Led · Series B · Aug 2019

Mux builds an API-centric video platform for developers, with a monitoring and analytics product (Mux Data) and a streaming product (Mux Video). The company says its approach enables faster publishing and reliable streaming; customers include Robinhood, PBS, ViacomCBS, Equinox Media and VSCO. Demand surged during the pandemic: on-demand streaming via Mux grew 300%, live streaming grew 3,700%, and revenue quadrupled over the past year. Mux has raised a total of $175M to date and achieved a valuation above $1 billion. CEO and co-founder Jon Dahl said the company didn't need to raise but took the round to accelerate growth during an "inflection moment in video." The company plans to grow headcount from about 80 to 200 employees and is exploring potential acquisitions to continue investing in the platform. Mux offers two core products: Mux Data, a SaaS analytics product for online video, and Mux Video, an API-delivered service that supports live and on-demand streaming. The company was founded in late 2015 by Jon Dahl. Mux Video is positioned as an infrastructure/API play aimed at simplifying video delivery for developers, while Mux Data exhibits more traditional SaaS economics. The business reported very rapid growth: aggregate revenues growing ~4x and Mux Video revenues growing ~8x, with an LTV/CAC around 5x–6x and net retention near 160%. Investors expect its gross margins to eventually resemble other infra companies like Twilio and Stripe, with Mux Data showing stronger SaaS-like margins. COVID-19 has accelerated demand for the product, with customers seeing sharp increases in streaming across social, fitness, e-learning and religious use cases. Mux builds infrastructure and monitoring tools for developers and publishers of online video, offering Mux Video (an API-first platform for encoding and streaming optimized by data and machine learning) and Mux Data (a video analytics product). Mux Data monitors billions of video streams and measures Quality of Experience metrics such as startup time, rebuffering, video quality, and playback failure. The company counts customers including CBS Interactive, PBS, Vimeo, TED, and Udemy. Founded in 2015 and led by CEO Jon Dahl, Mux plans to use new funding to invest in sales and customer success, R&D, and the developer community. The product is designed for developers to integrate video with a few lines of code and to provide publishers with monitoring and optimization tools. The company recently completed a Series B to support those growth initiatives. Mux offers a real-time analytics platform and performance monitoring for streaming video, giving developers actionable data and alerts backed by machine learning. The product includes a powerful analytics dashboard and real-time alerts to help publishers address rebuffering, errors, low quality, slow load times, and broken ad experiences. Customers can use Mux to run A/B tests, measure CDN or player performance, empower customer support with session-level insight, and track and fix hard-to-find errors. Customers named in the article include PBS, IGN, Livestream, Wistia, and Funny or Die. The Mux team includes video veterans who previously built Zencoder (sold to Brightcove) and created the Video.js open-source player, and includes engineers from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. The company says the new funding will further its mission to improve quality of experience for online video viewers. Mux provides a real-time performance monitoring and analytics platform for video streaming, aimed at video developers and media publishers. The platform lets publishers leverage data to improve on-demand and live video performance. The company is led by founder and CEO Jon Dahl. Mux is based in San Francisco, CA. It secured $2.8M in seed funding. The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations.

Participated · Series C · Apr 2019

Tonal builds a connected weight‑training system and content for the at‑home fitness market. The company shifted away from rapid growth toward a measured path to profitability after pandemic‑era expansion. It laid off roughly 35% of staff (headcount then reported around 750) and worked through excess inventory and supply‑chain challenges. Tonal has narrowed marketing to bottom‑of‑funnel performance and is considering adjustments to its product roadmap and expanded brick‑and‑mortar retail presence; its system is currently available in five stores and some Nordstrom locations for demos. Founder Aly Orady moved from CEO to CTO and president Krystal Zell was promoted to CEO; Zell says the company is “really close” to adjusted EBITDA profitability after nine months of difficult choices. The company does not disclose manufacturing locations or the valuation for the new raise. Tonal builds an all-in-one smart home strength-training system that uses digital weights and streamed classes to replicate gym weight stations. Founded in March 2015 by Orady and headquartered in San Francisco, the company saw sales grow 800% from December 2019 to December 2020. Tonal has faced delivery delays of 10–12 weeks and has been ramping production, increasing headcount and air-shipping devices from Taiwan to the U.S. The company plans to spend its new capital on marketing and brand awareness, expand its catalog of streamed fitness classes, and scale operations and its supply chain. Tonal has also expanded its physical presence via a Nordstrom partnership (at least 40 locations) and expects 60 physical locations by the end of 2021. Management additions include a new COO, Chief Strategy Officer and CTO to support growth; leadership says an IPO is a long-term goal but offered no timeline. Tonal builds a connected home strength-training system that pairs a reflective display with resistance technology to approximate dumbbell- and barbell-style workouts. The company differentiates itself by focusing on strength training rather than only cardio or mirror-style fitness devices. Tonal has pursued partnerships and trials, including work with the Mayo Clinic on physical therapy studies with results expected early next year, and deployments at hotels and resorts such as Andaz Scottsdale, the Waldorf Astoria Boca Raton, and JW Marriott Anaheim. The product has attracted athlete investors and ambassadors who cite its use during COVID-19 lockdowns. The home-fitness market is increasingly crowded (notably Lululemon’s $500M acquisition of Mirror), but investor interest remains strong amid pandemic-driven demand. The company is Bay Area–based and has raised significant outside capital to scale distribution and trials. Tonal produces a wall-mounted strength-training machine that uses electromagnetism to simulate and control weight and delivers on-demand training through a connected software platform. The machine retails for $2,995 and the company offers a $49/month membership for personal training sessions, recommended programs and workouts. Since launching its product in 2018, Tonal reports virtually no returns and says customer care proactively works with members to ensure satisfaction. The company says the majority of customers are aged 30–55, evenly split by gender, and live in or near the top 10 U.S. metro markets. Tonal plans to expand software personalization, build new workout categories and enable fitness experiences when users travel. It is also expanding marketing and retail presence (currently a flagship San Francisco store and an upcoming Newport Beach pop-up) and hiring across hardware, software, design, video production and marketing. Tonal sells a wall-mounted strength-training system that uses electromagnetism to simulate and control weight and applies machine learning to adjust resistance. The device includes a built-in personal trainer and programming available for a $49/month membership. Tonal determines a user’s baseline strength with a 10-minute test and continuously monitors rep quality to dynamically adjust resistance during workouts. The unit mounts to your wall and retails for $2,995. CEO and founder Aly Orady demonstrated the product at Tonal’s San Francisco headquarters. The company positions itself alongside connected-home fitness startups like Peloton and Mirror.

Led · Equity · Jan 2019

Epic! is a subscription-based digital reading platform that offers unlimited access to a library of 35,000 books, audiobooks and learning videos from 250 publishers. The service reaches more than 10 million children and has 1.7 million paying subscribers, with teachers in 91% of U.S. elementary schools signed up. Kids have read over 500 million books on the platform since launch, including 300 million last year, and teachers have created 2 million content collections and 200,000 quizzes taken more than 35 million times. Epic! charges $7.99 per month and is used to support classroom learning across subjects from literacy to science and math. The company reports doubling revenue every year and has grown consistently over five years since its 2014 founding in Redwood City, Calif. Epic! is expanding beyond books toward a broader, responsible digital media brand for kids and offers multilingual content, including 3,000 books in Spanish, French and Chinese. Epic! operates an on‑demand digital library aimed at elementary‑school children (roughly ages five to twelve) with about 25,000 books and videos, some with audio read‑along components. The app includes a teacher dashboard and educator features to track student reading and is offered free to teachers while families pay for access. The company says it reaches 5 million kids and that 87 percent of U.S. K–5 schools use Epic! for reading time. Epic! was founded in 2013 and launched its app in 2014. The product emphasizes an interest‑driven UI that encourages children to move between videos, books and interactive content rather than treating reading as a gate to other media. Future plans mentioned by the company include hiring, increased marketing, exploring partnerships in Asia, adding new content types, and potentially incorporating VR and AR content. Epic operates an all-you-can-read eBook subscription service targeted at children ages 12 and under. The service offers unlimited access for $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year and streams books rather than downloading them. Epic's library contains about 2,000 titles through partnerships with publishers including Simon & Schuster, Kids Can Press, Lerner Publishing Group, Open Road, and Integrated Media. The product provides personalized book recommendations based on age and interest, plus badges and rewards for reading achievements. The company recently launched an iPad app and emphasizes kid-focused design and curated, age-appropriate content to encourage reading on devices. Epic is based in Palo Alto and was founded by Suren Markosian and Kevin Donahue, who have backgrounds at Crowdstar, Google/YouTube, Disney, and Cartoon Network. The startup also announced it closed $1.4 million in funding.

Participated · Series D · Sep 2018

MasterClass operates a subscription streaming platform providing access to 100+ instructors and classes across Arts & Entertainment, Business, Design & Style, Sports & Gaming, Writing and more. Each class features about 20 video lessons averaging roughly 10 minutes apiece, and content streams on mobile, tablet, desktop and major TV platforms including Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV and Roku. Launched in 2015 by founder and CEO David Rogier and headquartered in San Francisco, the company plans to use its new capital to increase content production and pursue international expansion. MasterClass also intends to launch a new Enterprise business and continue growing its workforce. Financially, the company raised a $225M Series F and previously closed a $100M Series E a year earlier, bringing total funding to date to more than $475M. The company’s product and growth initiatives are the stated focuses for the new capital. MasterClass offers documentary-style, celebrity-taught classes (called “masters”) across topics, with lessons broken into 20–30 minute videos and downloadable workbooks plus community hubs. The platform has produced about 85 classes featuring high-profile instructors such as Gordon Ramsay, Serena Williams, Steph Curry, Anna Wintour and Neil deGrasse Tyson. MasterClass charges a $180 annual subscription; subscriptions accounted for 80% of revenue in 2018 and now represent 100% of the company’s revenue. The company said sales more than doubled last year but declined to share more recent usage metrics tied to the coronavirus period. MasterClass positions its content at the intersection of entertainment and education and emphasizes production quality over interactive instruction. It is experimenting with formats including audio-only, short form and augmented reality and plans to use capital to produce new classes and ramp production to roughly one class per week. MasterClass offers celebrity-taught online classes across subjects such as tennis and photography. The company currently offers 39 classes and plans to exceed 50 by the end of the year, and it released its first mobile app this April after growing primarily via desktop. MasterClass introduced a $180 annual subscription granting access to all lessons; subscriptions account for 80% of the company’s revenue. Sales more than doubled from 2016 to 2017 and were on track to double again in the current year. CEO David Rogier said the company is on pace to match Udacity and Coursera in revenue, though he declined to disclose MasterClass’s financials or valuation. The company plans to use capital to expand internationally and to recruit additional celebrity instructors. San Francisco-based MasterClass previously raised $54.5 million in venture capital. MasterClass produces hours-long, production-quality online courses taught by well-known practitioners (e.g., Serena Williams, Gordon Ramsay, Christina Aguilera) and offers community access and instructor Q&As. Courses are sold individually at about $90, and the company shares revenue with instructors. Leadership says learners span income, education and geographic cohorts, and that for up to 80% of students it is their first online class; the company did not disclose overall user or revenue figures. MasterClass works with instructors to produce and develop each program. The team plans to add more classes, hire more employees, and expand beyond arts into a “business” category with tutorials from entrepreneurs and visionaries. The company operates offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. MasterClass is an online education platform that sells video courses taught by high-profile professionals and celebrities. The site charges $90 per class and currently features offerings from Dustin Hoffman, Serena Williams, James Patterson, Usher, and a newly released Kevin Spacey class. Cofounders Aaron Rasmussen and David Rogier started assembling talent and filming in 2013 and currently employ 22 people. The company says it has "substantially more" registered users than the 30,000 figure reported previously but declines to disclose exact user counts. Management plans to film 10–15 additional classes in 2016, with some releases delayed by post-production. Several teaching talents, including Spacey and Usher, also participate as investors in the business.

Participated · Series C · Jun 2018

Scopely operates a portfolio of top-grossing mobile games (including Scrabble GO, MARVEL Strike Force, Star Trek Fleet Command, YAHTZEE With Buddies and others) built on a proprietary technology and publishing platform. The company emphasizes a studio ecosystem and directed-by-consumer game experiences, claiming one of the most diversified portfolios in the West. Scopely reports strong player engagement (Star Trek Fleet Command players average four hours per day) and launched Scrabble GO as the #1 most-downloaded word game worldwide. The business has achieved more than $1 billion in lifetime revenue and the company says it is significantly profitable with a strong balance sheet. Scopely plans to use new capital to accelerate M&A, expand into new product categories, and partner with teams and creators to scale growth. The company has roughly 950 employees across offices and studios in the United States, Spain, Ireland, the UK, and Japan. Scopely creates, publishes and live-operates mobile games and interactive entertainment products for worldwide audiences, delivering digital, directed-by-consumer experiences across original and licensed IP. Its portfolio includes Star Trek Fleet Command, Looney Tunes World of Mayhem, WWE Champions 2019, The Walking Dead: Road To Survival, YAHTZEE With Buddies and Wheel of Fortune: Free Play. The company intends to use new funding to accelerate its M&A and investment strategy and to expand its portfolio into new genres and IP. Scopely reported more than $1 billion in lifetime revenue this past summer and has more than doubled its valuation in the prior year. The company added two games at the end of 2018 and created Star Trek Fleet Command with the recently acquired DIGIT Game Studios. Scopely is led by Co-CEOs Walter Driver and Javier Ferreira and has global operations in Los Angeles, Barcelona, Tokyo and Dublin, with additional studios in seven countries across four continents. Scopely is a mobile-games company and touchscreen entertainment network led by CEO and co‑founder Walter Driver. It develops and publishes games in partnership with development studios; notable titles include The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, WWE Champions, Wheel of Fortune Free Play, Yahtzee and Dice With Buddies variants. The company operates a network with more than 165 million users. Scopely raised an additional $100M in Series C funding, bringing its Series C to $160M and total funding to more than $250M to date. Backers on the latest tranche included Revolution Growth, Greycroft Partners and Evolution Media. The company intends to use the funds to make acquisitions and to invest in game studios and intellectual property. Scopely highlights expertise in game design, live services, marketing, analytics, business development and advertising. Scopely has built a platform for promoting and monetizing mobile games, whether developed in-house or by third-party studios. Its titles include The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, Wheel of Fortune Free Play and WWE Champions. The company says it reaches more than 125 million players, with The Walking Dead alone generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Scopely said it is already profitable. Management plans to use new capital to expand the business through inorganic means while continuing organic growth in parallel. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles. Scopely offers tools for promoting and monetizing mobile games and operates both in-house development and partnerships with outside studios. The company released two hit games last year — The Walking Dead: Road to Survival and Yahtzee with Buddies — both ranked among the top-grossing games on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Road to Survival has been installed by more than 20 million players, and the game’s revenues have grown every month since launch, driven by advertising and in-app purchases. Scopely says it will continue to invest in existing titles while also launching new games. The company pursues partnerships with major IP holders, having worked with Hasbro and Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, and intends to pursue similar partnerships going forward. Financially, Scopely has raised a total of $98.5 million to date, including the newly announced Series B.