Led · Equity · Oct 2018

Mavrck operates a platform for brands and media companies to source and engage influencers for marketing campaigns. The company says it connects roughly 3 million creators with about 5,000 marketers across 500 consumer brands and has paid out over $200 million to creators to date. Mavrck will integrate Later’s Linkin.bio click and engagement analytics into its dashboard following the acquisition. Later brings social scheduling, analytics and Linkin.bio linking, with over 2 billion pageviews and nearly 7 million creators and small businesses using its suite. Mavrck’s leadership frames the product and M&A moves as positioning the company to capture growth in the creator economy, and the team has spoken about future shifts such as VR where creators may play a role. The company is using the new capital and the Later acquisition to expand its enterprise-facing creator marketing capabilities. Mavrck operates a platform that lets brands and media companies source, vet, and engage influencers and creators for sponsored content across social platforms, blogs, podcasts, and more. Its "Influencer Index" lists millions of contactable macro- and micro-influencers and the company has connected brands with more than 3 million creators, reaching over 240 million consumers. About 500 brands and 5,000 marketers use Mavrck, which employs patented algorithms, first-party opt-in data, and roughly 25 search filters (audience demographics, historical performance, fraud risk) to match creators to campaigns. Mavrck also enables customers to import or invite existing influencer relationships to build ambassador networks and handles campaign workflow and payments. The company plans to use new capital to double down on its platform, build recommendation engines powered by petabytes of historical data, and double its team while investing in business development. Founded in 2014, Mavrck emphasizes leveraging creator-driven social proof amid rapid growth in influencer marketing spend. Mavrck is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform that automates influencer workflows and measures campaign performance. It offers tools to automate and measure the process and to detect fraud by analyzing statistically significant samples of an account’s followers and of accounts that engage with content to identify bots. The company recently added features for Pinterest and is an official Pinterest marketing partner. Customers include P&G, Godiva and PepsiCo, and Mavrck says recurring revenue has grown 400% year-over-year. Mavrck has raised another $5.8M, bringing total capital raised to $13.8M, and says the funds will support increased demand and channel partnerships. The company previously raised a Series A in 2015 when it focused on micro-influencers and has since broadened into a wider, "all-in-one" platform. Mavrck provides a micro-influencer marketing platform for brands to identify and activate influential consumers at scale across multiple social networks. The company is led by CEO and co-founder Lyle Stevens. It recently launched a free Fan Grader analysis tool for brands to identify influential Facebook fans and added an Instagram integration that analyzed more than one million posts in its first two weeks. Customers include more than 30 premier brands such as Gillette, Hershey’s, Bota Box and Hydro Flask, and the company has agency partnerships with Mullen Lowe and GroupM. The company will use the funds to accelerate its growth. Mavrck is based in Boston, MA. Mavrck builds a platform that helps brands identify and engage long-tail or micro-influencers and manage reciprocity-driven campaigns. The company emphasizes conversions over impressions, positioning its product to deliver measurable leads and purchases. In a pilot with Unilever’s Clear product, Mavrck provided 1,000 influencers unique links that generated 15,000 email signups and more than 3,500 purchases within 30 days. Across its campaigns the company reported an average cost per lead of $1.52 and said its CTR and CPL compared favorably to Facebook News Feed ads and Promoted Tweets, though its cost per engagement was higher. Co-founder and CEO Lyle Stevens says the next major challenge is scaling the influencer base, and the company planned to engage communities to add zeros to its numbers as it moved into 2015. Mavrck is a TechStars Boston graduate and is focused on expanding reach while maintaining influencer authenticity and monitoring to prevent spam-like behavior.

Participated · Seed · May 2017

DeepGraph scans public data sources to identify market events (product launches, stock fluctuations, turnover) that make pitches more likely and builds a large knowledge graph of business milestones. The system drafts targeted messaging and proactively sends structured cold emails, then verifies responses to deliver interested potential customers to enterprise sales teams. DeepGraph integrates with Salesforce to share contacts and core data, and relies on overseas human workers to verify information and keep the graph up to date. The product is sold on a per-seat, per-month basis. The startup is seed-stage, currently a team of six, and is transitioning from R&D to sales amid a competitive automated-sales landscape that includes Growlabs and Nova AI. The company plans to use new capital to expand its operations and commercial efforts.

Led · Seed · Mar 2017

ClearGov offers a cloud-native Budget Cycle Management suite that includes Operational Budgeting, a Digital Budget Book, Transparency tools, and the newly launched Capital and Personnel Budgeting products. The integrated platform centralizes data, automates workflow, and increases collaboration and transparency across the annual budgeting process. Each product can be used separately, but full-suite clients realize greater collaboration and efficiency. Hundreds of communities rely on ClearGov’s solutions; the company surpassed 500 customers and was named to the Inc. 5000 list in 2021. Financially, ClearGov announced a $20MM strategic growth investment closed in December 2021 led by Frontier Growth. With the funding, ClearGov plans to expand its team, enhance its products based on customer feedback, and meet growing demand for affordable government budgeting software. ClearGov offers an enterprise SaaS platform that transforms complex public financial data into easy-to-understand infographics and benchmarking profiles for local governments. The company’s product includes basic town profiles and a premium Insights service that provides granular financials, commentary on fiscal trends, and web-based tools to compare efficiencies against similar communities. ClearGov’s database covers over 20,000 local governments across 20 states and aggregates more than $1.8 trillion of government expenditures. Customers such as Brookline, MA and Decatur, GA use ClearGov to create online “transparency centers” and to support budgeting and citizen communication. The seed financing announced is intended to fund the company’s rapid expansion. Founders Chris Bullock and Bryan Burdick lead the company, with Bullock serving as CEO.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2015

VoltDB provides a cloud-native data platform designed to meet real-time streaming data requirements of 5G-powered applications, combining stream processing, context and real-time analytics. Its integrated smart streaming capabilities enable enterprises and industrial organizations to push machine-learning-supported decisioning closer to the edge. The platform emphasizes low latency and strong consistency so organizations can execute sophisticated decisions in milliseconds. Led by CEO David Flower, VoltDB targets mission-critical use cases where speed and consistency are essential. The company was founded by a team of database experts including Dr. Michael Stonebraker. VoltDB intends to use the new funds to expand its global footprint. VoltDB is an in-memory, scale-out SQL database built to power a new generation of applications that leverage fast smart data. Led by Bruce Reading, CEO and President, the platform enables organizations to add context and intelligence to data and make real-time transactional decisions. Customers span markets such as mobile, financial services, energy, advertising, security and gaming. The company is based in Bedford, Mass. and Santa Clara, Calif. VoltDB raised $9.8M in a funding round led by strategic investors, with participation from existing investors Kepha Partners and Sigma Prime Ventures. With this investment the company has raised a total of $31.3M in funding. VoltDB provides an operational database platform that delivers high-speed data processing and real-time, in-memory analytics for millisecond decisioning. Its platform processes, analyzes and acts on massive amounts of incoming data. Customers in mobile, financial services, energy, advertising and gaming use VoltDB to power mission-critical enterprise applications, transportation systems, electricity management, and mobile and advertising networks. The company was founded in 2009 by Professor Michael Stonebraker and is led by CEO Bruce Reading. VoltDB is based in Bedford, Mass. and Santa Clara, Calif. It has more than 400 commercial customers and plans to use the new funding to accelerate sales and marketing and expand globally. VoltDB closed a $5M financing from Kepha Partners and Sigma Partners to extend adoption of its database software. Jo Tango of Kepha Partners and John Mandile of Sigma Partners will join the company’s board. Co-founded in 2009 by Dr. Michael Stonebraker, VoltDB develops an open-source DBMS that combines in-memory processing, a shared‑nothing scale-out architecture and a high‑availability solution. The company says its performance advantage stems from an in-memory, distributed database partitioning concept optimized for memory‑rich servers with multi‑core CPUs. VoltDB’s Community Edition is GPL‑licensed and available free of charge. Annual support subscriptions are offered starting at $15,000 per year. The company is based in Billerica, Massachusetts.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2015

Adored is a Manchester, NH-based mobile app that helps merchants reward customers with offers delivered to their smartphones via low-energy Bluetooth beacons. At participating merchants a beacon detects phones with the Adored app (users must enable Bluetooth and location), and the app uses a random identifier rather than an email or password to track anonymous behavior. Merchants receive analytics including foot-traffic totals and visit frequency to tailor real-time loyalty experiences. Adored has signed about 65 merchants across markets from North Country ski areas to Cambridge, Mass., including over 20 locations in the Common Man family. The company has more than 10,000 users and projects to reach 100,000 within the next year. Adored is not yet profitable and is focused on user and merchant growth rather than revenue; it plans to use new funding to hire more engineers and salespeople and double its full-time staff.