Participated · Series B · Apr 2025

Ocient builds data analytics software that delivers high-performance, compute-intensive analysis of very large and complex datasets using technologies such as Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA), Megalane™, OcientML®, and OcientGeo®. The company offers pilot-to-production deployments on premises, in the OcientCloud®, or in public clouds and emphasizes up to 90% price savings and reduced environmental impact. Ocient plans to use new capital to advance development and delivery of energy-efficient solutions for costly, complex, and operationally burdensome data and AI workloads and to expand customer deployments globally. The startup reported doubling revenues for the third straight year as it transitions into growth stage and has deepening industry partnerships with AMD, Solidigm, Amdocs, and others. Ocient was also accepted into the NVIDIA Inception program and recently launched a named telecommunications solution for data retention and disclosure. The company appointed Henry Marshall as CFO to manage financial operations as it scales. Ocient provides data analytics software that enables always-on, compute-intensive analysis of large, complex datasets, including in-database ML and geospatial capabilities. Its Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA) removes network bottlenecks to facilitate rapid data access and supports always-on loading, ETL/ELT, Zero Copy Reliability™, OcientML™, and OcientGeo™. The company says its platform delivers energy and cost efficiencies—including up to 80% price savings—and is positioned for next-generation, growth-scale analytics. Enterprises can deploy Ocient on premises, in OcientCloud™, or in the public cloud with minimal integration from pilot to production. Ocient reported 109% year-over-year revenue growth in its last fiscal year and plans to use new funding to advance product capabilities and deliver hyperscale data analytics solutions to a growing global customer base. Founded in 2016, Ocient is a global, carbon-neutral company headquartered in Chicago and has been recognized in the GigaOm Radar for Data Warehouses as a Fast Mover and Challenger. Ocient provides a proprietary data analytics solution (Ocient DAS) designed to enable rapid analysis of extremely large datasets. The platform can hold quadrillions of rows, ingest billions of rows per second, and filter and compute across trillions of rows per second. Ocient is deploying its DAS in Auction & Exchange Analytics, Security, and Geospatial customer use cases using industry-standard interfaces and hardware. The company was co‑founded in March 2016 by Chris Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski, and George Kondiles. Ocient closed a $40M Series B that brought total invested capital to $65M. The company plans to use the funds to grow engineering, customer success, operations, and sales and marketing, and expects headcount to double to 150 by the end of 2021. Ocient builds an ultra-large-scale relational database platform and SaaS designed to analyze multi-petabyte to exabyte-class datasets with interactive, sub-second query latency. Its DAS product can hold quadrillions of rows, ingest billions of rows per second, and filter/compute trillions of rows per second, and runs on commodity hardware or public cloud. The system targets use cases where NoSQL and Hadoop fall short, offering massively parallel processing and benchmarks that are typically ~50× faster than alternatives such as Presto (and up to 1,000× in some comparisons). The company says analytics that once took an hour can now take 10 seconds or less, enabling interactive insights on previously intractable datasets. Ocient has been expanding its team (hiring 15 employees and 9 interns in 2020 to reach over 50 employees) and plans to more than double headcount over the following year. The company also added senior management and advisory board members as it scales commercial and technical efforts. Ocient builds a relational database and analytics software platform designed to handle petabyte- to exabyte-scale data sets. Its platform is engineered to hold quadrillions of rows, ingest data at speeds of billions of rows per second, and filter and compute results at rates up to trillions of rows per second. The product targets organizations that need to analyze immense amounts of data at extreme scale. The company will use the new capital to support its engineering team, continue research and development, and activate a new development lab. Ocient was co-founded by Chris Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles and is based in Chicago, IL. It secured about $10M in Series A funding to advance product and engineering work.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2022

Qualifi provides an audio-based, on-demand asynchronous phone interview platform that lets recruiters send, share, and track interviews at scale. The product is designed to speed up hiring, mitigate bias, and preserve a human touch while enabling recruiters to interview hundreds of candidates in minutes. The company was founded in 2019 by Darrian Mikell, Devyn Mikell, DeSean Prentice, and Keenan Jaenicke and is based in Indianapolis, IN. Its founding team are alums of the Techstars Anywhere Class of ’21. Qualifi recently raised growth funding and intends to use the proceeds to expand operations and further develop the platform. Qualifi provides an audio-based platform that enables recruiters to phone-screen multiple candidates simultaneously using pre-recorded questions over a standard phone call. Because there’s no need for scheduling or phone tag, recruiters can vet seven times more candidates per day on average. The platform captures rich, actionable data to help recruiters make better, less biased hiring decisions and integrates with more than 30 top Applicant Tracking Systems. Companies across industries — from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises in healthcare, call centers, warehouse, logistics, construction and hospitality — used the platform to qualify tens of thousands of candidates in 2021. Led by CEO Darrian Mikell and based in Indianapolis, Qualifi plans to use new funding to add AI, ML and NLP capabilities and to expand go-to-market efforts with additional marketing and sales resources. Founded in 2019 by Darrian Mikell, Qualifi provides a platform that enables recruiters to create one-way interview experiences using audio and voice over standard phone calls. The product is designed to eliminate scheduling, reduce communication times with candidates, and capture data to help recruiters scale screening efforts. The company completed accelerator programs including Be Nimble’s Pitch Pardi and TechStars Anywhere as part of its early growth. Qualifi plans to use recent funding to grow its business through sales and marketing and to further optimize the platform. The team emphasizes phone-based audio responses to streamline early-stage recruiting workflows.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2021

Bright Cellars is a six-year-old, Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based subscription wine seller that personalizes selections by using customer data to guide winemaker partners. The company shifted from sending third-party wines to commissioning and tweaking proprietary blends based on member preferences. It says it has tested around 600 wines and typically has 40–50 wines live on the platform at any time. Bright Cellars declined to share subscriber counts but reported an acceleration in new subscribers during the pandemic; average bottle price on the platform is $20–$25. The company ships primarily from Santa Rosa and works with grape suppliers on the U.S. West Coast as well as internationally. It remains focused on D2C, is largely decentralized, and sees opportunities to monetize its consumer data or partner with legacy wine firms in the future. Bright Cellars is a nearly four-year-old, 40-person Milwaukee startup that sells wines directly to consumers on a subscription basis. The company uses a quiz to create taste profiles and personalize monthly wine selections for its members. It is also quietly building a portfolio of its own wines with different suppliers while continuing to ship under others' labels. Founders Richard Yau and Joe Laurendi say the member data they collect is valuable, and although Bright Cellars does not sell its findings today, it may offer aggregated insights in the future. The founders were roommates at MIT and remained in Milwaukee after early admission to the gener8tor accelerator. The broader market shows potential: consumers spent roughly $3 billion on wine delivered to doorsteps last year, and direct-to-consumer wine shipments rose 9% to 6.3 million cases between 2017 and 2018. Bright Cellars is a Milwaukee-based personalized wine subscription service powered by a data-science-driven engine that captures direct feedback to understand millennial wine preferences. The service delivers curated wine selections to subscribers based on that data-science profiling. Led by co-founder and CEO Richard Yau, the company completed the gener8tor accelerator program in 2015. Its subscriber base has grown to more than 22,000 members and revenue has grown tenfold. The team has more than 40 employees. The recent funding will be used to continue growing operations in Milwaukee. Bright Cellars is a Milwaukee-based personalized wine subscription service founded in 2014 by MIT graduates Richard Yau (CEO) and Joseph Laurendi (CTO). The company uses a machine-learning algorithm developed by its co-founders to match members to wines. After each wine is reviewed by members, the recommendation engine learns more about their actual preferences. Bright Cellars graduated from the gener8tor accelerator in May 2015. The company has 11 employees and intends to use the seed funding to continue building out a complete member experience and to grow the team. The recent financing will support product and team expansion efforts.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2021

HUED began as a digital directory connecting patients seeking racially concordant care with Black and Latinx physicians, and expanded its product to include anti-racism and implicit-bias training for clinicians and teams. The company’s mission is to dismantle structural barriers that prevent patients of color from accessing high-quality care and to improve outcomes for Black and brown communities. Founder and CEO Kimberly Wilson built the company from personal experience of the problem and has framed the market need using data on disparities in care. HUED has attracted attention and early traction through accelerator and pitch programs, including the Northwestern Mutual Black Founder Accelerator. The company has positioned itself at the intersection of healthcare and education, aiming to both connect patients to available clinicians and to increase cultural competency across provider networks. Financially, HUED closed a $1.6 million seed round to scale its product and training offerings.

Participated · Series C · Jul 2021

Founded in 2016, Vestwell delivers a unified, modern savings infrastructure that integrates with payroll providers, benefits platforms, financial institutions, advisors and government agencies. Its cloud platform supports over 2 million active savers and administers more than $50 billion in assets, generating in excess of $200 million in annual recurring revenue while operating profitably. The company’s technology embeds savings at the point income is earned, offers multilingual experiences in 20+ languages, and is expanding AI-driven guidance and administration to personalize user interactions. Recent product extensions include workplace emergency savings, college savings, student-debt solutions, and ABLE accounts, all delivered through the same architecture. Vestwell is also rolling out more sophisticated, professionally managed investment options that tailor portfolios to long-term retirement income goals. Future plans center on broadening distribution channels, deepening AI-native capabilities, and expanding beyond retirement to close America’s $50 trillion savings gap.