Participated · Series A · Apr 2021

Bespoke Financial provides technology-driven short-term lending and revolving lines of credit to licensed cannabis operators, using a data-driven application process and automated pre-qualification for dispensary financing. The company offers working capital to reduce cash flow cycles and enable business growth across the legal cannabis supply chain. Since its 2018 launch, Bespoke has funded businesses in 12 regulated markets and has financed lines of credit as large as $15 million. Bespoke’s platform is designed to bridge institutional investors and cannabis operators by mainstreaming cannabis debt financing. The company intends to expand lending capacity and serve as a conduit for larger pools of institutional capital ahead of any federal regulatory change. Bespoke is backed by venture firms including Casa Verde Capital, Sweat Equity Ventures, Greenhouse Capital Partners, Outbound Ventures, Ceres Group Holdings and Vista Investment Group. Bespoke Financial is a direct lender that provides short-term loans to cannabis operators, allowing borrowers to build credit with Bespoke and access better terms on subsequent loans and products. The company says its loan origination volume grew 25% year-over-year and has deployed $120 million in gross merchandise volume to over 2,000 cannabis license holders with zero defaults to date. Bespoke positions itself as a modern financing partner for the cannabis industry rather than just a lender. With the new capital, the company intends to launch new financing structures and expand financing options across multiple distribution channels. Bespoke has raised $28 million to date, was founded in 2019, and has 12 employees. Bespoke Financial provides lending and working-capital products tailored to cannabis businesses that lack access to traditional bank loans. The company’s initial product is a factoring instrument that advances money against signed contracts in exchange for a portion of future payments. Founders George Mancheril (ex-Goldman Sachs and Guggenheim) and entrepreneurs Pablo Borquez‑Schwarzbeck, Benjamin Dusastre, and Jeffrey Ghitman adapted ProducePay’s underwriting model to the cannabis supply chain. ProducePay previously financed roughly $2 billion in perishable commodities across 13 countries and is backed by around $200 million in venture capital and debt financing. Bespoke says it will improve cash flow cycles across the supply chain and provide scalable working capital to fuel client growth as the US legal cannabis market is forecast to exceed $23B by 2022. The company has raised $7 million in financing led by Casa Verde Capital.

Participated · Series C · Aug 2015

Lifefactory is a housewares company led by CEO Roy Mabrey that makes reusable glass water bottles, baby bottles and food storage solutions. Its products are manufactured in the U.S. and E.U. The company's products are available in over 3,000 premium retail locations and in more than 20 countries. Retail partners include Amazon.com, Bed Bath & Beyond and Whole Foods Market. Lifefactory plans to use new capital to expand the team, accelerate product development and build the brand. The company recently closed a $5M Series C growth equity financing to support those plans. Lifefactory produces BPA-free glass baby and adult beverage bottles with patent-pending silicone sleeves and silicone teethers; its products are marketed as free of toxins. The company is based in Sausalito, California. Lifefactory closed a $1.65M Series A funding round. The round was led by Greenhouse Capital Partners and Big Sky Partners. In conjunction with the funding, Peter D. Henig of Greenhouse Capital Partners and Katie Schwab of Big Sky Partners joined Lifefactory’s board of directors. Lifefactory’s products are sold by retailers nationwide and across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, including Whole Foods, Nordstrom and BabyGap. Lifefactory produces green consumer products for infants, focusing primarily on environmentally-safe baby bottles. The company, formerly known as Babylife, is based in Sausalito, California. Its products are sold through about 500 retail stores and online vendors across the U.S., Canada and Europe, including Nordstrom, Gap and Amazon. Lifefactory raised external seed capital after previously relying on contributions from family and friends. The business appears distribution-focused today, with retail partnerships forming a key channel. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article.

Led · Equity · Apr 2014

Neura provides an SDK that enables developers to analyze how users engage with their apps and how they use their mobile devices. The company serves more than 30 clients across travel and hospitality, transportation and ridesharing, health, e-commerce, food delivery and insurance. Customers use Neura to optimize push notifications and retention—one customer, MyDays, increased retention by 32% after using Neura’s insights. Neura emphasizes user privacy, saying it does not collect personally identifiable information or user IDs and is GDPR‑compliant. The startup is headquartered in San Francisco and plans product launches and expansion in the United States and the European Union. The new financing will be used for hiring and growing its business in those markets. Neura provides a privacy-first platform and SDK that analyzes user behavior across connected devices to create personalized functions and experiences. The company connects devices and services via an API and offers a standalone app through which users review and grant permission for each function. Neura says it can be integrated with more than 55 devices and software channels and recently ran a beta program with tens of thousands of users. The platform emphasizes user control of sensitive behavioral signals (for example, sleep or movement patterns) to protect privacy and reduce liability for device makers. Neura plans to use new funding to promote its SDK, strike partnerships with tech companies, and hire additional employees. Co-founder and CEO Gilad Meiri and CTO Triinu Magi lead the company and frame its mission around making connected devices useful without sacrificing privacy. Neura is an early-stage San Francisco technology company building an IoT platform that enables connected devices to understand individual patterns and behaviors. Its technology acts as connective tissue between devices, locations, people and the web, allowing devices to communicate and correlate data. Neura's platform delivers context awareness and adaptive learning capabilities intended to make environments more responsive and personal. The company, a graduate of UpWest Labs, recently secured $2 million in funding led by Greenhouse Capital Partners with participation from SingTel Innov8 Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital, TriplePoint Ventures and angel investors. Neura plans to use the proceeds to further develop its technology and expand solutions that help devices cooperate to understand the human element behind behavioral patterns. Management highlights applications across the home environment, wellness and healthcare as part of its strategy to graduate IoT from purely connected to truly smart.

Participated · Series C · Mar 2011

InsideView offers a big data market intelligence platform that triangulates company and contact data, social and news insights, and business connections for sales and marketing systems. Its products include APIs, InsideView for Marketing, and InsideView for Sales, with an added mid-priced edition called InsideView Essential. The company serves more than 20,000 companies and reports its platform data grew 3x since the beginning of 2015. InsideView says its APIs have grown 500% quarter-to-quarter in paid transactions since launching in Q3 2014, and its marketing products saw 138% revenue growth in the first half of 2015 versus the same period in 2014. Contact data is claimed to be up to 20% more accurate than competing providers, and European data expanded by 250%. The company plans to continue investing in three product areas: marketing products, APIs, and its big data platform. InsideView operates a platform that aggregates roughly 30,000 sources (including Twitter, Facebook, Reuters, and SEC filings) and feeds that intelligence into customers' CRM installations via APIs. Its products for marketing and sales fill in contact details, augment lead profiles, and present insights to salespeople within the CRM. The service maps to the data models of major CRM providers such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, and Sugar CRM. InsideView's processing stack uses natural language processing alongside technologies like Hadoop and relational databases. The company competes with legacy data vendors such as Harte-Hanks and with newer data-driven providers that integrate deeply into business platforms. The platform emphasizes speed and lead routing velocity as key value drivers for sales outcomes. InsideView's flagship product, SalesView, crawls more than 20,000 websites, social networks and databases—including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers, Reuters and SEC filings—to deliver sales intelligence to enterprises. SalesView is available as a standalone web application and integrates with CRM vendors such as SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com. The service reports over 75,000 users and is used by more than 1,000 companies, including Ariba, Centive, Cisco/WebEx, JobScience and SuccessFactors. InsideView reported 130% revenue growth in 2010 and CEO Umberto Milletti projected sales would increase by 100% in 2011. The company plans to use new funding to expand distribution partnerships and to invest in market education to train salespeople to use its applications. Milletti has stated the company intends to remain an across-platform independent business despite potential acquisition interest; competitors include Hoovers and Genius. InsideView's flagship product, SalesView, crawls more than 20,000 websites, social networks and databases—including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers, Reuters and SEC filings—to deliver sales intelligence. SalesView is available as a stand-alone web application and integrates with CRM vendors such as SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SalesForce.com, and is ranked among the most popular free apps on Salesforce's AppExchange. The service has over 10,000 users and more than 1,700 companies accessing its feed, including Ariba, Centive, Cisco/WebEx, JobScience and SuccessFactors. InsideView raised $11.5 million in a Series B financing. The company said the new financing will be used for new customer acquisition and further product development. Competitors mentioned in the article include Hoovers and Genius.