• waggle

  Participated · Seed · Dec 2016

  Waggle collects user-generated pet content via a mobile app and website, curates and lightly produces clips, then syndicates that programming through an e-mail newsletter, website, mobile app and Facebook. The New York City–based startup was incubated at Broadway Video Ventures and forges partnerships with organizations such as the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, America’s Funniest Home Videos and the San Francisco SPCA to fuel its digital programming. Since its beta began in September, Waggle has aired at least 1,000 hours of live-streaming pet videos on Facebook and garnered more than 10 million views. Co-founder and CEO Matt Cavnar says the company aims to celebrate pets and build a community-driven destination for animal lovers and pet parents. Eventually Waggle hopes to help pets and their owners become micro- and mega-influencers who can generate income via product placements or content licensing. The company has eight full-time employees, about half based in San Francisco, and intends to use its new capital for hiring, community and content development.

• Poncho

  Participated · Seed · Apr 2016

  Poncho delivers succinct, entertaining weather updates (with GIFs) via SMS, email and push so users receive need-to-know forecasts without opening a full weather app. It launched out of betaworks in New York and has expanded to offer alerts globally. The Poncho app emphasizes useful push notifications so users theoretically never need to open the app; the company previously experimented with an alarm-clock feature that was discontinued due to iOS Do Not Disturb. Poncho plans to add horoscopes, motivational content and offers, and is building a new backend to enable AI-driven personalization of weather, content and offers. The company reports seven-day retention in the ~60% range. It recently raised external funding to support product and personalization efforts. Led by CEO Sam Mandel, Poncho delivers personalized weather forecasts via email, text message, apps, notifications, and bot interactions on Facebook Messenger and Slack. Forecasts are tailored to user routines and based on a quick survey of wake-up time, morning commute, and allergy and hair concerns. The company closed a $2M seed funding round to support its growth. It intends to use the funds to continue building its chatbot interface and to deepen its data science and artificial intelligence infrastructure. The product roadmap emphasizes making the user experience more conversational and learning-driven.

• MessageYes (formerly ReplyYes)

  Participated · Equity · Apr 2016

  ReplyYes is a Seattle, WA-based e-commerce over mobile messaging platform that helps brands engage and transact directly with customers. Led by CEO Dave Cotter, the platform leverages artificial intelligence, human-assisted AI and integrated payments to learn from customer feedback and improve the mobile customer experience. ReplyYes aims to help brands increase customer engagement and grow e-commerce revenue through conversational commerce. Current customers include Universal Music Group, The Edit, Origin Bound and Lowercase Alpha. The company raised a new financing round and intends to use the proceeds to expand its platform to lifestyle brands. ReplyYes is a Madrona Venture Labs spinoff led by CEO Dave Cotter that operates a chat commerce platform enabling users to buy products by replying to text recommendations. Its first channel, The Edit, delivers daily personalized vinyl record suggestions to 45,000 users, who can reply "yes" to purchase or provide "Like"/"Dislike" feedback. In eight months the company has sold $1 million in vinyl records through that channel. The product blends AI-driven chatbots with human agents to handle complex requests and improve personalization over time. ReplyYes has launched a second text-based storefront, Origin Bound, for graphic novels and plans to support hundreds of retail channels, including third-party retailers. The 12-person team is working to expand the platform beyond SMS to Facebook Messenger and Twitter.

No current team members are available.