Participated · Series C · Dec 2021

Liqid develops the Liqid Matrix composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) software platform that enables cloud-like speed and flexibility for data center infrastructure. The platform lets users configure, deploy, and scale physical bare-metal servers in seconds and reallocate accelerators and storage resources via software as needs evolve. Liqid positions its technology as a solution to rigid traditional architectures, improving resource utilization and reducing power and cooling requirements. The company says the capital will be used to identify, create, and pursue evolving market opportunities for CDI solutions amid AI-driven changes across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments. In 2021 Liqid more than doubled its workforce, surpassed 100 customers, and reported 1034% revenue growth from 2017 to 2020. Its customers and partners include the US Department of Defense, Dell Technologies, NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Intel Corporation, and the company is based in Broomfield, Colorado. Liqid’s core product, Liqid Matrix™, is a composable infrastructure software platform that lets users configure, deploy, and scale physical bare‑metal servers in seconds and reallocate accelerators and storage via software. The platform targets AI, HPC, cloud, and edge workloads and emphasizes higher utilization, faster time‑to‑results, and sustainability benefits versus traditional static data center architectures. Liqid says its solutions can deliver 2–3x improvements in utilization and materially reduce energy, water use, and CO2 emissions. In 2021 the company more than doubled its workforce, surpassed 100 customers, and reported 1,034% revenue growth from 2017 to 2020. Customers and partners include the US Department of Defense, Dell Technologies, NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Intel. Liqid intends to use new capital to expand internationally, grow its salesforce and support functions, increase OEM and channel marketing, and accelerate its software development roadmap to maintain market leadership. Liqid offers a software-defined composable infrastructure platform and Command Center orchestration that lets users build dynamic bare-metal servers and reallocate NVMe, GPU, FPGA, Intel Optane, CPU, and networking resources on demand. The platform composes across major fabric types including PCIe Gen3, PCIe Gen4, Ethernet, and InfiniBand. Liqid maintains OEM and technology partnerships with vendors such as Dell Technologies, Inspur, NVIDIA, Phison, Toshiba, Marvell, Intel, Jabil, and KingstonDigital. The company says it recently doubled quarter-over-quarter revenue, achieved record profit, and recorded a record number of customers and deployments. Liqid will use new funding to accelerate growth by increasing budgets for operations, sales, marketing, engineering, and other business-critical functions and to address an expanding number of industry verticals. Liqid builds an on-demand composable infrastructure (CI) platform that pools and composes compute, networking, storage, and graphics processing over a PCIe-based fabric to enable bare-metal server reconfiguration. Its flagship Liqid CI Platform and Liqid Grid fabric switch allow IT administrators to orchestrate and instantly reallocate physical datacenter resources. The company planned general availability of its platform in 2017 and intends to use new funding to accelerate product development, hire engineering talent, and expand sales and marketing. Liqid frames its technology as a solution to the motherboard/chassis limitations that lock resource allocation at purchase. It has OEM partnerships with Kingston Technology and Inspur and cites Phison Electronics as a strategic partner. Liqid is headquartered in Lafayette, Colo. Liqid is operating in stealth to deliver an innovative solution for real-time resource management in data centers, aiming to help organizations keep pace with rapidly changing IT demands. The company positions its product to evolve current data center architectures and improve how resources are allocated and managed. Liqid says its financing will accelerate product development and time to market while enabling it to build out its team. Leadership frames the technology as a potential industry transformer for handling growing volumes of data. The announcement highlights the company’s focus on research and development as the near-term priority. No operating metrics or revenues were disclosed in the articles.

Participated · Series B · Jul 2018

Forge Global operates a private securities marketplace that connects investors and shareholders to provide liquidity solutions and secondary trading for private companies. Since inception the firm has completed more than $9B in transactions across nearly 400 private companies and reported three consecutive record-breaking quarters, including Q1 2021 when it completed 1,400 transactions totaling more than $730M of volume. After merging with SharesPost in 2020, Forge received FINRA approval to operate as a single broker dealer with SharesPost, strengthening its transactional capabilities. In February 2021 the company launched Forge Company Solutions, a suite for company-sponsored liquidity programs including executive liquidity, employee liquidity, tender offers and direct listings. Forge says it will use new funding to expand service offerings in the U.S. and beyond and to continue developing products and services for the private market. Founded in 2014, Forge is backed by a mix of Silicon Valley investors and global institutions including Deutsche Börse, Temasek, Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas and others. Forge Global is a trading, settlement and custody marketplace for pre-IPO securities that enables employees and investors in private companies to liquidate portions of their shares and gives investors access to late-stage private firms. Founded in 2014 as Equidate, Forge's platform lists companies such as Spotify, Lyft, and 23andMe and is backed by investors including Tim Draper, Peter Thiel, FT Partners and Munich Re. Since inception the company has completed nearly $2 billion in transaction volume. Forge is collaborating with BNP Paribas to develop and distribute a structured equity product linked to a diversified basket of private shares, leveraging Forge's technology, data, and relationships across unicorn firms. The partnership includes an equity investment from BNP Paribas and an observer seat on Forge's board for Angel Rodriguez-Issa. Forge says the initiative will launch a $1 billion series of investment products to provide institutional and high-net-worth clients exposure to pre-IPO companies. Forge Global operates a marketplace for pre-IPO securities, allowing shareholders and investors in privately held innovation firms to liquidate portions of their shares. The platform provides access to top private companies such as Spotify, Lyft and 23andMe prior to their IPOs. Led by CEO Kelly Rodriques and established in 2014, the company has facilitated over $1 billion in transaction volume across US and international companies. Forge has launched the Forge Tech30 Capped Index and the EQUIAM Private Tech30 Fund to provide diversified exposure to large private tech companies. The company says it will expand the range of services offered to companies, investors and strategic partners to broaden access to the private markets. Equidate operates an online secondary marketplace that makes privately held company shares available to accredited and institutional buyers, typically requiring $20,000–$50,000 minimum investments. The platform charges roughly a 5% commission on each transaction and employs 26 people. Equidate has played a material role in pre-IPO liquidity, handling about 40% of Spotify’s secondary trades ahead of its direct listing. The company says it is on track to transact $1 billion worth of shares this year. It has engaged with a number of high-profile private companies, including Didi, Meituan Dianping, Tencent’s music service and Xiaomi. As companies stay private longer, Equidate is positioned to support interval liquidity programs and broader secondary-market demand. Equidate operates a web-based marketplace for pre-IPO company shares that connects accredited investors with opportunities to invest in fast-growing private companies. The platform also provides a channel for employees of startups to liquidate equity. Access to the marketplace is restricted to accredited investors with a net worth over $1 million or annual income above $200,000. The company is led by CEO Sohail Prasad and recently appointed Head of Strategic Operations John‑Paul Teutonico. Teutonico previously served as Chief Administrative Officer at SecondMarket. Equidate raised a seed funding round of undisclosed amount backed by several angel and institutional backers.

Participated · Equity · Jun 2016

SpringCM is a secure cloud platform that optimizes the generation, workflow, and archiving of business documents and manages contracts across desktop, mobile and partner applications like Salesforce. Its suite of workflow automation tools includes document management, sales contract lifecycle management (CLM), and sales content management to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks and provide a holistic view of customer relationships. The company is a Platinum Partner and one of the top 15 partner apps for Salesforce. Led by newly appointed CEO Dan Dal Degan, SpringCM plans to use new funding to develop additional document and contract management applications and to add engineering, sales and other positions. In 2016 the company added more than 175 new customers, including Uber, Spotify, Valvoline, Qlik and IKEA, demonstrating recent commercial traction. SpringCM provides a cloud platform that manages sales contracts and a wide range of documents, integrated with Salesforce and partner applications. Its CLM product automates workflows and complex processes to shorten contract cycles and accelerate time-to-revenue. The company says it is on track to deliver six new product releases this year and notes a FedRAMP "in process" status to expand in the public sector. More than 600 companies, including Anaplan, athenahealth, BCBS and the USDA, use SpringCM. SpringCM is a Salesforce Platinum partner and positions its offerings to serve sales, legal and public-sector needs. The company says the new funding will enable continued innovation and an accelerated product roadmap. SpringCM is a Chicago, IL-based provider of content cloud services for the enterprise. Led by CEO Greg Buchholz, the company delivers Content Cloud Services with rich security, mobile, sync and business process capabilities. Its platform is used to manage content for Sales Contract Management and other business processes integrated with transaction systems. SpringCM serves global brands and public sector agencies including Facebook, NCR, Office Depot, PDI Nice-Pak and the U.S. Department of Energy. The company intends to use new funding to ramp its sales and marketing efforts. SpringCM has offered hosted content management since 2005 and builds products that integrate content-management functionality inside Salesforce.com. The company reports about 400 paying customers and says roughly half of its business and 75 percent of new pipeline come from Salesforce partnerships. SpringCM opened a small Silicon Valley office staffed with five employees and plans to grow that to 20 by year-end. Management intends to use the new funding primarily to expand sales and marketing and increase the company’s presence in Silicon Valley. The company has been growing its Salesforce channel and recently announced two products that embed content management where salespeople work. SpringCM is a Chicago-based cloud enterprise content management company that provides cloud solutions for contract management, invoice automation and case management. The company delivers content and workflow tools for business processes from the cloud. It secured $15M in financing described as a mix of debt and equity to support growth. Existing investors Foundation Capital and North Bridge Venture Partners participated in the round, and Silicon Valley Bank provided growth capital and working capital financing. CEO Chris Junker said the funds will be used to further develop and extend the company’s channel sales, partner relationships and research and development activities.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2015

WebAction offers a streaming integration and intelligence platform that enables multi-stream data integration and real-time Change Data Capture across enterprise databases, events, log files, applications and IoT sensor data. The platform allows enterprises to detect anomalies, identify and visualize events of interest, and trigger alerts and workflows. The company rebranded as Striim and plans to use new funding to expand development and marketing efforts, accelerate sales, and build distribution channels. In conjunction with the financing, Intel Capital’s Igor Taber will join WebAction’s board of directors. WebAction was founded in 2012 and is based in Palo Alto, California. WebAction offers a real-time big data server that acquires, processes and delivers both structured and unstructured data across IT infrastructure to enable data-driven applications. The platform allows data to be filtered, processed, enriched and correlated while it is still in motion. Led by Chairman and CEO Ali Kutay, the company provides technology for immediate processing of streaming data. WebAction closed an $11m Series B financing led by Summit Partners with participation from Frank Caufield and Regis McKenna. In conjunction with the investment, Peter Chung of Summit Partners, Caufield and McKenna joined WebAction’s Board of Directors. The company said it will use the new capital to expand research and development and increase investments in sales, marketing and other business development activities.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2015

Porch operates a marketplace that connects homeowners with home-services professionals for improvement and moving-related projects. The company has formed partnerships with platforms including Facebook, eBay, Overstock and Streem to extend its reach. Porch has grown through acquisitions — buying Serviz (appliance repair and home services), Kandela (a 100-person Los Angeles company focused on move-related installations), and HireAHelper (a moving marketplace that helps about 250,000 people move per year). The company previously shrank headcount from 500 to 250 while repairing the business, and later reported headcount hit 875 in August following acquisitions. CEO Matt Ehrlichman said the new funding will help Porch push toward profitability and fund operations. The business resumed growth after emerging from a two-year quiet period in April 2018. Porch is a Seattle-based, data-driven platform that helps homeowners find local professionals for home improvement and repair projects. The company has expanded from neighborhood project data into mobile tools and a mobile booking service that lets homeowners hire pros for a set price through its apps. Porch reports about 3.2 million professionals on its service, including 200,000 with verified licenses, and data for over 130 million projects; it employs over 300 people. The company says it will use the new funding to speed its nationwide rollout, scale infrastructure, and launch multiple new products in 2015. Porch emphasizes a careful vetting process for professionals, which it describes as relatively slow and something it wants to get right. With this round, Porch has now raised roughly $100 million since launch. Porch operates a data-driven home network that connects homeowners with home improvement professionals, offers project inspiration, and lets owners manage their home improvement history. The company aggregates data on approximately 1.5 million professionals and over 120 million projects, and reports more than 100 exclusive data partnerships and thousands of additional partnerships. Porch has added features such as Verified Licenses (over 200,000 licensed professionals) and Verified Reviews to increase homeowner trust, and launched the Porch Home Report through realtor.com. The company also announced Inspiration and Manage Your Home features that surface project photos, actual costs, and the ability for homeowners to claim and tell their home’s history. Porch has grown rapidly in its first year—expanding to over 200 employees and roughly 30,000 square feet of office space—and established a strategic partnership with Lowe’s with presence in all 1,720 U.S. Lowe’s stores. Moving forward, Porch plans to expand beyond home improvement to deliver a broader “home network” of products and services over the coming year. Porch.com operates an online site focused on home improvement and remodeling information. The platform lets users view home improvement and remodeling projects completed by their neighbors and helps recommend and connect homeowners with local contractors and professionals. Porch has operations and one of its founders in San Diego. The company announced a strategic partnership with Lowe's in which Lowe's will run a retail promotion to introduce Porch to customers. The promotion is set to begin in 139 Lowe's stores in North and South Carolina and in Seattle. As part of the deal, Lowe's is making an undisclosed strategic investment in Porch. Porch is a Pinterest-like platform for home design and improvement that connects homeowners with professionals who can execute projects. The site lets users view neighbors' projects, see actual project costs, and choose professionals based on friend endorsements and work history. According to the article, Porch has aggregated data on 60 million home improvement projects with 600,000 photos and lists over 1.4 million professionals on its platform. The company is still private and plans to launch later in the year, with early access available via its site. Porch was founded by data, marketplace, and consumer acquisition entrepreneurs including CEO Matt Ehrlichman, with team members from Google, Microsoft, Expedia and others. The article frames the opportunity against a roughly $500 billion annual residential construction and home improvement market and notes competitors such as Houzz and Zillow's Digs.