Participated · Equity · Jan 2025

Beanstack is an edtech platform that empowers libraries and schools to build a culture of reading through reading challenges and motivational tools for readers of all ages. The company evolved from a book-of-the-month concept into Beanstack for Schools, which uses proven gamification principles to motivate students without relying on quizzes. Its product is licensed by over 15,000 libraries and schools worldwide, and Beanstack readers have logged over seven billion minutes of reading. The company says it is growing significantly year over year. Beanstack plans to use new capital to accelerate its repeatable growth model and to invest in its "Reading Culture Trailblazer" client marketing program. The team was founded by Felix Brandon Lloyd and Jordan Lloyd Bookey, who previously secured a $250,000 Shark Tank investment from Mark Cuban. Zoobean builds Beanstack, a software platform that helps educators and librarians run reading challenges and track participant progress with data-driven insights. Beanstack is licensed to more than 1,200 public libraries and schools worldwide and is often described as the “Fitbit for reading.” The company first gained attention after appearing on Shark Tank, where Mark Cuban invested, and he has re-invested in the latest funding. Amazon’s Alexa Fund joined the new investment and Zoobean is exploring Alexa integrations so readers can ask Alexa to track progress or receive reading reminders. The company did not disclose the size of the round and Amazon declines to share the size of its Alexa Fund investments. No operating metrics beyond licenses/users or revenue figures were disclosed in the article. Zoobean is an Arlington, VA–based startup that curates personalized selections of children's apps, books and reading guides. Its product relies on a team of curators who rate and tag apps and books, and a recommendation system that generates personalized picks when customers enter a child's interests. The company also provides reading guides and tools that facilitate collaboration between teachers and families. Led by CEO Felix Brandon Lloyd, Zoobean plans to use new funding to increase marketing and continue product development. Financing details in the most recent transaction were not disclosed. Previously, the company raised $500K in seed funding in 2013. Zoobean curates children's books and offers a handpicked monthly hardcover subscription alongside an online shop. At launch the site catalogs nearly 1,500 parent-recommended titles curated by parents, teachers, librarians and others, with extensive tagging for topics, characters' backgrounds and recommended ages. Subscribers pay $14.95 for the featured high-quality hardcover of the month, while the majority of catalog sales are fulfilled through affiliates such as Amazon. The company also provides a weekly reading guide with activities for parents and children. Zoobean emphasizes diversity in its selection, including books that reflect various ethnicities and harder-to-find topics like transgender issues and bullying. It exited a private, invite-only beta with about 200 testers and plans to expand its offering while raising additional capital.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2019

Front Range Biosciences specializes in next-generation plant breeding, plant tissue culture, and cannabis seed development to improve the reliability and quality of industrial hemp and medical cannabis genetics. The company runs a Clean Stock program that supplies disease- and pathogen-free plants and seeds backed by data-driven breeding solutions. FRB operates facilities in Colorado, California and Wisconsin and maintains a partnership with the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics in Barcelona, Spain, giving it global reach. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Lafayette, Colorado, the company positions itself as a market-leading R&D program in hemp and cannabis genetics. FRB is currently raising a $30M Series B financing round and has attracted investment from KEY Investment Partners, which will act as a strategic partner. KEY founding partner Pete Karabas is joining Front Range Biosciences' board as a board observer. Front Range Biosciences is a Lafayette, Colorado–based agricultural biotech that provides technology for breeding and producing new plant varieties and seeds in hemp, coffee and regulated cannabis. The company raised $8.5M in funding to support continued expansion of its hemp and cannabis portfolio. FRB plans to expand hemp seed production both nationally and globally and scale its young plant program, with production capabilities expected to multiply in 2020. Led by CEO and Co‑Founder Jon Vaught, the company has operated for a little more than three years. During that time FRB built over 160,000 square feet of facilities across Colorado, California and Wisconsin, acquired a cannabis genomics team and shipped millions of plants to farmers and growers nationwide. The new funds are intended to accelerate those production and portfolio expansion efforts. Front Range Biosciences develops Clean Stock® plant material using tissue culture, a sterile propagation technique, to address disease, inefficiency, inconsistency and scale for high-value crops. Its core product is sterile, duplicated baby plants on a defined nutrient medium for crops such as hemp, cannabis and coffee. The company supplies Clean Stock to growers and has partnerships to expand production, including with Frinj Coffee for coffee cuttings and Faith and Family Farms for cannabis in California. Led by CEO and co-founder Dr. Jonathan Vaught, Front Range is expanding Clean Stock production into California and taking orders for late 2018. It plans to use new funding to accelerate its Clean Stock program across Colorado, California and Canada, pursue IP development, and resource its varietal development program for hemp and cannabis. Front Range Biosciences specializes in tissue culture propagation of high-value crops, aiming to resolve cultivators' operational problems such as disease, inefficiency, inconsistency and limited scale. The company runs a varietal improvement program that leverages sequencing technology to map cannabis genetics and develop commercially relevant traits, including disease resistance, oil and resin yield, and desirable cannabinoid profiles. Front Range is led by CEO and co-founder Dr. Jon Vaught and COO and co-founder Nick Hofmeister. The company intends to use recent funding to scale its processes and expand into California and other legal cannabis states in the U.S. Its core product and R&D focus combine propagation services with genetic improvement to deliver more reliable, higher-yielding plant varieties for cultivators. Front Range Biosciences offers industrial-scale tissue culture propagation and an advanced breeding platform aimed at improving cannabis clone consistency and commercial traits. Its flagship product is tissue culture propagation for scalable, consistent clone production. The company also develops breeding tools to identify and enhance commercially relevant traits. Front Range will use new funding to build out its team and expand its tissue culture offering to improve efficiency and consistency for clone production. The company participated in the CanopyBoulder accelerator program for cannabis startups last year. It recently closed a $1.5 million seed round to support these efforts.

Participated · Equity · Jun 2015

Brazen is an Arlington, Virginia–based engagement platform led by CEO Ed Barrientos. The platform allows organizations to schedule and host chat-based online meetups and events to engage a wide variety of audiences. More than 150 organizations, including Raytheon, Gannett, Amtrak Dartmouth, Gainsight, AmeriCorps Alums and Penn State, use Brazen to interact with employees, job candidates, customers, students and alumni. Brazen raised $4.7m in funding in a round led by Osage Venture Partners. The company has raised more than $10m in total. Investors in the $4.7m round included Randstad Innovation Fund, Militello Capital and Kegonsa Capital Partners.

Participated · Series A · Oct 2014

ExecOnline delivers applied-learning leadership development programs to enterprise clients via a proprietary online platform and partnerships with elite business schools. The company reports participant completion rates above 90%, strong NPS scores, and measurable ROI for clients. Its platform combines on-campus engagement dynamics with scalable online delivery to serve corporate executives. ExecOnline has delivered transformational learning experiences to leaders at over 500 global organizations since 2012. The company plans to invest in sales and marketing, expand its content Experience Library, and enhance its technology platform to accelerate growth. ExecOnline develops and delivers enterprise leadership development programs combining in-person training with online learning, covering strategy, innovation and change, leadership, and operations and finance. Its portfolio includes proprietary offerings and programs run with elite schools such as Berkeley, Columbia, IMD, MIT, Wharton, and Yale. The company has delivered leadership development experiences to more than 250 organizations and 12,000 business leaders, with customers including over 250 corporations, mainly in the Fortune 1000. Founded in 2012 and led by CEO Stephen Bailey, ExecOnline operates from New York City. The company plans to use new funding to further develop proprietary L&D program offerings and to increase sales and marketing efforts. ExecOnline is a NYC-based provider of online leadership development programs that partners with business schools including Berkeley-Haas, Columbia, IMD, MIT-Sloan, Wharton, and Yale. Its university-certified programs cover leadership, strategy, innovation, and operations and combine on-demand video lectures, self-paced application exercises, and live online collaboration with faculty and a global community. Founded in 2012 by CEO Stephen Bailey, the company has delivered leadership development experiences to more than 150 organizations and 7,000 business leaders. ExecOnline intends to use the Series B proceeds to extend sales and marketing capabilities and to grow its suite of enterprise-focused online leadership development offerings. The company works with enterprise clients to tailor dynamic content to corporate objectives and focuses on measurable organizational impact. ExecOnline delivers school-certified online executive education programs in partnership with elite business schools such as MIT Sloan, Columbia Business School and Berkeley‑Haas. Its core product is a proprietary enterprise learning platform featuring on-demand HD video lectures, self-paced application exercises, and live video collaboration with professors and executive peers. The company powers programs that are school-certified and delivered to corporate cohorts. Over 1,000 executives from approximately 70 companies were committed to attending programs with UC Berkeley‑Haas and Columbia, and nearly 400 executives from 35 countries participated in Fall 2014 programs. Led by founder and CEO Stephen Bailey, ExecOnline plans to use new funding to improve offerings, enrich its platform, establish additional business‑school partnerships, expand sales and marketing, and scale operations. ExecOnline offers an end-to-end online executive training platform that partners with top 10 business schools to deliver branded curriculum and interaction with business school professors. The service lets executives complete training from their desks without traveling to campus. It targets Fortune 500 companies that typically send executives to immersive programs at schools like Harvard. Founder Stephen Bailey says the product solves the staffing crunch companies face when executives are away for extended on-campus programs. The startup raised $800,000 in seed funding from The Washington Post and has two companies signed up so far. ExecOnline is slated to go live in January and does not yet have a website; competitors mentioned include degree-focused providers like 2U and platform providers like Moodle.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2014

Fancred is an iOS app that lets sports fans capture and share photos, live commentary and build a portfolio of favorite sports moments. The platform assigns users a Fancred rating (1–100) to incentivize participation and community credibility. The company plans to expand its engineering team and build an Android app to grow the community. It is exploring monetization options such as selling fan gear or aggregated fan data but is focused short-term on building its user base. Founded in 2012 by former Brightcove employees and emerging from Boston Techstars in 2013, Fancred operates with 11 full-time employees plus a network of 150 college interns. The company does not disclose community or user numbers in the article. Fancred is a Boston, MA-based sports social network and mobile app led by CEO Hossein Kash Razzaghi. Launched in March for iPhone, the platform provides a personalized way for sports fans to communicate and consume sports content. The app allows users to comment, share photos and links about their favorite events, players and teams. Fancred is a TechStars startup. The company raised $1.5M in seed funding and plans to use the proceeds to grow its user base, develop the product and set up partnerships. The funding is intended to support expanded mobile engagement and strategic partnerships in the sports media space.