Participated · Seed · Apr 2021

Guardian Agriculture develops the Guardian SC1, an autonomous, electric aerial crop protection system designed for commercial-scale sustainable farming. The company, led by founder and CEO Adam Bercu, designs and manufactures its systems entirely within the U.S. Founded in 2017, Guardian is based in Woburn, Massachusetts, with offices in California. It has accumulated more than $100 million in customer orders. Guardian raised $20M in a Series A and plans to use the funds to accelerate production and expand commercial operations to farms nationwide. The company will begin commercial operations supporting a Wilbur‑Ellis customer in California this summer. Guardian Agriculture has developed an integrated, US-manufactured eVTOL system for precision agricultural application, offered as a data-driven crop protection service. Its autonomous eVTOL platform collects and acts on crop-health data to target treatments, aiming to reduce pesticide use and minimize environmental impact. The company completed 18 months of R&D with partners across multiple high-value crops and is led by a team with backgrounds in autonomous systems from Apple, Otto, and Uber. Guardian says its systems could eliminate hundreds of millions of pounds of unnecessary pesticide use annually when deployed at scale. The business has built a backlog of more than $20 million in service reservation agreements and is ramping production to meet initial demand. The offering is positioned as immediately practical without requiring infrastructure changes, with plans to accelerate development and production.

Participated · Series B · Aug 2019

Klang is developing Seed, a large-scale, persistent MMO space colony life-simulator in which players manage multiple characters and collaboratively rebuild society in a continuous virtual world. Seed runs on Improbable’s SpatialOS to enable a much larger, richer persistent world than single servers or engines allow. The studio positions Seed as an attempt to redefine the MMO landscape with single-shard, continuous simulation gameplay. Klang has said the new funding will allow it to deliver Seed without compromising its vision. The company has raised $37.42 million to date and most recently secured a $22.33 million seed round to advance development. Klang is based in Berlin and employs 44 people. Klang is a Berlin-based game studio developing Seed, a massive multiplayer online persistent simulation built atop Improbable’s SpatialOS virtual world builder. Seed tasks players with colonizing an alien planet, managing multiple characters in real time and interacting with other human-controlled characters; the engine keeps characters active after players log off. The title is in pre-alpha, with no release date announced and no confirmed pricing model—Klang is considering options such as pricing tied to the costs of simulating entities. The studio was founded in 2013 and relocated from Reykjavík to Berlin. Klang’s founders tout decades of MMO experience, including work on EVE Online and Dust 514. The company intends to use new funding to expand its development team and continue production on Seed. Klang is developing Seed, a persistent, massively multiplayer online world that emphasizes player-driven politics and ecosystems alongside AI-driven systems. Seed uses Improbable’s SpatialOS to enable large-scale simulations and supports gameplay that affects the planet’s economy and ecology. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is designing the game’s political framework to let players experiment with governance forms ranging from minimal government to monarchy and various democracies. The studio plans to open an external playable version of Seed in early 2018 and is building tools to let communities persist and evolve even when players are offline. Klang will use the funding it raised to grow the studio and complete development of the first internal release of Seed. The company was founded in 2013 in Reykjavík, moved to Berlin, and its founders include former CCP Games developers; in 2016 it launched the mobile game ReRunners.

Participated · Series A · Dec 2018

Wise Systems provides a real-time, automated routing and autonomous dispatch platform that schedules routes, monitors progress, and adjusts to day-of disruptions using machine learning to improve fleet efficiency and service. The company targets last-mile delivery and service operations and reports customer outcomes including up to 15% fewer miles, an 80% reduction in late deliveries, and 20% increases in fleet utilization. Wise has seen strong growth, expanding 300% year-over-year over the past two years and winning deployments at large enterprises such as Anheuser-Busch and Lyft. This year the platform became available in the SAP App Store and Wise launched in Japan, supported by a partnership with Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation under Daimler Trucks Asia. The company plans to use new financing to accelerate product development and expand into additional geographies to meet rising global demand for its dispatching and routing solutions. Wise Systems provides a real-time, fully automated routing and dispatching platform that schedules routes, monitors routes in progress, and intelligently adjusts to day-of delays. The platform uses machine learning to continuously improve fleet efficiency, performance, and service for customers across food, beverage, parcel, courier, and field-service industries. Customers include multi-billion dollar enterprises such as Anheuser-Busch and Lyft, as well as other market leaders in distribution and delivery. The company emphasizes optimizing outcomes for drivers, dispatchers, and delivery recipients while reducing mileage and idle time. Wise Systems recently raised financing to support growth and the transition of last-mile logistics from static to dynamic operations. The company plans to accelerate R&D in machine learning, expand its partner network, and scale sales and operations to further develop autonomous decision-making capabilities. Wise Systems builds autonomous dispatch and routing software that uses machine learning, real-time traffic, machine-learned service times, route-specific intelligence, and driver input to improve fleet efficiency and on-time delivery. The platform automatically schedules routes, monitors routes in progress, and intelligently adjusts to day-of delays. Wise powers transportation operations in over 50 locations and across thousands of drivers nationwide, serving customers from multi-billion-dollar enterprises like Anheuser-Busch to regional operators. With the new capital, the company plans to scale operations, accelerate R&D on next-generation AI-powered delivery management technologies, and extend market reach. The company raised $7 million in a Series A, bringing total funding to $8.5 million. Founded in 2014 by MIT and Harvard graduates and based in Cambridge, Mass., Wise positions itself to reshape delivery in the $10 trillion logistics and transportation industry.

Led · Series A · Sep 2018

Hoodline operates a two-part platform: a local data wire that produces automated hyper-local news stories and a recommendation module that serves Hoodline inventory alongside publishers' own articles. The company ingests roughly 250 terabytes of data from sources such as Yelp, Foursquare and local sports feeds, and uses editor-written templates (described as "advanced Madlibs") to turn signals into bylined stories. It is currently generating stories in 20 cities and partners with publishers including ABC, MSN, Yahoo, Hearst and CBS. Hoodline runs a team mix of engineers and editors (about two engineers to one editor) and has both machine-generated and journalist-byline content. Management says the funding will be used to scale nationwide and eventually expand beyond the U.S. and to new types of partners. The company was previously called Ripple News, acquired a Hoodline blog network in 2016, and has backing from accelerators and corporate investors mentioned below.

Participated · Series A · Feb 2017

Dubset built an audio fingerprinting and rights-management platform that can detect every sample used in a song or mixset against a database of roughly 100 million master recordings and then distribute royalties appropriately. Founded in 2010, the company spent years developing the tech to handle complex sample-clearance issues for remixes, mixtapes and hour-long DJ sets. Dubset has struck deals with major streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music, enabling sample-containing tracks cleared through its platform to appear on those apps. The company is onboarding labels and publishers to have their master recordings indexed so remixes can be monetized rather than taken down. CEO Stephen White said the company expects a big year opening up the ecosystem and that DJ mixsets will become available on major streaming apps. The rise of sample-heavy genres and support from high-profile artists have driven interest in the service as a new revenue stream for rights holders. Dubset Media develops MixSCAN™, a patent-pending rights-management platform that identifies, registers, resolves rights and reports royalties for mix content. The company operates Thefuture.fm as a turnkey mix-content distribution platform for deployment by music services and DSPs. Dubset completed two-year trials of MixSCAN and has ingested and registered over 200,000 mixes from top DJs, enabling those artists to stream on its distribution platform. Management says the technology enables granular, scalable rights and royalty reporting and can power new revenue streams and royalty structures in the Dance/EDM segment. The company added industry veterans to its advisory board, including Ebro Darden, Bruce Flohr, Mark Gillespie, and Dean Wilson, to guide product development, content acquisition, and distribution. Through its investor network the company gains access to large music services, millions of listeners, and hundreds of millions of mobile subscribers across more than 30 countries. Dubset.com is a New York City–based service that provides DJ-curated internet radio with hundreds of channels of exclusive music content. Its channels are powered by proprietary MixSCAN™ technology, which identifies individual tracks, locations, and metadata required to analyze, report, and pay downstream agencies and rights holders. The company has signed over 200 DJs and offers curated channels produced by top DJs. Led by founder and CEO Dave Stein, Dubset added SRC Records founder and Universal Music Group executive Steve Rifkind to its board of advisors. The company recently completed a $500K funding round to support its operations and technology (investor details below).