Led · Equity · Apr 2020

Audiens provides an audience management platform used by customers including ING, Iper and Unieuro to optimize marketing, increase customer lifetime value and reduce advertising cost per acquisition (CPA). The company is led by CEO Jonathan Brech and founder Marko Maras. Audiens is headquartered in Cambridge, UK and positions itself as a global independent customer data platform. In April 2020 the company raised $8M (£6.5M) in funding. The firm said it will use the proceeds to accelerate international expansion and strengthen its teams in key European markets. No operating metrics beyond customer names were disclosed in the article.

Participated · Series A · May 2019

Percepto, based in Modi’in, Israel and led by CEO Dor Abuhasira, provides Autonomous Inspection & Monitoring (AIM), an end-to-end visual inspection solution powered by autonomous drones, robots and AI. AIM automates the entire visual inspection workflow from data collection to AI-powered analysis and insights, enabling faster detection of gas leaks, overheating and infrastructure deterioration. The platform is used by Fortune 500 customers on six continents, including Siemens Energy, Delek US, companies across Koch Industries and ICL Dead Sea Works. Percepto raised a combined $67M Series C in equity and debt funding, bringing total investment in the company to more than $120M. The round was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies and included new investors Zimmer Partners and one of the largest U.S. energy companies, with participation from existing backers U.S. Venture Partners, Delek US Holdings, Atento Capital, Spider Capital and Arkin Holdings. The company plans to use the funds to expand operations and broaden its business reach while helping customers meet environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) goals by minimizing safety and environmental risks. Percepto develops a vertically integrated stack of drone hardware and software for autonomous site inspection and monitoring, marketed as AIM. Its product is a "drone-in-a-box" that launches on-demand or on schedule, returns to recharge, and transfers data for analysis. The company hires teams in AI, computer vision, navigation and analytics and acquires compute chips from Nvidia to power its systems. Percepto counts customers in around 10 countries, including ENEL, Florida Power and Light and Verizon. Founded in 2014, it has raised $72.5 million to date and recently closed a $45 million Series B. The company has integrated its Sparrow drones with Boston Dynamics' Spot for complementary inspections and says it expects additional partnerships. CEO Dor Abuhasira said the round will help Percepto "create a category leader." Percepto provides on-site autonomous drone solutions for critical infrastructure and industrial sites via its Drone-in-a-Box (DIB) system. The DIB platform uses computer vision, AI and cloud management to enable real-time detection of threats, safety hazards and anomalies, as well as mapping, 3D modelling and emergency response without human intervention. Its solution targets large-scale enterprises in energy, oil & gas, mining and other heavy industries and is in use in more than ten countries, including deployments with Fortune 500 customers such as Enel. Founded in 2014 and led by CEO Dor Abuhasira, Percepto has raised $27.5M to date following a $15M Series A. The company intends to use the Series A proceeds to scale operations, further expand its international presence and continue research and development. Percepto positions its product to improve security, increase productivity, reduce safety risks and lower operational costs for industrial operators. Percepto develops a small hardware-and-software "little black box" that attaches to drones and runs computer vision on an onboard Nvidia Tegra K1 GPU and camera. The product includes an SDK the company says can save companies roughly 70% of the time needed to develop a new drone application. Percepto started last year in Tel Aviv and currently employs seven people, with plans to grow to 12 or more within six months using the new funding. The company is shifting its focus from consumer hobbyist use toward commercial applications such as inspection and automated filming. Percepto plans to make its software available for free under an open-source license later this year to encourage developer adoption and potential enterprise take-up. Founders Dor Abuhasira and Raviv Raz built the product after noticing gaps in consumer drone footage and believe the system could become a standard commercial platform for drone computer vision.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2018

Fauna offers a web-native GraphQL API (FaunaDB) that can be accessed directly from browsers, mobile clients, or serverless functions. Its serverless query language (FQL) enables queries that encapsulate custom business logic across relational, document, and graph data. Developers can connect using numerous JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Next, Angular, Nuxt) and languages (Python, Go, Ruby, Java, Scala). FaunaDB integrates with developer tools such as Microsoft VS Code and serverless platforms including AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare Workers. The company reports a user community of over 25,000 developers. Recent executive hires — Eric Berg as CEO and Bob Muglia as Executive Chair — and a new board appointment signal a push to scale product and go-to-market execution. Fauna builds FaunaDB, a transactional NoSQL database designed to deliver high-performance distributed transactions while remaining operationally simple, globally scalable and policy-secure. FaunaDB is infrastructure-agnostic and available on-premises as well as a managed cloud service. The database targets mission-critical, ACID-compliant workloads across industries from financial services to video games and is in active use at global leaders such as NVIDIA and by hundreds of teams using FaunaDB Cloud. Fauna was launched in 2012 and the founding team includes engineers who previously scaled Twitter. Financially, the company has raised $29.5 million to date, including a $25 million Series A announced in this round. Management says it will use the new resources to scale the company to match the size of the opportunity and to continue building the database and the company to last. Fauna develops FaunaDB, an adaptive operational database designed to address modern application requirements by combining global distribution with a multi-tenant architecture that allocates resource consumption by business priority. The company says FaunaDB lets digital businesses maintain agility while meeting operational needs. FaunaDB is currently in managed beta. Early customers include NVIDIA and other industry leaders across data-rich sectors such as social, mobile, SaaS, IoT, and gaming. Fauna was founded in 2012 by CEO Evan Weaver and CTO Matt Freels and is based in San Francisco, CA. The company recently closed a $4.5M seed financing.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2016

Sensay launched in May 2015 as an SMS-based service that lets users sign up to both give and receive advice, using an AI matching algorithm to pair questioners with appropriate responders. The platform has expanded beyond SMS to support Slack, Kik, Telegram, WeChat and recently added Facebook Messenger, enabling cross-platform conversations. Sensay reached 1 million SMS users before expanding to other messaging services. The company views itself as a marketplace where responders act as merchants and askers as customers; today interactions are mediated with a virtual tipping currency. Sensay has not yet started generating revenue but is measuring commerce activity in chats and plans to experiment with monetization soon. The team reports roughly 35–50% cross-platform interaction rates and says about 50% of chats contain commerce opportunities, though the product still faces challenges like response time and potential errors from human responders.

Led · Equity · Apr 2016

Ticket Monster (TMON) is a mobile-first e-commerce marketplace in South Korea that launched in 2010 and evolved from a daily-deals site into a broader marketplace. Its platform records 8.5 million unique products purchased, reaching roughly 17% of the population, and its business mix is about 70% general merchandise, 20% travel and roughly 10% groceries. Groceries currently represent around five percent of sales but are the fastest-growing vertical after the launch of Tmon Fresh, which management says has tripled visit frequency. TMON plans to use new funding to double down on grocery and to expand its travel operations. The company competes closely with Coupang and other Korean marketplaces and notes the limited domestic market size (about 50 million people) as a constraint on standalone scale. TMON is not yet profitable: last year it reported $252 million in sales and losses of about $137 million, and management says profitability is still a couple of years away. Ticket Monster is a mobile commerce e‑commerce company offering goods, local and travel services through partnerships with approximately 91,000 merchants and more than 100,000 SKUs. Founded in 2010 and led by CEO Daniel Shin, the company expanded after management and its investment partners acquired a controlling stake from Groupon in April 2015. It is backed by KKR and Anchor Equity Partners. The company focuses on mobile shopping, payments and online transaction solutions. Following the new investment it plans to leverage a strategic partnership to promote NHN Entertainment’s PAYCO payment solution and to research applying technology and data across the shopping process, from ordering to payment and shipping. The recent capital and partnership are framed around driving synergies across core business areas.