• Inkbox

  Participated · Series A · Jul 2018

  inkbox is a tattoo ecosystem that makes realistic semi-permanent tattoos customers apply at home without needles. Customers can choose from thousands of designs created by an active artist community or create their own, and the company operates an artist marketplace. Founded by brothers Tyler and Braden Handley in February 2015 and based in Toronto, inkbox has shipped over 500,000 tattoos to customers in more than 150 countries. The company has released collections with brands and influencers including Vans Warped Tour, Anna Brisbin, SickKids Foundation, and Debby Ryan. Plans include expanding its artist marketplace, developing new tattoo technologies, strengthening its brand and scaling operations through strategic hires. Alongside the financing, inkbox added advisors Jill Braff and Divya Gugnani. To date the company has raised $16M, including prior seed rounds. Toronto-based founders Tyler and Braden Handley launched Inkbox after a Kickstarter that raised nearly $300,000 and refined their product to a 10-minute application. The company sells short-term organic temporary tattoos and describes itself as a biotech on the back end with a consumer fashion front end. Inkbox completed a general consumer launch and hired chemist Chris Caputo, a former Harvard postdoc, as its first main hire. The team says it manufactured the underlying technology from scratch and spent about six months scaling it to consumer production. The company is developing a longer-lasting version of the technology that would last 30 days and has additional products planned. Financially, Inkbox recently closed a $1 million seed round from angels and an early-stage VC as it prepares for retail sales.

• Music Audience Exchange

  Led · Equity · Mar 2017

  Max is a Dallas, TX-based music technology company that operates the SET.Live platform to enable artists to engage directly with fans during live shows and create sponsorable assets for brands. The platform powers brand-music partnerships with clients including Ford, UScellular, McDonald’s, AARP, Gildan, and Elavon, and supports a growing portfolio of 1,000+ artists such as Kane Brown, Alan Jackson, Jon Batiste, Leela James, AJR, and others. Max uses data-driven marketing automation to better serve brands, artists, and music fans. The company plans to use the Series B funding for continued development of SET.Live and to expand its sales and marketing teams. Max is led by CEO and founder Nathan Hanks and recently expanded its board with Carl Sparks of Interlock and Elizabeth Brooks of Better Angels Ventures. Music Audience Exchange (MAX) is a Dallas-based company founded by George Howard and Nathan Hanks in 2014 that builds a platform to pair brands with artists who haven’t yet broken into the mainstream. Using tools derived from Hanks’ work at ReachLocal, MAX identifies more than 200 demographic categories of fans for 2.4 million musicians across 765 genres. The company matches a brand’s target audience and budget to artists and negotiates sponsorships that can include commercial exposure in ads, backing tours, and guaranteed song rotations. MAX says the deals are only signed when artists agree to the terms; beneficiaries include NEEDTOBREATHE, Leela James, Aaron Watson and La Maquinaria Norteña. Founders position the product as a way to put more money into artists’ pockets and as a new era of patronage where brands get behind creators. Leadership also sees the approach applying beyond musicians to other influencers such as YouTube creators and actors. financially, MAX has recently raised new capital to scale its platform and business development.

• Rippleshot

  Led · Seed · Feb 2017

  Rippleshot is a Chicago, IL-based fraud analytics startup led by CEO and co-founder Canh Tran. The company provides issuers, merchants and processors with a cloud-based platform that uses machine learning and data analytics to detect fraud. Its technology processes millions of payment card transactions in real-time to pinpoint when and where card-data breaches occurred, identify which cards are most at risk, and suggest mitigation strategies to prevent fraud loss. In August 2017 Rippleshot secured $2.6M in funding in a round led by KDWC with participation from CMFG Ventures. The company intends to use the funds to grow its technical team of developers and data scientists to expand in the credit union and banking market and to enter the merchant fraud detection space. The financing announcement coincided with the addition of Gloria Colgan, former president of PYMNTS.com, to Rippleshot's advisory board. Rippleshot is a Chicago-based fraud analytics company that provides banks and credit unions with a cloud-based machine-learning and data-analytics platform. Its technology processes millions of payment card transactions in real time to pinpoint when and where a data breach occurred and identify fraudulent activity. Following detection the platform provides banks with tools to update fraud detection rules to lower fraud losses while avoiding unnecessary card re-issuance. The company intends to use the $1.2M bridge funding to expand its sales, development and account management teams. The financing was led by KGC Capital with participation from UMB Bank, Wintrust and fintech accelerator SixThirty, and Jason Henrichs joined Rippleshot’s advisory board in conjunction with the round. The company is led by CEO and co-founder Canh Tran.

• Shiftgig

  Participated · Series C · Jan 2017

  Shiftgig operates a smartphone-based marketplace that lets hourly workers (“Specialists”) pick up shifts at local businesses and events. The platform serves about 1,500 businesses and 15,000 workers, with customers across all 50 states concentrated in roughly 12 cities. It works across food service, hotel, retail, logistics, warehouse and experiential marketing verticals, handling weekly payments, vetting and reliability scores for workers. Shiftgig charges businesses per shift and takes a percentage fee that varies by order and client size. The company says it is ACA-compliant and carries appropriate workers’ compensation insurance. Management intends to use new funding to scale the marketplace into additional cities. Shiftgig operates a people-centered, mobile-first marketplace that connects workers with short-term shifts and enables hiring managers to fill and manage assignments. Led by cofounder and CEO Eddie Lou, the platform lets workers choose when, where and for which local employers they want to work. The company raised $22m in Series B funding to support growth. Shiftgig plans to use the capital to scale the business and launch in new cities across North America. Investments will be made in sales, marketing, technology and operations. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article. Shiftgig operates an online community and marketplace that allows members to connect with businesses to access jobs and content in the restaurant, nightlife, hotel and retail verticals. The company was co-founded in 2011 by Eddie Lou (CEO), Jeff Pieta (President) and Sean Casey (CTO). It reports over 1,050,000 registered members and 25,000 businesses on the platform. Shiftgig secured $10M in its first institutional financing and intends to use the funds to expand its technology, product and team. Recent senior additions include Jill Erickson as Chief Revenue Officer, Travis Haight as VP of Service Delivery, Dan Miller as VP of Talent and Michael Yoch as VP of Product. The product focus remains on connecting workers and businesses in the service industry and scaling the platform's capabilities.

• Singular

  Participated · Series A · Nov 2016

  Singular builds a marketing intelligence platform that unifies data from mobile, web and offline sources to give marketers a single pane of glass. The product sits on top of complex marketing stacks and integrates with existing marketing tools while often displacing smaller point solutions. CEO Gadi Eliashiv says the platform can present both high-level CMO dashboards and the finest level of detail for attribution and analysis. The company was founded by former Onavo executives Gadi Eliashiv, Eran Friedman and Susan Kuo, who serve as CEO, CTO and COO. Singular already counts customers including Lyft, Yelp, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Symantec, Zynga, Match and Twitter. The team positions the product as an intelligence layer rather than an ad‑buying tool. Singular provides a marketing analytics platform that delivers attribution, cost aggregation, creative reporting and workflow automation within a single application. Led by CEO Gadi Eliashiv, the company connects disparate digital marketing data from publishers, CRM providers and other partners to help marketers uncover actionable insights for customers such as Lyft, Twitter, Match.com and Zynga. Since its inception in 2014, Singular has tracked and analyzed more than 6 billion installs and $3 billion in digital marketing spend, and it processes billions of consumer marketing data points weekly from over 600 integration partners. Singular will use the new funds to accelerate product development and support international expansion, and it already maintains regional offices in Europe and the Middle East. The company has raised $20 million to date, including the newly announced $15 million Series A. The platform serves industries including commerce, travel, gaming, entertainment and on-demand services. Singular provides a cross-platform, cloud-based mobile marketing dashboard that unifies the mobile marketing ecosystem by combining ad network data with ad trackers, BI solutions, and other databases. The company positions its product as a fully automatic SaaS solution that removes manual operations and enables marketers to analyze granular ROI across channels, creatives, geographies, and user segments. Singular emphasizes measuring quality installs and post-install engagement rather than simple install counts, enabling marketers to optimize spend and scale campaigns. It cites customers including Kabam, GREE, Storm8, Hotel Tonight, Big Fish Games, Perfect World, and GetTaxi. The founding team comprises ex-Onavo executives (CEO Gadi Elishayov, CTO Eran Friedman, and COO Susan Kuo), who left Onavo prior to its acquisition and built Singular from that experience. Financially, the company announced a $5 million seed financing from General Catalyst Partners.

No current team members are available.