Participated · Series C · May 2024

Gorgias consolidates customer conversations across channels into a unified CX platform and integrates with Shopify, Loop Returns, Recharge and 100+ e-commerce tools. Trusted by over 15,000 e-commerce brands, including Steve Madden, Olipop, Glamnetic, TUSHY, and Marine Layer, it aims to turn CX into a revenue-generating channel. Its suite of AI features, such as Automate, provides instant, on‑brand answers and differentiates the company from rivals. Gorgias plans to expand those AI tools and launch AI Agent, a fully autonomous AI teammate built on brands’ own knowledge bases, data, and integrations. AI Agent—launched in July after a beta—can instantly answer tickets, perform actions in other apps, match a brand’s tone, and enable smooth human hand-off; Psycho Bunny’s beta automated more than 25% of email tickets while achieving higher CSAT. The funding will be used to scale and deepen the company’s AI capabilities and feature set. Gorgias provides a helpdesk platform that consolidates customer support channels for online stores, handling live chat, email, phone, SMS, messaging apps and social media. The six-year-old company serves more than 10,000 online stores and has 245 employees across offices in San Francisco, Paris, Toronto, New York City, Sydney, Belgrade and Charlotte. Gorgias says it has twice as many customers as at Series B and that its annual recurring revenue and valuation have more than doubled since late 2020. The company is monitoring cash burn, has slowed go-to-market hiring, and assessed cost cuts to use cash on hand more prudently. It will use the new funding to accelerate development of an Automation Add-on (to deflect repetitive tickets) and a forthcoming Revenue Add-on to identify customers likely to generate further revenue. Gorgias provides a customer support platform for e-commerce businesses that automates responses to common inquiries and gives support teams tools to reply more quickly and upsell. The product integrates customer communications into a single app for merchants. The company says it supports more than 4,500 stores, including Steve Madden, Timbuk2, Fjällräven, Marine Layer, Ellana, Electrolux and Sergio Tacchini. Revenue has grown 200% this year, driven by increased online orders during the pandemic. The founding team includes CEO Romain Lapeyre and CTO Alex Plugaru. Gorgias has expanded its headcount from about 30 people to more than 100 this year. It plans to use the new capital to continue hiring—particularly on the engineering side—to develop additional automation for the platform. Gorgias builds AI-driven customer service and support software that integrates with platforms like Shopify to automate routine questions and surface data-driven responses for agents. The product automates basic inquiries (e.g., “What’s my tracking number?”) and provides tools to help representatives respond faster and upsell. Gorgias positions customer-service teams as sales associates, enabling clients to monetize support interactions; Groovelife pays commissions based on upselling and Steve Madden uses automation for roughly 20% of tickets. The company serves about 2,000 customers. Co-founders Romain Lapeyre (CEO) and Alex Plugaru (CTO) are leading product development. Gorgias plans to use its latest funding to add new features and recruit more merchants. Gorgias builds a helpdesk that combines machine learning with integrations (Salesforce, PayPal, etc.) to automatically suggest how agents should resolve support requests. Agents can approve suggested resolutions to close tickets, enabling support at scale. The company started as an add-on customer-support product and has grown to 11,000 users. Customers include Classpass, Plated and Stripe. Co‑founded by Romain Lapeyre (CEO) and Alex Plugaru (CTO), Gorgias was accelerated in Techstars NYC in 2015. The company raised $1.5M in seed funding and plans to use the proceeds to hire new people and continue building the product.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2024

Owner offers an opinionated commerce and marketing system—starting with restaurants—that focuses on outcome-driven growth rather than another generic software tool. Its core product includes AI-based website creation, automated marketing tools, and universal standardized web templates that enable thousands of split-tests daily. Owner reports that guests on its websites are more than twice as likely to place an order, restaurants on the platform grow traffic by 30% on average within 30 days, and its websites convert 100% more visitors into customers on average. The average Owner customer grows direct online revenue more than 30% in the first year and every year after that, and over 1,000 customers have switched to Owner from competing products. Owner integrates with point-of-sale systems including Toast, Square, and Clover. The company positions itself as the fastest-growing company in restaurant tech and aims to become a "Shopify" for local businesses. Owner.com is an all-in-one platform for independent restaurants offering online ordering, a website builder, CRM, marketing automation, and a branded mobile app generator. Founded by Adam Guild and Dean Bloembergen, the company has integrated AI features such as an AI-powered email marketer to help restaurants generate marketing messages. Owner.com reports thousands of customers after tripling its customer count over the past year, processes hundreds of millions of dollars annually for its customers, and generates tens of millions in revenue. The company has raised $58.7 million to date, including a $10.7M seed led by SaaStr Fund and a $15M Series A led by Altman Capital. Today it completed a $33M Series B at a $200M post-money valuation co-led by Redpoint Ventures and Altman Capital with participation from Horsley Bridge, Activant Capital and Transpose Platform Management. Management says it will continue investing in engineering and design to build additional tools in its product pipeline aimed at helping mom-and-pop restaurants improve online guest experiences and marketing. Owner.com offers an integrated platform designed to manage an independent restaurant’s entire digital presence, including online ordering, delivery tools, website creation and updates, email marketing, recruiting and reputation management. The company recently relaunched with expanded delivery and marketing automation features and plans to add reservations and catering products. It says the product consolidates many point solutions to save restaurants time and money, claiming it saves owners an average of seven hours per month and over $2,750 per month in fees. At the time of its earlier funding the business had reached a seven-figure run-rate and reported over 105% monthly revenue retention across more than 700 restaurant locations; today it operates in 49 states with more than 1,500 restaurants. Owner.com is growing at over 20% month-over-month, is on track to grow ARR by more than 700% in 2022, and was valued at $150 million after the latest financing. The founders, Adam Guild and Dean Bloembergen, started the company in 2020 and plan to use the new capital to expand headcount and accelerate product development. Owner.com offers independent restaurants a free online ordering, delivery and marketing platform that lets restaurants own their customer data and automate marketing campaigns. The Palo Alto–based startup charges customers a 5% convenience fee while keeping the service free for restaurants. Since launching last year the company has reached a seven-figure run rate, over 105% monthly revenue retention across more than 700 restaurant locations, and has transacted over $18 million. Owner.com says it has helped its restaurant customers avoid paying roughly $3 million in third-party platform fees annually. Co-founder and CEO Adam Guild (a Thiel Fellow) leads product development and the company plans to add features like landing pages, reservations, and native white-label apps. The product targets independent operators who lack the scale to negotiate lower rates from legacy ordering platforms.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2022

Luminous is developing a custom AI supercomputer stack centered on proprietary silicon photonics to eliminate data‑movement bottlenecks and improve performance and programmability. The company is building nearly every part of the stack from chips to software, aiming for order‑of‑magnitude gains in performance and simplified programming models. Luminous says its work will enable much larger, more efficient AI models and support commercial‑scale AI applications. The company plans to double its engineering team and is actively recruiting photonics designers, digital and analog VLSI engineers, packaging and system integration engineers, and machine learning experts. Funding announced in the articles will support custom chip and software development and gearing up for commercial production. Luminous frames its mission around delivering useful, usable, and safe AI by providing the hardware needed to run tomorrow’s AI applications. Luminous Computing is developing photonics chips designed to handle AI workloads by using light to move and multiply dense arrays of data at high speed. The company says its approach will remove major bottlenecks that traditional processors struggle with, and its architecture is based on CTO Mitchell Nahmias’ Princeton research. The one-year-old, seven-person startup was founded by Michael Gao, CEO Marcus Gomez and Nahmias; Gomez and Gao have prior software and data-science experience. Luminous reports it already has working silicon and aims to ship development kits within the next few years. The company claims a single chip could replace the computing power of roughly 3,000 Google TPUs. It raised capital to grow the team and specifically hire people with semiconductor industry experience to accelerate engineering and development.

Participated · Series B · Jul 2020

Medly Pharmacy is a NYC-based full-service digital pharmacy founded in 2017 by second-generation pharmacy owners Marg and Sahaj Patel. It operates branded physical retail locations that offer free same-day prescription delivery and also accommodate walk-in patients. Customers can schedule delivery windows, consult with pharmacists, and manage prescriptions via the company’s desktop and mobile apps. Medly reported relationships with 15,000 providers, a patient base of 50,000, and has delivered over 500,000 prescriptions to date. The company closed a $100M Series B and intends to use the funds to expand its platform and enter new markets. Medly Pharmacy is a full-service digital pharmacy that delivers patients' prescriptions for free on the same day and exposes lowest-cost copay options within its app. The company emphasizes a humanized digital experience and works directly with doctors to manage drug coverage and refills. Medly operates both a digital service and dedicated brick-and-mortar locations and plans to expand those nationwide. Since launching in 2017, Medly grew employees from zero to 250 and plans to at least double headcount by 2020. Its annualized 2017 revenue grew ten-fold in 2018 and the company projected revenue in the hundreds of millions by 2020. Proceeds from the announced financing are earmarked to fund national expansion and scale operations.