Participated · Convertible Note · Mar 2020

On, formerly known as GameOn Technology, is a San Francisco, CA–based provider of an AI chat platform designed for enterprise use. Its platform empowers generative AI experiences that enable brands to create new and sustainable revenue streams and connect with customers and fans. The company lists partners including Valentino, Armani, the New York Yankees, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Philadelphia 76ers. On is led by Alex Beckman, Kalin Stanojev, and Nate Simmons and serves luxury lifestyle brands and sports teams worldwide. It raised $25M in the reported round, bringing total capital raised to $80M. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and broaden its business reach. GameOn Technology operates an omnichannel conversational chat platform that powers personalized, real-time experiences for brands and sports teams, delivering live scores, highlights, videos, commerce and customer service. The platform is used by major teams and properties across the NBA, NFL, NHL, PGA Tour, FIFA and ATP, and by clients such as Arsenal F.C., the Milwaukee Bucks and the Las Vegas Raiders. GameOn reports conversational click-through rates over 50% (up to 65% on commerce-related content) and claims 10x the user engagement compared with traditional paid search. The company leverages intelligent chat to deepen fan profiles across channels and to create sustainable revenue channels for brands. GameOn plans to deepen its footprint in sports and expand into diversified verticals like retail while scaling technical, business development and marketing efforts. GameOn Technology is a San Francisco–based conversational application platform that provides a proprietary end-to-end development and integration platform called ChatOS™ for messaging and voice services. The platform connects directly to brands’ CMS, data sources and API feeds to deploy rich content—scores, live updates, highlights, gifs and videos—across popular chat and voice applications. GameOn’s solution enables brands to engage fans in natural conversation and deliver dynamic content where fans are. The company counts partners such as the NBA, NHL, PGA, Arsenal F.C., Sky Sports and TIME Inc. as customers. Led by founder and CEO Alex Beckman, GameOn plans to use new capital to accelerate ChatOS development, expand into new content verticals, and increase sales efforts. The company has raised $18.5M in total capital to date, including the most recent financing. GameOn is a free iOS and Android social sports app that lets fans join team-specific “huddles” which automatically surface real-time news, scores, and highlights and allow friends to interact during games. The app supports in-stadium video sharing, in-house high-quality sticker packs tied to athletes, and plans to let athletes host public huddles for live interaction and anecdotes. Prominent athletes — including Lawyer Milloy, Sydney Leroux, Joel Embiid, Cobi Jones, T.J. Ward and Dwayne Bravo — have signed on to contribute exclusive content. The San Francisco company was founded last year and has eight employees. GameOn has recorded more than 50,000 downloads during a year of public beta testing. The startup raised seed funding to further develop the platform and expand the team.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2018

Berkeley Lights has developed a digital cell biology platform that combines bioscience, optofluidic light technology, and information to individually isolate, culture, assay and export thousands of live cells while providing visual and digital monitoring. The platform enables scientists to select and retrieve the best cells, accelerating drug discovery and development for large-molecule therapeutics. The company’s technology is used by biopharmaceutical companies working in large-molecule drug discovery and development. Berkeley Lights completed a $95M financing led by Nikon, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Walden-Riverwood Ventures, Black Diamond Ventures, and Paxion Capital, and additional new investors including Cota Capital, KTB Network, Atinum Investment, Shangbay Capital, AJS BioTree Healthcare Fund, and Varian. The company plans to use the funds to expedite solutions for cell therapy development and manufacturing, including CAR T and endogenous T-cells, and to increase research and development and expand commercial activities. Eric Hobbs, Ph.D., serves as CEO.

Participated · Series D · Apr 2018

Innovium develops the TERALYNX family of programmable switch silicon delivering 1Tbps to 25.6Tbps throughput with telemetry, low latency, programmability and large buffers, and a roadmap that scales to 51.2Tbps+. The company reports TERALYNX 7 in continued volume production, TERALYNX 5 ramping shipments for ToR, Edge and 5G designs, and the introduction of TERALYNX 8. Innovium says its products have been adopted and validated by market-leading OEM, cloud and ODM customers, including wins, deployments and trials at a majority of the top 25 cloud customers. Financially, Innovium reported revenue growth of over 5x in 1H 2020 versus 1H 2019 and achieved over 20% market share in 50G SerDes shipments. The business is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. The company plans to use new capital to accelerate R&D innovation and expand customer engagements worldwide. Innovium develops the TERALYNX family of data-center optimized switching silicon, delivering products ranging from 3.2Tbps to 12.8Tbps with a focus on power efficiency, programmability, radix, buffers, and low latency. The company emphasizes a grounds-up platform designed to meet rising data-center demands from public and hybrid cloud, machine learning, analytics, storage, and video. Innovium plans to use new funding to drive production and volume ramps of its TERALYNX 12.8Tbps and 6.4Tbps switch family and to continue product roadmap innovation and market expansion. The article notes the TERALYNX silicon is seeing market traction and volume deployment at several industry-leading customers. Innovium is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California and highlights a team with experience delivering multiple generations of widely deployed data-center products. The company states its products are software-compatible across the TERALYNX family. Innovium develops high-performance TERALYNX switching silicon targeted at data center networks. Its TERALYNX family delivers software-compatible products ranging from 3.2Tbps to 12.8Tbps with claims of unmatched power efficiency, radix, programmability, buffers and low latency. The company says its data center–focused design and patented innovations enable it to leapfrog competing products and position it as a leader in programmable large-scale data center networks. Innovium plans to use the new funding to accelerate commercialization of the TERALYNX 12.8Tbps switch silicon family and to execute on its roadmap. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. As of this round Innovium has raised a total of $90 million in financing. Innovium develops networking infrastructure products aimed at next‑generation data centers and is based in San Jose, California. The company focuses on building hardware and software solutions for data center networking (as described in the article). In 2015 it completed two oversubscribed financing rounds that together raised over $50 million. The financings drew participation from strategic and financial investors, and led to multiple additions to Innovium’s board. Rajiv Khemani is the company’s CEO and founder. The article does not disclose operating metrics such as revenue or users.

Led · Series B · Nov 2017

Bossa Nova develops real-time, on-shelf product-data robots that collect terabytes of shelf-level data to help retailers optimize the omnichannel shopping experience. Its autonomous robots drive through aisles, navigating safely among customers and store associates. The company reports deployments in 50 Walmart stores across the United States. Bossa Nova raised $29M in the reported round and has $70M in total funding to date. It intends to use the new capital to expand headcount by 50%, further R&D efforts, and explore opening international offices. The company is led by president and CEO Bruce McWilliams and has offices in San Francisco, Mountain View and Pittsburgh. Bossa Nova Robotics develops autonomous mobile robots that drive through retail aisles to detect what has sold, identify out-of-stock and misplaced items, and deliver real-time inventory data. The robots sense obstacles and navigate around shopping carts and other in-store obstructions. The company has a partnership with Walmart to deploy its machines in 50 stores. Bossa Nova plans to use new funding to scale the business and expand its team, with a focus on autonomy software and artificial intelligence. The startup is hiring to support that build-out. The San Francisco–based company was founded in 2005 and has raised a total of $41.7 million to date. Bossa Nova Robotics builds robotic technology for retailers that analyzes shelf stock and collects data to optimize inventory. Its fully autonomous robots operate in stores among shoppers and provide detailed, time-sensitive data intended to improve shelf compliance and recapture lost sales. The company says it is testing its retail robots with five of the world’s leading retail chains. Bossa Nova positions its machines as a coworker that works in tandem with store managers and employees. Founded out of Pittsburgh with an office in San Francisco, the company plans to expedite rollout and deploy its robots full-time in retail stores. It recently raised $14 million in a Series A to accelerate that deployment.

Led · Series B · Nov 2015

H2O.ai offers an open-source ML framework (H2O) plus proprietary tools and about 45 pre-built applications for use cases like fraud detection, churn prediction, anomaly detection, price optimization and credit scoring. Its software runs on existing big-data stacks and cloud storage, and the open-source component is used by over 20,000 enterprises. The company emphasizes product-led revenue (about 90% products, 10% services) and reports roughly 40% of revenues from financial services customers. H2O.ai is expanding its H2O AI Hybrid Cloud platform, H2O Wave low-code application development, AI AppStores and marketplace, and plans to build more products and hire talent. Customers named in the article include Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Goldman Sachs, MarketAxess, Franklin Templeton, BNY Mellon, Unilever, Reckitt, UPS, Chipotle and AT&T. The company positions itself to serve enterprises and ISVs that want to embed AI into workflows and vertical clouds. H2O.ai builds Driverless AI, an automatic machine-learning product introduced in 2017 that lets non-experts leverage AI without large data-science teams. The company has open-source roots and reports about 20,000 users of its open-source products. It recently introduced a recipe concept and has open-sourced 100 recipes for tasks such as credit risk scoring, anomaly detection, and property valuation. Since its Series C in 2017 H2O.ai has grown from 70 employees to 175 and says it has tripled its number of customers, though it declined to give exact counts. Customers include Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, which have also acted as investors in recent rounds. CEO Sri Ambati said the company is focused on building for the long haul and would not discuss valuation or IPO timing. H2O.AI provides an open-source AI platform and commercial products designed to democratize artificial intelligence for companies that lack deep data science resources. Its product suite includes Driverless AI, released last summer, which automates many machine learning tasks such as feature engineering. The company combines open-source tools with paid products and maintains partnerships with AWS and Azure. H2O.AI reports roughly 100,000 data scientists, 12,400 organizations, and nearly half of the Fortune 500 using its products. It was launched in 2011, has close to 70 employees, and counts customers including Capital One, Comcast, AT&T and Kaiser. With the new funding the company plans to hire more staff and expand into Europe over the next year. H2O.ai offers H2O, an open source machine-learning platform used by data scientists and developers and accompanied by tools such as Sparkling Water (integration with Apache Spark) and Flow (a notebook-style UI). The company monetizes the platform through support offerings and has added tools around the core platform, including Steam and Sparkling Water. H2O.ai says it signed 25 new customers this year — including AT&T, Comcast, Kaiser Permanente, Walgreens, Progressive, Transamerica Corporation and Zurich Insurance Group — and that over 5,000 organizations actively use the service. Financially, H2O.ai has raised $34 million to date, including a $20 million Series B announced in this round. The company plans to use the new funding to scale sales, marketing and customer success teams and to expand the partner ecosystem around the H2O platform. It also plans to improve service delivery and further simplify the use of machine learning via Excel and APIs in the cloud. H2O.ai offers an open-source predictive analytics platform designed for data scientists and application developers who need scalable, fast machine learning for smart business applications. The platform supports R, Python, Scala, Java and a REST API, enabling integration with standard data science workflows. Use cases cited include smart home appliances, self-driving cars, personalized digital content and smart assistants. Customers named in the article include Cisco, Neilsen, PayPal and over a dozen more. The company raised a Series A (amount undisclosed) and intends to use the funds to expand its customer base. H2O.ai is headquartered in Mountain View, California.