Participated · Series A · Oct 2015

Zebit is a San Diego, CA-based e-commerce marketplace and custom credit provider led by President & CEO Marc Schneider. The company offers underserved consumers up to $5,000 of interest-free credit alongside a marketplace of millions of brand-name products. Zebit is building data-science-driven underwriting models at registration and at the point of sale, while developing new financing solutions. It is also expanding its e-commerce assortment to create a fully integrated e-commerce and financial brand for everyday purchases. The company intends to use newly raised capital to continue to scale and expand its reach. Zebit operates a payment platform that provides zero-percent interest credit with no fees, penalties, or credit checks, usable in the Zebit Market or at retailers that accept Zebit at checkout. Within the Zebit Market customers can finance thousands of brand-name products over time, sold at competitive retail prices and never above MSRP. The platform hosts products from brands including Panasonic, Samsung, Canon, Garmin, HP, LG Electronics, KitchenAid, Cuisinart, Hoover and Coleman. Zebit’s offering is available to participating employers with workforces ranging from 1,000 to over 100,000 employees and the company has commitments from employers representing 250,000 employees to offer the benefit in 2016; it also has a relationship with a $100 million electronics retailer. Led by co-founders Michael Thiemann (CEO) and Marc Schneider (COO), the company plans to use new capital to support receivables, operations, and expansion of its payment and e-commerce platforms. The article reports a $10m Series A raise to support those operational and growth initiatives. Zebit, operated by Global Analytics in San Diego, develops lending and underwriting software used by banks. Its products enable customers to offer short-term loans, lines of credit, and secured and unsecured credit. The company also operates a lending business in the UK and plans to expand into other markets. Zebit's software aims to bridge the gap between payday loans and traditional bank credit. Financially, Zebit last raised $25M in venture funding in May of the prior year and has now secured additional debt financing, bringing total capital raised to $95M. The company is venture-backed by Mohr Davidow, Crosslink Capital, Leapfrog Ventures, and QED Investors. Zebit is a platform-as-a-service that applies big data and Adaptive Data Fusion to underwrite financial transactions on a per-transaction basis. The platform supports end-to-end micro-lending workflows and is designed for partners such as online retailers to serve customers with limited access to credit. Zebit reports having completed over one million transactions and an initial UK launch market described as a profitable $50+ million business. The company emphasizes real-time model regeneration and transaction-level risk assessment to improve underwriting accuracy and pass savings to responsible customers. The team includes pioneers of real-time analytics and fraud detection systems (including developers of FICO’s Falcon® system). Zebit is a brand of Global Analytics Holdings and was launched in 2011.

Led · Series D · Sep 2013

C9 describes itself as a revenue performance management company whose analytics platform helps customers forecast sales revenue and gain insights from historical trends. The product processes data with a NoSQL database, exposes an SQL query layer and uses an in-memory data cache for real-time analytics. Through sales reports and dashboards customers set filters to see live pipeline status and identify deals unlikely to close or issues early in the quarter. C9 competes with Tibco Spotfire, Tableau Software, Lattice Engine and Birst, and counts LinkedIn, Pandora and Thomson Reuters among customers. User reviews are mixed: customers praise real-time pipeline views but report outages and occasional syncing issues with Salesforce.com, highlighting a need to focus on quality of service in a competitive predictive-analytics market.

Participated · Series C · May 2012

Ace Metrix offers a software-as-a-service platform that assesses and acts on the creative effectiveness attributes of television and online video advertising. Its Ace Metrix LIVE platform provides real-time advertising campaign optimization and houses the largest database of its kind with more than 16,000 scored ads across 75 categories and over 12,000 quantitative and qualitative data points. The company’s Creative Lifecycle Management framework enables marketers to pre-test, target, and trend advertising with complete comparability and competitive context. Ace Metrix says it serves many of the top national television advertisers and targets the $71B TV advertising sector and the emerging video advertising segment. Management stated it is on track to continue a 100% growth rate through 2012. The company is privately held and backed by leading venture and industry investors named in the announcement. Ace Metrix is a Los Angeles-based provider of real-time television advertising analytics. Its core product is a syndicated Software as a Service (SaaS), launched in June 2009, that delivers standardized metrics enabling advertisers to benchmark ads within their brands and against competitors. The company serves large national advertisers including Big Lots, Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corp., Microsoft, Nintendo and Nissan North America. In June 2010 Ace Metrix received a strategic investment from WPP Digital and entered a collaboration to promote its products to WPP clients and to develop new television advertising measurement solutions. As part of the arrangement, Mary Ann Packo, CEO of Millward Brown North America (a WPP company), will join Ace Metrix’s board. No financial terms of the investment were disclosed in the article. Ace Metrix provides online television advertising analytics and measures ad effectiveness for online television. The company is described as a fast-growing provider of advertising effectiveness measurement services. It closed a $6.0M Series B financing to support its operations. The funds will be used to expand sales and marketing. In conjunction with the funding, Pete Sinclair of Leapfrog Ventures will join Ace Metrix's board. The company is based in Los Angeles, CA.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2011

RedSeal provides a cyber risk modeling platform that models public cloud, private cloud and physical networks to validate security posture, accelerate investigations and improve productivity for network and security teams. Its platform delivers actionable intelligence, situational awareness and a Digital Resilience Score. RedSeal's analytics are designed to help security teams prepare for and contain cyber risks within minutes rather than days. The company serves more than 220 Global 2000 corporations and mission-critical government agencies, including all branches of the U.S. military, power grid companies and major financial institutions. Led by chairman and CEO Ray Rothrock, RedSeal intends to use the new funding to accelerate its growth. RedSeal provides a security analytics platform that generates intelligence to protect critical network assets and supports emerging cloud and mobile technologies. Its analytics engine builds a functioning model of a customers network, tests the network to identify security risks, prioritizes needed actions, and supplies information to remediate issues. The platform is in use in more than 200 finance, retail, and technology companies, utilities, service providers and government agencies. RedSeal has operations in North America, Europe and Asia. Led by Chairman and CEO Ray Rothrock, COO Pete Sinclair and CTO Mike Lloyd, the company intends to use new funding to increase engineering capabilities and expand its presence domestically and overseas. RedSeal Networks provides proactive security intelligence solutions that help IT security management and staff understand the security state and regulatory compliance of their network and information systems. Its platform enables customers to recognize the resulting risk to operations and assets and to identify and drive actions to improve security and reduce risk. The company recently launched RedSeal 5, adding capabilities around security performance metrics and predictive security infrastructure impact analysis. RedSeal serves Fortune 1000 customers, government organizations and large global multinationals. It plans to use new funding to expand its presence in Europe—growing the size and reach of its sales and channel programs—and to support customers in India, where it opened an office in Bangalore. The company is led by President and CEO Parveen Jain and has secured $10M in funding. RedSeal Systems is a San Mateo-based vendor of security posture management software. Its product enables organizations to assess and strengthen their cyber-defenses. The company raised $12M in a financing round led by OVP Venture Partners with participation from Venrock, Jafco Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Leapfrog Ventures. This investment brought RedSeal's total capital raised to approximately $43M. Mark Ashida, managing director at OVP Venture Partners and former general manager of enterprise networking and authentication for Microsoft, joined RedSeal’s board of directors. The financing was reported by FinSMEs on October 21, 2009.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2011

HotLink offers HotLink SuperVISOR, an enterprise-class virtual integration and transformation platform that abstracts virtual infrastructure so enterprises can mix and match hypervisors while using existing management consoles. The platform explicitly supports VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (KVM). The company emerged from stealth and announced the product alongside its financing, positioning the technology as a first-of-a-kind solution for heterogeneous data centers. HotLink counts enterprise customers across technology, financial services, telecommunications and Internet search. The company was founded in early 2010 and is based in Sunnyvale, California. HotLink secured a $10 million Series A to commercialize the platform and plans to work with investors to bring its transformation technology to market.