Participated · Series C · Jul 2022

Kitchen United operates a platform combining commercial kitchen space, restaurant-hub technology and streamlined logistics to help foodservice operators enter new markets, grow off-premises revenue and expand delivery areas. Its technology enables customers to order from multiple prepared food and consumer goods brands on the same ticket and with the same delivery driver, synchronized to maximize quality and payload while minimizing time and expense. The company also develops Kitchen United OS, a multi-concept ordering technology platform used by national restaurant brands. Led by CEO Michael Montagano, Kitchen United currently powers approximately 200 operational kitchens across 20 regions. The company plans to increase both its technological and physical presence, with continued focus on Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Texas and other U.S. trade areas. Management intends to use the recent funding to accelerate growth and expand operations. Kitchen United operates commercial kitchen centers that house 10–15 restaurant brands each, providing operators a value-driven, low-risk way to enter new markets and expand delivery areas by removing capital and technology barriers. Launched in 2017 and headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., the company positions itself as a strategic real estate partner for restaurant chains as consumer preference shifts to off-premise dining. Kitchen United handles operations so restaurant brands can focus on food while scaling via shared kitchen infrastructure. The company cites a large addressable market—William Blair estimated U.S. off-premise restaurant sales at $279B in 2018, growing to an expected $402B in 2022. Current locations include Pasadena and Chicago, with upcoming openings in Scottsdale and Austin and additional sites under construction in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other major markets. As part of its growth strategy, Kitchen United plans to enter New York City through a relationship with RXR Realty to open kitchen centers in RXR and other Tri-State properties. The company recently closed a financing round to support expansion into its primary growth markets, including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston. Kitchen United is a virtual-restaurant concept that operates "Kitchen Centers" — converted warehouse, big-box or light-industrial facilities that can house 10–20 restaurants and centralize delivery production. The company aggregates demographic and cuisine-specific demand data to select locations and provide restaurant partners opt-in consumer and operational intelligence to tailor menus, staffing and operations. Kitchen United positions its offering as a lower-cost, lower-risk way for national, regional and local chains and food entrepreneurs to enter new markets and expand off-premise dining. Launched in 2017 and headquartered in Los Angeles, the company says its centers create operational efficiencies and reduce delivery costs while expanding partners' addressable delivery markets. Kitchen United plans to use recent funding to accelerate national growth and to build its real estate, marketing, engineering and operations teams. Leadership brings experience from chains and hospitality companies including Taco Bell, McDonald’s, SBE Entertainment and Wolfgang Puck.

Participated · Series D · Apr 2021

Phenom provides an AI-powered Talent Experience Management (TXM) platform that personalizes and automates the talent journey for candidates, recruiters, employees and management. Its TXM offering includes Career Site, Chatbot, CRM, CMS, SMS and Email Campaigns, University Recruiting, Internal Mobility, Career Pathing, Diversity & Inclusion, Talent Marketplace, Gigs, Referrals, Hiring Manager and Analytics. The company says over 400 global enterprises — including nearly 50 Fortune 500 companies — use its system, with customers such as Southwest Airlines, Newell Brands, Land O’Lakes, AXA and Radian Group Inc. Phenom intends to use the funds from its latest raise to continue to innovate its TXM platform. Led by CEO and co-founder Mahe Bayireddi and headquartered in Greater Philadelphia, the company also has offices in India, Israel, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. The platform focus and customer base position Phenom for continued product development and enterprise deployments. Phenom People provides an AI-powered, SaaS Talent Experience Management platform that connects candidate, recruiter, employee and management experiences, reducing the need for multiple HR tools. The platform targets the full talent lifecycle across those four stakeholder experiences. Led by CEO and co-founder Mahe Bayireddi, the company serves over 300 customers across all industries. At the time of the report the company had about 500 employees across Philadelphia, Canada, India, Israel, the U.K. and the Netherlands. Phenom intends to use new funding to continue growth and scale. The company had raised a total of $61m to date following the announced round. Phenom People offers a Talent Relationship Marketing (TRM) platform that leverages artificial intelligence to create personalized candidate experiences. The platform includes a personalized career site experience, real-time Candidate Relationship Management (CRM), Content Management System (CMS), Campaign Management, Event Management, Talent Analytics, and conversational bots. The company serves over 120 customers, including Fortune 500 companies such as Abbott Laboratories, Cognizant, Express Scripts, General Motors, Kohl’s, L’Oreal, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, and Whole Foods. Led by CEO and co-founder Mahe Bayireddi and based in Ambler, PA, Phenom plans to use new funding for strategic growth initiatives. The company aims to accelerate product innovation and expand global sales. Phenom recently raised a $22m Series B, bringing total funding to $31m. Phenom People is a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based provider of a Talent Relationship Marketing platform. Led by CEO Mahe Bayireddi, the company offers a platform that automates the process of driving talent awareness, interest, engagement and acquisition. It built the Phenom Enterprise Talent Graph, an engine that collects and analyzes candidate data and combines it with predictive intelligence. The platform helps candidates, recruiters and hiring managers find matches more effectively. Phenom raised an additional $2.7M in Series A funding, bringing total Series A proceeds to $7.6M. Sigma Prime Ventures joined the round and Sigma Prime Managing Director John Simon will join Phenom People’s group of senior advisors. Phenom People provides a talent relationship marketing (TRM) platform that collects and analyzes candidate data and combines it with predictive intelligence to help candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers find matches. Led by CEO and co-founder Mahe Bayireddi and based in Philadelphia, the company delivers TRM to more than 70 customers, including Cisco, Deloitte, Safeway, Fidelity, and Hershey’s. The company raised $6M in a Series A round led by Sierra Ventures. Phenom said it will use the funds to expand its sales, marketing, and product teams and to continue innovating and expanding product capabilities. As part of the financing, Sierra Ventures managing director Tim Guleri joined Phenom People’s board, along with HR entrepreneur Rudy Karsan, co-founder of Kenexa and head of Karlani Capital. The additional capital is intended to support growth and product development as the company scales its TRM offerings to enterprise customers.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2021

PerimeterX delivers app-security solutions as a service, offering Bot Defender, Code Defender and Page Defender to detect and proactively manage risks to web applications. The company reported protecting over $100 billion in e-commerce revenue in 2020 and processing more than 2 billion login requests per day. Recent product enhancements include enhanced blocking for Code Defender to reduce client-side data breaches, protections for account takeover attacks, a new verification option beyond visual CAPTCHA, and a unified user dashboard. PerimeterX has expanded its ecosystem with integrations including Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Snyk, DataDog and Splunk. It also launched the PerimeterX Partner Program with founding members such as Adobe, AWS, Google, Microsoft, Okta and Salesforce to help providers extend app security portfolios. Led by CEO Omri Iluz, the company intends to use the new funds to expand into new geographies and vertical markets. PerimeterX provides application security solutions that detect and proactively manage risks to web applications, mobile apps and APIs. Its product suite includes PerimeterX Bot Defender (bot mitigation), PerimeterX Code Defender (web application and supply-chain attack protection) and PerimeterX Page Defender (client-side browser malware protection). The platform offers behavior-based analytics, sensors, detectors and enforcers, plus a user portal and actionable reporting. The portfolio is fully software-based, compatible with cloud services and CDNs, and can be deployed anywhere. Led by co-founder and CEO Omri Iluz and based in San Mateo, CA, the company raised a $14M Series C extension. The extension brought the Series C to $57M and total capital raised to $91.5M. PerimeterX intends to use the funds to speed the expansion of its product portfolio. PerimeterX develops a bot-defense platform that uses behavioral fingerprinting and machine learning to detect anomalous, automated activity by analyzing user behavior (mouse movements, swipes) and device attributes (graphics and audio drivers). The company’s solution aims to distinguish normal user behavior from automated tools to block malicious traffic. Founded in 2014 and based in San Francisco, PerimeterX has grown to roughly 140 employees. Its technology requires large datasets to train models, which the company leverages to automate detection and mitigation. Management says the business often integrates alongside other web-application security vendors rather than competing directly. The Series C proceeds are expected to be used largely for sales and marketing to accelerate revenue growth and scale the business. PerimeterX is a San Mateo, CA-based provider of behavior-based threat protection technology for cloud, web and mobile. Its core product is a web-based bot defender that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze user interactions and distinguish bots from humans. The solution analyzes billions of events daily and blocks hundreds of millions of bot attacks every day. Its API integrates with nearly any component of a company’s technology infrastructure so DevOps teams can incorporate real-time behavioral analytics. PerimeterX secured $23M in a Series B and intends to use the funds to accelerate development of its bot attack prevention technology into new areas and to expand in the U.S. and internationally. Joydeep Bhattacharyya of Canaan Partners joined PerimeterX’s board; Omri Iluz is CEO and the company counts customers across the Fortune 500, the Alexa Top 500 and the Internet Retailer 100. PerimeterX delivers scalable, behavior-based threat protection across web, cloud and mobile environments and introduced a new service called PerimeterX Bot Defender. Bot Defender relies on dynamic behavioral fingerprinting built from hundreds of indicators to identify automated attacks rather than static signatures. The solution integrates via a simple JavaScript tag and operates out-of-band so it does not add latency or require proxying customer traffic. PerimeterX offers robust reporting and visibility into analyzed traffic, enabling analysis by time, risk score, country, IP address and customer tags. The company reported deployments protecting more than one billion page views each week, a number the article says is rapidly growing. PerimeterX was founded in late 2014 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices in Israel and Silicon Valley.