Participated · Seed · Jun 2016

Evie is an Android homescreen application that installs its own interface with a search bar to search across installed apps, contacts, restaurants, stores, movies, music, shows, phone settings and web content. It deep-links into installed apps to take users directly to relevant pages (for example, an ordering page in DoorDash) and falls back to mobile websites when apps are not installed. Evie can compare options across apps (such as delivery times and prices across DoorDash, Seamless and GrubHub) and recognizes structured content inside apps rather than just matching text. The team began working on Evie about 18 months prior to the article and positions the product more as an Android equivalent of iOS’s Spotlight Search than a traditional search engine. The company has discussed potential future integration with Google’s Instant Apps technology. Evie is a free download on Google Play and is backed by $12.6 million in seed and Series A funding.

Participated · Series A · Dec 2015

OpsClarity provides the Intelligent Operations Platform, a data-science-driven monitoring and analytics solution that automatically detects application architecture, maps system relationships, and applies domain knowledge to modern web-scale stacks. The platform uses advanced anomaly detection and streaming analytics to improve signal-to-noise ratio and accelerate event correlation and root-cause analysis. OpsClarity emerged from stealth and says the platform is available now for customers running dynamic cloud-native environments. The technical team includes veterans from Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, Google and Facebook and collectively holds nearly 50 patents in data science, machine learning and visualization. The company has raised outside capital and plans to use funding to expand its engineering team and ramp up go-to-market efforts. OpsClarity is privately held and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2015

Dome9 Security is a Mountain View, California–based cloud infrastructure security platform offering a SaaS solution to help customers manage security operations and accelerate compliance across public and multi-cloud environments. Its flagship product, Dome9 Arc, provides native API-enabled integrations with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, plus an agent-based approach to extend protection to other public clouds and on-premises deployments. The platform delivers cloud security orchestration capabilities including visualization, remediation, active enforcement and protection. Led by CEO and co-founder Zohar Alon, Dome9 targets organizations running workloads in cloud environments. The company said it will use the newly raised capital for R&D as well as sales and marketing. Following the Series C, Dome9 has raised $29M in total funding. Dome9 Security provides a platform to protect cloud infrastructure, leveraging cloud-native technologies to visualize security risks, verify and enforce security policies, and remediate threats for continuous secure application delivery. Its self-managed cloud service is trusted by more than 250 enterprise customers to protect clouds on AWS, Windows Azure, IBM/Softlayer and others. Led by CEO and co-founder Zohar Alon, the company sells purpose-built cloud security solutions and plans to expand its product portfolio. Dome9 intends to use new funding to grow its sales and marketing efforts. Financially, the company has raised $13m to date, including the latest round. The company is based in Menlo Park, CA.

Led · Series D · Jul 2015

PSafe offers a free security and privacy app for smartphones, having shifted its focus from PCs to mobile since 2010. The company claims 52% of the Android market in Brazil, representing over 40 million smartphones, and is the fifth most popular app in Google Play in Brazil. Its platform blocks about 86,000 virus attacks per day and 400,000 malicious URLs with a reported 99.9% detection rate, and it is rolling out a SafeWifi router initiative to curb wifi infections. PSafe monetizes by recommending apps and games to users, targeting by geography, device, age and gender; advertisers see an average 2% CTR and 70% retention, and Facebook is its largest of roughly a dozen advertising clients. The company spends heavily on cost-per-install marketing, which its CEO describes as the single biggest expenditure. PSafe plans to use growth capital to expand across Latin America (starting with Mexico) and says it is on track to be profitable in 2016. PSafe is a Brazilian free antivirus software that runs in the background, auto-updates and offers unlimited free cloud storage to back up users' files. The product has achieved heavy adoption among Brazil's B and C middle classes with 30 million installs and about 20 million average monthly users. Founder and CEO Marco de Mello positions the company on building trust rather than revenue; the company currently reports no revenue. PSafe plans to scale to 100 million users and is developing an in-app app, content and game store to live within the PSafe interface. The company emphasizes Portuguese 24/7 support as a cultural advantage versus international competitors. Management intends to use growth capital for technology build-out and awareness marketing to educate Brazilian users about online threats. Psafe (operating as Grupo Xangô) launched in Rio de Janeiro with a cloud-first suite that includes a free cloud-based antivirus, backup/recovery, performance optimization and secure remote access (PSafe Lockbox). The company emphasizes hosted services to minimize local performance impact and says its malware signature updates occur every five seconds across its servers. Founders Marco DeMello, Ram Rao and Ben Myers hired about 30 people and developed the first product within weeks of establishing the office. Psafe is positioning security as one feature within a broader set of hosted consumer services and plans additional products, with one product slated for launch in September and a roadmap of companies under an accelerator-like model. The company is also launching a viral rewards campaign (“Heróis da Rede”) that converts referral points into group-buying coupons. The article does not disclose revenue, user metrics, or the financial terms of the investor commitments.

Participated · Series C · Nov 2014

Boost Media provides ad optimization for search advertising by testing variants created by a network of freelance copywriters and designers, identifying the versions that produce the most clicks or highest conversion rates, and promoting the best creatives more broadly. The platform runs experiments to find the most persuasive ad copies and then scales winning variants in campaigns. The company previously operated as BoostCTR and is led by CEO David Greenbaum, who shifted the focus from small and medium businesses to enterprise customers. That strategy has resulted in more than 100 large brands using the platform. Greenbaum said he is interested in eventually moving into display advertising but is currently doubling down on search. Financially, Boost announced a $19M Series C in the latest round and has now raised $31M in total. BoostCTR operates a crowdsourced platform where copywriters and image specialists compete to create better ads and approved submissions are A/B tested against existing creatives. Customers submit ads they want optimized, and the variant with higher clicks or conversions is scaled. The company says it has a network of more than 1,000 freelancers who earn an average of $25 per hour. BoostCTR has expanded beyond ad copy to optimize images and has shifted its sales focus toward large enterprises. It has hired two data scientists and taps external resources to provide deeper feedback on campaign performance. Revenue has grown 100% quarter-over-quarter. The company also recently hired Shawn Kernes as CTO and senior vice president of product while its previous CTO moved to the COO role. BoostCTR offers a dashboard that connects to advertisers' AdWords accounts and runs contests among a bullpen of screened copywriters to generate and test new text ads automatically. Copywriters never access client accounts directly; they see contest pages and are paid (typically about $25) when their entries outperform baselines. The company sells monthly subscription credits (priced between $60 and $90) where each credit starts an optimization contest for a new ad group and offers refunds or reimbursements if advertisers are unsatisfied or if ROI doesn't improve within 10 attempts. CEO David Greenbaumsaid the startup claims it can deliver roughly a 30% lift in click-through rates and sales volume. BoostCTR faces competitors such as Trada (which requires AdWords certification and has Google Ventures backing) but plans to differentiate via scale, matching algorithms and automated testing. Planned product work includes expanding to Bing and Yahoo ad platforms, integrating with bid-management platforms, building a public API for third-party developers, and sharpening algorithms to match writers and track performance (aiming to build an equivalent of Google’s “quality score” for writers).