Led · Equity · Mar 2021

Equa provides a single-source, immutable platform for governance and equity management that scales from company formation to cap table management and investor relations for transaction management. Led by CEO Shawn Owen, the company serves founders and investors with tools for organizational governance. Equa reported over 357 client organizations and a growing base of more than 2,200 users, including executives, employees, and investors/shareholders. In March 2021 the company raised $2.3M in funding. Equa said it will use the proceeds to continue to expand operations and broaden its business reach. Backers included enterprise blockchain technology provider Horizen Labs.

Led · Series A · Apr 2019

Trint provides an AI-driven speech-to-text platform that automatically transcribes and translates audio, video and text to make multimedia content verifiable, searchable, editable and shareable. The company positions itself in a new software category it calls “StoryTech,” and is releasing a tool to build stories from audio and video on the Trint platform. Trint serves enterprise and individual customers and lists clients including Nike, The Associated Press, Airbnb, CNN and Spotify. The company has offices in London and Toronto and was founded in 2014. Trint has been one of the UK’s fastest-growing startups, cited by Deloitte as the 28th fastest-growing company with a 1,571% growth rate over four years, and was named in the Top Ten of the UK Startup 100 List. The new funding will be used to drive product innovation and accelerate hiring in its London and Toronto offices as the company scales its team. Trint combines a text editor and an audio/video player into a single platform that produces searchable, editable transcripts and changes how professionals work with audio and video. The product targets video production, brands, news organisations, and researchers, and is used by more than a quarter million customers. Its client list includes major media organisations such as The Associated Press, Vice News, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel. Founder and CEO Jeff Kofman, an Emmy Award–winning former war and foreign correspondent, built the product from his experience manually transcribing thousands of hours of interviews. Since its 2016 launch Trint has grown from four to 45 employees (including seven in a North American office in Toronto) and has seen consistent double-digit revenue growth since 2017. In the coming months the company plans to roll out a suite of collaboration features and a tool combining a video player with an interactive transcript to make recorded content more searchable, discoverable, and shareable. Trint employs machine learning and speech-to-text technology and integrates a web-based audio/video player with a text editor so automated transcriptions are synced to the audio playhead for quick checking and editing. The company was co-founded by Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman and originally launched in September 2016 with early funding from the Knight Enterprise Fund and the Google Digital News Initiative, plus support from BBC Worldwide Labs and Cisco. Trint’s product makes recorded content searchable, turning otherwise hard-to-search audio and video into editable, indexable text, and the company claims close to 7,000 regular users in its first nine months. Financially, Trint has closed $3.1 million in pre-Series A funding. The startup plans to use the capital to develop technology to become an end-to-end publishing platform and to roll out a mobile app. It also intends to introduce a series of enterprise solutions targeting international media organizations, universities, businesses and government agencies, and to add features to make online videos and podcasts searchable, shareable and accessible. Trint is a UK-based workflow software company that provides a service to transcribe, verify, correct, search, edit and export usable content for professionals in media, PR, marketing, business, law and academia. The platform is currently in beta testing at NPR News, BBC News, Thomson Reuters, Oxford University and several newspapers and magazines. Trint raised a seed funding round of undisclosed amount from members of the Wild Blue Cohort, a West London business angel network. The company intends to use the funds to continue developing the platform and to expand operations. Wild Blue was founded in 2014 with support from the Innovative Projects Fund of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.

Participated · Equity · Feb 2018

Artemis, previously Agrilyst, builds an enterprise Cultivation Management Platform (CMP) for indoor farms and greenhouse operators. The platform collects operational data (including crop yields), manages workers, and emphasizes compliance with food-safety and local cannabis regulations. It integrates with existing systems ranging from climate control to ERP tools and point-of-sale systems to give operators a single view of operations. Compliance is a core focus, and the company added Dr. Kathleen Merrigan to its board; Merrigan is a former U.S. deputy secretary of agriculture and a venture partner at Astanor Ventures. Cannabis now represents about half of Artemis’s revenue, and its clients are collectively worth $5 billion. The company plans to use the new funding to scale sales and expand its team. Agrilyst provides an intelligent indoor farming platform that aggregates sensor data to help growers monitor and manage crop growth and health. Its tools support more than 50 vegetables and over 800 crops, and the service is available in 10 countries. The company added 100 new customers in 2017 and reported 500% growth in both revenue and customers since 2016. Agrilyst has expanded product support to include cannabis, floriculture, and insect production. The team recently appointed a new CTO and a VP of Customer Success while Allison Kopf remains co‑founder and CEO. The company intends to use the new funding to support growth, expand into new markets and product lines, and leverage investor ties to enter the Chinese market. Agrilyst builds a Software-as-a-Service platform that aggregates sensor data and manual inputs to provide analytics and management tools for indoor growers. The product includes workflow management, inventory tracking, and nutrient and pest management, and it delivers data-driven recommendations to growers. The company recently launched a version specifically optimized for vegetable producers and improved onboarding. Agrilyst can import data from popular indoor-agriculture sensors and also allows growers to import spreadsheets when sensors aren’t used. The team is about a year old and has six employees. Agrilyst plans to support cannabis growers starting in July and aims to add flavor profiling by capturing taste data over time; it does not plan to build hardware itself but will support many third-party sensors.