• Layer

  Participated · Seed · Sep 2013

  Layer is a messaging platform that enables businesses to add messaging to iOS, Android and web products. Customers include Trunk Club, Staples and Udacity, and Layer partnered with Microsoft to provide messaging with instant translation at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The company plans to build more integrations, continue improving its open-source user interface frameworks, and develop technology in areas like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Layer is acquiring interactive messaging startup Cola to integrate Cola's "Bubbles" interactive features across web and mobile and into channels like email and SMS. Cola's technical team led by CTO Jeremy Wyld will join Layer to build the integrations, while the rest of Cola, including CEO David Temkin, will not join. Financially, Layer announced a $15 million Series B led by Greycroft Partners with participation from Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and others, and said it has now raised a total of $23 $30 million. Layer provides an open-layer architecture for Internet communications, offering APIs and SDKs that let developers integrate messaging, voice, and video into applications. The platform currently serves clients including Trunk Club, Forbes, Hinge, Udacity, and Onefootball. The company is led by founder & CEO Ron Palmeri and co-founder Tomaž Štolfa. Layer was a winner at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013. It has previously raised over $22 million from investors such as AME Cloud Ventures, Anthem Venture Partners, Bloomberg Beta, CrunchFund and Greycroft Partners. In June 2016 Layer received an investment from Social Discovery Ventures; the amount of that deal was not disclosed. Layer provides a communications platform that can be added to mobile and web apps by dropping in an SDK of fewer than 10 lines of code. Once integrated, apps can enable text, voice, and video messaging and file sharing; Layer also offers an open-source Layer UI kit to accelerate interface development. The company handles infrastructure and scaling concerns for developers, and currently ships SDKs for iOS and Android with web support planned. Layer is still in private beta and expects to roll out to a larger number of developers as it pursues its goal of becoming the go-to framework for in-app communications. The startup was founded by Tomaž Štolfa and Ron Palmeri, who have prior exits and product experience (including vox.io and Grand Central/Google Voice). Financially, Layer completed a $14.5M Series A and reported a post-money valuation in the mid-$60 million range. Layer offers an SDK (currently for iOS and Android) plus an open-source Layer UI kit that lets developers add messaging features—text, voice, video and file sharing—into apps with fewer than ten lines of code. The company aims to abstract infrastructure and scaling concerns for developers and ultimately support web apps as well. Since winning TechCrunch Disrupt, Layer received roughly 3,000 developer applications but is limiting its beta to about 50 developers; it expects full open access to the SDK in Q2 2014. Layer has 18 employees now and plans to grow to nearly 40 within the coming year, and has expanded into a Mission neighborhood office in San Francisco. The startup integrates with partner apps (for example, Sunrise) to incorporate rich messaging. The new funding is intended to power and scale the communications infrastructure required to run its services. Layer develops an open communications platform that lets developers add messaging, voice and video calling to mobile apps and plans to extend to web products. Its SDK enables integration with a few lines of code so developers do not need to manage the underlying infrastructure. The company raised $1.5M in seed funding to continue platform development. Layer plans to use the proceeds to further develop the platform and to hire mobile and web engineers as well as security and cryptography specialists. Founded in early 2013 by Tomaž Štolfa and Ron Palmeri, the company is based in San Francisco, CA. Layer was the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield 2013.

• Prism Skylabs

  Led · Series A · Oct 2012

  Prism Skylabs extracts insights from existing security-camera footage to deliver "web-style analytics" for retailers and other businesses. Its product generates visuals such as footpath maps, heat maps of customer interest, and customer counts and conversion metrics. The company says it works with more than 80 customers. Prism launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011. It raised a $15 million Series B led by Intel Capital to use surveillance-camera footage for in-store analytics. Other participants in the round include Presidio Ventures, Triangle Peak, Data Collective and Expa. The company previously raised a $7.5 million Series A and counts CrunchFund among past investors. Prism Skylabs offers a cloud-based service that detects and ingests feeds from existing video surveillance cameras, extracts relevant images and builds visualizations such as customer paths, heatmaps and empty-store photos while protecting customer privacy. The product analyzes video data to provide summaries of customer activity, behavior and movement and lets businesses syndicate images to Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Google+, YouTube and Picasa. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011 and was founded by video surveillance expert Steve Russell and Ron Palmeri; Russell previously founded 3VR and holds multiple video-related patents. The offering is available by invitation only, with wider availability expected to launch in November. Financially, Prism Skylabs has completed angel financing previously (~$1.5M) and is now further capitalized by a new institutional round to scale product availability and retail deployments. Prism Skylabs provides a cloud service and downloadable software that brings business video feeds online, extracts images, and builds visualizations such as customer paths, heatmaps, and empty-store photos while protecting privacy. The product can syndicate images and realtime photos to social channels (Facebook, Twitter), websites and Yelp, and can integrate with point-of-sale systems. Prism also enables mashups of video-derived traffic with web analytics and social metrics to measure campaign effects and daily-deal impact. The company uses proprietary compression technology to reduce bandwidth for surveillance video and has applied for patents on its approach. Prism operates on a freemium model with additional paid features planned. The startup was in closed beta at the time of reporting and had drawn early buzz from angel investors prior to launch.

No current team members are available.