The Venture Codex

Led · Series C · Nov 2021

Chicago-based Fyllo, led by founder and CEO Chad Bronstein, delivers the Compliance Cloud, a suite of software and services that simplifies regulatory management for companies operating in tightly controlled sectors like cannabis. Its offering combines compliance monitoring, data services and marketing tools, and is complemented by the Fyllo Data Marketplace, which lets mainstream advertisers target cannabis and CBD consumers. The company is expanding its capabilities through M&A, including the February 2021 acquisition of retail and marketing platform DataOwl. Fyllo plans to continue strategic acquisitions and aggressive hiring to bolster its technology stack. Year-to-date in 2021 the business has grown revenue more than 100% and expanded headcount by roughly 275%, adding executives from firms such as Twitter and Salesforce. These metrics underscore rising demand for compliance-first SaaS in regulated markets, positioning Fyllo for continued growth.

Participated · Series F · Oct 2021

DIG is a vegetable-forward, multi-format restaurant group founded in 2011 in New York City that operates fast-casual restaurants, annex programs, strategic partners, and a dining & innovation space called 232 Bleecker. Its core offering is vegetable-centric cooking supplemented by responsibly sourced proteins and produce from DIG Acres, a 20-acre mixed vegetable farm in Chester, NY that supports a farmer apprenticeship program. The company runs DIG Academy, a culinary and business training program, and DIG Feeds, which has donated over 225,000 meals to hospitals, shelters, and community organizations. DIG emphasizes people-first policies including permanent wage increases (converting a $2/hr pandemic bonus), four-month fully paid parental leave for eligible employees, and a tested 4-day workweek pilot. Planned growth includes reopening locations temporarily closed due to COVID-19, expanding restaurant count from 30 to 60 over the next three years, rolling out new formats and kitchen technology pilots (including one at 127 4th Avenue), and expanding DIG Academy into immersive analog and digital education. Dig Inn is an operator of fast-casual restaurants with a 15-restaurant chain in New York and Boston. The chain offers market plates with an average meal price of $10 and sources produce from local farms. Dig Inn aims to make simple, high-quality food available at a relatively affordable price. The company plans to use new capital to launch more restaurants and to open a free culinary training school for employees. Management also intends to make key leadership hires and build out its internal tech platform as part of expansion efforts. The chain plans to open 13–15 additional locations in New York and Massachusetts by 2019 and to expand to a third state in 2018; it had previously raised $21.5 million in earlier rounds. Dig Inn is a vegetable-forward, farm-to-table restaurant chain offering fresh meals priced about $7–$10 per plate. Founded in 2011 in New York City, the company operates 10 locations and has a dedicated local following. It employs nearly 500 in-store staff and about 20 employees in its New York corporate office. The company plans to expand beyond NYC this year, growing its store count from 10 to as many as 18 and targeting Boston as the likely first market outside New York. Dig Inn expects to hire roughly 100 additional employees to support that expansion. Management is focused on preserving company culture during growth through shared meals, open-office arrangements, newsletters, and social events.

Participated · Series C · May 2020

States Title provides AI-based solutions for the real estate industry, using machine intelligence and patented technology to make closings simple and efficient. Its family of brands includes North American Title Company (NATC) and North American Title Insurance Company (NATIC). The companies offer solutions for lenders, real estate agents, title agents, and homeowners. Clients include some of the largest bank and non-bank lenders in the U.S. States Title was founded in 2016 by CEO Max Simkoff and is based in San Francisco. The company raised debt financing to accelerate its product roadmap and market expansion. States Title offers title and escrow solutions through its family of brands, North American Title Company (NATC) and North American Title Insurance Company (NATIC), targeting lenders, real estate agents, title agents and homeowners. Its patented technologies enable use of data science to create predictive title insurance based on an assigned risk score that indicates how safe a property is from liens or liabilities. The company emphasizes an instant customer closing experience, efficiency improvements, and cost reductions across the title process. Led by founder and CEO Max Simkoff, States Title has a team of nearly 1,000 data scientists, engineers, product managers, and operations associates across the U.S. The company closed a $123M Series C financing to support growth. It intends to use the funds to continue expanding its business reach.

Led · Series C · Feb 2017

Comprehend Systems provides a cloud-based software suite that helps Clinical Research teams accelerate and improve the quality of trial submissions across studies, sites, systems and CROs. Its platform supports centralized monitoring, risk monitoring, CRO oversight and collaboration, data review and medical monitoring initiatives. The company is led by CEO Rick Morrison. Comprehend intends to use new funding to expand its sales and engineering teams. Financially, the company has raised $44.5M since launching and recently closed additional capital. The suite is positioned to support portfolio-level trial oversight across multiple stakeholders. Comprehend Systems builds a clinical-trials data platform that centralizes trial information and makes it accessible to executives, clinical operations staff, data managers, and clinical monitors. The platform aims to shorten the time to generate trial reports—previously taking up to a month—and to enable iteration or early termination of trials based on actionable data. Comprehend says consolidating disparate information increases collaboration, improves audits, and reduces research timelines and study costs for drug and device companies. Customers adopting the platform in the past year include Boston Scientific, Karyopharm, MERGE, Atlantic Research Group, and Versartis. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company says it will use the newly raised funds to expand platform development and hire additional staff to assist customers. The company raised $21 million in this latest venture round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with support from Sequoia Capital. Comprehend Systems offers Comprehend Clinical™, a cloud-based platform that pulls together clinical and operational data from disparate systems to help sponsors, study managers and clinicians track and analyze trials. The company emphasizes quick, self-service access through an online portal that lets sponsors sign up and analyze study data in days without lengthy procurement or heavy IT integration. Comprehend positions its tools to surface operational and clinical trends, support safety and regulatory review, and identify time- and cost-saving opportunities. It has pursued partnerships to expand reach, including an integration with Merge Healthcare’s eClinical Solutions division to give Merge customers end-to-end critical insights. The company says it will use new funding to continue development and expansion of its insights platform and to address growing complexity in clinical trials. Comprehend was founded in 2010 in Palo Alto by entrepreneurs with experience in clinical research and software development. Comprehend Systems develops Comprehend Clinical, a clinical data visualization and analytics platform that integrates study data from EDC, safety systems, and CTMS into a single interface. The product offers drag-and-drop ad-hoc reporting, dashboards, and intelligent drilldown designed for data managers, monitors, and clinical operations executives. The company has filed multiple patents for its technology and completed beta tests with pharmaceutical companies and academic research organizations. Comprehend plans to use recent funding to introduce new features and functionality driven by customer feedback. The team emphasizes ease of integration with existing systems and aims to help sponsors and CROs identify operational and clinical trends, safety issues, and opportunities for time and cost savings. Advisory board members with industry and software experience have been added to guide corporate, product, and sales strategy.

Led · Series E · Nov 2016

xAd operates a location-based mobile advertising platform that serves ads in apps and mobile web pages using GPS, server integrations and location requests (it does not use Wi‑Fi). The company places ads across roughly 150,000 apps and reports reach of 500 million devices and 100 million places. As part of its strategy to grow audience and data, xAd acquired the WeatherBug app and an extended license to Earth Networks' sensor data (it did not acquire the sensors themselves). WeatherBug reportedly has about 20 million unique users per month, providing a regularly engaged, location-minded audience. xAd plans to invest in a global rollout of the weather-data integration and pursue further app acquisitions (categories mentioned include fitness and mapping) to strengthen its location offering. Management says the company is already profitable and is using the deal activity to help remain independent amid competition and consolidation in adtech. xAd operates a location-based mobile advertising technology platform that tailors ads to a user’s location and provides analytics for campaign performance. The platform serves about 40 billion impressions per month across roughly seven ad networks and exposes APIs that power third-party programmatic buying and back-end services. xAd says it is the first U.S.-based hyperlocal mobile advertising technology platform to expand globally and is live in Germany, the UK, Canada and India, with imminent launches in China and France. The company shifted in 2012 from an SMB focus to also serve national brands and now works with over 300 national advertisers. xAd is profitable, growing quickly (doubling year-over-year) and had “several million dollars in the bank” prior to this round. The company has not announced plans around iBeacons or NFC and describes the funding as padding its nest egg for future opportunities. xAd operates a local mobile search and advertising network in the U.S., using patented mobile optimization technology to identify who, what and where an end user is and serve relevant ads. The company aggregates and manages nearly half a billion location-specific ad requests per month, billions of business listings, and more than one million national and local advertisers. In May the company reported hitting 2 billion ads served. In March xAd acquired the remaining assets of Go2 Media, including its direct-to-consumer business and mobile web properties, brands and search sites. The startup said the new funding will be used to enhance tools for publishers and advertisers and to continue building and supporting its mobile ad-serving technology. The article does not disclose revenue or other financial metrics beyond the fundraising and operating metrics above. xAD operates a U.S. local mobile search and advertising network that uses patented mobile optimization technology to identify an end user’s who, what, and where and serve relevant ads. The platform is currently serving 200 million local search ad requests per month and partners with large mobile ad networks like Millennial Media to provide local inventory. Ads delivered through xAD include full business descriptions, images, offers, reviews, maps, and driving directions and are integrated into apps such as White Pages on iPhone and Android. The company says it returns relevant ad results 80% of the time. xAD is already profitable and raised new funding to expand and accelerate its technology platform. It competes with Google while the U.S. local mobile advertising market is expected to exceed $2 billion by 2014.