Participated · Equity · Jan 2023

Notch provides an end-to-end back-of-house software platform that automates order management, bill and invoice reconciliation, and payment processing for foodservice businesses. The company partners with restaurant groups such as Oliver & Bonacini Hospitality and wholesale distributors like The Butcher Shoppe to bring operations online. In late 2022 Notch rolled out an Accounts Receivable solution for wholesale distributors to automate collections, and in Q1 2023 it plans to release an AP manager to move supply-chain payments online. The platform enables restaurants across North America to move off cash and cheques and pay vendors through the Notch system. As part of its product push, the company restructured its team and hired new heads of marketing, operations, and sales. Notch intends to use recent funding to ramp up sales and marketing and accelerate geographic expansion. Notch is a Toronto-based provider of online restaurant supply-chain software that digitizes the paper-driven wholesale food ordering process for restaurant chains and food brands. Its platform currently includes Notch Marketplace, used by nearly 1,500 restaurants across North America to shop and price-compare more than 100,000 wholesale food SKUs, invoice, track orders, receive real-time inventory updates, and forecast. Notch is developing Notch Pay, an automated payment and collection solution for restaurants and distributors. Led by CEO Jordan Huck, the company serves restaurants and distributors in the Greater Toronto Area, Chicago, and Texas (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin). The company plans to use the new capital to accelerate growth, expand further across North American restaurant chains and food brands, fund ongoing innovation, hire and retain talent, and continue U.S. expansion. The article reports the company raised $10M in funding to support these initiatives.

Led · Seed · Jan 2022

CodeSee builds tools that help developers visualize and understand how all parts of a code base fit together. The company launched the open-source OSS Port project last September and is developing a paid product currently being tested with companies. It is working on a teams and enterprise offering and a Review Maps tool that visualizes code changes in GitHub to show changes in context rather than as alphabetical file lists. CEO and co-founder Shanea Leven says the product helps developers onboard and review large, complex changes more effectively. The company has 13 employees and plans to add five or six more this year. Financially, CodeSee previously raised a $3M seed in 2020 and has now announced an additional $7M secondary seed. CodeSee develops developer tools to visualize and help teams understand how a codebase fits together; today it released OSS Port, an open source project to help disparate open source teams get a holistic view of a project. The company positions the open source product as a proof of concept for a commercial offering. CodeSee was founded and built over the last 18 months by CEO Shanea Leven and CTO Josh Leven and now has 10 employees. CEO Leven has product-management experience at Docker and Cloudflare and says the company emphasizes a deliberate, inclusive culture. The team is distributed and is considering future local hubs as it grows. Financially, CodeSee disclosed that it raised a $3 million seed round last year that had not previously been announced.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2021

54gene launched to address the underrepresentation of African genetic material in pharmaceutical research and built services including genome sequencing and a clinical diagnostics/COVID testing arm. The company expanded rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic but has since seen revenues dwindle and has shut down its clinical diagnostic arm. It conducted two rounds of major fundraising in 2020–2021 (a $15M Series A and a $25M Series B) but arranged an in-house bridge round in 2022 when its valuation was reduced from about $170M to roughly $50M. That bridge round reportedly closed with a 3x–4x liquidation preference and was funded by existing investors led by board members. The company has cut nearly 200 employees in two layoff rounds and its founder and CEO stepped down, replaced on an interim basis by the general counsel; the founder will continue in an advisory and fundraising role. 54gene is YC-backed and says the fresh capital was injected to support the company through the challenging period and position it for future paths such as additional fundraising or strategic partnerships. 54gene conducts genomics research and builds sequencing and biobanking infrastructure to advance drug discovery and precision medicine for African populations. Since launching in 2019 the company recruits voluntary participants for genetic samples via swab or blood tests and processes them in its own sequencing and microarray lab in Lagos, opened last September in partnership with Illumina. The Lagos lab offers genotyping, whole-genome sequencing (WGS) and whole-exome sequencing (WES), expanding the company’s ability to generate comprehensive genomic data. 54gene has scaled its biobank capacity from 60,000 at its last raise to about 300,000 samples and aims to manage up to 500,000. The company plans to use new funding to recruit and train technical staff, expand sequencing, target identification and validation, run precision-medicine clinical trials, and expand across East and West Africa through partnerships. Financially, 54gene has raised $25M in Series B and has raised more than $45M in total since inception. 54gene collects African genetic code and provides a proprietary platform to catalog and analyze that data for health research and drug development. Founded in 2019 by CEO Dr. Abasi Ene-Obong, the company is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a biobank facility and research lab in Lagos. It maintains an engineering team and a network of more than 300 researchers, clinicians, and geneticists across Africa. The Lagos biobank currently holds capacity for 60,000 samples; with the new funding the company plans to expand capacity to 200,000 samples and pursue a longer-term goal of 500,000. 54gene will use proceeds to boost lab processing capabilities to handle tens or hundreds of thousands of genetic samples and to hire across the organization, including a VP of finance and additional scientists. Its primary path to revenue is paid co-development of drugs and medicines with pharmaceutical companies, sharing revenues once a drug is approved and on the market. The company has also re-positioned to support COVID-19 testing in Nigeria's public health facilities and aims to offer screening in its Lagos lab with capacity for more than 3,000 tests per day once approved. 54gene is building the first and largest biobank of African DNA to bring African genetic material into global medical research. The company is collecting data from 10 of Nigeria’s largest research and public hospitals and expects to hold 40,000 participant samples. Current sampling focuses on cancer, cardiovascular diseases and metabolic conditions such as diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Sample collection at each hospital has been vetted by institutional review boards and uses informed consent from participants. 54gene operates from San Francisco and Lagos and intends to generate revenue through paid partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. The company has strengthened its team with commercial and operations hires, including Jessica Rich as chief commercial officer and Delali Attipoe as chief operating officer.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2021

Humane is developing an integrated device and cloud services platform for AI led by ex-Apple designers and engineers Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. The company remains secretive about its product but has promised a public reveal in the spring and emphasizes trust and privacy “from day zero.” Patent filings and job listings suggest a body-worn device using a laser projection system (projected AR) with cameras, depth sensors, a Snapdragon-class chip and a wearable battery, and use cases such as personal live broadcasting, senior monitoring, memory recall and a personal guide. Humane has formed strategic partnerships with Microsoft, SK Networks, OpenAI, LG, Volvo and Qualcomm for cloud processing, distribution, integration, R&D and potential automotive and smart-home adaptations. Financially, Humane has raised $230 million to date and recently closed a $100 million Series C; the company says it is investing heavily in innovation, research and development. The team has grown to exactly 200 employees. Humane is a stealth startup building a new class of consumer devices and technologies driven by a collaboration of design and engineering. The company has not released products publicly but holds patents that hint at wearable multimedia projection and fertility/hormonal-cycle awareness systems. Humane describes its aim as creating devices and a platform for what it calls the “intelligence age,” focusing on experiences built on trust and joy. The company has roughly a 60-person team and lists nearly 50 open positions across hardware, camera/computer vision, design and security roles. Financially, Humane has raised multiple rounds: just under $12M in early funding, a $30M Series A in September 2020 (per PitchBook), and a newly announced $100M Series B. Its Series B valuation was not disclosed. Humane, Inc. is a San Francisco, CA–based company advancing a new platform for the next era of computing. It creates and sells consumer hardware, software, and services designed to feel familiar, natural and humane. The company was co-founded by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. In September 2020 Humane closed a $30M Series A round. The company intends to use the funds to continue developing its innovative solutions and advance its platform for the next era of computing.

Participated · Series A · Dec 2020

Arthur.ai launched in 2019 to help companies monitor models in production and has expanded its product to include explainability and bias mitigation. The company offers tooling that detects model drift, explains model outputs, and automatically adjusts outputs to meet customers' fairness constraints. Arthur.ai’s research team has published papers and the company emphasizes diversity in its research and hiring to help prevent bias in its software. The startup has grown headcount from 17 at Series A to 55 employees today. Over the last four quarters the company averaged 58% ARR growth. Recent fundraising and board additions indicate continuing investor interest and support for product and team expansion. Arthur.ai provides a monitoring tool that detects when machine learning model performance deteriorates in production and surfaces bias and other risks. The product is designed to alert data-science teams when models stop measuring what they were trained to measure, addressing drift and fairness issues. The company says demand has increased this year and points to competition/validation from AWS’s SageMaker Clarify. Arthur.ai reported 300% revenue growth over the prior six months and has 15 customers. Headcount grew from eight to 17 over the past year, and the company expects to double again by the end of next year. Leadership emphasizes diverse hiring and partnerships with groups such as AI for All and Black Girls Code as part of its hiring and culture plans. Arthur offers a platform-agnostic monitoring and explainability product for machine learning models in production, positioned as an analogue to New Relic or DataDog for models. The product tracks model performance, helps explain model behavior, and surfaces issues like bias or degradation after deployment. The company emerged from stealth with a public product launch and says its tool works across stacks, which it views as an advantage against vendor-specific offerings from AWS and IBM. Arthur was launched in 2018, is based in New York City, and currently has a 10-person team. The company recently closed a $3.3 million seed financing to support its development and go-to-market efforts. CEO and co-founder Adam Wenchel leads the company.