Participated · Series C · Apr 2022

Oyster is a B Corp-certified global employment platform that enables companies to hire, pay, and care for distributed teams. The platform provides reliable, compliant contracts, payroll, and local benefits and perks to support people-centric hiring anywhere in the world. Founded in January 2020 by Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack and based in San Francisco, CA, Oyster focuses on enabling employers to employ distributed teams. The company received a $5M investment from ServiceNow Ventures and intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts. This funding followed a recent Series D that valued Oyster at $1.2 billion and brings total capital raised to $291M. Oyster is a payroll and HR platform that specializes in global employment, enabling companies to employ and pay distributed workers by hiring on clients' behalf and remitting salaries. The 2019-founded U.S. startup focuses on paying remote workers in emerging markets, saying over 40% of people on its platform are in those markets and that it remitted “hundreds of millions” to workers in 2023. Oyster is B Corp-certified and in the last year launched products including Global Payroll, Visa Sponsorships, local compensation insights, and a no-code offering that embeds global hiring, payroll, and rewards into customers' HR products. Management says the company has grown more than 7x in two years and improved margins substantially. Clients and partners include TriNet BambooHR, Quora, Lokalise, and Printify. The new funding will be used to accelerate platform development and expand more generally. Founded in January 2020 by Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack, Oyster provides a platform to hire international employees compliantly, pay them instantly, and provide local benefits in 180+ countries. Customers already use the platform to pay more than $200 million to global talent each year. In 2021 the company grew revenue by over 20x and grew the number of team members employed on its platform by 17x. It has a team of 500 employees in over 60 countries. The company intends to use the funding to further develop its global employment platform and invest in the People Ops community. Oyster provides an HR platform for globally distributed companies designed to make hiring talented people around the world compliant, human, and delightful. The platform aims to enable growing organizations to give international team members a better experience without the usual headaches or expense. Oyster announced new investments from PayPal Ventures and HR Tech Investments, an affiliate of Indeed. The company communicated the funding news from San Francisco, CA. The announcement was published by Massinvestor, Inc. No financial terms, instruments, or operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Oyster provides a platform to help organizations hire and manage distributed workforces, offering hiring, onboarding, payroll, benefits, and salary-management services for contractors and full-time employees outside a company’s home country. The company reports exponential growth and now works with 80 large businesses to fill knowledge-worker roles. Pricing mentioned in the article ranges from $29 per person per month for contractors to $399 for full employees, with additional packages for larger deployments. Oyster holds B-Corp certification and emphasizes a mission to expand access to global job opportunities, including in emerging economies. The company was co-founded by Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack; Jamous is described as London-based. Oyster competes in a crowded market alongside companies like Deel, Papaya Global, Remote, and Turing.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2021

Acryl Data provides a community-driven metadata platform and enterprise data catalog with solutions for data discovery, governance, lineage and an observability module called Observe. Its platform is built on the open-source DataHub framework and uses event-driven metadata to reduce catalog maintenance costs and enable trigger-based workflows. Features include real-time data quality monitoring, configurable metadata tests to surface cost-optimization opportunities, and lineage and impact analysis to accelerate resolution of data issues. Acryl plans to add AI features to intelligently curate metadata, suggest business glossary tags, and generate summaries describing catalog characteristics such as reliability and usage. The company has a 25-person workforce and lists customers including Notion, Zendesk, Robinhood, OVO Energy, BetterUp and Riskified; DataHub itself is used by companies like Pinterest, Stripe, Optum, Expedia, Saxo Bank and Peloton. Acryl disclosed a $21M Series A round, bringing total capital raised to $30M. Acryl Data develops a next-generation, stream-based metadata platform that extends the open-source DataHub and includes a developer-friendly data catalog. The platform uses a streaming architecture powered by Apache Kafka and an API-first design to enable DataOps practices, automated policy-based actions on metadata changes, and real-time metadata integration across tools. Its first product is an enterprise-ready SaaS data catalog, currently in private beta, that aims to simplify data discovery and governance across multi-cloud environments. The company emphasizes a DataOps approach and data quality to help central data teams scale and enable reliable data products. Acryl Data was founded by Shirshanka Das and Swaroop Jagadish, who previously led data efforts at LinkedIn and Airbnb respectively, and builds on Das’s work on DataHub and Apache Gobblin. The company announced a $9 million seed raise and is based in Mountain View, California.

Participated · Series D · Jun 2021

G2 operates an online software review and information database that guides buyers through competing software products and user reviews. Its core product uses algorithmic category rankings together with NLP/AI review scoring and verification of reviewer business identities, plus human verification. The company says whether a vendor pays G2 has no impact on ratings or placement. G2 disclosed it added 700 paying customers for its Marketing Solutions in the past 12 months, a 45% growth rate, and said that business represents the bulk of current revenue. CEO Godard Abel said international software buyer traffic and revenue have been nearly doubling, and the company plans to invest in Europe and Asia. With new capital G2 will accelerate its coverage of the software market and invest in data work to improve its recommendation engine. G2 Crowd operates an online marketplace for businesses to discover, buy and manage software and services, led by CEO and co-founder Godard Abel. The company publishes more than 500,000 verified-user reviews and attracts nearly two million business professionals each month. Its site covers over 58,500 products across 1,200 categories and provides expert educational content on IT, digital trends and logistics. G2 leverages a proprietary algorithm and more than 18 million quantitative and qualitative data points to calculate user satisfaction, usability, traction and trajectory scores in real time. The company plans to use the new funding to increase headcount at its Chicago and San Francisco offices and to hire overseas. Financially, the business has raised $55M in the latest round, bringing total fundraising to date to $100M. G2 Crowd is a crowdsourced enterprise software review platform often described as "Glassdoor for software" that helps buyers evaluate and choose business software. The company requires users to register via LinkedIn to authenticate reviewers and reduce fraudulent or competitor-biased reviews, and allows sharing of reviews to LinkedIn feeds. G2's business model avoids advertising and lead generation, offering free company profiles that companies can claim, while it plans to expand into analytics and research. It aims to compete with Forrester, Gartner and IDC on profiles and sector analysis, and to expand into adjacent product and services recommendations such as consulting or integration services. The site has strong SEO and grew from 75,000 reviews last year (triple the prior year) to a projected 225,000 reviews this year, driving visibility and traffic but also exposing it to Google algorithm risk. G2 is Chicago-based and has raised $30M in the Series B, bringing total funding to over $45M. G2 Crowd operates a business software review platform that leverages peer reviews and social signals to change how business software is bought and sold. The site hosts more than 37,000 in-depth user reviews that are read by over 300,000 software buyers each month. G2 Crowd plans to use its new funding to hire additional talent, build out its buyer community, expand software categories, and provide buyers with more unique insights from its growing review and social-signal data. The company emphasizes transparency and social proof as an alternative to dated analyst opinions and sales-coordinated referrals. G2 Crowd is backed by roughly $12 million in venture capital. The company is based in Chicago. G2 Crowd operates a crowd-sourced review platform for business software, positioning itself as a Yelp for enterprise software. The site uses LinkedIn for verifier identity to help guard against false positive reviews. Since launching in February 2013, more than 13,000 business professionals have signed up and the site hosts roughly 12,000 reviews covering about 3,000 business software products. The company aims to expose innovators and disruptors that larger analysts like Gartner may overlook and to serve multiple industry verticals. Financially, G2 Crowd completed its first institutional financing, raising $2.3 million to support growth and scale.

Participated · Series C · May 2021

Piano offers an end-to-end digital experience platform that combines data architectures, AI, and commerce features to help brands and publishers identify, understand, and serve customers at scale with privacy compliance. Its platform is designed to operate at massive scale and deliver audience experiences faster than competing solutions. The company serves global, national, and local brands across six continents and maintains more than 15 offices, with U.S. headquarters in Philadelphia. Piano was founded in 2010 and has been recognized by Red Herring, the World Economic Forum, and Deloitte for its growth and innovation. The company intends to use new capital to enhance platform capabilities, expand market presence, and support strategic growth initiatives. The articles do not disclose revenue or user metrics. Piano builds analytics, subscription and personalization tools for publishers, combining paywall and subscription management with content analytics and audience-engagement features. The company works with around 1,000 customers, including CNBC, Wall Street Journal, The Economist and TechCrunch. Revenues have grown 400% since 2019 and Piano is operating at roughly a $75M annual run rate. It acquired French analytics firm AT Internet in March to better integrate cross-silo traffic, advertising, subscription and engagement data. Piano plans to expand into newsletter products and other audience-connection areas, and may pursue further M&A to consolidate fragmented capabilities. The company will use new funding to continue building its technology and to explore integrations with strategic partners. Piano provides a monetization and audience intelligence technology platform that includes a subscription commerce engine, a customer experience toolkit, and a user management system. The company serves more than a thousand premium media brands, including Business Insider, The Economist, Bloomberg, Men’s Health, AdAge, Digiday and The Chive. Led by CEO Trevor Kaufman and based in New York City, Piano employs about 180 staff across seven offices from New York and London to Rio De Janeiro. The company raised $22M in a Series B to fund continued product and service enhancements and to grow across functions, particularly R&D and client services. Piano plans to expand into new markets and sectors and is considering several acquisitions. Tinypass provides an e-commerce platform that lets content creators and publishers monetize digital content with paywalls, downloads and a variety of pricing, access and subscription options. The platform integrates with publishers' existing site infrastructure and content management systems, is free to set up, and scales from individual bloggers to multi-national publications. Tinypass reports high conversion rates across its publisher base and says it has been growing at roughly 40% month-to-month since the beginning of the year. Its client roster includes major media companies, local newspapers, online education providers, health and wellness sites, business information providers and research organizations. The company closed a $3 million financing round led by Cascabel Management and Plough Penny Partners, after previously raising $1.25 million in seed financing in 2012. Tinypass has also added senior hires — a COO, CTO and an EVP of sales & business development — which it frames as the next step in its mission to simplify digital content monetization.

Participated · Series C · Mar 2021

Bevy provides community-building software that powers community sites and events for enterprises, including Salesforce Trailblazers and Google Developers. The product is used by customers such as Adobe, Atlassian, Twilio, Slack and Zendesk. Bevy spun out of the Startup Grind community in 2017. The company says it has raised $60 million to date, is valued at $325 million (4x its May 2019 valuation) and expects to reach $30 million in ARR by the end of this year. Leadership has pursued deliberate diversity goals after last summer, moving from zero people of color among 27 employees to just under 15% today and aiming for 20% Black employees by next summer. Management reports that increased diversity has correlated with higher customer satisfaction, profits and revenue trajectory. Bevy offers a fully end-to-end virtual experience for event organizers, including event creation, user registration, and integrations with platforms like Zoom, Salesforce, Marketo, and Meetup. The company emerged from Startup Grind to productize tools originally built for that community; the two companies are separate though Derek Andersen leads both. Bevy pivoted into virtual events as the conference business halted during the COVID-19 pandemic and has seen demand surge. Customers include Duolingo, which hosted 1,000 events in six weeks, and Salesforce user groups that organized 650 events with 20,000 RSVPs in recent months; Startup Grind scaled from a single virtual event to planning hundreds. Bevy positions its product to support a customer-to-customer marketing model that empowers customers to run events at scale. Financially, Bevy announced a new $15M Series B and had previously raised a $6.4M Series A.