Participated · Series C · Apr 2020

Podium provides a platform that helps local businesses collect payments, manage consumer communications, and run personalized marketing campaigns. The company’s tools include text messaging, website chat, marketing campaigns, and payment transactions. Podium says it is helping thousands of local businesses facilitate millions of interactions with consumers. Led by co-founder and CEO Eric Rea, the company plans to use new funding to reach more local businesses worldwide. Podium intends to invest in building out its payments, communications, and marketing technology. The article reports a valuation of over $3 billion following the raise. Podium offers a messaging platform for small businesses and has expanded into payments to let customers accept transactions more quickly. The company reports payments transaction volume has been roughly twice its expectations and believes payments could become a material revenue stream alongside its SaaS business. Podium reached about $100M ARR around the end of 2019 after a history of rapid ARR growth (approximately $12M in 2017, $30M by end of 2017, $50M in late 2018). To help businesses during the COVID-19 downturn, Podium is rolling out a free tier called Podium Starter with a waitlist and a plan to make it available to local U.S. businesses. Leadership says messaging demand is well-suited to reduced face-to-face interactions, and payments likewise fit contact-averse customer behavior. The company has raised significant venture capital to date and is positioned with a larger cash runway following its latest financing. Podium is a customer communication platform launched in 2014 by Eric Rea and based in Lehi, Utah. Its platform supports customer messaging, reviews, webchat and customer feedback across channels customers actually use. The product has been adopted by nearly 20,000 businesses and drives over 4 million customer interactions per month. Podium has more than 300 employees and plans to add another 100 employees by the end of the year. The company intends to use new funding to further develop existing and future products and to expand into more international markets. Podium launched in 2014 to help offline businesses get a handle on online customer reviews by focusing on reviews from verified customers. The product targets local brick-and-mortar businesses receiving reviews on Yelp, Facebook and other sites and uses an algorithm to identify online review information. Podium reports roughly 10,000 businesses in its roster (about 80,000 individual customers) and says revenue increased 600% in the last year; it is on target to hit $30 million in annual revenue by the end of 2017. The company plans to use new funding to hire a lot of engineers to build a new customer interaction platform and pursue machine-learning goals. Planned capabilities include deeper at-scale discovery, making and confirming appointments, and other features to improve the customer experience. Podium was part of Y Combinator's winter 2016 batch.

Participated · Series C · Mar 2020

Cloudbeds provides a cloud-based hospitality management platform that combines tools for operations, revenue management, guest experience, and marketing with a marketplace of third-party integrations. The platform is designed to help independent hoteliers and hosts grow revenue, streamline operations and enable memorable guest experiences. The company serves customers of 22,000+ independent properties across 157 countries. Led by CEO Adam Harris and COO Richard Castle, Cloudbeds raised $150M in a Series D to support growth. The round brought total venture funding to $253M and was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 with participation from Echo Street, Walleye Capital, Viking Global Investors, PeakSpan Capital and Counterpart Ventures. Cloudbeds intends to use the funds to grow its team, accelerate customer acquisition, expand product offerings, and invest in delivering technology to the industry. Cloudbeds provides a hospitality management suite that offers tools to manage properties of any type and size. Its software is used by more than 20,000 hotels, hostels, inns and alternative accommodations across 157 countries. Led by CEO Adam Harris and COO Richard Castle, the company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Diego, CA. Cloudbeds has over 400 employees with local teams in 40 countries and staff speaking over 30 languages. In November 2020 Cloudbeds raised $82M in a Series C financing. The company intends to use the funds to further invest in its technology platform. Cloudbeds develops an all-in-one hospitality software suite that includes property management, channel management, and a commission-free booking engine. The company’s channel manager, myallocator, is a popular standalone solution used by thousands of properties. Founded in late 2012 and led by CEO Adam Harris and President/COO Richard Castle, Cloudbeds employs 102 people worldwide. It has offices in San Diego, São Paulo, and Dublin and services tens of thousands of properties in 120+ countries. The company is using the recent financing to continue expanding operations globally.

Led · Series B · Aug 2019

Plum operates an e-commerce marketplace focused on second-hand fashion products in China. The company is described as Matrix-backed in reporting. It has reportedly completed a $20 million Series B+ financing. Investors named in the report include Japanese internet company Recruit alongside other major backers. The article did not disclose revenue, user metrics, valuation, or detailed use of proceeds. No information on prior rounds or founding year was provided in the report.

Participated · Series B · Jul 2018

Savioke, founded in 2013 by CEO Steve Cousins and based in San Jose, CA, develops and deploys autonomous robots that operate in human environments. Its flagship product, Relay, is an autonomous indoor delivery robot used in hotels, hospitals, office buildings, high-rise apartments, logistics facilities and other public settings. Relay is designed to increase productivity, revenue, and guest or patient satisfaction across those environments. In June 2018 the company raised $13.4M in a Series B, bringing total funding to $31M. Backers in the round included Brain Corp, Swisslog Healthcare, NESIC and Recruit. Savioke will use the funds to scale delivery of robotic solutions to customers and partners in global healthcare, hospitality and logistics markets. Savioke develops autonomous robots for the services industry, notably Relay, its autonomous hotel delivery robot. Relay is deployed at five of the world’s major hotel brands for routine room and coffee-to-guest deliveries. The company plans to use the new funding to expand sales, marketing and product development for Relay. Savioke raised a $15M Series A in the announced round, bringing total capital raised to $17.6M to date. The company was founded in 2013, is led by CEO Steve Cousins and is based in Santa Clara, California. Savioke is a robotics startup founded in 2013 in Sunnyvale and led by CEO Steve Cousins, formerly of Willow Garage. The company is developing a first, as-yet unnamed robot focused on the services industry, targeting hospitals, elder care facilities, hotels, restaurants and office services to take on dirty, dull and dangerous work and improve process efficiency. Its robot will be built on the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS). The team is largely composed of ex-Willow Garage staff. Savioke plans to begin customer trials later this year. Financially, the company announced a $2 million seed round to develop and build the robot, with backing from several venture investors.

Led · Series C · Apr 2015

Gengo operates a global crowdsourced translation platform that connects translators with customers and has most of its revenue coming from overseas despite being Tokyo-based. The company has processed over 300 million pieces of translated content and last year opened a data portal showing platform metrics. Management plans to use new funding to hire in the U.S. and Japan, boost sales and marketing, and develop more powerful translation tools to crack international markets and expand in Japan. Investors see growth opportunities in Japan ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Leadership has shifted: Matthew Romaine, previously CTO, became CEO and has led the new round while co‑founder Robert Laing moved to a "Special Projects" role. Financially, Gengo recently closed a $5.4M Series C and has raised over $23M to date. Gengo operates an online translation platform that taps a network of more than 7,500 pre-screened and rated translators to provide translations in 33 languages. The company’s platform serves high volumes from video, travel, e-commerce and community portals, and it is an integrated paid translation service for YouTube. Japan and the U.S. each account for about 40% of Gengo’s revenue. Gengo has been growing rapidly—its translators translated more text in 2013 than in 2012—and the team reported notable partnerships, including Google’s YouTube and 3Play Media. The company maintains a staff of about 30 in Tokyo and nine in San Mateo. Management says the new funding will be used to accelerate global expansion, improve the translation platform, and increase translation speed. myGengo operates a human-only translation service (no machine translation) and offers an API for website and app owners to access a network of over 3,000 native translators. The company charges from US$0.05 per word and has translated more than 15 million words to date. myGengo expanded from nine to 15 languages in a year and says revenue has grown 1,000%, with more content translated in Q1 2011 than in its entire prior history. CEO Robert Laing reports 63% of revenue comes from high-volume media, ecommerce and travel via the API, 17% from app localization, and the remainder from SMB and individual customers. myGengo’s customer roster includes VW, Audi, Evernote, Pulse, and Greplin. The company plans to use new capital to bolster sales, marketing, and engineering, expand its API business, and grow its global native translator network. MyGengo operates a translation platform that supplements automated techniques with a network of over 2,500 translators across time zones. It provides an API and Rails, WordPress and Django plugins, translating thousands of texts daily in 14 languages. The service translated over 5 million words in the first three months of 2011, more than in the prior two years combined. Customers include ShapeUp, Evernote, YouVersion and Producteev. MyGengo competes with Smartling, One Hour Translation and Speaklike but differentiates with a lower price point (about 25% below One Hour Translation) and developer integrations. CEO Robert Laing has said the company aims to "own" translation within major B2B2C channels, indicating a focus on enabling merchants and publishers to sell and communicate across borders. The company recently hired Kenji Yamamoto as Chief Revenue Officer and Jeff Binstock as Chief Operating Officer and has secured seed financing to support growth. myGengo provides crowdsourced human translations in nine languages, using certified translators to handle texts from short sentences to long documents entirely over the web. The service claims prices up to 70% cheaper than professional translators and launched an API in April to let developers plug on-demand human translation into websites, apps, widgets and social networks. Since the April API launch, the volume of words translated per month grew five-fold and monthly revenue grew by the same factor. The company plans to use the seed funding to expand its multi-lingual site tool “String,” build API plugins for popular frameworks, and establish a US enterprise sales operation. myGengo is based in Tokyo and has attracted a diverse, international investor base.