Participated · Series B · Jun 2022

TaskHuman offers live, on-demand video chats with a global network of specialists across health, wellness, professional development and other personal needs, using an AI-powered natural-language search and a recommendation engine. Users pay with "TaskHuman minutes" for one-to-one sessions, and employers can subscribe to provide unlimited access, content and group sessions to employees. The company says it has over 1,000 coaches across nearly 50 countries and counts customers such as Zoom, Dr. Scholl’s, RingCentral, Purdue University, Oakland Housing Authority and U.S. Department of Labor Job Corps centers. TaskHuman plans to continue global expansion, scale its coach network, and add support for more languages and countries. Management reports annual recurring revenue has grown more than fivefold year over year. The platform emphasizes real-time, personalized engagement as its differentiator versus prerecorded or scheduled coaching offerings. TaskHuman provides an app that lets users instantly discover and connect with a global network of specialists covering nearly 1,000 aspects of daily life, including physical fitness, mental well-being, spiritual, emotional, financial, career and leadership coaching. Led by co-founder and CEO Ravi Swaminathan, the platform offers live 1:1 video calls, group sessions and in-app content. The company works with nearly 1,000 coaches from over 20 countries. Organizations can extend TaskHuman as an employee benefit; customers include Zoom Video Communications, Medidata, Purdue University, RingCentral, IntelyCare, Southwest Transplant Alliance, One Workplace and Freedom Learning Group. TaskHuman raised a $9.5m Series A and has $14.3m in total capital raised to date. The company plans to use the funds for product development, expansion into a wider range of topics, increased hiring and marketing.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2022

BlockApps develops STRATO, a blockchain-as-a-service platform compatible with Ethereum that helps enterprises build and deploy blockchain applications. The company launched in 2015 and focuses on bringing real-world assets and business processes onto a common ledger. CEO Kieren James-Lubin said BlockApps aims to bridge blockchain technology with everyday business use outside the crypto world. The firm plans to use the new funding to expand its go-to-market strategy, grow its team, expand its partner program and bring more real assets—such as land, titles and receivables—onto STRATO. BlockApps raised $41M in the new round and has $50M in total funding to date, including a prior $9M financing. The round was oversubscribed and no public valuation was disclosed. BlockApps provides STRATO, a Blockchain-as-a-Service platform that enables companies to run self-owned, extensible business networks on proven Ethereum protocols. STRATO offers enterprise features including flexible API integration, high transaction performance, and the ability to query and report on blockchain data using traditional business tools. The company works with Fortune 500 customers such as Bayer, BHP Billiton, John Hancock and United Airlines, as well as startups. BlockApps plans to use its new funding to accelerate growth in healthcare, energy, agriculture and travel, and to expand into other verticals. The company is led by CEO Kieren James Lubin and is headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y. Financial details beyond the Series A announcement were not disclosed in the article.

Participated · Seed · Jul 2021

Liatris develops scalable inorganic nanocomposite thermal insulation designed to be non-combustible, easy to install, economical, and environmentally friendly. Its core product roadmap includes high-performance R‑10/inch building insulation and a new effort to create flexible insulation for high-temperature industrial and non-combustible building uses. The company has received selective federal support, including a $1M NSF Phase II SBIR award (March 2022) and a $1.6M DOE BENEFIT award (October 2021) to advance its materials. Since winning the Sto Building Materials Challenge in 2019, Liatris has raised $4M in follow-on funding from collaborative research awards and investor funding, including an oversubscribed $1M seed round closed last July. Liatris is expanding R&D capacity by leasing a 4,880 sq ft Class A lab in Rockville, MD and adding six full-time employees to support the new projects. The company plans to scale lab infrastructure and training through collaborations with state and local programs as it moves toward commercializing its insulation products. Liatris is developing a board-based insulation that will be fully non-combustible per the ASTM E136 standard and made primarily from low-carbon inorganic materials. Its first product is a non-flammable insulation board for which lab samples have demonstrated >R-5 per inch, comparable to high-performance foam. The company intends to use the $1M seed to scale up pilot samples of this product. R&D to date has been funded by Sto (which has a purchase order in place), the National Science Foundation’s SBIR program, and the Maryland Industrial Partnership (MIPS). The patented technology was developed by Dr. Arthur Yang, Liatris’s CTO. Liatris is led by co-founder and CEO Frank Yang and is based in Bethesda, Maryland.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2019

Aperiomics, founded in 2014 and based in Sterling, Virginia, develops a next‑generation genomic testing platform designed to identify every known pathogen from a single sample. The company quickly launched a COVID-19 test in March. Management says the platform will be made available to more doctors and integrated into the healthcare system as a new gold standard in diagnostic testing. Financially, Aperiomics closed its Series A at $3 million after adding $1.2 million to an initial $1.8 million announced in August 2019. The company has also launched a $1 million bridge note to fund operations until a Series B; the bridge is led by Tamiami Angel Fund IV, which has committed $300,000 and will include executive investments. Series A investors include VentureSouth, Pipeline Angels, Atlanta Technology Angels, The Launch Place and the Central Texas Angel Network. Aperiomics applies Deep Shotgun Metagenomic Sequencing and the Xplore-PATHOSM test to identify every bacterium, virus, fungus and parasite known to modern science. The Xplore-PATHOSM Test combines advanced DNA testing, big data and infectious disease expertise to identify the root cause of infectious diseases. By offering unbiased microbial insight, the company aims to help healthcare providers prescribe more precise treatments. Led by CEO Dr. Crystal Icenhour, Aperiomics recently expanded into a new 4,700 square foot facility in Sterling, Virginia and is constructing an on-site laboratory to be completed and certified in the coming months. The company plans to use new funding to increase the number of patients served and clinicians partnered with, and to make major investments in research and development.

Participated · Seed · May 2018

Motion Gestures builds AI software for hand tracking and gesture recognition that runs on third-party cameras. The software supports any camera type (RGB, NIR, Depth), any resolution including ultra-low 32×32 pixels, and arbitrary camera positions. It tracks a 21-joint skeleton per hand, provides real-time positional coordinates, recognizes dynamic gestures at low frame rates (e.g., 20 fps), and enables custom gestures without conventional training-data collection. The solution is deployable on ordinary processors and scales the number of tracked hands with available computational resources. The company is engaged with more than 150 OEMs across dozens of industry verticals worldwide. Motion Gestures plans to use the new funds to expand operations and accelerate development; it has raised USD 2M in this Pre-A and USD 10M total including USD 4.5M in Canadian government grants. Motion Gestures develops a patent-pending machine learning platform that lets developers create gesture interfaces in minutes without coding or collecting training data. The software auto-generates training data, works across motion, touch, and vision sensors, and can be deployed to cloud, gateway/hub, and embedded platforms. Its gesture library includes letters, numbers, shapes, symbols, and rotations and supports advanced 2D and 3D gestures. The platform emphasizes ease of testing via smartphone feedback and offers a free developer license to the cloud SDK. The company aims to accelerate mainstream adoption of gesture control across wearables, automotive, consumer electronics, home automation, medical devices, VR, drones, and robotics. Motion Gestures was founded in 2016 in Waterloo, Canada. The company announced it closed seed financing to further development and begin international marketing.