Participated · Equity · Dec 2018

NuoDB is a NewSQL database that looks and behaves like a traditional SQL database from the outside but is revolutionary under the covers. The company positions itself as a new class of database for a new class of datacenter. It was created by an experienced team of software experts and is described as having the support of a visionary investment team. NuoDB is based in Cambridge, MA. According to an SEC filing reported by BostInno, the company has raised a $30 million equity round. Investors named in the filing include Temenos, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners, Dassault Systems, and Morgenthaler Ventures. NuoDB provides an SQL database designed for cloud-enabled and modern datacenter applications. Its ACID-compliant database distributes tasks among multiple processors and uses peer-to-peer messaging to route tasks to nodes, aiming to avoid bottlenecks and maintain application performance. The product targets geo-distributed data management and business continuity for frequent application deployments. Led by President and CEO Bob Walmsley, the company operates from Cambridge, MA and also has offices in Dublin and Belfast. NuoDB completed a $17m funding round and plans to use the proceeds to further refine its database offering and expand sales and marketing efforts. NuoDB, Inc. is a Cambridge, MA–based provider of a webscale distributed database management system designed for the cloud and the modern datacenter. Led by CEO and co‑founder Barry Morris, the company delivers a DBMS specifically built for cloud deployments and modern datacenter environments. Customers mentioned in the article include AutoZone and Zombie Studios, among others. The company received an investment from Roger Sippl; the amount of the investment is undisclosed. Roger Sippl, who co‑founded Informix and other software companies, will help NuoDB improve the product. The article does not disclose revenue, user metrics, or further financial details. NuoDB develops a distributed database management system that uses a "durable distributed cache" to scale out and avoid a single point of failure. The product runs on commodity hardware and virtual machines and became generally available in January 2013. Founded in 2010 by database architect Jim Starkey and CEO Barry Morris, the company spent 2013 getting to GA and acquiring initial customers. Since GA it has grown to about 25 commercial customers, including AutoZone, DropShip Commerce and Zombie Studios, and its free Developer Edition is used by roughly 11,000 developers. NuoDB expects its revenue to grow at least 300 percent in 2014. The company plans to use the new funding to build out its sales and marketing teams. NuoDB develops an elastically scalable database architected for the cloud using a shared‑nothing, asynchronous, peer‑to‑peer design. The product is SQL‑compliant, guarantees ACID transactions, is highly resilient, and requires minimal administration. Its architecture is intended to deliver high performance at web scale without sacrificing traditional relational features. The database is currently in beta and is slated to become generally available in Q3 2012. NuoDB plans to use new funding to advance product development as well as sales and marketing. The company was founded in 2010 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Participated · Series F · Sep 2016

Applause is an in-the-wild digital testing company that helps brands test and improve digital experiences across web, mobile, IoT, wearables and brick-and-mortar. It combines crowdtesting, test automation and a global community of professional testers to validate products across devices, operating systems, carriers and locations. Applause serves thousands of companies, including Amazon, Google, HBO, BMW, Ralph Lauren and Concur, and has tested more than 100,000 new builds for 3,000 companies. The company reports usability and design feedback as its second-largest revenue producer, maintains a community of more than 250,000 testers and a workforce of 300+ employees across multiple cities. Applause plans to expand its in-the-wild digital testing services globally, grow its usability feedback offerings, and formally launch and scale its digital research services. The company launched in August 2008, is headquartered near Boston, MA, and has raised more than $115 million to date.

Participated · Seed · Jul 2016

Rize is a Woburn, Massachusetts-based maker of industrial desktop 3D printing machines. The company offers an industrial-class 3D printing platform called Rize One that leverages patented APD (Augmented Polymer Deposition) technology. Rize One is aimed at a wide variety of commercial applications including prototyping, production parts and tooling, fixtures and jigs. The APD technology is adaptable to allow the use of other materials with various part properties, creating a wider spectrum of applications. Rize was co-founded by Eugene Giller and Leonid Raiz and is led by President and CEO Frank Marangell. In July 2016 the company raised $4M in seed funding from Longworth Venture Partners and SB Capital.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2016

RapidMiner provides an open source platform that enables enterprises to include predictive analytics in business processes. Led by CEO and president Peter Lee, the company focuses on growing adoption of its predictive analytics platform. It plans to use new funding to further invest in sales and marketing. RapidMiner is experiencing strong commercial traction, doubling revenue annually. The company grew to over 100 employees in 2015. RapidMiner provides “code-free” analytics tools used for model fitting, predictive analysis and churn modeling. The company says it helps users “extract value from big data,” according to President and COO Michele Chambers. RapidMiner historically developed its tools as open source but in November 2013 shifted to a ‘business source’ model that reserves the most recent product version for paying customers while making subsequent versions available under an OSI-certified open source license. The model supports an active community of third-party developers who can tinker with the code. RapidMiner reports it has tripled product revenues over the past 12 months. The company plans to use recent funding to scale its business-source data analytics service. RapidMiner builds predictive-analytics software that sits on an open stack and ingests data from some 60 structured and unstructured sources, including SAP and Hadoop systems. Its tools are used across verticals—entertainment, technology, pharmaceuticals, government and academia—for use cases such as customer segmentation, loyalty and retention analysis, credit ratings, resource planning and asset maintenance. The company reports roughly 3 million total product/document downloads and about 200,000 users, with paying customers including eBay, Intel, PepsiCo and Kraft; its user base is ~65% Europe, 25% U.S. and 10% rest of world, and 50% of open‑source users are in the U.S. RapidMiner has rebranded from Rapid-I, opened a new Boston HQ and is starting to hire in the U.S. to accelerate North American growth. To support that expansion it added Yahoo’s former chief data officer Usama Fayyad to its board. The company announced its first external funding round to gear up for the next stage of growth.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2015

Olapic aggregates images submitted by users on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook and helps brands boost sales by replacing traditional stock photography with authentic social content. It uses a curation algorithm alongside human editors to identify which images are best suited to specific brand use-cases. The company’s algorithm tracks 46 signals to determine which photos drive the highest engagement and conversion, and it feeds those results back into its curation engine to improve over time. Olapic says realistic, contextual images translate into higher sales and cites customer examples such as West Elm adjusting shoots to include pets. The platform is used by more than 200 brands, including Calvin Klein, West Elm and Target, and reports that about 70% of consumers grant permission to use their photos. With social networks adding “buy it now” features and the rise of the visual web, Olapic positions itself to expand brands’ use of user-generated imagery. Olapic scours the web for user-generated photos via hashtags and keywords and lets retailers insert those images into product pages or galleries. Brands retain control over which photos are used, can see submissions in real time, and have tools to engage the users who submit content. The platform includes an analytics dashboard that lets brands track ROI and, according to co-founder Pau Sabria, can increase e-commerce conversions. The company has shifted its focus from publisher customers to e-commerce brands and currently has around 20 live brand integrations, including Lululemon, Nasty Gal, Steve Madden, Threadless, New Balance, Jet Blue and Coach. Olapic plans to use new funding to scale the service, hire additional sales staff, and invest in marketing and awareness for customer-inspired e-commerce. The product-centric approach emphasizes visual social proof within shopping experiences to drive conversion. Olapic provides a toolset that lets website visitors upload photos from local storage or pull in images shared on social services (Twitter, Instagram) for use by brands and publishers. The platform includes moderation workflows combining humans and algorithms to filter relevance and spam, as well as widget aggregation to create collections across a brand's property. Customers to date include Condé Nast, Pepsi, NY Daily News, The Baltimore Sun and sports organizations such as the Mavericks, Grizzlies, Giants, Ravens and FC Barcelona. The company is expanding into e-commerce with a launch partner, Free People, and offers tagging and hashtag-driven flows to surface customer photos alongside product pages. Olapic sells its service on a SaaS basis with pricing starting at $300/month up to several thousand per month, and plans to re-open a freemium self-serve tier. The company was founded by Pau Sabria, Luis Sanz and Jose de Cabo, who met at Columbia University, and recently closed a $1 million seed round.