• Piano

  Led · Equity · Nov 2013

  Piano offers an end-to-end digital experience platform that combines data architectures, AI, and commerce features to help brands and publishers identify, understand, and serve customers at scale with privacy compliance. Its platform is designed to operate at massive scale and deliver audience experiences faster than competing solutions. The company serves global, national, and local brands across six continents and maintains more than 15 offices, with U.S. headquarters in Philadelphia. Piano was founded in 2010 and has been recognized by Red Herring, the World Economic Forum, and Deloitte for its growth and innovation. The company intends to use new capital to enhance platform capabilities, expand market presence, and support strategic growth initiatives. The articles do not disclose revenue or user metrics. Piano builds analytics, subscription and personalization tools for publishers, combining paywall and subscription management with content analytics and audience-engagement features. The company works with around 1,000 customers, including CNBC, Wall Street Journal, The Economist and TechCrunch. Revenues have grown 400% since 2019 and Piano is operating at roughly a $75M annual run rate. It acquired French analytics firm AT Internet in March to better integrate cross-silo traffic, advertising, subscription and engagement data. Piano plans to expand into newsletter products and other audience-connection areas, and may pursue further M&A to consolidate fragmented capabilities. The company will use new funding to continue building its technology and to explore integrations with strategic partners. Piano provides a monetization and audience intelligence technology platform that includes a subscription commerce engine, a customer experience toolkit, and a user management system. The company serves more than a thousand premium media brands, including Business Insider, The Economist, Bloomberg, Men’s Health, AdAge, Digiday and The Chive. Led by CEO Trevor Kaufman and based in New York City, Piano employs about 180 staff across seven offices from New York and London to Rio De Janeiro. The company raised $22M in a Series B to fund continued product and service enhancements and to grow across functions, particularly R&D and client services. Piano plans to expand into new markets and sectors and is considering several acquisitions. Tinypass provides an e-commerce platform that lets content creators and publishers monetize digital content with paywalls, downloads and a variety of pricing, access and subscription options. The platform integrates with publishers' existing site infrastructure and content management systems, is free to set up, and scales from individual bloggers to multi-national publications. Tinypass reports high conversion rates across its publisher base and says it has been growing at roughly 40% month-to-month since the beginning of the year. Its client roster includes major media companies, local newspapers, online education providers, health and wellness sites, business information providers and research organizations. The company closed a $3 million financing round led by Cascabel Management and Plough Penny Partners, after previously raising $1.25 million in seed financing in 2012. Tinypass has also added senior hires — a COO, CTO and an EVP of sales & business development — which it frames as the next step in its mission to simplify digital content monetization.

• basno

  Participated · Series A · Jul 2013

  Basno operates a digital badges platform that lets people create, collect and display badges recognizing real accomplishments, skills and expertise. The company is shifting away from gamified check-in style badges toward achievement-based awards (e.g., running a marathon) and attaches rewards such as prize-draws, VIP access and loyalty discounts to encourage display. Examples of attached offers include entry to win a $250 Foot Locker gift card and partners seeding the ecosystem with rewards like Virgin America bonus miles. Basno supports badge syndication to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and embedding in blogs and email signatures, and serves the majority of its traffic via mobile browsers. Its business model is freemium, with badge issuers paying for premium distribution, analytics and design tools. The company plans to use new funding to grow the team, create deeper badge-owner experiences, develop self-serve tools for issuers and onboard high-quality brands, with an initial head start in the athletics vertical.

No current team members are available.