The Venture Codex

Led · Equity · May 2025

Plexus is an AI-based legal automation platform transforming how in-house legal teams operate. The company announced it has secured over $6 million in new funding, marking its first institutional partnership. The round was led by existing shareholders and Seattle-based Lighter Capital. Plexus will use the funds to fuel expansion into key international markets, accelerate AI product delivery, and onboard additional talent. Its platform is evolving beyond workflow automation into digital lawyers that speed contract review, negotiation, compliance workflows, and approvals. The platform is already used by household brands including Nike, L’Oréal, PepsiCo, Woolworths, AIA, and The Iconic. Lighter Capital described the financing as non-dilutive and cited Plexus’s recent growth and solid business metrics.

Led · Equity · Jan 2019

FitSmallBusiness.com is an online publication devoted to helping small businesses grow, producing researched articles, data analysis, and expert interviews. The site reports a rapidly growing monthly readership of more than 1.5 million and a staff that includes more than 20 full-time writers and editors. In the second half of 2018 the company more than doubled its full-time employees and contractors from 60 to over 130 as it scaled editorial, marketing, and business development. It has recently built out senior management, hiring Eric Noe as Chief Content Officer and Editor-in-Chief, Adrienne Coopera as Chief People Officer, and Daniel Kamen as Chief Marketing Officer. The company positions itself as still early in reaching its full revenue potential and is investing heavily in growth. FitSmallBusiness emphasizes audience and organizational scale as the foundation for future monetization.

Led · Equity · Dec 2018

NinjaCat provides an all-in-one, cloud-based marketing analytics and data solution that centralizes and automates reporting, data pipelines, warehousing, dashboards, KPI monitoring, and call tracking. The platform is highly customizable and built for enterprise marketers to improve data utilization in a secure and time- and cost-efficient manner. The company offers training via documentation, webinars, live online, and in-person sessions to support adoption. NinjaCat has been bootstrapped to consistent growth since its 2013 founding and is New York–based. The new investment is intended to support product portfolio expansion and accelerated growth. Leadership states the capital will help advance the product roadmap, including next-generation data wrangling, analysis, visualization at scale, and enhanced AI capabilities to deliver marketing intelligence. NinjaCat provides a Unified Marketing Analytics Platform (UMAP) for agencies, publishers, AdTech providers and other large media companies to ingest, track, store, analyze, monitor, report and act on all of their marketing data at scale, across thousands of clients. Launched in 2014 and led by CEO Paul Deraval, the company is based in New York City and employs 53 people. The company raised $1.1M in funding from Lighter Capital, which the article says is enabling NinjaCat to build its platform. The funding was provided in three tranches. NinjaCat has achieved annual recurring revenue north of $6 million and projects to reach $10 million in ARR within the next seven months. The platform is positioned to serve large media customers and agencies that need scalable marketing-data reporting and action.

Led · Equity · Nov 2018

Springboard Retail offers a cloud POS and comprehensive retail management platform with enterprise-grade customer, inventory, and order management, plus reporting, APIs, and integrations. Built for multi-channel retailers, the software delivers real-time data to teams across the organization to help control sales and margin. The company was launched in 2014 and currently employs about 45 people while serving over 700 customers. Springboard reports it powers roughly $2 billion in annual retail sales across North America and Mexico. In September it launched SpringboardTRAC, an integrated foot-traffic counting device that feeds conversion and traffic data into the Springboard dashboard. Management says sales have grown over 200% and the business is expanding while remaining capital efficient.

Led · Equity · Nov 2018

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Orange, California, ListReports builds software that supports real-estate agents with branded marketing materials and data designed to streamline the home-purchase journey. The platform’s goal is to turn what is often a cumbersome transaction into a delightful, information-rich experience for buyers and sellers. Since receiving its first external financing in 2016, the company has grown revenue by 1,100 percent, demonstrating strong market traction. Management cites a strategy of steady, non-dilutive funding to sustain rapid yet controlled expansion. Co-founder Randy Shiozaki credits revenue-based financing for allowing the team to scale while preserving ownership. The company plans to leverage additional growth capital to cement its position as a dominant player in real-estate technology. No detailed user, customer, or revenue figures beyond the growth rate were disclosed in the article.