The Venture Codex

Participated · Equity · Mar 2022

LexCheck provides an AI-powered contract analysis platform that uses natural language processing to automate editing, negotiating, and risk profiling of contracts. The product standardizes negotiations with digital playbooks that deliver redlines, comments, insertions, deletions and automatically escalate deviations from preferred positions. LexCheck says custom playbooks can be trained with only 24–50 sample documents and that its tools integrate with existing contract lifecycle management solutions. The company’s products are developed by practicing lawyers in collaboration with linguists and software engineers. LexCheck has tripled its customer base to include large financial institutions, tech providers and top law firms, employs 32 people, and has not disclosed revenue figures. Proceeds from the recent round will fund expansion of R&D and sales and marketing. LexCheck is a New York City–based provider of an AI-powered contract negotiation platform. Led by founder and CEO Gary Sangha, the company offers an AI-based solution that delivers near-instantaneous attorney-quality negotiation for contracts from NDAs to procurement, sales, and complex investment and acquisition agreements. Its proprietary AI can be tailored to a client’s specific needs with minimal training data while accounting for business context. Once deployed, LexCheck produces issues lists or contract language revisions within minutes of uploads, reducing the amount of time attorneys spend reviewing contracts by over 90%. The company plans to use the funds to accelerate growth in the legal technology sector and to continue the rapid expansion it experienced in 2021. In 2021 LexCheck opened new offices in London and Melbourne and increased staff headcount by 3x. LexCheck is an NYC-based artificial intelligence and legal technology platform that applies AI to help customers accelerate and automate contract negotiations. Its platform serves leading Fortune 500 companies and supports contract drafting and review across ordinary commercial contracts to complex, high-stakes agreements. LexCheck's tools improve the accuracy and consistency of contract review and revision. The platform can integrate with existing legal operations infrastructure to minimize the bandwidth and time required to approve and execute legal documents. It also provides the metrics needed to optimize legal operations performance. The company completed a $3M seed financing and intends to use the funds to expand its business internationally.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2022

JABU operates a last-mile B2B e-commerce platform that enables small and medium kiosk merchants to order, stock and pay for products with same-day delivery and access data-driven dashboards for FMCG brands and banks. The company has a standalone wallet product, Jwallet, which merchants and drivers use for payments, cash-in/cash-out services, agent banking-style flows, stock financing and access to asset finance. In January the company reported over 6,000 merchants across Namibia, South Africa and Zambia, and the CEO said that number has since increased by 50%. JABU works with a network of logistics partners (drivers across 232 logistics partners are noted) to handle distribution. The company positions Jwallet as an alternative to BNPL, partnering with banks and building merchant communities to facilitate savings and peer credit lines rather than relying on balance-sheet credit. JABU says it will deepen its presence in Southern Africa and expand to new markets such as Botswana and Eswatini later this year. JABU operates a last-mile distribution and B2B e-commerce platform that connects over 6,000 retailers to local and multinational suppliers and digitizes orders, payments and logistics. The company owns a fleet of vehicles and eight distribution centers and offers suppliers dashboards for delivery tracking, merchandising, marketing and advertising. Since March the startup reports monthly GMV growth of 25x, average delivered SKU growth of nearly 53% monthly, and revenue growth of 35x. JABU is developing merchant wallets to digitize cash collections and enable B2B2C services, and plans to take commissions on future wallet transactions. The company has more than 200 employees and operates in three Namibian cities with recent expansion into two Zambian cities. JABU is preparing for a Series A raise to fund expansion into Botswana and South Africa, grow its tech and operations teams, and train field agents.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2021

Turbodega offers inventory-management and accounting software for traditional corner stores (bodegas), with features that let users sell through a marketplace and connect to third-party marketplaces. The platform aims to digitalize 15% of Peru's bodegas and convert them into last-mile delivery and financial-agent points. It began as a January 2020 pilot with about 500 bodegas and today has partnerships with distributors and companies such as Pepsico in Lima and presence in Arequipa, Junín and Pucallpa. The company already operates with a Unilever distributor in Guadalajara as it prepares a formal expansion into Mexico. Turbodega plans product integrations with banks and e-commerce platforms to streamline onboarding and enable stores to offer financial services and parcel delivery. Using the new funding, it intends to accelerate digitization of roughly 40,000 establishments in Peru and about 10,000 in Mexico.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2021

NeuraLight develops a software system that uses ordinary webcams or smartphones and modern image analysis to extract sub-pixel ocular signals linked to cognitive load and neurological disease. The core product claims accuracy comparable to professional gaze trackers that cost tens of thousands of dollars by deriving micro-parameters from the eye. The company positions its measurements as an objective metric to improve diagnosis and tracking and to tag patients in clinical trials, increasing confidence in study data without making regulated diagnostic claims. NeuraLight has tested hundreds of healthy volunteers as a control group and is preparing studies to create an agent to detect ALS; trials and partnerships are also underway for Parkinson’s, MS and Alzheimer’s. The team envisions passive, frequent home or telehealth monitoring (including via standard video calls), but clinical deployment will require more tests and FDA approval. NeuraLight is based in Austin and Tel Aviv and intends to use new funding to expand its team, infrastructure and product. NeuraLight has built a platform that automatically extracts microscopic ocular metrics from augmented video to serve as digital endpoints for neurological disorders. The company’s technology removes light and movement artifacts from standard smartphone or webcam video and derives precise eye‑movement measurements. NeuraLight plans to sell these digital endpoints to pharmaceutical companies to accelerate clinical trials and improve drug development for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, MS and other neurodegenerative diseases. The company emerged from stealth with $5.5 million in seed funding to advance its platform and partnerships with pharma. NeuraLight aims to assemble a large, de‑identified oculometric database and apply AI to gain insights from thousands of patients. The team is dual‑headquartered in Austin and Tel Aviv and has recruited talent from research, pharma, Google, Chorus.ai and Viz.ai; the founders have filed a provisional patent and report early measurement work underway in Israel.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2021

Stor.ai (fka Self Point) is an end-to-end digital commerce solution that provides grocers — from local retailers to national chains — with tools to build and manage product catalogs and advanced fulfillment capabilities. Led by CEO Orlee Tal and founded in 2014, the company serves a client and partner base that includes Unilever, Toshiba and Microsoft. Stor.ai’s core product focuses on enabling grocers to run and advance their online businesses through catalogue management and fulfillment methods. The company plans to use new capital to integrate additional features into its offering. Management intends to accelerate growth in North America and expand into markets in Latin America and Europe. The article does not disclose revenue or user metrics.