Led · Series A · Sep 2022

Rephrase.ai is a synthetic media production platform that creates avatars by mapping faces, synchronizing lip movements, and mimicking voice tone to generate videos from text. Customers select an avatar, background and voice, enter text, and export the resulting videos for use in sales and marketing tools. Founded in 2019 and based in San Francisco, the company has a team of 35 and expects to hire roughly 35 more by the end of the year. The new capital will be used to expand headcount with a focus on engineering, data science, product and business teams, and to build vertical solutions for industries like fintech, BFSI and direct-to-consumer. Rephrase pursues enterprise contracts and counts customers including Johnson & Johnson, Amazon, Castrol and Mondelez India (which used an avatar of Shah Rukh Khan for personalized in-store ads). The startup has raised $12.5 million to date and management reports roughly two years of runway. Rephrase.ai builds synthetic-media technology that its founders envision could one day take any script and create a professional movie without filming. In the near term the company is commercializing an engine for personalized sales videos where users select a model, background and voice and enter text the model will recite. The team spent roughly 18 months developing a method that can use about 10 minutes of footage to predict lip movements for arbitrary phrases. The platform includes safeguards to limit deceptive deepfakes: presenters control who can authorize videos of their faces, access is restricted to authorized businesses, and videos are generated from scratch rather than by transferring faces. Rephrase.ai participated in Techstars Bangalore in 2019 and is currently in early-stage discussions with potential customers. It recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding and is exploring expansions into chatbots and education.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2021

Tilting Point is a progressive free-to-play publisher that powers up existing live games using deep marketing and product expertise, technology and a user-acquisition war chest. The company works with more than 40 developer partners to scale games via UA funding and management, ASO, ad monetization, platform deployment and co-development. Founded in 2012, Tilting Point has grown to a staff of over 200 with offices in New York, Barcelona, Boston, Kyiv, Seoul, San Diego and St. Petersburg and a new Miami location. Its portfolio and published titles include Star Trek Timelines, Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest and SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, and it has acquired mobile games and assets from Playtech plc., including FTX Games and titles such as Star Trek: Timelines and TerraGenesis. The company is expanding onto new platforms (cloud-based Facebook Gaming, Nintendo Switch) and into strategic international markets like South Korea and China. Tilting Point plans to use new capital to sign more developers, co-develop more titles, acquire more studios, deepen partnerships on top IP launches and broaden its geographic, platform and audience reach.

Led · Equity · Jan 2017

Upside.com is an online travel company created by Priceline founder Jay Walker and staffed by several former senior Priceline executives, including Scott Case, Tim Brier, and Paul Breitenbach. The platform is designed to serve business travelers by offering bundled travel deals and incentives. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., with additional facilities in Stamford, CT, and New York, NY, the company aims to leverage its leadership’s deep travel-industry experience to capture market share quickly. At launch, Bloomberg reports the company was valued at more than $200 million, reflecting high investor confidence. Upside plans to deploy its fresh capital toward product development, marketing, and scaling its operations. No operating metrics such as revenue or user numbers were disclosed in the articles. The company is positioning itself as a next-generation travel solution built on dynamic pricing and personalization technologies.

Led · Equity · Jan 2016

CourseHorse operates a marketplace that enables users to discover and enroll in local classes spanning casual programs (cooking, art) to professional courses (finance, programming). Led by CEO & co-founder Nihal Parthasarathi, the company aggregates offerings from universities, cultural institutions and education providers. It works with over 1,500 class providers, listing 70,000 classes for 200,000 members nationwide. Current educators on the platform include Columbia University, Stanford Graduate School of Business, General Assembly, New York Public Library, California State University and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. The company recently raised $4M in funding and will use the proceeds to accelerate expansion beyond New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago and to expand its engineering team to build out product offerings. CourseHorse is positioned to grow its marketplace footprint and product capabilities using the new capital. CourseHorse operates a curated class discovery platform and centralized booking engine that aggregates more than 20,000 classes from over 500 local education providers. The company takes a commission on each class booked through its engine and reports strong growth metrics: traffic growing ~40% month-over-month and enrollment and revenue growing around 50% monthly. CourseHorse was co-founded by NYU graduates Katie Kapler and Nihal Parthasarathi and counts Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley as an adviser. Until this round the company had been purposely bootstrapped and lean; it now plans product expansion including a stronger recommendation engine in the next version of CourseHorse. The funds will support geographic expansion beyond New York, including a Time Out partnership to launch CourseHorse-powered discovery on Time Out’s NYC and Los Angeles sites and a planned Los Angeles launch, with two to three additional cities targeted over the next year. The team comprises six full-time employees plus contractors as it scales the product and market footprint.

Led · Equity · Oct 2015

Ampush offers a managed software platform that helps companies buy and manage mobile ads slipped into social apps' news feeds. The platform combines social targeting data from partners like Facebook with clients' CRM data and lets customers build ads and manage campaigns from a single dashboard. Ampush bills via an annual contract plus a percentage of the customer's ad spend and focuses on clients in entertainment, ecommerce, financial services, mobile gaming, and travel. The company reports strong growth this year and had been self-funded until taking outside capital. Ampush plans to use the new investment to continue developing its platform and to extend its reach to international markets. The team includes CEO and cofounder Jesse Pujji and cofounders Chris Amos and Nick Shah, and the company emphasizes proprietary integrations with platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.