The Venture Codex

Led · Equity · Apr 2013

Swipp operates a consumer-facing social interest platform where users 'swip' and score a person, place, or thing, creating an opinion graph described as a 'quantifiable sentiment layer.' Its core product captures scored opinions plus user location so the company can measure and track opinion changes and regional trends over time. Swipp has launched Swipp Plus, a self-service tool for businesses to mine the consumer data, track terms, create embeddable widgets, and gauge sentiment across topics. It also offers Swipp Enterprise, a tailored, paid offering for larger customers while Swipp Plus is free for companies to try. The platform positions itself as a market-research-style alternative to pulling sentiment from other social networks by organizing opinionated comments by topic and adding numeric scores. The article notes Swipp's user base is smaller than major social networks and it is unclear how compelling its data is to businesses so far. To fund the business-facing product, Swipp announced additional institutional financing. Swipp offers a global social intelligence platform composed of consumer-facing apps, commercial software branded as Swipp Plus, and a developer API. The consumer app (iPhone, web, mobile web) lets users rate and comment on topics in real time using a five-point visual scale, upload photos, and filter opinions by social connections, location, age and gender. The commercial product includes vertical- and event-focused apps (the article cites a Super Bowl-themed app) and Swipp Plus widgets that embed polling on third-party sites. Swipp plans to open its API to third-party developers later in the year to enable integrations around its interest-graph data. Founders Don Thorson and Charlie Costantini bring product and marketing experience from Apple, Jajah, Ribbit and Talenthouse. The company has been in development for two years and executed a broad global launch with localization and staff on the ground in multiple countries. Swipp reported $3.5 million in funding from Old Willow Partners alongside the product launch.

Participated · Series A · Dec 2011

BestVendor operates an online resource for business professionals to exchange recommendations and reviews of work-related software and services. The site launched in beta last month and the company positions itself as for work-app recommendations what Amazon is for books and Yelp is for restaurants. The platform has attracted more than 4,800 members, who have shared an average of 13 work-related applications each. BestVendor’s core product centers on aggregated recommendations and user-shared reviews of workplace apps and services. Financially, the company has completed a $3M Series A and previously raised a $600K seed round. Going forward, the company intends to grow its membership and expand the catalog of recommended work apps. BestVendor is a crowdsourced review platform that helps SMBs make faster, smarter purchasing decisions for business products and services. The site aggregates user-shared recommendations and ratings for collaboration software, web hosting, payroll providers, telecommunications platforms, and more. Users share and rate products they use to gain free access to other reviews, following a Glassdoor-like ‘get to give’ model. Visitors can filter reviews by industry, company size, vendor, and other criteria to find relevant vendors. BestVendor was founded in January 2011 and is based in New York. The company has not yet turned on monetization but plans to charge vendors for leads and offer enhanced vendor listings similar to Yelp.

Led · Series E · Jun 2011

AisleBuyer LLC is a Boston, MA–based provider of mobile self-checkout and mobile commerce solutions for retailers, brands and restaurants. Led by CEO Andrew Paradise, the company offers a shopping platform that includes a virtual multi-channel self-checkout system. Its platform allows shoppers to order items through a website while purchasing physical items in-store and enables scanning of credit cards to avoid manual entry of payment information. The company plans to use the funding to open a Palo Alto office, develop new product features and expand its engineering and sales teams. AisleBuyer recently raised $7.5m in equity funding from existing investor Old Willow Partners. Related reporting notes a prior $4.0m equity and debt financing round. AisleBuyer develops a mobile self-checkout app that allows shoppers to scan items in-store, review pricing, access ratings and reviews, and checkout securely via smartphone. The company was founded in 2009 and is based in Boston, MA. Its technology is currently live for testing at Magic Beans locations in Brookline, Cambridge, Wellesley and Hingham, Massachusetts, and the Magic Beans app powered by AisleBuyer is available as a free download in the iPhone App Store. AisleBuyer plans to use new capital to expand nationally and hire additional staff. The company closed a combined equity and debt financing to support these growth plans.