Led · Equity · Feb 2024

Founded in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, Starship Technologies has created the world’s largest autonomous delivery network, with more than 2,700 Level-4-autonomous robots operating across 270+ locations in seven countries. The robots have completed over 9 million deliveries, covering more than 12 million miles and preventing an estimated 650 tonnes of CO₂ emissions versus traditional delivery methods. Starship’s core product is an AI-powered, sidewalk-level delivery robot that integrates with platforms such as Grubhub, Bolt, Wolt and Foodora, enabling sub-30-minute, low-cost last-mile service. The company claims positive gross margins today, driven by the cost efficiency of autonomous delivery compared to human couriers. Looking ahead, management plans to scale the fleet from 2,700+ robots to more than 12,000 by 2027 and expand from U.S. university campuses and 30+ European cities into major American urban markets. Its unmatched dataset—generated by robots making two autonomous road crossings per second—continually refines safety, routing and reliability, reinforcing a competitive moat. To date, Starship has raised over $280 million to cement its leadership in delivery robotics.

Led · Series C · Aug 2022

Wire is an enterprise-focused messaging and collaboration platform offering end-to-end encryption, real-time audio/video, screensharing and compliance/user-management features. The product supports on-premise encrypted data storage (which most customers choose) and can operate in airgapped networks. Wire is built on the MLS security standard and has a compliance module that provisions a server‑side virtual device to enable auditable copies of regulated employees’ communications with user consent. The company targets governments, militaries and regulated industries (finance, healthcare) and counts more than 1,800 customers, including five of the world’s G7 governments and the German federal administration and parliament. Financially Wire reports ARR doubled in the last 12 months, turnover up 2x year over year, and double-digit customer growth since last year. Going forward the team plans to accelerate penetration in government, military and regulated markets, expand its compliance offerings, and develop SDKs to embed Wire into other solutions. Wire offers an end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration service that supports text, photos, videos, voice messages, file sharing, one-to-one conversations, rooms and video calls, with source code available on GitHub. The company has shifted focus from consumer to enterprise customers and targets large corporations and government customers; five G7 governments are currently using Wire. Wire encrypts communications by default so the company cannot decrypt conversations, and it is working on Messaging Layer Security (MLS) and improvements to conference calls and real-time interactions. The startup sees messaging and real-time collaboration converging and aims to offer a secure service across those scenarios. Wire currently has about 1,800 customers, a nearly 50% increase year-over-year, and reported that revenue tripled in 2020. The company is relatively small with roughly 90 employees, leaving room to grow and iterate. Wire provides an end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration platform aimed at enterprise customers while still serving consumer users. The product offers encrypted messaging, conference calls and file transfer with decryption keys stored only on user devices, and the company publishes its source code on GitHub. Wire has about half a million individual users and roughly 700 enterprise customers, including names such as Fortum, Aon, EY and SoftBank Robotics. The company shifted focus toward the enterprise market in 2017 and is developing federated protocol support and Messaging Layer Security (MLS) to expand secure deployments. Wire plans to introduce a freemium tier for consumers while pursuing a larger funding round to accelerate enterprise growth. Operationally, customers are licensed from Wire Switzerland, development remains in Berlin, and hosting stays in Europe despite a recent change in the group holding location. Wire is a communications app available on iOS, Android and Mac that emphasizes improved media processing, audio technology, file compression and delivery under a clean, gesture-driven interface. The app supports sharing text, pictures, GIFs, HD audio and embedded content from SoundCloud and YouTube, though it currently lacks real-time video chat or asynchronous video recordings. The team includes veterans from Skype, Apple, Nokia and Microsoft, with founders who previously built audio-processing companies and codecs. Wire plans to add video support, HTML5 web access (WebRTC compatible) and later premium features that users may pay for. The company implements end-to-end encryption for calls (SRTP) and TLS for messages and media, stores data in Europe, and is actively working on policies for message retention after account de-activation. Financially, Wire has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Skype co-founder Janus Friis and Iconical.com.

Participated · Series C · Feb 2018

Founded in 2010, Vivino operates a label‑scanning app that combines a decade‑built wine database with a personalized recommendation engine and an in‑app marketplace. The company has grown its user base from 29 million in 2018 to about 50 million today and has amassed roughly 1.5 billion pictures of wine labels. Vivino partners with merchants worldwide to enable purchases directly in the app and currently sells wine in 17 countries. It is a roughly 200‑person company that reported reaching roughly a quarter of a billion dollars in sales and says its unit economics are healthy. Vivino plans to use new capital to boost its core tech and recommendation engine, deepen resources in each market, expand merchant relationships, increase marketing spend, and build out product engineering. Vivino is a mobile wine app and online wine marketplace that lets users take a photo of a wine label to get ratings, pricing and a purchase option instantly using proprietary image recognition. The platform leverages community data to suggest personalized wine recommendations based on users' ratings and purchases. It is available for download on Android and Apple devices and is powered by a community of 29 million wine drinkers. Founded by Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaard in 2010 and based in San Francisco, the company combines social data with commerce. Vivino plans to use the new funding to continue developing its technology, further invest in its team and extend commerce initiatives to new markets like Hong Kong. The company has raised $57M in total funding to date. Vivino is a mobile wine community and app that lets users discover, enjoy and rate wines and build a personal wine library. Founded in 2010 by Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaard, the app is available on Android, Apple and Windows devices and uses proprietary image recognition to match photos of wine labels and restaurant lists to a database of millions of wines. The company reports 13 million global users who share reviews and experiences via social networks. Vivino operates a wine marketplace and plans to continue building that marketplace. The company intends to use new funding to expand its presence in top wine consumption regions including the United States, Italy, France, Spain and Germany. In conjunction with the funding the company added Christophe Navarre to its board as a non-executive director and named Karen MacNeil as an editorial advisor. Vivino is a mobile app that lets users photograph wine labels and matches them against a database of 1.3 million wines to show producer, country, varietals, vintage, and local purchase options. Users can maintain lists of wines they "love" or "loathe," get recommendations, and see social feeds of what friends are drinking. The app added optical character recognition (OCR), which improved label-matching accuracy to 86 percent, and users now generate about 2 million label scans per month. Vivino claims to be the most downloaded wine app in the world and the highest-ranked wine app in the United States. The company competes with U.S. startup Snooth and emphasizes building its database and matching technology. The startup plans to use new funding to expand its database and technology and to add users in Europe and the Americas. Vivino is a mobile wine app that lets users photograph wine labels, automatically recognize them, and match them to a database of nearly 500,000 wines. Available on iOS and Android, the app lets users rate and track wines, read reviews, and follow other users to discover new bottles. The company has not yet enabled e-commerce, but plans to allow users to buy wine by the bottle or case soon. Over the past six months Vivino has seen 100,000 monthly downloads, and in November active users scanned an average of seven wine labels per month. Vivino positions itself to capture consumers who increasingly use mobile apps to research, identify, and purchase wine. The product centers on image recognition and a large wine database to simplify wine discovery and tracking for consumers.

Participated · Series C · Jun 2016

Spirosure develops the Fenom PRO, a point-of-care breath analyzer intended to provide exhaled nitric oxide information to guide asthma diagnosis, management and monitoring. The connected medical device combines several sensors with a digital ecosystem to support clinicians' decisions. Fenom PRO is CE-marked for use in Europe by allergists, immunologists and pulmonologists and is investigational in the United States. Spirosure completed an FDA 510(k) submission on December 11, 2017 seeking U.S. clearance; the device is not currently available for sale in the U.S. The company is commercializing Fenom PRO internationally and is recruiting teams for sales and regulatory activities in Europe, China and Japan. Spirosure is headquartered in Pleasanton, California. Spirometrix develops and commercializes breath-analysis devices that measure exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) for asthma diagnosis and management. Its core products are the Fenom PRO point-of-care breathalyzer and the Fenom HOME handheld at-home breathalyzer, both using a solid-state electrochemical sensor and cloud-connected analytics. The company also builds a respiratory digital ecosystem that integrates device data with environmental inputs (pollen, pollution, air quality) for algorithmic pattern recognition and clinical decision support. Spirometrix licensed its sensor-based technology from Professor Prabir Dutta’s laboratories at The Ohio State University. The company expects CE marking for the Fenom PRO this summer and to commence FDA clinical trials for Fenom PRO later this fall, with Fenom HOME clinical trials slated to begin by year-end. Financially, Spirometrix closed a $17.4 million Series C and has raised $29 million in three rounds to date to fund product finalization and imminent commercial launches in the EU and USA. Spirometrix is an emerging healthcare technology company founded in 2011 and based in Pleasanton, Calif., that develops novel breath analysis devices focused on respiratory disease. Its core product line centers on non-invasive measurement and monitoring of exhaled nitric oxide (NO) as a biomarker for asthma. The company aims to combine sensors with a digital ecosystem to provide insights and clinical decision support for disease management. Spirometrix’s mission targets cost-effective, non-invasive products for chronic conditions including asthma, COPD, and chronic pulmonary hypertension using proprietary sensors and algorithms. The company recently closed a financing that strengthens its ability to scale sensor production through a strategic manufacturing partnership. The NTK relationship is intended to provide mass-production capability and support commercial deployment of Spirometrix’s devices.