• Signal

  Led · Series E · Jun 2016

  Signal offers a real-time, people-based marketing platform that integrates data collection, persistent identification, data onboarding and media activation to enable real-time cross-channel engagement. Led by CEO Mike Sands and based in Chicago, the company serves major brands and media groups. Its technology runs on more than 45,000 digital properties across 158 countries and supports customers including Allstate, Audi, Crate & Barrel, GAP, JetBlue, Macy’s, 1-800-Flowers.com, Starcom MediaVest Group and Starwood Hotels and Resorts. The company has raised over $70M to date and recently secured additional growth capital. Signal says it will use the new proceeds to further accelerate and expand its technology platform and organization globally. The business emphasis is on scaling its platform and global reach to drive broader adoption among enterprise marketers.

• YCharts

  Participated · Series C · May 2015

  YCharts provides a cloud-based investment research, visualization, and analytics platform focused on equity, mutual fund, and ETF data for wealth management professionals. The platform supports security research, portfolio construction, idea generation, and market monitoring and serves as a user-friendly alternative to terminal-based tools. YCharts reports more than 6,000 clients across RIAs, broker-dealers, and asset managers who use its comprehensive data and visualization tools. The company completed a growth recapitalization to support continued organic growth and increased investment in product and sales and marketing. Management also intends to pursue complementary acquisitions as part of its next-stage growth plan. The business emphasizes time savings for users and enhanced client communications through its analytics and presentation capabilities. YCharts offers a web-based financial terminal that provides sophisticated, easy-to-use analytics across asset classes and extensive datasets (20,000+ equities, 2,500 ETFs, 40,000 mutual funds, 400,000 economic indicators). The platform is positioned as a lower-cost alternative to established terminals and is used by RIAs, wealth managers, portfolio managers, hedge funds, VCs, private equity funds and consultants. YCharts reports roughly one million users per month and is on pace to deliver an end-2015 revenue run rate three times its 2014 level. The company has formed strategic distribution partnerships with Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Commonwealth and Dynasty to expand reach to investment advisors. YCharts says it will continue adding functions and features monthly and is focused on scaling its sales organization to capture professional-market share. The company was founded in 2010. YCharts computes more than 2,000 metrics for every listed stock and tracks over 350,000 global economic indicators, aggregating data from public sources and partnerships. It sources data through deals with other firms, including investor Morningstar, and offers an Excel plug-in to pull YCharts data into spreadsheets and financial models. The company provides a limited free plan and two paid plans for professionals: $49/month and a $199/month plan that includes data export, the Excel plug-in, and data verification. YCharts’ pro product is performing well ahead of expectations, and the team reports it is seeing larger deals than anticipated. The company says it has more than 1 million monthly users and is increasingly the choice of professionals seeking sophisticated financial information. Following the new funding, YCharts plans to scale more aggressively by investing in engineering and expanding its sales force to grow its institutional business. YCharts offers stock research tools, charts and analysis that let investors compare dividend yields, total returns and around 75 other metrics over time. It aggregates long-tail historical public data—P/E ratios, R&D spending, cash flows—and graphs these metrics to provide objective, non–opinion-based insights. The company offers three products: YCharts.com, YCharts Pro and a chart creator tool for third-party sites, journalists and bloggers; Pro users access quantitative analysis strategies for a monthly fee. The service has grown from 30,000 users to more than 400,000 users in slightly more than a year. YCharts emphasizes comprehensive long-term outlooks and comparisons (for example, total returns not offered by Yahoo Finance). The funding will be used to build out the team, scale infrastructure, increase marketing, and expand the scope of its financial research and analytics. YCharts is a Chicago, IL-based online fundamental stock research engine that provides individuals, business partners, and investment professionals with research on corporate performance. The company offers an online service for fundamental stock analysis and corporate-performance research. It has completed a Series A financing; the amount raised was undisclosed. Participants in the round included Hyde Park Angels, the Illinois Innovation Accelerator Fund (I2A), Amicus Capital and Social Leverage LLC. The investment will be used to expand marketing activities and accelerate development of the service. As part of the financing, Sam Guren (managing director of Hyde Park Angels), Kapil Chaudhary (partner of I2A Fund) and individual investor Brian Hand joined YCharts’ board of directors.

• DialogTech

  Participated · Equity · Sep 2014

  DialogTech provides a call analytics and automation platform designed to optimize the entire sales funnel. Its Voice360™ suite offers applications to control, measure and optimize the impact of phone calls across every stage of the customer lifecycle, from discovery to purchase to retention. The company currently serves over 5,000 global customers, including Uber, Zendesk, Sleep Train Mattress Centers, Experian and Yale University. DialogTech was founded in 2007 and is based in Chicago, IL. The company received a $10M credit facility and intends to use the funds to continue to grow operations and expand its offerings. Ifbyphone builds voice marketing software and sells tools that let marketers and salespeople track incoming calls from search results and advertising campaigns. Its Voice360 platform scores calls and routes them to the appropriate people; the company says new funding will be used to further develop Voice360. The company announced it has almost 5,000 customers. Earlier this year Ifbyphone reported a $9 million Series D; the new funding doubles its total funding to $60 million. Part of the new capital is being used to acquire competitor Mongoose Metrics; financial terms of that deal were not disclosed. Mongoose’s Cleveland office will remain open and Mongoose CEO Brad Reynolds will join Ifbyphone to lead integration, a move CEO Irv Shapiro said creates a market leader in call tracking. Ifbyphone offers products that track and automate calls for marketing, sales, and customer support teams, including interactive voice response and virtual call centers. The company positions itself as giving managers control over voice conversations and associated data. It has nearly 4,000 paying customers and processed more than 200 million phone calls and 600 million minutes as of December of last year. Ifbyphone plans to hire 25 people in the first half of the year, bringing headcount to more than 115. The company has raised funding previously and continues to expand its product and go-to-market efforts. Ifbyphone is a Skokie, IL-based provider of a software-as-a-service voice-based platform that enables customers to manage, measure and automate voice interactions in the marketing process. Its platform supports lead capture, lead nurturing, lead routing and lead analysis. Led by CEO Irv Shapiro, the company serves small-to-medium-sized businesses and plans to build infrastructure to serve mid-market clients as well. Ifbyphone recently received a $2m debt financing commitment to increase capacity and develop new capabilities. The company has also recently received funding from the National Association of REALTORS. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Ifbyphone offers a web-based platform that lets companies route, track and automate telephone calls via a public cloud server, enabling features like virtual receptionists, voicemail and phone voting. Developers can build web services against the platform to control every phase of a call through open APIs. The company acquired Cloudvox to gain access to open APIs and tooling for developers to build call‑routing and interactive voice applications. Users can pay for basic services or upgrade for more in-depth analytics and interactive voice features; pricing in the article ranges from $50 to $75 per month. The product targets call centers and enterprises that want to integrate telephony with web applications and analytics. The company is Skokie, Ill.-based and has grown its offering through both product development and acquisition.

• Base

  Participated · Series B · Mar 2014

  Base provides a sales platform that leverages big data, mobility and real-time computing to help sales teams close more deals and give managers forecasting and visibility into their sales pipeline. Led by CEO Uzi Shmilovici, the company serves more than 6,500 customers including Stryker, Jet.com, Dow and Cisco. Base is backed by top-tier venture firms. In September 2015 the company raised $30M in a Series C round. The company intends to use the funds to invest in the platform’s sales intelligence capabilities. Base is based in Mountain View, California. Base is a cross-platform CRM for sales teams that offers mobile geolocation and Base Voice, which lets reps make calls from any device and automatically capture and log calls. The company positions itself as a challenger to Salesforce and says it is winning customers from the larger rival. Base reports about 3,500 customers, "revenue in the millions," and 700% year-over-year growth. It has just under 100 employees and plans to hire aggressively, expanding its sales team by 6x by the end of the year. The company will move its headquarters from Chicago, where it was founded, to the Bay Area to meet strong demand and will continue investing in its product. Base develops a cross-platform CRM that lets small businesses manage customers and sales across devices. It offers native apps for Android, iPhone, Mac and Windows and plans to release tablet and Windows Phone 7.5 apps soon. The product enables users to capture, track and visualize sales leads and manage contacts with notes, tasks and reminders. Founded in 2009 by Uzi Shmilovici and based in Chicago, the company emphasizes mobility and user experience to make data available on any device. Since the beginning of the year Base grew its user base by more than 500% and is used by tens of thousands of businesses worldwide. The startup had previously raised $1.1 million before closing this $6.8 million Series B. Founded in 2009 by Uzi Shmilovici, Future Simple builds software products targeting small and medium-sized businesses. The company has launched two SMB products: PipeJump, a small business CRM, and QuoteBase, a project/job quote generator that the company says has thousands of users. Future Simple is Chicago-based but Israeli-founded and draws on the founder's prior startup experience (Shmilovici co-founded Netcraft). The recent financing will be used to bolster the management team, market the current products, and develop additional products. The company is positioning itself to expand its SMB product suite and scale user adoption of its existing offerings.

• Signal

  Participated · Equity · Nov 2013

  BrightTag powers more than 1,000 brands and agencies by enabling collection, connection and real-time action on cross-channel customer data from websites, mobile, social, email, ads, point-of-sale, CRM, call centers and kiosks. Its patented technology facilitates billions of requests globally and supports top brands that together generate more than $1.5 trillion in commerce. The company reports 300+ percent year-over-year growth each year and was on pace to do so again in 2014. Leadership includes President and CEO Mike Sands, Founder and Chief Revenue Officer Marc Kiven, and CTO Eric Lunt. BrightTag positions its platform to enable omni-channel, data-driven marketing that improves engagement, conversion and loyalty. The company said it will use new funding to accelerate product development and expand sales efforts across Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the U.S. BrightTag offers an integration platform called The BrightTag ONE that helps marketers and web analysts make online data instantly useful in web and mobile applications. The platform addresses privacy, data quality and site performance challenges. Led by CEO Mike Sands, BrightTag serves customers including 1-800-Flowers.com, JetBlue Airways, Grainger and Chegg. The company closed $15M in new financing to support its growth. It intends to use the proceeds to accelerate development of its technology platform and to expand sales efforts in the US and overseas. In conjunction with the financing, a partner from the lead investor will join BrightTag’s board. BrightTag provides a cloud-based integration platform that creates a connectivity layer between first-party website data and marketing and analytics services, eliminating the need to place third-party tags directly on client sites. The platform enables marketers to monitor in real time what data they share, where it is going, and who is using it, while improving site performance and reliability. BrightTag positions itself as a neutral, open "data Switzerland" that allows marketers maximum flexibility to connect with any service in the digital marketing ecosystem. Its technology facilitates direct cloud-based connections between marketer websites and marketing partners, enabling faster innovation and “instant-on” capability for new marketing technologies. The company serves 30+ enterprise clients across hundreds of websites globally, including Orbitz, Starcom MediaVest Group, Bluefly and AccuQuote, and says its customers collectively spend hundreds of millions online annually. Headquartered in Chicago, BrightTag said the new funding will accelerate its sales trajectory and support its expanding roster of global enterprise clients.

No current team members are available.