the past year it opened offices in London and acquired the UK content marketing company VAN. The company says it will use the new funding to accelerate global expansion and product development and is actively hiring. The product focus and recent partnerships indicate a push to scale publisher adoption and international presence. Sharethrough operates a native advertising exchange focused on in-feed and in-stream ad formats and distribution of branded content. The company evolved from an earlier focus on video ads to support multiple formats via its Sharethrough Advertising Exchange. Its network includes publishers such as People, Forbes, and Popular Mechanics, and comScore reports the Sharethrough network reaches 227 million unique visitors monthly, including 119 million on mobile. Sharethrough positions itself as the largest native ad platform and emphasizes promoting meaningful brand content. The company announced a $17 million financing (see deal details) and says it will continue technology development, pursue international expansion, and hire additional engineers and sales and bring STR software to more publishers. Dan Greenberg is founder and CEO and the company’s leadership has been active in promoting native advertising. Sharethrough builds native video advertising products that are customized to a publisher’s website and designed to feel like an organic part of content. The company launched the Sharethrough Sponsored Videos platform to standardize and scale native video ad deployment for a large number of publishers and advertisers. CEO Dan Greenberg framed the company’s strategy as aggressively doubling or tripling down on native video advertising. Sharethrough reports its platform reaches 105 million people in the United States and distributes native ads for 50% of the top 100 brands and more than 85% of the top U.S. media agencies. The company says revenue is up 87% year‑over‑year. As part of its growth push, Sharethrough has added senior hires including Chief Revenue Officer Mike Gaffney and VP of Operations James Navin. Sharethrough operates a social video ad network that helps agencies and marketers distribute brand video advertisements through social ad formats. Its ad unit allows viewers to tweet videos and share content on Facebook directly from within the ad. The company provides clients with metrics and data on how each video advertisement performs. Sharethrough has run more than 200 campaigns on publisher sites, including Reddit, for brands such as Sony, Xbox, GM, Activision, Nestle and LEGO. On the financing side, Sharethrough raised $5 million in a Series A led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Floodgate, following a prior $1 million angel round from Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Baseline Ventures and others. The company competes with players like Tremor Media, Brightroll and YuMe.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2013

MarketShare, founded in 2005 and based in Los Angeles, provides technology, data, modeling and business intelligence solutions that enable businesses to evaluate marketing and sales investments. Its platform covers paid media (TV, print, display, search, video, social media, trade funds), owned media (website traffic) and earned media (word-of-mouth, social media, PR). The company is led by co-CEOs Wes Nichols and Jon Vein, with Ivan Markman as COO. MarketShare has additional offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo and Bangalore. The company intends to use new funding to further enhance its technology platform and to accelerate growth in markets worldwide. MarketShare is a cross-media analytics firm that provides a platform combining technology, data, modeling and business intelligence to help marketers drive demand across media, sales, price and distribution decision points. Founded in 2005 and led by co-CEOs Wes Nichols and Jon Vein, the company offers a cloud-based suite of analytic products and predictive models. It has pursued strategic acquisitions, including JovianDATA and MarketingNPV, and formed partnerships with firms such as TRA, Inc. and [x+1]. The company plans to use new capital to accelerate organic growth, make further strategic acquisitions, expand in Asia‑Pacific and EMEA, and invest in analytics and innovation. MarketShare has expanded international operations in the U.K. and Japan and maintains offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo and Bangalore.

Led · Equity · Sep 2012

GENWI offers a cloud publishing solution and mobile CMS (mCMS) that lets publishers repurpose content and build customizable native and HTML5 apps using templates and tools. Its platform decouples content and design so editors manage content while designers handle navigation and UI, which are joined at runtime and distributed across devices. The system avoids frequent app-store resubmissions for small tweaks and supports targeted content delivery by geography, usage patterns, or interest. GENWI is powering roughly 1,500 apps, storing and delivering 90 million+ articles and 120 million+ images, and serving over 6 million app views per month. Customers include Conde Nast, IndiaTimes, Moguldom Media, Forbes, PBS Kids and The Hollywood Reporter. The company grew revenues 600% year‑over‑year, expanded its team to 24, and says the new funding will help propel it toward profitability. GENWI provides a cloud-based publishing platform that enables publishers to create and distribute interactive mobile apps across iOS, Android, HTML5 and other devices. Its Cloud Publishing Suite includes a mobile-optimized content aggregation and management system, a custom interface layout engine, usage analytics, intelligent content curation, social and ad network integration, and app distribution — all managed from the cloud. GENWI says it has created and actively manages over 1,500 apps for "thousands of" publishers. The company raised a $4M Series A from Nexus Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $5.1M to date. The new capital will be used to build infrastructure and an extensive app network to enable more advanced monetization and distribution features, support global expansion, and add multilingual functionality. Founded in 2010 and based in Los Altos, California, GENWI is privately held.