• Exoticca

  Led · Debt Financing · Apr 2019

  Exoticca operates a traveltech platform that digitizes and sells complex multi-day tour packages combining flights, hotels, transfers and activities across 70+ destinations. The company is investing heavily in its proprietary AI-powered interconnectivity systems to synchronize services, personalize recommendations, optimize pricing and automate itinerary creation. Management says these AI capabilities improve matching between travelers and experiences while boosting operational efficiency and partner relationships. Exoticca is present in markets including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, Colombia and Mexico, and generates more than 75% of its business in North America. The company positions itself as a digital pioneer in the €100 billion multi-day tour package sector and is a portfolio company of several venture funds. Recent financings have strengthened its balance sheet to support further international expansion and technology investment. Exoticca runs a platform that integrates flights, hotels, meals, transfers, transport and local suppliers to simplify booking of complex multiday tour packages. The company says its model can reduce costs by as much as 30% compared with traditional offerings. Exoticca reports it has more than doubled sales year-over-year since 2015. It operates in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico and Colombia through a network of online and offline travel and non-travel partners and offers 70 destinations from its Barcelona headquarters. Seventy-five percent of its business comes from the U.S. and Canada and the company targets middle- and upper-middle-class customers. Management says the objective is to expand into Latin America, the Middle East, India and China. Exoticca digitises high-complexity, big-ticket tours (multiple flights, hotels and activities) and offers them completely online with real-time availability, removing traditional brick-and-mortar intermediaries. Its platform speeds up purchasing and helps deliver more affordable prices for large trips. The company has expanded into Latin America, recently opening Mexico and Colombia, and plans to launch five more markets in the region by 2024. Exoticca reports rapid revenue growth: from €2 million in its first year (2015) to €200 million in 2023, and it expects to reach €300 million in sales by the end of 2024. To date the company has raised over €85 million in funding. Management positions the business for continued geographic expansion using digital distribution to scale. Exoticca, founded in 2013 and based in Barcelona, is a next-generation tour operator that enables online booking of complex multi-day trips by bundling flights, hotels, transfers and activities in one platform. The company uses technology to deliver a frictionless purchasing experience, real-time monitoring and enhanced in-destination customer support. It currently sells trips to over 60 destinations across seven markets (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Spain and Mexico) and recently launched a B2B vertical for traditional travel agencies. Exoticca has reported sustained growth with an average compounded growth rate of over 100% since 205 and expects to close 2022 with €120 million in revenue. The platform raised a €20 million venture debt financing led by Claret Capital Partners and Sabadell Venture Capital, bringing the company's total funding to €66 million. Proceeds will be used to accelerate growth, increase investment in technology and product, and support expansion into the Americas. Exoticca operates a digital platform for multi-day package tours to long-haul destinations, enabling online purchase of complex packages with flights, hotels and activities. Its platform covers over 50 destinations worldwide. The company is based in Barcelona and currently operates in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain. Led by CEO Pere Vallès, Exoticca plans to use new funding to invest in technology and product to further automate the booking process and enhance travelers' experience. The company is also open to growing through acquisitions. Financially, Exoticca has raised a total of $53M to date after closing a $30M Series C.

• SuperAwesome

  Led · Equity · Feb 2019

  SuperAwesome offers a platform of kid-safe advertising, social engagement tools, authentication and parental controls used by more than 300 customers, including major kids’ brands. The company says its technology is powering over 12 billion kids’ digital transactions per month. SuperAwesome is fully profitable, reported $55 million in revenue last year and was on track for $80–$90 million in revenue in 2020. The startup positions itself to help companies comply with emergent kids’ privacy laws such as COPPA and GDPR-K, a market dynamic that the company says has boosted demand. SuperAwesome is discussing partnership opportunities with Microsoft around family identity following a strategic investment from M12, though details of cooperation have not been disclosed. SuperAwesome provides kid-safe infrastructure used by hundreds of children’s brands to enable anonymous content, advertising, and other digital services. Its Popjam platform is a community-management tool for young influencers and brands engaging under-13 audiences on YouTube. The company says it has defined digital standards that keep more than half a billion children anonymous during online games and videos and is COPPA- and GDPR-K‑compliant. SuperAwesome works with customers including Mattel, Disney, Hasbro and Lego. Management disclosed strong financial performance, reporting revenue growth of more than 75% in 2018 and a revenue run rate of almost $60 million. The company also said profitability has been growing and has significantly beaten targets. SuperAwesome plans to launch a dedicated kids ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) service offering free streaming content tailored to family YouTubers and influencers. SuperAwesome is a U.K.-headquartered 'kid-safe' digital marketing platform that helps brands put their wares in front of children. Its infrastructure includes an ad platform claiming an audience of a quarter of a billion kids and a compliance suite, Kids Web Services (KWS), offering cloud-based tools such as a parent portal and kid-safe authentication to address COPPA and forthcoming European rules. Major clients include Hasbro, Mattel and LEGO. The company has grown in part through acquisitive hires — Ad4kids, MobiGirl Media, and the sales and ad teams of Bin Weevils — and pursued other deals such as an aborted MyFamilyClub acquisition. SuperAwesome plans to use new funding to grow faster and reach more territories, expanding its team in North America and Southeast Asia and hiring across the U.S., U.K. and Asia while pursuing regional partnerships. Financially, the company says it is profitable or break-even, expects to drive tens of millions of advertising dollars into the kids digital content ecosystem this year with 4–5x annual growth, and sees a clear route to revenues of $100M+ over the next couple of years.

• Coople

  Participated · Equity · Oct 2018

  Coople operates an algorithm-driven on-demand hiring platform that matches workers to roles based on location, availability, experience and ratings. The platform provides end-to-end HR automation spanning planning, recruiting, onboarding, workforce management, payroll and payments. Coople says it serves as a source of flexible, high-quality work for many users who now rely on the platform for a large part of their income. The company reports 400,000 registered job seekers and over 20,000 registered companies, primarily in the Swiss and British markets. Coople has raised $76 million to date and will use new funding to further automate its online platform and expand within existing markets. The Series C proceeds will also finance launches in the Netherlands and one other unnamed international region. Coople operates an on-demand staffing platform that uses an algorithm to match workers to flexible jobs based on experience, star-rating, location and availability. Its platform provides end-to-end automation across planning, recruiting, onboarding, hiring, workforce management, payroll processing and payments. Launched in 2009 and based in Zürich, the company currently operates in Switzerland and the UK and works with over 310,000 registered workers and over 14,000 registered businesses. Coople supplies workers to blue-chip clients and large events, including Deliveroo, Inditex, Intercontinental Hotels, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, the Royal Automobile Club and events such as the Silverstone Formula 1 Grand Prix and Coldplay concerts. The company raised US$21m in the announced funding and intends to use the capital to invest in product and technology innovation, recruitment and continued expansion in Switzerland and the UK ahead of further international expansion. To date Coople has raised US$45m following investments from One Peak Partners, Goldman Sachs Private Capital, Rothschild Paris Orléans and angel investors. Staff Finder is an on-demand marketplace that helps businesses find temporary workers to cover immediate hourly or daily staffing needs. The platform claims 98% of job requests are filled within four hours and currently works with more than 5,000 customers. It targets hospitality, events & promotion, retail, logistics, business services and office sectors. Founded in 2011 and based in Zurich, the company says the new capital will be used for international expansion, including a full launch in the U.K. and building out a product team in London. This funding represents its first institutional investment and is intended to support scaling in major cities worldwide. CEO Viktor Calabrò said the company aims to become the first truly global on-demand staffing marketplace.

• Realeyes

  Participated · Series A · May 2018

  Realeyes develops Emotion AI and computer-vision technology that uses front-facing cameras to measure attention and emotional response of opt-in audiences to digital content on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. The company’s flagship solution, PreView, is an attention-measurement platform that predicts creative performance and has delivered up to 30% performance gains and a reported 9X return on investment. Realeyes serves over 180 enterprise customers, primarily large advertisers, agencies, and media platforms. The company is headquartered in London, was founded in Estonia, and maintains offices in New York, Tokyo, and Budapest. Management says the new capital will be used to commercialize new emotion-AI products globally and accelerate product development to meet demand from advertisers, publishers, and enterprises. Realeyes builds emotion‑measurement technology that uses webcams, computer vision and machine learning to quantify how people feel and their attention levels while watching video content online. Its solution is used by brands, agencies and media companies to optimize and better target video content. The company plans to use the $12.4M funding to scale across the US and EMEA, grow into Japan and expand its products beyond marketing into smart cities, mental wellbeing and robotics. The round brings Realeyes' total funding to $31.1M. Founded in 2007, Realeyes has offices in New York, Boston, London and Budapest and employs 78 people. Customers include Mars, AT&T, Hershey's, Coca-Cola, agencies Ipsos, MarketCast and Publicis, and media companies such as Warner Media and Teads. Realeyes is a London-based startup that uses computer vision and front-facing cameras to read emotional responses to video and applies predictive analytics to map those responses to ad effectiveness. The company says it has hand-labelled over 15 million frames of naturally occurring emotions with up to seven human assessments per frame and has built a commercial platform around that core measurement technology. Realeyes reports revenues grew 932% over the last four years and counts customers including Coca-Cola, Mars, Publicis, Turner and Oath. The business is roughly 65 people, with more than half of staff in engineering and R&D, and was started by CEO Mihkel Jäätma while he was a student at Oxford. It plans to use new funding to expand engineering and business development, to bring on senior hires such as COO Barry Coleman and a more hands-on role for Maja Pantic, and to pursue applications beyond advertising in healthcare and education. The company stresses an opt-in panel model for testing and positions its measurement approach as a way to gauge ad effectiveness without invasive tracking.

• Scality

  Participated · Equity · Apr 2018

  Scality builds a market-leading software-defined file and object platform designed for on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. In 2020 the company reported 30% year-over-year annual growth and achieved the largest quarterly revenue results in its 10-year history. Its enterprise customers span 43 countries across healthcare, financial services, cloud service providers, government and media, with notable new logos including Splunk, Veeam and Weka. Customer investments increased in all-flash file and object storage solutions and S3 hybrid deployments across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Public Cloud. Scality secured large-capacity orders up to and over 80PB, expanded into Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Dubai, India and Russia, and reinforced channel relationships with HPE, Supermicro and Western Digital. The company introduced new capabilities in RING object storage and SOFS, added support for all-flash servers, launched a NAS Archiver solution and validated SOFS in Azure. Scality develops software for distributed file and object storage and multi-cloud data control, used to protect, search and manage data across clouds. The company positions its technology as a core component of cloud services across industries including financial services, manufacturing, Media & Entertainment and medical institutions. Customers named in the article include Rackspace, Orange, KDDI, DMM.com, Telstra, Bloomberg Media, Dailymotion, Lancaster General Health, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Banque Natixis and SNCF. Led by CEO Jerome Lecat, Scality will use the new funds to accelerate investment in engineering for technology innovation. The article states the company is San Francisco, CA–based and serves businesses planning to leverage cloud. Prior to this round Scality had raised a total of $92m; this round brings total funding to date to $152m. Scality builds the RING, a software-defined storage platform that unifies file, object and OpenStack storage and runs on standard x86 servers. The RING is designed for capacity-driven workloads (cloud services, video, archiving), scales to exabytes and serves over 500 million users worldwide. Since its prior round in July 2013 the company increased revenue by 400% and grew headcount from 42 to 160. Scality has expanded internationally with a Japanese subsidiary (Scality KK), an office in Singapore and a Boston R&D center, and has resale agreements with HP and Dell. The company released an online trial of the RING and IDC named Scality a leader in object-based storage. Scality plans to use new capital to boost its North American salesforce, expand internationally, support resellers, and accelerate product development in multi-geo services, file/object interoperability and security; management has stated the company is being primed for an IPO by 2017. Scality provides the Scality RING, a patented scale-out object storage solution that operates on commodity server hardware and supports protocols such as NFS, the S3 API, Cinder for OpenStack, and Hadoop integration. Introduced in 2010 and led by CEO Jerome Lecat, the company targets large-scale Cloud, Big Data, and backup/archive use cases. Customers include four of the top ten cable operators in the US, a large telecom in France, portals in Italy, Germany and the UK, and several mobile operators in Japan. The company intends to use new funding to strengthen sales and marketing efforts aimed at enterprise and service-provider markets and to expand its R&D team. Since inception the company has raised a total of $35M in invested capital. Scality is based in San Francisco, CA. Scality provides storage-as-a-service and an object-based storage platform for enterprise customers. The company plans to add full multi-tenancy to support service providers offering virtual private clouds (VPCs). It will use part of the Series B proceeds to open an East Coast sales and services office in New York to complement its San Francisco headquarters. Scality said it will step up development of its platform following the new funding. The company previously delivered a complete email platform to cable operator Telenet for over 2 million users. Total investment in the company to date is $13 million.

No current team members are available.