Participated · Series D · Aug 2022

CleverTap operates cloud-based customer management and engagement tracking tools that sift through app data to offer contextual and personalized recommendations and to run campaigns and feature tests. Its platform powers over 10,000 apps and is used by more than 1,200 customers, including EA, TED, Gojek, Mercedes Benz and Canon, across more than five dozen countries. The company started its journey in India and is headquartered in California, and it has been expanding adoption in the U.S., Europe, the U.K. and other international markets. CleverTap positions itself to compete on features and pricing by leveraging India’s developer talent and scalable inside-sales capabilities. After the latest financing, the company is valued at about $775 million. CleverTap is an AI-powered customer lifecycle and user retention platform that leverages machine learning to offer an engagement suite for converting, engaging, retaining, and growing mobile user bases. Led by co-founder and CEO Sunil Thomas, the company serves over 8,000 consumer brands worldwide, including Vodafone, Star, Sony, Discovery, Fandango LATAM, Carousell, and Gojek. CleverTap completed a $35M Series C funding round, bringing total funding to $61M. The round was led by Tiger Global Management and Sequoia India, and the company is backed by Sequoia India, Tiger Global Management, Accel, and Recruit Holdings. The company intends to use the funds to build a US-based engineering hub, grow teams across engineering, sales, and marketing in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and add enhanced predictive capabilities to its platform. CleverTap also plans to accelerate its global go-to-market expansion and operates out of Mountain View with offices in San Francisco, Seattle, London, Singapore, and Mumbai. CleverTap is a global customer lifecycle management platform that enables businesses to deliver omnichannel experiences to millions of customers in real time. It uses a proprietary big data and artificial intelligence engine to analyze billions of user actions and provide marketing and growth teams with customer context across the customer journey. Led by CEO and co-founder Sunil Thomas, the company serves more than 8,000 companies, including Vodafone, Star, Sony, Domino’s Pizza, GO-JEK, Cleartrip and BookMyShow. The company has offices in San Francisco, London, Singapore, Mumbai and Bengaluru. CleverTap intends to use the new funds to accelerate its data science-driven product capabilities and to scale to meet demand for its platform. The Series B increased the company's valuation to more than $150m. WizRocket provides a mobile engagement platform and SDK that helps companies fine-tune mobile, web, and email notifications, tailoring messages based on demographic data and past interactions and analyzing campaign performance. Developers install its SDK to customize notifications and measure whether campaigns work. The company says it has served over 350 customers and its platform reaches more than 20 million unique visitors each week. Clients have included Freecharge, Disqus, Pricebaba and Zovi.com. WizRocket plans to use new capital to launch an API for developers and a new engagement platform. The startup is Palo Alto–based and has raised $9.6 million to date.

Participated · Series D · Mar 2022

HackerRank provides a skills-based recruiting platform that offers coding assessments for employers and practice and interview-preparation tools for developers. The company emphasizes developer training and privacy, allowing developers to control whether they share their practice results. HackerRank says it is a “hardcore recruiting platform,” not an edtech company, and has leaned into remote hiring trends that expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports 2,800 customers—including portions of the Fortune 100—and 18 million developers on the platform, with roughly 50% of developers in India, 30% in the Americas and 20% in EMEA. HackerRank is based in Mountain View and was conceived by founders Vivek Ravisankar and Hari Karunanidhi while they were in India. The company recently raised funding and reported a valuation of around $500 million according to its CEO. HackerRank operates a skills-based recruiting platform and an online coding challenge community used to evaluate and match developer talent. The company runs HackerRank for Work, which customers including five of the top eight commercial banks, auto manufacturers, retailers and others use to recruit technical staff. Since launching in 2012, the community has grown organically to over 3.4 million developers and the company has about 150 employees. Over the last year HackerRank expanded beyond core programming skills to support roles such as DevOps and database specialists. The company was cash flow-positive for part of 2017 and expects to return to that state in the near future. Management plans to invest in customer acquisition, the community, and machine learning/data science to improve employer–candidate matching and expand the product portfolio. HackerRank operates a hiring platform focused on technical assessments and candidate screening and has launched DbRank, a screening tool for database programmers, business analysts and data scientists. DbRank evaluates candidates by having them run real-time database queries and automatically scoring their performance, initially covering Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL and MSSQL, with NoSQL support likely to follow. The company received a $7.5M strategic investment from Recruit Holdings’ HR Technology Fund, bringing total funding to $19.9M. Recruit, a major information‑services and HR player with over 28,000 employees and holdings that include Indeed, is expected to help HackerRank expand in the Asia‑Pacific region. Since its Series B last year HackerRank has grown headcount from 40 to 125 and recently hired Scott Gilfoil as head of HR and talent. In the coming months the company plans to expand its India operations beyond its Bangalore office to Mumbai, Delhi and other cities. HackerRank operates a code-challenge community alongside a white-label recruiting platform focused on technical hiring. Its core offerings include sponsored coding challenges and a real-time whiteboard with a built-in code editor for technical phone interviews. The company has doubled its revenue every quarter for the last three quarters, monthly active users are growing 20–25% month-over-month, and about half a million developers are active on the site. Most recent growth has come from the white-label recruiting product rather than its original public challenges. HackerRank plans to grow its sales team rapidly to capitalize on momentum and to expand its product into additional domains such as networking and database administration. Customers using the service include Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, VMware, Skype and Square, and the company has begun making inroads with non-tech firms as well.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2019

SKALE operates an elastic, proof-of-stake blockchain network designed to give dapps high throughput and low transaction costs. The company launched a testnet last year and established the NODE Foundation earlier this year. SKALE says the network will enable dapps to conduct “millions of transactions per second at a fraction of the cost of what’s possible today.” There are currently 23 dapps on the platform and a roughly 20-person engineering team; the company plans to add more engineers. The recent funding will be used to launch the mainnet, seed and stabilize the network, and increase security. Founders include Stan Kladko, Ph.D. and Jack O’Holleran. Skale Labs is building a permissionless, layer-2 blockchain aimed at giving Ethereum decentralized application developers a new base platform. The company intends to run the first implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine on a Plasma chain to enable smart-contract execution off mainnet. Skale says its network will allow dapps to conduct "millions of transactions per second at a fraction of the cost" of current options. The project plans to launch a testnet by the end of 2018 and activate mainnet in the following year. Skale also intends to create a foundation to support the network similar to the Ethereum Foundation. The recent fundraising will support development of this scalability infrastructure.

Participated · Initial Coin Offering · Sep 2019

Stacks provides a Layer-2 solution that anchors transactions to Bitcoin’s base layer, allowing developers to build smart contracts and decentralized applications while retaining Bitcoin’s security and decentralization. Its technology targets the gap left by Bitcoin’s lack of native programmability, positioning Stacks as an alternative to Ethereum and Solana for Web3 development. The company plans to use new capital to enhance scalability, reduce latency, and expand developer tooling, making it easier for developers and enterprises to create Bitcoin-based DeFi, NFT, and other Web3 products. A substantial portion of resources will fund global collaboration initiatives, hackathons, and education programs to grow the developer ecosystem. Stacks also intends to bolster its Growth Engineering team and broader ecosystem development efforts. Industry analysts cite the platform’s anchoring model as a competitive advantage that aligns with rising demand for Bitcoin Layer-2 solutions. While the company has not disclosed revenue or user numbers, the fresh funding signals investor confidence in its growth trajectory.

Led · Series D · Feb 2019

Presto Phoenix develops a voice artificial intelligence platform purpose-built for quick-service restaurant (QSR) drive-thrus. Its technology aims to increase restaurant revenue, cut labor costs, boost staff productivity, and improve the overall guest experience by automating order taking. The company positions its product as an enterprise solution that can be rapidly deployed across large QSR chains. A graduate of Y Combinator, Presto Phoenix plans to use newly raised capital to scale operations and accelerate product development. Management highlights the platform’s ability to serve high-volume, multi-location operators, although no user or revenue figures were disclosed. The firm’s recent funding underscores growing investor interest in applied voice AI within the food-service sector.