The Venture Codex

Participated · Series C · Aug 2020

mPulse Mobile provides conversational AI and tailored digital health engagement, combining a healthcare conversational platform with streaming health education to nurture, educate, and activate consumers. The company reports more than a decade of experience, 150+ healthcare customers and roughly 500 million conversations annually. After acquiring HealthCrowd, mPulse says its combined reach supports over 100 million patients and health plan members and expands capabilities in Medicaid and hard-to-reach populations. HealthCrowd serves four out of five of the country’s top managed care organizations and manages lives in 34+ states, bringing complementary communications platform expertise. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate go-to-market expansion, enable product innovation, and pursue organic and inorganic growth. Financial terms of the transactions were not disclosed, though PSG became the majority shareholder. mPulse Mobile provides conversational AI solutions for healthcare that combine behavioral science, analytics and industry expertise to drive healthy behaviors. Led by CEO Chris Nicholson, the company enables healthcare organizations to activate their consumers and improve engagement. It serves more than 100 healthcare customers and powers over 300 million conversations annually. mPulse plans to use recent funding to expand its consumer conversational AI capabilities, enhance its client engagement analytics platform and broaden engagement solutions across healthcare verticals. The company recently closed a Series C round of more than $16M. mPulse Mobile provides mobile solutions for the healthcare industry designed to engage and activate consumers through tailored mobile dialogues. The company launched its Activation Intelligence product, which leverages demographic, psychographic and patient-generated data to dynamically profile users and deliver individualized mobile dialogues. Activation Intelligence is already in production in an Integrated Delivery Network diabetes self-management study covering a diverse population of more than 8,000 patients and automating tens of thousands of tailored mobile dialogues; study results will be published later this year. mPulse added 26 new clients and partners across multiple healthcare segments, including Cambia Health Solutions, Magellan Health, CityMD, Premera Blue Cross, Catasys, Docent Health and Healthx. The company intends to use the funds for market growth through strategic acquisitions and further investment in data science and artificial intelligence technology solutions. Led by co-founder and CEO Chris Nicholson, mPulse has raised a total of more than $25M to date following the Series B. mPulse Mobile spun out of secure mobile messaging company mobileStorm about a year ago to focus on the healthcare sector, which was mobileStorm's fastest-growing area. Its core product is a secure messaging platform that can send SMS, power a secure website messaging service, or be integrated into a healthcare organization’s existing app. The company serves payers, pharmacies, providers, and medical device companies and says its customer base exceeds 50 healthcare organizations. mPulse is working with Inland Empire Health Plan to engage Medi‑Cal beneficiaries and is launching pilots with other Medi‑Cal plans. Management describes communicating with hard-to-reach populations and engaging them in their health as a core company strategy. The company’s total funding has reached just over $14 million following its most recent investment. mPulse Mobile provides mobile engagement solutions for health plans, providers, and pharmaceutical companies, focusing on two-way secure messaging and consumer outreach. Its platform targets missed appointments, medication adherence, and gaps in care to improve outcomes and lower costs. The company reports more than 50 U.S. health plan, provider, and pharmaceutical clients. mPulse was granted a U.S. patent for its secure mobile messaging solution. Financially, it has raised over $13M in venture funding to date and closed an oversubscribed Series A. The company plans to hire roughly 20 team members across tech, behavioral science and analytics, account management, and sales and marketing.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2018

Qordoba provides a UX content management platform that lets product and content strategy teams manage UX copy on an integrated platform. The product measures emotion, brand adherence, language style and tone and uses industry-leading NLP and emotion-detection technology to help copywriters stay on-brand across user personas. Qordoba integrates with design and development tools so copy updates can be made without engineering resources. The company plans to accelerate development of its EQ-AI deep learning models to enable computers to understand human emotion in text. Qordoba has seen fast growth in the technology and enterprise spaces, tripling revenue year over year and adding customers such as Visa, Marriott, Conde Nast, the NBA, Postmates and Sephora. Headquartered in San Francisco, it aims to continuously optimize UI content for consistent and personalized user experiences across mobile, web and embedded applications. Qordoba offers a SaaS machine-learning solution for localization that lets users and machines interact with and extract intention from natural language and data. Its SmartSuggest machine learning product helps create localized experiences across software, websites and marketing content and is reported to produce up to a 90% reduction in content production costs. Customers named in the article include Sephora, Cartier, WorldRemit, Nutanix and Netskope. The company positions its technology as a fast, scalable way to expand from one market to many and to localize references, place names and tone in addition to language. Qordoba plans to use new financing to further invest in its machine learning technology and its ecosystem of developer tools. The company is based in San Francisco and is backed by venture investors. Qordoba provides a tech-focused localization platform that pairs human editors, translators and subject-matter experts with proprietary algorithms to source, screen and manage linguists for large, complex projects. The company emphasizes expert-sourcing over crowdsourcing and handles full-scale localization of academic textbooks, legal documents, mobile apps and websites. Machine translation is a small part of its offering; Qordoba uses technology primarily to streamline talent sourcing, manage workflows (including SMS notifications and response-time–based ranking) and build a knowledge store from past projects. The startup reports around 5,000 freelancers available, clients including Groupon, LinkedIn, HSBC and SAP, and a 20% month-over-month growth rate in new business. Qordoba has set up offices in Dubai and Frankfurt and employs full-time staff as well as remote workers worldwide. The new capital is earmarked to continue product development and scale its platform.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2018

Raken is a field-first construction management platform based in Carlsbad, California, that provides a mobile-first app for streamlining critical field workflows including daily progress reporting, time and production tracking, safety and quality management, RFIs, and resource scheduling. The platform enables real-time information flow from field to office, powerful integrations, and industry support to help contractors save time, reduce risk, and keep projects on track. Raken serves over 4,500 construction firms, subcontractors, and general contractors and has more than 70,000 users. The company emphasizes an easy-to-use mobile experience and industry-leading support to improve data reliability and decision making. Management plans to build new product features and broaden the field management platform to serve expanding customer needs. Raken provides a software platform that streamlines construction workflows such as daily reporting, time tracking and safety management. Led by CEO/founder Kyle Slager and CTO/CPO/co‑founder Sergey Sundukovskiy, its "digital toolbox" includes iOS and Android apps that connect the field to the office with daily reports, time cards, task management, project insights, photo management and more. The company serves more than 3,000 clients across all 50 U.S. states and 89 countries. Raken raised $10M in Series A funding to finance expansion of its existing product line and to develop additional construction field management workflows. The funds are intended to further build out field-management workflows for its customer base. Raken provides web and mobile reporting, compliance and project-visibility tools tailored to the construction industry. Its mobile apps are targeted toward superintendents and job foremen, while web apps give project managers and engineers real-time visibility into job-site updates. Features include safety and delay notifications delivered via text message and email. The company serves more than 2,500 clients across 13 countries and is adding over a hundred new customers every month. Raken was co-founded in 2013 by CEO Kyle Slager and CTO/CPO Dr. Sergey Sundukovskiy and is based in San Diego, CA. The company intends to use newly raised funds to accelerate product development.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2018

Rainforest QA offers a hybrid QA platform that pairs an API-driven workflow with a vetted crowd of human testers recruited and trained through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Product managers enter plain-English test scripts, and Rainforest’s distributed workforce executes them, flagging bugs and performance issues across various user scenarios. The system records testers’ key presses and click paths, generating drafts of automated tests and performance logs for PHP- and JavaScript-based apps. Today the service supports web apps on Windows and Android, with Mac and iOS web coverage slated to launch within the next month and native mobile app support in pilot with enterprise customers for release in Q4 2015. By continuously evaluating and rating new Mechanical Turk workers, Rainforest scales testing capacity rapidly without requiring clients to maintain in-house QA teams. Early customers include YC graduates Zenefits and Soylent as well as internal teams at IBM. The company has secured $4 million in seed financing to expand its platform and feature set.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2017

JazzHR provides a software platform that replaces time-consuming, manual hiring tasks with intuitive tools to find, recruit, and hire talent. The company serves over 3,000 organizations and is led by CEO Pete Lamson. JazzHR will use the new funding to accelerate strategic product development and continue go-to-market expansion. Since launching in 2009, the company has raised $25M in total funding. JazzHR is based in Pittsburgh, PA and focuses on recruiting solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. The Resumator offers a recruiting platform with scalable collaboration tools and real-time analytics designed to simplify the recruiting lifecycle, manage mobile talent pipelines and guide hiring strategies with data. Founded in 2009 by Don Charlton (CEO) and based in Pittsburgh, PA and San Francisco, CA, the company serves over 2,200 customers in 63 countries across technology, media and entertainment industries. Its product set emphasizes collaboration, pipeline management and analytics to streamline hiring for growing teams. The company plans to use new financing to expand into key markets, bolster its data and engineering teams, and establish new products and partnerships. Financially, The Resumator has raised $18M to date and is pursuing growth-stage expansion. The customer base and international reach underpin its go-to-market and product development priorities. The Resumator is a hiring platform that combines social media features and traditional recruiting tools to help companies find, sort and review applicants. The service includes tools to administer skill tests and social features that help teams make hiring decisions collaboratively. The company says it is growing very quickly and was used recently by both 2012 U.S. presidential campaigns and startups including Pinterest, Klout, MailChip, Instagram and Tumblr. Founded in 2009, The Resumator plans to use its new funding to expand its leadership team, increase customer acquisition and secure strategic partnerships. It is specifically hiring in sales, business development and operations and is looking to partner or integrate with HR service providers further up the HR technology adoption chain. The company is also working with venture capital firms and accelerator programs to attract more high-growth potential businesses. The Resumator offers web-based social recruiting and applicant tracking tools that allow employers to promote job openings and efficiently review incoming resumes. Its platform centralizes candidate submissions so multiple people within a company can collaborate to rank, track and discuss candidates, targeting what the founder calls 'deputized hiring managers' in SMBs. Customers include Evernote, Tumblr, Bump and Klout. Competitors cited in the article include Jobvite, Firefish, Sendouts and Taleo. The Pittsburgh-based company launched in 2009 and says it has been growing steadily from its small office. It has raised approximately $900,000 to date, including the most recent $700,000 round. The Resumator develops web-based social recruiting tools combined with an applicant tracking system to help smaller organizations manage hiring collaboratively and paper-free. Launched in January 2009 and based in Pittsburgh, PA, the product promotes jobs in social media and streamlines resume review. The company targets "deputized hiring managers" in smaller organizations who rely on HR email accounts and spreadsheets today. Customers include more than 200 organizations across nearly every industry. The Resumator is a graduate of Innovation Works' AlphaLab program. It plans to roll out features in 2011 to provide deeper connectivity between a business, its employees, and their social network connections.