Led · Equity · Mar 2018

Staq is an NYC-based automated reporting platform as a service for digital advertising that automates and unifies reporting and analytics across the ad technology stack. Led by CEO Andy Ellenthal, the company’s proprietary platform connects to over 400 ad servers, exchanges, social media platforms and CRM workflow tools, eliminating manual spreadsheet work while driving higher yield and ROI. Staq closed a $2M funding round to support product and team growth. The company intends to use the funds to enhance its software platform by creating an expanded back-end with a flexible data-lake architecture. It plans to introduce features and services including industry-wide data normalization, benchmarking and descriptive analytics, and to grow its sales and engineering teams. Staq offers a SaaS-based integrations and reporting automation platform for digital advertising, unifying analytics and automating operations across the ad technology stack. Led by CEO James Curran, the platform integrates the technologies publishers, brands, and agencies use to transact and monitor business performance at scale. The solution contains over 350 integrations with ad servers, exchanges, CRM and workflow tools. The company closed a $5M venture capital round to support growth. Staq plans to use the funds to add integrations between digital advertising technologies, expand the scope of advertising analysis and optimization available through the platform, and hire additional personnel. Staq develops a collection, reporting, and integrations system for advertising technology that consolidates campaign, inventory, audience, sales pipeline, and analytics data across ad stacks. Its product enables users to view campaigns, inventory, audience data, sales pipeline and analytics from across all of their advertising technology. The system has integrated into more than 175 technologies among publishers and marketers, including ad servers, RTB exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, audience targeting systems, analytics, CRM and workflow tools. The company was founded in 2012 by James Curran (CEO) and Mike Subelsky (CTO) and is based in New York City and Baltimore. Staq recently secured $2.5M in Series A financing and intends to use the funds to expand adoption of the product.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2016

Rocketrip builds an enterprise platform that rewards employees with gift cards when they book travel and transportation under budget. The product gamifies cost-conscious behavior, offering credits redeemable at merchants like Amazon, Bloomingdale's, and Home Depot. CEO Dan Ruch calls it a "behavioral change platform" inspired by Google's internal travel system. Corporate customers include clients such as Twitter and Pandora, and Canaan Partners' Michael Gilroy holds a board seat. Rocketrip reports the average business trip booked through its service saves companies $208. The company plans to expand beyond travel to incentivize healthcare choices (for example, quitting smoking) and to let employers use Rocketrip points to reward community service. Rocketrip is a New York City–based technology platform that helps companies reduce corporate travel expenses. The solution motivates business travelers to save money by rewarding them with points redeemable for gift cards, charitable contributions, travel benefits and other rewards. For each itinerary the platform generates a personalized “Budget to Beat” based on real-time prices for flights, hotels, trains and rental cars. Led by founder and CEO Dan Ruch, the company uses gamified incentives to change traveler behavior and cut travel spend. Rocketrip intends to use the new funding to expand marketing, sales and research and development. The article reports a $9M Series B raise led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Rocketrip runs an incentives platform for business travel that challenges employees to beat pre-set trip budgets; if they do, Rocketrip pays them a portion of the savings and takes a small cut. The company describes its model as a rare everybody-wins arrangement—clients save money, travelers earn cash, and Rocketrip earns when customers save. The product is centered on changing traveler behavior through budgeted trips and cash rewards. Rocketrip has attracted investor interest and recently raised an additional round characterized as an "A1" continuation of its Series A rather than a new stage. The company raised $3 million in this A1 round after a $2.6 million Series A in February, and its valuation had increased going into the A1. Investors in the latest round include Genecast Ventures, Canaan Partners, Paul Buchheit, and CrunchFund. Rocketrip provides a platform that helps companies save on travel expenses by rewarding employees for cost-saving booking behavior. The company uses algorithms that integrate a company’s travel policy with real-time trip pricing and availability to create a personalized “Smart Budget” for each trip. Employees who book under budget share a percentage of the savings in the form of cash and gift cards. The platform also supplies employers with insights and analytics on spending, savings and employee travel behavior to help optimize travel policy and rewards. Rocketrip is led by Founder & CEO Dan Ruch and Co‑Founder & Head of Product and Technology Gillian Tee. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate software and product development and to expand sales and client services.

Participated · Seed · May 2016

BigID is an AI-augmented data security and privacy platform that helps organizations discover, manage, protect, and extract value from regulated, sensitive, and personal data across public and private cloud environments. The company provides data-centric security, privacy, compliance, AI innovation, and governance capabilities and is led by CEO Dimitri Sirota. Recently BigID introduced data hygiene features for the generative AI data pipeline and new controls to detect and track model access to sensitive data. The company serves customers that deploy its platform to proactively discover and manage data across their data landscape. BigID raised a $60M Growth round and has now raised $320M in total capital at a valuation of over $1 billion. It intends to use the new funding to accelerate both organic and inorganic expansion in AI data security and compliance from its NYC base. BigID offers a data intelligence platform that enables organizations to discover their enterprise data and take action across privacy, security, and governance. The platform provides modern data visibility and control through modular apps designed to scale for evolving data landscapes. BigID’s capabilities are positioned to help customers discover data and ensure it remains compliant, private, and secure. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is investing to support BigID’s next phase of growth and innovative technology. BigID’s leadership frames the partnership as a way to bring innovative solutions that address complex and evolving data challenges. BigID builds a security and privacy platform that helps organizations discover, manage and secure data. The company has separated its product into modular core capabilities sold as an integrated platform. Management says it has added employees since December and is developing a host of new product modules and offerings to be announced in the coming weeks. Leadership intends to use the new capital to accelerate product development and add a sales team focused on smaller commercial accounts. BigID has attracted both venture and strategic investors, reflecting demand for data management and security solutions. The company reports it has raised more than $200 million across four rounds. BigID builds a security and privacy platform that began as a GDPR-focused data discovery product and has expanded into a broader data intelligence platform. The company enables BigID and third parties to build applications on top of its platform and plans to open a marketplace to third-party developers in 2021. Management said it expects a material uplift in revenue this year and reports five years of runway following the latest round. BigID has 235 employees today and plans to grow to about 300 next year; it paused hiring in Q2 during the pandemic but did not resort to layoffs. The company is accelerating sales and marketing in 2021 and is working to expand internationally and improve diversity at board, executive, and staff levels. BigID builds an enterprise privacy platform that provides data discovery, classification and correlation across disparate sources. The platform is designed to help customers trace personal data connections across systems like Salesforce, Workday, AWS and mainframes, even across hundreds of petabytes. The company recently restructured its offering into a core set of capabilities sold as a cohesive platform while remaining a broad-based solution. BigID says customers repeatedly request these core capabilities, which enable compliance with new privacy regulations. CEO and co‑founder Dimitri Sirota said the company will continue expanding the platform and has upcoming announcements around partnerships, customers and new capabilities. Financially, BigID has been raising quickly to scale for demand and has now raised more than $96 million to date.

Participated · Equity · Dec 2015

ZeroFOX offers a SaaS platform that provides visibility, detection and automated remediation for threats across social, mobile, surface, deep & dark web, email and collaboration platforms. Its AI capabilities include deepfake detection (Deepstar), scalable object detection, OCR for image-driven platforms, and business-email-compromise detection. The platform analyzes millions of content pieces per day and protects thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of digital brands and accounts. ZeroFOX cites industry metrics (its 2019 Financial Services Digital Threat Report) showing large increases in digital threat activity and positions its technology to address scale and sophistication gaps left by legacy vendors. The company has integrated Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit to accelerate detection and remediation. It plans to use new funding to accelerate global expansion, advance its AI roadmap, and strengthen its intellectual property. ZeroFox offers a platform designed to catch malicious links, prevent account takeovers, and stop social-media scams like coupon fraud. It sells primarily to security teams and CISOs, as well as risk and fraud groups, marketing teams that manage social accounts, and ISPs. Named customers include Rogers Communications and Comcast. The company operates on a subscription model, charging on a per-account basis starting at $20 per month. CEO James Foster has emphasized that social media is an information-sharing channel where users are more likely to "trust and click," creating a growing attack vector. The $40 million Series C was announced to help companies manage social-media risk. As part of the deal, Alastair Cookson of Redline Capital Management joined ZeroFox's board. ZeroFOX is a Baltimore, MD–based provider of social media security solutions offering a detection and defense platform that continuously monitors social platforms for cyber attacks, account compromise, fraud, information loss and social engineering campaigns. The company leverages its technology and security practices to protect organizations from next‑generation digital threats. James C. Foster serves as Chairman and CEO. ZeroFOX raised an additional $27M in funding to support its operations. The company plans to invest the proceeds into engineering, expand global sales and marketing efforts, increase M&A activity, and focus on intellectual property protection and defense. In conjunction with the round, Highland Capital general partner Corey Mulloy is joining the ZeroFOX board. ZeroFOX offers a cloud-based Social Risk Management platform that provides real-time risk management, threat intelligence, and security analytics to detect social-based cyber attacks, fraud, phishing, social engineering, and impersonations. The platform is aimed at enterprise and government customers to give visibility into an extended attack surface created by social media. The company emphasizes proactive mitigation of social-media–driven threats and plans to scale its presence with NEA’s support to become a global brand for Social Risk Management. ZeroFOX highlights industry recognition and awards, including multiple regional and industry honors. Financially, the company announced a $10.7M Series A and reported total funding of $13M over the prior 12 months, including a $450K non-dilutive incentive from the State of Maryland. ZeroFOX was founded in January 2013 and is based in Baltimore. Riskive offers a cloud-based Social Risk Management platform that leverages predictive analytics to identify, monitor and prevent social-media–based cyber threats. Its technology is deployed in beta and is designed to provide real-time protection for users, applications and social brand assets. The company targets government and enterprise customers and emphasizes preventing attacks before they occur. Riskive has assembled a team of more than 12 security experts who continue to enhance the proprietary platform. The leadership has signaled ongoing research and development of innovative defense technologies to keep ahead of emerging social threats. The company recently raised seed funding to support product development and deployment.

Led · Seed · Feb 2015

Revmetrix has built an omnichannel data platform for retailers that collects and uniquely identifies customer interactions across in-store, online and mobile channels to create detailed customer profiles. The platform lets retailers build complex queries across profiles, interactions, segments, locations and products, create highly targeted first-party audiences, and connect to dozens of marketing platforms (email, display, direct mail and social) to power integrated campaigns. Revmetrix is running a pilot program with several big-name retailers to enroll them on the platform. The company was founded by Hemang Gadhia and Christopher Brown; Hemang Gadhia serves as CEO. Revmetrix is based outside of Washington, DC. Financially, the company announced a $2.2 million seed financing to debut the platform.