The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Sep 2023

Givzey is the fundraising industry's first Gift Agreement Platform, focused on empowering nonprofit organizations to scale multi-year pledges to all levels of giving. The company emphasizes enabling nonprofits to scale pledge-based giving across donor segments. Givzey announced an oversubscribed Seed funding round that raised $2.1M. Investors in the round include Oyster Fund, York IE, CJ Orr and The Orr Group, members of Tiger 21 Indianapolis Group, and Launchpad Venture Group. Givzey is based in Boston, MA.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2023

StellarFi is a bill-pay manager that helps members build credit by charging a subscription ($4.99 or $9.99) to manage and pay recurring bills—including rent, subscriptions and utilities—and reporting those on-time payments to Experian, Equifax, TransUnion and Innovis. The company does not require credit checks or deposits, does not charge interest, and claims members see an average 26-point score increase in the first month; the average user score at signup is 580. Launched in late June, StellarFi scaled quickly via affiliate partnerships, neobank contracts and SEO, finishing the year with over $2 million in ARR and hitting $1 million ARR in 134 days. As a public benefit corporation, StellarFi focuses on financially disadvantaged communities and intends to build a marketplace to link members to lenders and provide access to capital through partners. The firm is still developing its mobile app and aims to “conquer the mobile experience” to drive engagement and lender access. Operationally, StellarFi reported zero defaults so far but has encountered significant fraud attempts and says it uses sophisticated algorithms to detect and quarantine fraudsters. StellarFi is a Public Benefit Corporation building a credit-building and bill-pay app that consolidates everyday bills and reports monthly payments to the three main credit bureaus. The company targets the 132 million Americans with poor or no credit and enables users to build credit through rent, utilities and other routine payments. StellarFi also offers rewards and cash back that users can apply directly to connected bills. The startup launched a public beta on March 14, 2022 in Austin, Texas and plans comprehensive money-management tools, partnerships for loan and credit card offerings, and financial literacy resources. StellarFi was founded by Lamine Zarrad, who previously founded neobank Joust (acquired by ZenBusiness) and served as Head of Product at ZenBusiness. The company recently closed an oversubscribed $7M initial funding round to deploy its platform and expand access nationwide.

Participated · Series A · Jan 2023

Splitero helps homeowners unlock trapped home equity by offering Home Equity Investments (HEIs) that provide upfront cash with no income verification and no monthly payments, instead taking a share of future home appreciation. The company’s proprietary Maturity Match™ structure aligns each HEI’s term with the remaining life of the homeowner’s primary mortgage, positioning the product as a flexible substitute for HELOCs or cash-out refinancing. Splitero currently serves homeowners across 14 U.S. states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. Industry data cited in the article notes that U.S. homeowners collectively hold trillions of dollars in accessible but under-utilized equity, creating a large addressable market for Splitero’s offering. The company emphasizes ease of qualification by eliminating traditional income documentation requirements. Partnerships with institutional capital providers such as Blue Owl Capital and Antarctica Capital bolster its ability to scale HEI originations. Headquartered in San Diego and founded by real-estate veterans, Splitero is positioning its platform and securitization capabilities to expand both homeowner reach and investor participation.

Participated · Series B · May 2021

Crayon offers a software platform that programmatically captures competitive intelligence in real time from more than 300 million sources and delivers insights across formats such as battlecards, newsletters, alerts and dashboards. Its product integrates with CRM, chat, sales enablement and knowledge-sharing tools to put competitive insights into the hands of sales, marketing, product and executive teams. The company serves more than 500 customers (including Discover, Dropbox, Gong, Intuit, SurveyMonkey, Zendesk and ZoomInfo) and says over 33,000 competitive-intelligence professionals rely on its platform. Crayon is recognized by Forrester in the New Wave for Market and Competitive Intelligence Platforms and ranks highly in G2 categories based on customer reviews. The company has nearly 100 employees and expects to double headcount over the next 12 months. Crayon will use the new funding to accelerate product development and expand its team. Crayon provides a market and competitive intelligence platform that aggregates hundreds of millions of sources to capture external messaging, product and pricing changes, hiring plans, partner strategies, and other competitive signals. Tens of thousands of teams use its software, including Fortune 50 companies, mid-sized businesses, and high-growth startups such as Intuit, Monster.com, and Zendesk. In the prior four months the company released dynamic Battlecards, a Salesforce integration, and integrations with sales enablement platforms. Crayon will use the new funding to double the team and support growth across engineering, sales, services, and marketing. The company aims to scale product and go-to-market efforts using these resources. Crayon provides a market and competitive intelligence platform that tracks more than 300 million pages across 7.6 million domains and 2.4 million companies. The platform combines data analytics with artificial intelligence to uncover relevant and timely insights for every employee. Customers include Fortune 50 companies and mid-sized businesses such as Intuit, Fuze and Zendesk. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Jonah Lopin and John Osborne. Crayon will use the $5M funding to double the team and accelerate growth. Crayon provides marketers with a big data platform to track, understand and take action on everything happening outside the company’s perimeter. It tracks 117 million web pages across 7.4 million domains spanning 2.3 million companies and uses a variety of machine learning techniques to produce actionable sales and marketing insights. Over 42,000 users access a dashboard covering more than 100 categories, including pricing changes, messaging and positioning changes, new product launches, and online reviews. The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate global expansion and hire engineering, product, marketing and sales people. Crayon was co-founded by Jonah Lopin and John Osborne and is based in Boston, MA. The company recently secured seed funding of $3.35M. Crayon operates a searchable index of marketing and design examples that lets marketers and agencies search more than 13 million designs by keyword or browse by categories such as traffic level, industry or content management system. Users can build shareable collections, collaborate, vote on designs and post comments, and the company says it can add over 500,000 new designs per day. Founders Jonah Lopin (ex-HubSpot VP) and John Osborne (ex-AdMob product manager) positioned the product to inspire marketers and help them stay on top of trends. The company reports tens of thousands of users and has a stated goal of reaching 100 million designs by the end of 2015. Crayon launched in November and is hiring multiple engineering roles as it builds toward its product vision. The recent $1.5 million angel round is intended to fund growth of the engineering and product team.

Participated · Equity · Feb 2021

Beamable builds decentralized infrastructure for gaming and provides an open, extensible game server platform. The platform lets developers create online games and virtual worlds in minutes and quickly add player auth, analytics, social, commerce, inventory, content management, meta-game features, GenAI and Web3 capabilities. The company is led by CEO Jon Radoff. Beamable plans to develop and scale its Network, a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) intended to redefine how backend infrastructure for games is built and operated. It raised $13.5M in Series A financing to fund development and scaling of the Network. The company is based in Boston, MA. Beamable provides a Software-as-a-Service platform that helps game makers continuously operate, update, monetize and socialize their games. The platform is integrated with the Unity 3D engine, enabling developers to focus on creativity and differentiation. Led by CEO Jon Radoff, the company has signed up over 100 game studios since last year. Over 20 million users have accessed games built on Beamable, resulting in $150M in revenue transacted through the platform. Beamable raised approximately $5M in an equity funding round and intends to use the proceeds to expand operations and its business reach. The company is based in Boston, MA. Disruptor Beam builds franchise-based mobile games, including Game of Thrones Ascent (2013) and Star Trek Timelines. The company says revenue grew more than 300% last year, driven largely by Timelines, and over 15 million people have played its games. It plans to keep developing existing titles and launch new franchise games currently in development. Next up is The Walking Dead: March to War, a multiplayer strategy game scheduled for release sometime in 2017. Leadership also plans to use funding to build out a publishing platform for marketing, customer acquisition and support. The team is monitoring the impact of the new Star Trek Discovery TV show and may incorporate elements from the show into Timelines.