• Label Insight

  Led · Series B · Feb 2016

  Label Insight is a Chicago-based provider of product transparency solutions that offers a SaaS transparency platform for CPG product information. The platform covers more than 80% of top-selling food, pet, and personal care items in the U.S. and uses proprietary data science and machine learning to capture product labeling information and create more than 22,000 unique custom attributes per product. Its technology powers analytics, marketing, merchandising, and ecommerce solutions for customers across the retail, brand manufacturer, government, and technology industries. Customers include more than 25 top CPG companies and 12 leading retailers. The company plans to use the funds to hire data science professionals, continue product development, and accelerate customer growth. Label Insight is led by CEO Paul Schaut. Label Insight provides a product data platform that adds proprietary smart attributes—nutrients, allergens and other metadata—to basic food and beverage product information, enabling CPG brands and retailers to gain deeper insights into their assortments. Led by CEO Anton Xavier, the company supports retailer-customized data views and participation in industry efforts such as the SmartLabel™ transparency initiative. Label Insight also works with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on ingredient and nutrient analysis initiatives. The company will use the new funding to develop new products, broaden custom data views and expand its data science capabilities. The investment includes strategic partnership aspects that will allow KPMG member firms to offer clients access to Label Insight’s platform and help the company enter new markets and build relationships with retailers, manufacturers and government agencies. To date Label Insight has raised a total of $14m.

• Norse

  Led · Series A · Sep 2015

  Norse is a live attack intelligence company that provides enterprise threat intelligence products and services, including the Norse Appliance 10g and the Norse Intelligence Service, a turnkey "early-warning-as-a-service". Its Norse Intelligence Network is a globally-distributed grid of sensors, honeypots, crawlers and agents that processes hundreds of terabytes daily against a 7 petabyte attack history database. Norse's processing weighs over 1,500 variables to compute real-time risk scores for millions of IP addresses and URLs every day, enabling near-real-time detection and blocking of threats. The company said the new funding will be used primarily to bolster product development and accelerate expansion of its global sales organization to capitalize on international growth opportunities. Norse has appointed Andrew Lewman as vice president of data development and David Weier as senior vice president of worldwide sales to support those efforts. The company serves large financial, government and technology organizations and is headquartered in Foster City, Calif. Norse provides a patent-pending, infrastructure-based technology that continuously collects and analyzes real-time, high-risk Internet traffic to identify sources of cyber attacks and fraud. The company is led by CEO Sam Glines and CTO Tommy Stiansen. It is headquartered in San Mateo, CA, and also has offices in St. Louis and Atlanta. Norse raised $10M in a Series A round to expand and strengthen engineering, product development, and sales and marketing. The startup said it is currently hiring to support that growth. The funding round was provided by Oak Investment Partners. NorseCorp is a St. Louis, Missouri-based provider of Internet security intelligence and payments solutions for all industries. The company has developed IPViking™, technology that conducts real-time reconnaissance of high-risk IP addresses and delivers actionable intelligence on-demand; IPViking is included in NorseCorp's nGate™ product. Led by CEO Sam Glines, NorseCorp offers integrated security and payments products. The company completed a $3.5M financing to support growth. It intends to use the capital to add new people, support the launch of multiple security and payments products, and expand research and development activities. Backers for the round were not disclosed.

• Bottlenose

  Led · Series B · Feb 2015

  Bottlenose provides a high-performance, cloud-based platform (Nerve Center) that analyzes massive volumes of real-time stream data to surface emerging risks, threats, crises, and opportunities without customers having to specify queries. The product handles structured and unstructured streaming sources and correlates signals across social, enterprise, and media data to detect incidents such as intrusions. The company analyzes roughly 72 billion data records and messages daily, covers 98% of live TV and radio in real time (about 40 hours of audio/video per minute), and serves 18 global organizations including Pepsi and Warner Bros. Bottlenose has about 40 full-time employees and plans to grow toward ~80 with the new capital. The firm holds eight patents covering capabilities like cross-source correlation. Management says it will expand the product line and move toward more full-stack offerings with announcements planned later in the year. Bottlenose is a web platform that aggregates multiple social media accounts and organizes streams into a single interface. Its free beta uses a sonar tool to connect tweets, mentions, hashtags, images and other media and serves about 100,000 professional marketers (it had about 50,000 users in 2012). The company is developing Bottlenose Enterprise, which expands trend and real-time data analysis with features for audience response, sentiment, impressions, volume and correlations. Enterprise is in private invite beta and targets Fortune 500 customers, with dozens in pilot or as customers. The enterprise product is already being used by brands including Pepsi, FleishmanHillard, Razorfish and DigitasLBi. Bottlenose raised $3.6M in Series A and plans to use the funds to scale engineering, sales and marketing ahead of a public launch of Bottlenose Enterprise in the fall. Bottlenose provides live attention monitoring and analytics solutions for social marketers, enterprises, brands and interactive agencies to gain insights about audiences, campaigns and markets and to detect emerging trends and conversations. The service was in public beta at the time of the report. The company said it will use the new funding to further develop its solutions. Bottlenose is led by CEO and co-founder Nova Spivack. In conjunction with the financing, John Frankel of ff Venture Capital joined Bottlenose’s advisory board and is expected to play a strategic role in the roll out of the company’s Pro offerings. Those Pro offerings were expected to be rolled out early in Q1 of 2013.

No current team members are available.