Participated · Seed · Aug 2025

Innerworks provides an Advanced User Intelligence platform designed for financial transactions, offering adaptive security that prevents fraudulent transactions while enabling frictionless payments without requiring 2FA. Its system detects and permanently blocks malicious users, preventing them from reappearing under new or stolen accounts. The platform uses over 1,000 data points and is fuelled by a network of ethical hackers via the RedTeam ethical hacking platform to identify user devices with accuracy. The company was co-founded in 2020 by CEO Oliver Quie, CTO Oscar Hayek and CPO Tom Ryan. Innerworks intends to use new funding to expand operations, accelerate development efforts and grow its business reach. The article does not disclose revenues or user metrics.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2022

Koji is a San Diego, CA-based app store for the creator economy that provides hundreds of free apps built by Koji and its community of independent developers. Its flagship product, the Koji Link in Bio, gives creators on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms new ways to engage audiences, connect with supporters, and monetize. Koji apps open directly inside social media apps without downloads or installs and are not subject to App Store fees, allowing creators and developers to keep more earnings. Since launching in March 2021, more than 150,000 creators use Koji’s Link in Bio and the platform hosts over 200 apps, from games to utilities like the Shoutout app. The company has a weekly app release cadence and apps are produced by community developers, creator-economy startups (including Laylo, Subtext, and Fanfix) and Koji’s in-house team. Koji recently announced a suite of Web3 apps, including commerce apps that offer discounts to customers who own specific NFTs, and plans to expand its engineering and creator teams while accelerating platform and crypto/Web3 development. Koji provides a standards-based, full-stack Java platform for creating interactive social-media content—anything from interactive selfies and memes to minigames—that generates shareable links usable across platforms. The product supports multimedia, audio, video, 3D graphics, augmented reality, and virtual reality, and offers hundreds of templates that users can “remix.” During a year-long beta the company says users created about 150,000 Kojis and those were played 10 million times. Koji enables a marketplace where template creators can sell premium templates or license assets; the company takes roughly a 20% cut of purchases. The team is small (about 10 employees) and recently hired former Sony Online Entertainment CTO Chris Yates as head of engineering. CEO Dmitry Shapiro and cofounder Sean Thielen position Koji as a bridge between platforms to make interactive content more viral and broadly shareable.