• HUNGRY

  Participated · Series C · Jun 2023

  Hungry operates a food-tech marketplace that sells business food solutions and hosts live and virtual experiences from local chefs and restaurants. The company was founded in 2017 by Eman Pahlavani, Shy Pahlevani and Jeff Grass and is based in Washington, DC. Hungry runs operations across numerous U.S. cities including Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and San Jose. The company recently acquired snacks brand NatureBox. Hungry is valued at $270m and says it will use new funding to drive continued growth and achieve full operational profitability. The product mix centers on marketplace transactions and experiential offerings from local food providers. Hungry is a technology-enabled marketplace that offers curated experiences to groups and businesses across the U.S. Its offerings include catering, chef pop-ups, snack packs, virtual cooking experiences, and food delivery services. The company operates in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, New York City, Austin, Dallas and Los Angeles. Hungry closed a $21M Series C to fund expansion. Management intends to use the capital to accelerate geographic and service-based expansion, beginning with launches in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area in September. The company positions itself at the intersection of food service and experience-driven corporate offerings. HUNGRY operates a technology-enabled marketplace focused on the $60 billion business and events catering market, offering curated experiences for groups and companies across catering, chef pop-ups, snack packs, virtual cooking and delivery. The company emphasizes diversity, equity and inclusion across its staff and chef network, reporting approximately 73% more minority workers and 111% more minority managers than the average U.S. business; women make up 52% of staff and ~45% of its chef network, with minorities accounting for nearly 64% of that network. HUNGRY says it will leverage new capital from its recent investment to improve hiring and training practices so employees can develop skills and execute at a higher level. The company has donated more than half a million meals and runs Food Solutions programs to reduce waste. HUNGRY has received recognition on lists including Forbes' "America's Best Startup Employers of 2021," Fast Company's "Most Innovative Companies 2021," and Forward Fooding's "FoodTech 500." Founded in 2017, HUNGRY is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with operations in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, New York City, Austin and Dallas. Hungry operates a marketplace that connects businesses with screened independent chefs who cook out of ghost kitchens and have food delivered by Hungry's team. The company has built a network of chefs in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Atlanta and serves customers including Amazon, E-Trade, Microsoft and BCG. Hungry emphasizes a lower cost structure than restaurants while maintaining high-quality dishes produced by top chefs. The startup also runs a charitable program that donates one meal for every two sold and has donated nearly 500,000 meals to date. CEO Jeff Grass and co-founders Eman Pahlavani (COO) and Shy Pahlavani (president) launched the business after working together at their prior startup LiveSafe. The company plans to use new funding to expand into additional markets and aims to be in 23 cities by the end of 2021. Hungry operates a digital marketplace and logistics platform that enables independent chefs to sell cuisines directly to corporate customers and event clients, targeting the $25 billion business and events catering market. The platform features chefs including former White House chefs, Chopped champions, Food Network chefs, and celebrity personal chefs. The company plans to use the new funding to continue investing in its digital marketplace and logistics capabilities and to accelerate expansion into new U.S. markets. Founded in late 2016 by Eman Pahlevani and Shy Pahlevani and led by CEO Jeff Grass, Hungry currently operates in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. The company has raised a total of $12.5M to date and intends to deploy capital to drive growth and market penetration.

• Surf

  Participated · Seed · Mar 2021

  Surf is the latest consumer-facing product from Toronto-based Trufan, an audience-analytics company focused on generating and activating first-party data for brands. The free browser extension tracks users’ online activity and compensates them directly with rewards or cash for the data they choose to share. On the brand side, the tool feeds into Trufan’s end-to-end platform, helping companies grow, understand, and activate their audiences across channels. Trufan also claims to maintain the world’s largest social database, with more than 10 million audience reports covering over 2.4 billion social profiles. The company’s roadmap centers on expanding Surf’s user base and deepening its integration with Trufan’s broader analytics suite. Financially, the firm has now raised a cumulative CAD $6.3 million, enabling continued product development and go-to-market efforts.

• Beamery

  Participated · Equity · Apr 2017

  Beamery provides an AI-native talent platform that identifies and closes skills gaps while attracting, nurturing, and engaging future workforces. The platform enables employers to take a skills-based approach across the entire talent lifecycle, helping customers find and hire candidates faster, improve organisational efficiency and productivity, and increase talent retention. Beamery serves many global Fortune 500 companies. The company has about 250 employees and maintains offices in London and the United States. Beamery intends to allocate its recent debt financing to support growth plans and product development efforts. In 2022 the company reached a unicorn valuation of more than $1 billion following a Series D led by Teachers’ Venture Growth. Beamery is a talent lifecycle management platform that uses AI to help companies identify candidate matches, rank skills, and support recruiting, talent mobility and upskilling. The company serves “hundreds” of enterprise customers and over 25,000 users and reports net retention of 135%. Revenue from Fortune 500 clients rose by more than 250% compared with June 2021. Beamery has expanded its analytics capabilities with a workforce dashboard, launched a candidate portal, and introduced Beamery Grow after acquiring Flux. The platform emphasizes explainability and compliance, completing a third-party bias audit and partnering with Parity AI while offering candidate preference controls for consent and AI use. The company says the new funding will support continued investment in its platform and tech capabilities and help build out a global sales footprint. Beamery offers an end-to-end "talent operating system" that centralizes sourcing, hiring, retention and analytics via a unified talent graph. The London-based company provides tools for sourcing candidates, programmatic job advertising, internal mobility, recruitment events, and analytics. Beamery says customers filled 1 million roles in the past 12 months and reported 337% year-over-year revenue growth in Q4, alongside a 462% increase in jobs posted across its customer base. The company also noted a prior 46% increase in candidates pipelined in the earlier year. Beamery plans to use the new funding to build more technology and expand the business, and its CEO signaled potential roadmap areas including contractor-management capabilities, assessments, native communications and recruiter coaching. Customers include large enterprises such as AstraZeneca, Autodesk, Nasdaq and strategic investor Workday. Beamery, founded in 2014 and led by CEO Abakar Saidov, offers a talent acquisition platform that unifies candidate attraction, identification and engagement. Its technology uses large-scale data-mining, a 360-degree view of candidate relationships and machine learning to surface and nurture top passive candidates. The platform is used by global organizations including Continental, Zalando, Shop Direct, Grab and Balfour Beatty. Beamery has offices in London, Austin and San Francisco and has raised $40m to date. The company received a strategic investment from Workday Ventures and will join the Workday Software Partner Program. Workday’s Talent Acquisition team has selected Beamery’s products to identify early-stage, passive candidates, positioning them as complementary to Workday Human Capital Management. Beamery offers a 'talent CRM' (candidate relationship management) and recruitment marketing software designed to help companies build and manage talent pools and run customized marketing to nurture future hires. The platform targets fast-growing and global businesses that need a proactive hiring approach rather than relying on spreadsheets. Customer numbers have risen from around 50 in April 2017 to about 100 today, including customers such as Facebook (using it globally), Continental, VMware, Zalando, Grab and Balfour Beatty. Beamery says the new funding will support customer growth, including ramping up hiring in its London (HQ), Austin and San Francisco offices, and expanding into more markets. A significant portion of the Series B will be allocated to R&D and product development focused on its HR tech niche. The company positions itself as a category leader in proactive recruitment technology.

• LifeDojo

  Participated · Series A · Feb 2017

  LifeDojo provides online 12-week corporate wellbeing programs that guide employees through motivation, daily action and support to drive permanent health behavior change. The company offers a software platform, a mobile app and coaching capabilities as its core product. Clients include Fortune 500 companies and high‑tech, high‑growth companies across more than 16 countries. LifeDojo announced a partnership with Sodexo’s Benefits and Rewards Services activity and its subsidiary Inspirus, a provider of employee engagement and recognition services. Founded in 2013 by CEO Chris Cutter and based in San Francisco, the company closed a Series A to support growth. It intends to use the funds to expand its software platform, mobile app and coaching capabilities.

No current team members are available.