Participated · Series A · Apr 2019

Pana is a Denver startup founded in 2015 that provides a travel concierge and companion app to coordinate business travel, especially for onsite interviewees. Its core product blends automation with human concierges via in-app chat, text and email, handling bookings, rebookings and complex requests with a five-minute human response time. The company previously offered a $49/month consumer travel concierge plan but has shifted focus to the corporate travel market, outsourcing coordination for out-of-network guests. Pana is pursuing the broader corporate travel market by working with large travel platforms such as SAP Concur rather than competing directly. It already books thousands of trips per month and counts customers including Logitech, Quora and Shopify. The startup recently closed a $10 million Series A to support this corporate push. Pana (formerly Native) is a Denver, Colo.-based conversational commerce travel startup that combines artificial intelligence with a concierge service to provide personalized travel booking, troubleshooting, benefits and awards. Led by CEO and co-founder Devon Tivona, the service pairs 24/7 human assistants with proprietary AI to handle member requests. Members send messages via the app to request flight bookings, hotel reservations, car rentals, or restaurant suggestions. Through the combination of experts and AI technology, requests are typically handled and answered within 30–60 seconds. The company is accepting a limited number of beta members and plans to roll the service out to beta customers over the next couple months. Pana raised seed funding to expand product distribution and further develop its proprietary AI technology.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2017

The Mighty operates a social network and media site where people with chronic illnesses, mental health disorders, and disabilities share personal stories and support. Founded by Mike Porath in 2014, the company is Los Angeles-based and mission-driven to "empower and connect people facing health conditions and disabilities." The site has grown to more than 1 million community members, a 10 million-strong newsletter subscriber base, and adds about 150,000 newsletter signups per month. Editorially the company staffs 15 editors and writers and supports over 10,000 unpaid contributors. Early traffic growth and partnerships have produced incipient revenue from sponsored posts, videos, and surveys; The Mighty runs sponsored posts rather than branded drug ads. The company recently struck a partnership with WPP to surface its storytellers to healthcare clients and is building new features including a Quora-style Q&A and one-to-one messaging. Peter Wang joined as CTO to help build product and scale the platform. GGV Capital’s involvement is intended to help accelerate international growth.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2015

UniqueSound is a Paris-based marketplace that connects professional content creators directly with curated music composers. Founded in September 2014 by Romain Cochet, the platform enables ad agencies, brands, video platforms, game studios and producers to hire composers for custom music or search ready-to-use tracks. The service reports over one thousand curated composers and customers such as Vice Media, TBWA and Verizon. UniqueSound graduated from NUMA Paris in December 2014 and Techstars NYC in April 2015. In September 2015 the company raised $1M in seed funding. It intends to use the funds to expand teams in New York City and Paris, increase sales efforts and continue product development.

Led · Seed · Nov 2015

Localize provides a translation automation platform delivered via a copy/paste JavaScript snippet, with advanced routing workflows, an API for developers, and a collaborative dashboard for translators and agencies. The platform supports in-house translators, third‑party agencies with real‑time quotes, community contributors, and business translation services. Recent product work includes a partnership with Textmaster, content labeling for language‑specific media switching, a quality‑assurance workflow, and improvements to in‑context editing. Localize has served over 70 million pages for enterprise customers including Uber (driver recruiting), Intuit (QBO Labs), WeWork, Airbnb, and Microsoft LATAM, plus 400+ other customers in over 40 countries and content in more than 150 languages. The company plans to use new funding to grow the team and scale its translation software and localization platform for startups.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2015

Stream offers APIs for activity feeds and chat that developers can integrate into apps with a few lines of code. The company began with activity‑feed APIs and expanded into chat, currently integrating third‑party chatbots and using Dolby for audio and video while planning to bring more components in‑house. Stream has said it wants to add end‑to‑end encryption and build more chatbot and media capabilities itself. Its technology is used across sectors including healthcare, education, finance, virtual events, dating, gaming and social. Notable customers include TaskRabbit, NBC Sports, Unilever, Delivery Hero, Gojek, eToro and Stanford University. Apps that use Stream’s services collectively cover more than 1 billion users, and the company reported chat revenue grew 500% in 2020. Stream was co‑founded in Amsterdam in 2015 and now has its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, while retaining a substantial team in Amsterdam. Stream builds APIs focused on activity feeds and, more recently, chat to help product teams add social features to their apps. The company started with activity feeds and began developing a chat API about 10 months ago after customers tried to build chat on top of feeds. Customers named in the article include Harvard, Dubsmash and Healthline. Stream is a five-year-old, 60-person startup with offices in Boulder and Amsterdam and was founded by Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli. The founders entered Techstars when the company was two months old in 2015. During the COVID-19 pandemic some smaller customers folded and one larger customer went bankrupt, but demand rose from education, healthcare, online events and religious communities. Financially, Stream closed a $15 million Series A led by GGV Capital, bringing total funding to $20.25 million. Stream offers an API for creating personalized news feeds that app creators can embed and scale within their apps. Its clients include Product Hunt, Google's Fabric, and Unsplash, and its feeds reach around 200 million end users. The company says news feeds are the dominant way of discovering content online and are used in 22% of apps. Stream plans to use new funding to accelerate product development, expand support for larger customers, add multi-region capabilities, and enhance machine-learning for personalization. It also intends to build up a small marketing and sales effort and grow its team. Stream has raised a total of €4.75 million to date and maintains an office in Boulder, CO. Stream sells newsfeed development and management as a service, building on an open-source feed project its team created. The original open-source project is about three years old and has been downloaded 250,000 times. Founders Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli began working on Stream in August after leaving prior startups and participated in the Techstars NY accelerator. Originally founded in Amsterdam, the company relocated operations to Boulder due to visa issues. Stream reports 120 companies are "in production" with the service, including its largest customer, GoldenLine.pl. The company positions its managed feed offering as a scalable alternative to costly in-house feed solutions used by many apps.