The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Oct 2023

AskFora offers AskFora Teams, a SaaS product built on its AI-driven skills search platform that automatically maps employees’ skills to open roles using public and internal data. The product includes an AI chatbot named Fora and a core dataset spanning over 5 million professionals and 250,000 skills. AskFora ingests data from sources such as LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter/X, news, blogs, employee-submitted data, and organizational records (courses, certifications, experiences). AskFora Teams provides modules for recruiting cost savings, DEI and retention, referral increases, targeted training and gap analysis, workforce planning, and improved productivity. The service is offered on a subscription basis at a list price of $10 per month per employee and targets organizations from roughly 200 to 2,000+ employees. Early customers include firms in high-end manufacturing, specialized consulting, and direct-to-consumer industries.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2022

Defendify delivers multiple layers of cybersecurity protection designed to continuously strengthen security across people, process, and technology. Its platform consolidates assessments, testing, policies, training, detection, and response into a single cost-effective solution. The company serves scaling organizations and has added thousands of customers across more than 60 countries. Despite the pandemic, Defendify has continued strong growth and has doubled its team size. Recent strategic additions include former Oracle CIO Mark Sunday as senior advisor, Emily Carville as CMO, and John Mayfield as director of sales. The company intends to use the new funding to accelerate go-to-market strategies, product development, and team expansion. Defendify is a Portland, Maine-based developer of a SaaS cybersecurity platform serving small businesses and channel partners. Its platform provides multiple layers of ongoing protection to continuously improve customers' security posture. The company closed a $2M seed funding round led by existing investor 3dot6 Ventures with participation from York IE, Maine Technology Institute (MTI), Maine Venture Fund (MVF), FreshTracks Capital and Wasabi Ventures. Defendify intends to use the funds to expand its core product, invest in sales and marketing, and make strategic hires. In the last 18 months the company has raised a total of $3.6M, added thousands of users and doubled its employee count. Defendify was co-founded by Andrew Rinaldi and Rob Simopoulos. Defendify provides a SaaS-delivered cybersecurity platform tailored for small businesses. It partners with channel resellers to offer a holistic, multi-layered solution that continuously improves security posture against evolving threats. The platform features multiple layers of ongoing protection and is designed to scale as small businesses grow. Co-founded by Andrew Rinaldi and Rob Simopoulos and based in Portland, Maine, the company sells through channel partners. Defendify raised $1.6M in pre-seed funding and plans to use proceeds to expand its core product and increase partner acquisition. Backers include Maine Technology Institute and 3dot6 Ventures.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2022

Ogee is a commercial-stage beauty company that produces certified-organic, high-performance skincare and makeup made from sustainable, traceable ingredients. The brand emphasizes proven efficacy while meeting strict transparency, regulatory, and safety standards. Ogee was founded in 2014 and is based in Burlington, VT. The company plans to significantly expand its business, launch new product lines, support additional channels, and expand into international sales. Leadership says they will add to their existing collection with a greater assortment of healthy, high-performing ingredients for their community. Ogee closed a $7.07M Series A offering in 2021 to support growth and product expansion.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2022

Resonant Link develops high-performance wireless charging systems built around a multi-layer self-resonant structure (MSRS) to power implantable medical devices and electrify robotics, material handling, and electric vehicle fleets. The MSRS design delivers substantially higher performance, faster charge speeds, lower normalized cost, and reduced weight and size versus existing technologies, and supports implant depths up to six times deeper while meeting FDA temperature limits. The platform claims 99% efficient wireless links and 20× higher recharge rates, enabling smaller on-board batteries and continuous 24/7 fleet operation by recharging during short stops. Resonant Link plans to expand its teams and operations in Vermont, Massachusetts, and California in 2022 and will use new capital for strategic hiring, product development, and customer deployment. The company partners with U.S. defense and research programs and has secured customers across sectors, including six Fortune 500 companies. In the past 12 months the company was profitable, grew revenue 6× year-over-year, and doubled its customer base; seven medical partners are designing its wireless power into implantables and 13 fleets have signed initial deployments. Resonant Link builds wireless chargers using its MSRS technology, which it says achieves 5–10x lower losses than conventional approaches and enables higher speed, smaller size, longer range, and competitive cost per watt. The MSRS was invented at Dartmouth College in 2013 and the company has demonstrated the technology with customers in medical devices, consumer electronics, and electric mobility. Resonant Link says its coils are SAE J2954-compliant for automotive charging and will work with NREL to independently validate performance gains. The company is positioning its chargers to enable onboard-battery shrinkage by recharging vehicles during short stops in operation to extend range. Resonant Link lists partners and backers including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, Cyclotron Road / Activate, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Urban Us, and Scout Ventures. The company is based in Vermont and California and describes its team as a mix of Ph.D. engineers, industry veterans, and ex-founders focused on accelerating electrification across multi-billion-dollar markets.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2021

Faraday provides the Faraday Prediction Cloud, which lets growth teams and their partners make and deploy consumer behavior predictions throughout their tech stacks. The platform emphasizes responsible data practices and ethical AI to improve targeting, personalization, and customer engagement at scale. The company plans to expand its data science, engineering, and revenue teams to strengthen its market position. Faraday completed a $4.1M Series A in July 2021. The round was led by Intercap with participation from FreshTracks Capital and Launch Capital. Faraday is based in Burlington, Vermont. Faraday provides a turnkey AI platform for business-to-consumer companies, bundling consumer data, integrations, algorithms, visualizations, and reporting to deploy predictive modeling in weeks without an in-house data science team. The platform applies advanced machine-learning to optimize every stage of the revenue journey—from acquisition to lead conversion and retention—and is positioned as cost-effective and easily implemented. Faraday reports holding over 73 billion U.S. individual data points and identified and reached more than 90 million high-potential, high-value individuals for client campaigns in 2017. Its B2C clients include direct-to-consumer brands such as Burrow, which says Faraday’s AI coordinates one in three of its sales. The company has expanded its team with hires including Rob Trail (SVP of Sales and Customer Success) and data scientist Dr. Sean Kelly. Faraday has secured more than $2 million in new funding to support growth and product development. Faraday provides a software-as-a-service application designed to improve customer acquisition by revealing the best strategies for winning new business. The platform generates targeting hypotheses, facilitates multi-channel outreach through a network of vendors, and tracks results to highlight best-performing approaches. It includes a predictive analytics engine that identifies customers most likely to convert. Led by CEO Andy Rossmeissl and based in Middlebury, Vermont, the company plans to use new funding to build out its team and launch a new release of its platform. In 2013 Faraday worked with seven clients in the residential solar and energy-efficiency industries across five states and analyzed over 800,000 households. The company reported closing an $880K Series A to support its growth and product rollout.