Participated · Equity · Oct 2020

DoubleVerify provides software for digital media measurement and analytics, helping advertisers and publishers assess media quality and performance. The company is investing in new growth areas including media performance optimization and Connected TV analytics. Financially, it arranged a $350 million investment from a new investor group and recently refinanced its credit arrangements. The new capital will primarily be used to purchase shares from existing shareholders, with a portion allocated to support continued business growth. Providence Equity Partners, which invested in 2017, remains DoubleVerify’s majority investor. The company expects the new investment round to close in Q4 2020. DoubleVerify is a New York-based provider of digital media measurement software, data and analytics that authenticates the quality and effectiveness of digital media for large brands and media platforms. Its DV Authentic Impression® product supplies clients with a KPI ensuring each ad impression is viewable, fraud-free and meets brand safety requirements. The company will use proceeds from the transaction to launch new digital advertising engagement services. Management under CEO and President Wayne Gattinella will continue to lead the company following the close. The company received a majority investment from Providence Equity Partners; terms were not disclosed but reports put the sum at approximately $200M. Blumberg Capital will remain an investor and David Blumberg has been appointed to DoubleVerify's board; Laura Desmond will be appointed as Lead Director. DoubleVerify is a New York City–based provider of online media verification and compliance solutions, launched in 2008 and led by CEO Oren Netzer. The company uses proprietary, patent-pending technology to track actual delivery of campaigns and verify compliance with insertion order terms, conditions and buying guidelines. It serves advertisers, agencies, ad networks, DSPs, exchanges and publishers. DoubleVerify employed 160 people at the time of the article and planned to add 50 more across offices in New York, Israel and London by year-end. The company received financing to support strategic acquisitions and further growth. As of this round, DoubleVerify had raised $47M in total. DoubleVerify provides ad verification services that track online ad placement and monitor compliance across the ad supply chain. Its realtime ad verification service crawls websites and automatically captures screenshots of offending ad placements, and the company reported it reduced non-compliant ad rates (10–30%) to zero after notifying sites and agencies. DoubleVerify says its technology can see ads through nested IFrames — a delivery method for roughly 70% of impressions — and claims to be the only verifier that can properly track those ads; competitors such as AdXpose dispute that claim. The company currently tracks more than 25 billion ads per month and counts over 50 Fortune 500 marketers among its customers. Competitors named in the article include Collective and AdXpose. The company has raised $10 million in a second round of funding led by Institutional Venture Partners. DoubleVerify launched a real-time ad verification service after a preliminary test period to track proper placement and compliance of online ads. The product relies largely on a custom-built site crawler that renders pages, searches for misplaced ads, and captures screenshots for inspection, supplemented by some human monitoring. A company chart showed widespread non-compliance across tested sites (10–30% non-compliance, with one site at 70%), and cases where sites briefly cleaned up after notification but then regressed, suggesting the need for ongoing monitoring. DoubleVerify says a number of blue-chip advertisers — including one of the top three banks, one of the top three telecommunications companies, and one of the top five pharmaceutical companies — now require its monitoring on their ad buys. The company positions itself against competitors such as Collective Networks and Mpire by emphasizing comprehensive verification for premium sites and ad networks and checks on placement, channel, and content adjacency. Financially, DoubleVerify was founded a year ago and recently raised $3.5 million in an investment round led by Blumberg Capital, with additional funding from First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures, and unnamed individual investors.

Participated · Series C · Jul 2020

LogDNA provides a cloud-first observability data platform that ingests, normalizes, and routes massive amounts of machine and log data to the tools and teams that need it. The company focuses on enabling developers, SREs, platform engineers, and security teams to capture the value of data in motion rather than just data at rest. LogDNA has shown substantial growth—Deloitte cited 1,293% revenue growth from 2017–2020—and has more than tripled its team in recent years while expanding its customer base to include brands such as Lifesize, Reltio, Asics, Better.com, Sysdig, and 6 River Systems. Since 2018 LogDNA has been the sole logging provider for IBM Cloud. The company plans to use the investment to deliver a new observability data pipeline solution (generally available in 2022), expand its team, and broaden strategic partnerships and integrations. Its platform is positioned to address cost, workflow, and scale challenges in modern cloud-native environments. LogDNA provides a centralized way for DevOps teams to manage and search log data to troubleshoot issues and accelerate application delivery. The product grew out of a marketing-technology backend and the company was part of Y Combinator's winter 2015 cohort. LogDNA serves roughly 3,000 customers and has about 100 employees. The company has a strategic partnership with IBM to provide logging services for IBM Cloud. Management is transitioning leadership to Tucker Callaway as CEO while co-founder Chris Nguyen moves to chief strategy officer. LogDNA plans to continue hiring and is prioritizing diversity and inclusion measures, including unconscious-bias training and an external review of hiring practices. LogDNA provides multi-cloud log management applications that give insight into development and production environments. Its platform enables teams to ingest, aggregate and view all of their log data regardless of data residency and infrastructure, with deployment options for self-hosted, cloud and multi-cloud environments. LogDNA can begin collecting and analyzing logs from AWS, Docker, Heroku and Elastic with virtually zero onboarding time and can send logs via Syslog, code library or agent. The company serves over 2,000 customers, including IBM, Instacart and Lime. Led by co-founder and CEO Chris Nguyen, LogDNA intends to use the new funding to scale its engineering, sales and marketing teams. LogDNA is an intelligent logging system that provides fast, intuitive log management for DevOps teams. The platform has seen 1,000 percent user growth in the past 12 months, surpassing 10,000 users, and many customers are logging 5–10 terabytes per day. LogDNA plans to use its new funding to invest in machine learning to help prevent server outages, to enable deployment on private clouds, and to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering teams in California. The company hopes to release on-premise and private-cloud access for larger enterprises in the next few months to meet demand driven by compliance and security requirements. LogDNA is already HIPAA compliant for healthcare customers, with SOC2 and PCI certifications described as in progress. Founders Chris Nguyen and Lee Liu, Ryerson University graduates, moved to Silicon Valley after participating in Y Combinator's Winter 2015 cohort. LogDNA was founded by Chris Nguyen and Lee Liu after a “Slack moment” when a tool they built for their ecommerce business proved more valuable than the original product. The company provides logging and server-management tools that aim to proactively identify patterns in log data to reduce outages and alert DevOps teams before failures occur. It offers a free plan that stores up to 50GB of log data per month and an enterprise tier priced at $999 per month for up to 1TB. With fresh funding, LogDNA intends to add more product features, integrate into other services, and work to improve its user numbers. The service is positioned for business customers who need to maintain a strong digital presence and minimize disruptions. Competitors named in the article include Loggly, Logentries, Sumo Logic, and Scalyr.

Led · Equity · Dec 2019

Smartly.io provides a multi-platform advertising solution that combines creative production and ad buying automation to help brands create, launch and iterate brand and performance advertising. The platform enables advertisers to manage and optimize creative and ad operations across Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest and has been an official Facebook Marketing Partner since 2014. Smartly.io serves over 600 brands, including customers like Uber, eBay, Under Armour and Samsonite, and manages more than €2.5 billion in ad spend (2019). The company employs over 350 people across 16 offices worldwide and says it is growing rapidly and profitably. Management plans to continue building the platform’s creative and optimization capabilities and to bring brand and performance teams closer together. Smartly.io builds automated marketing software that creates ads and videos from product images and manages audience targeting and budget allocation for Facebook and Instagram advertisers. The platform decides when and where to purchase advertising and the company launches new Facebook formats and tools weekly. Smartly.io aims to become multi-platform, expanding to Google, Pinterest and Amazon. It serves more than 500 agencies and brands, has reached a $1 billion run rate in ad spending on its platform, and employs about 150 people. The company has been profitable for two years and handles all customer support in-house, with most salespeople possessing coding experience. Management is focused on U.S. and international expansion and may pursue acquisitions or a more aggressive growth strategy. Smartly.io offers a platform for planning, creating, and optimizing Facebook ad campaigns, serving many of the largest e-commerce companies in Europe. The company launched in 2013 and became a trusted member of the Facebook Marketing Partner community. Case studies cited in the article include a 3.1x CTR increase for Linio.com and a 375% increase in web traffic plus a 48% increase in sales for We Effect. Smartly.io emphasizes dedicated real-time support and rapid implementation of new Facebook features, and it offers a free two-week trial and demos. CEO and founder Kristo Ovaska was named ‘Founder of the Year’ and the company won ‘Best Newcomer’ at the Nordic Startup Awards. The company is hiring for software engineering and management roles as it looks to expand its team.

Led · Series A · Feb 2018

Jobcase operates a social platform focused on empowering and advocating for workers, offering access to jobs, tools, resources and a peer community. The company reports more than 110 million registered members and about 20 million monthly active unique users. Recent product features include virtual hiring events and an onsite unemployment resource center to help workers and employers navigate COVID-19–related challenges. Jobcase also powers a network of job sites and supports nonprofit-driven activities via its Jobcase network. The company plans to use new capital to accelerate product development, member services, and employer partnerships. Jobcase collaborates with employers, nonprofits and government agencies to improve and diversify access to workforce opportunities. Jobcase is a free, open-access social media platform where members manage all aspects of their work lives. The company serves more than 100 million registered members and records over 25 million unique monthly visitors. Its technology also powers over 100 career-related sites. Jobcase is led by founder and CEO Fred Goff and employs nearly 200 people. The platform offers career resources, community support, and services to help members with hiring, job search, and workplace issues. The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate product development and expand services for Jobcasers through internal growth and potential strategic acquisitions. Jobcase is a Boston, MA-based social platform focused on work that provides community and technology-backed tools to help members and employers navigate a changing labor market. Its platform manages job-related activity and offers access to the knowledge, connections and wisdom of over 80 million registered members. The company’s technology powers more than 100 job sites in the Jobcase Network and it is an industry-affiliated partner of MIT’s CSAIL. Jobcase builds tools — including blockchain-based capabilities — aimed at preparing members for frequent job changes and more contract and part-time work. Led by CEO Fred Goff, the company intends to use new funding to accelerate its growth rate. Financially, Jobcase closed an $11.5M Series A-1 on top of a $7M Series A, bringing total 2017 proceeds to $18.5M. Jobcase operates a Boston-based social media platform focused on America's workforce, partnering with employers to power hiring initiatives and promote local talent brands within communities. Led by CEO Fred Goff, the company also collaborates with non-profits to run job fairs, career clinics and other training and development initiatives. Jobcase is an industry-affiliated partner of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The company reported a team of 115 employees and over 75 million registered members. It plans to use new funding to hire additional staff and add up to 40 employees at its Kendall Square headquarters by summer 2018.

Led · Series A · Nov 2015

SnapApp offers an interactive content creation platform that lets marketers build personalized experiences without developer resources and integrates with top marketing automation tools. The company serves enterprise customers including Paycor, Cisco, CEB, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Blackbaud, and Equifax. Founded in 2011 by Seth Lieberman, SnapApp is headquartered in Boston, MA. In August 2017 it closed a $10.2M Series B round. The company said it will use the funds to accelerate product development and innovation, drive sales growth, and pursue potential acquisitions. The platform’s positioning targets B2B marketing teams seeking measurable, interactive content workflows. SnapApp provides online tools for building calculators, quizzes, infographics, interactive videos and other types of interactive content for marketers. The platform is used by marketers—particularly those selling to other businesses—to engage prospects and collect business intelligence. Customers named in the article include Oracle, Cisco and EMC. CEO Seth Lieberman said interactive content enables marketers to better educate and guide prospects while collecting data on customer challenges. Lieberman also referenced a DemandGen report showing buyers are using more interactive tools to make purchase decisions. The company recently secured a notable financing round to support its growth.