• Brammo

  Participated · Series B · Oct 2011

  Brammo designs and develops electric vehicles including the Enertia and Empulse motorcycles and is the 2013 FIM eRR North American World Cup Champion. It is an OEM supplier of its Brammo Digital Drivetrain systems, including the Brammo Power battery pack and Brammo Power vehicle management system. Brammo maintains vehicle distribution and marketing operations in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. TEAM Industries has entered a strategic partnership and will become an investor in Brammo and collaborate to design and develop electric vehicle drivetrains for next-generation EVs. TEAM is a vertically integrated engineering and manufacturing company that has developed drivetrain components for OEMs since 1967 and offers services from product design collaboration to manufacturing to specification. The partnership aims to bring Brammo’s championship-winning EV technology to adjacent markets and provide OEMs a broad range of EV drivetrain solutions. Brammo develops electric vehicle technology and manufactures two-wheel electric motorcycles, including the Encite, Enertia, Empulse and Engage models. Led by CEO Craig Bramscher, the company operates vehicle distribution and marketing in North America, Europe and Asia. The company is based in Ashland, Oregon. Brammo has closed the first $13M tranche of a planned $45M Series C funding round. It intends to use the capital to accelerate its development plans. The article states the round was led by Polaris Industries, with participation from other undisclosed investors. Brammo designs and manufactures all-electric motorcycles and the battery packs and software that power them. The company sells an urban commuter model, the Enertia, which retails for about $8,000. Brammo has product plans including two super moto/off-road models (Engage and Encite) and a sport motorcycle called the Empulse, in addition to its existing lineup. It partners with Flextronics for manufacturing and battery-pack production and with Polaris as a strategic partner to bring its drivetrain technology to new markets. CEO Craig Bramscher has said the Polaris relationship is intended to accelerate product development and geographic scale. To date Brammo has raised just under $40 million in outside funding.

• Bunchball

  Participated · Equity · Jun 2011

  Bunchball offers online "gamification" solutions through its Nitro platform. Nitro enables businesses to track and reward participation across websites, mobile applications and social media by creating gamified experiences intended to increase loyalty and revenues. The company works with major brands and media companies, including Warner Bros., Comcast, USA Network, LiveOps and Hasbro. Founded in February 2005 and led by CEO Jim Scullion, Bunchball is headquartered in San Jose, CA. The company plans to use new funding to invest in product development, marketing and sales and to expand into B2B, loyalty and incentive market segments. Most recently it raised $6.5M in financing. Bunchball collects behavioral data from games on social networks and uses it to build games and virtual worlds for media properties such as The Office. Its Nitro platform matches social-network behavior with media-site metrics and applies “rules” to encourage desired actions via points, levels, leaderboards, challenges and virtual goods. The company licenses Nitro to large media clients including NBC, CBS and Lifetime and charges based on tiers such as API-call volume; it also sells for-pay modules like a virtual rooms feature. Bunchball monetizes through game services, advertising within social networks, and enabling media companies to sell branded swag and sponsorships. The Office site exceeded NBC’s target of 10,000–15,000 users by attracting more than 200,000 users, over 80% of whom are active. The company is based in Redwood City, Calif., and also operates cross-network games and a single gamer identity and virtual-currency system for use across sites. Bunchball operates a site hosting multiplayer Adobe Flash games for social networks, blogs and other websites. Its catalog emphasizes retro-style multiplayer titles; examples in the article include N-blox Evil Edition (a 2-player Tetris-style game) and Sea Battle (a Battleship-style multiplayer game). The company’s multiplayer features were highlighted as a way to promote deeper interaction between players on social networks such as MySpace. Adobe and San Francisco-based Granite Ventures provided a $2 million investment in Bunchball. That investment was made through a limited partnership called Adobe Ventures. The founders are Rajat Paharia and Sunil Singh.

No current team members are available.