Participated · Series A · May 2021

Betterhalf is a marriage-focused platform that provides online dating, technologically enhanced wedding planning, and astrological services. The company was founded in 2019 by Rahul Namdev and Pawan Gupta. Betterhalf reports its annual revenue doubled over the prior six months and its total user base has tripled since June of last year. It now boasts more than 1 million active users per month. The company says it will use new capital to maintain growth momentum and expand offerings. Management aims to develop Betterhalf into a “super app of marriage and wedding services.” Betterhalf.ai is an AI-driven matrimonial app backed by Y Combinator. The startup raised $3 million in a pre-Series A round with participation from S2 Capital, Quiet Capital and angel investors including Kunal Shah and Samvit Ramadurgam. It will use the funding to boost app engagement, build monetisation features, and improve product discovery across organic channels. Co-founder Pawan Gupta said the round closed after Y Combinator Demo Day and signals investor confidence in the readiness of 100M urban Indians for a new-age matrimony app. The company aims to grow its revenue run rate from $1M to $5M ahead of a Series A. The proceeds are positioned to support growth and product development toward that next milestone. Betterhalf.ai is an AI-driven dating platform focused on helping working professionals find partners with marriage intent using compatibility scores derived from users' interactions and multiple relationship dimensions. The product leverages past relationship data from millions of couples worldwide to generate personalized experiences, targeted subsets of matches, and faster match turn-around. It emphasizes verified matches that include professionals at companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Adobe, and Accenture. To reduce fake or junk profiles the startup employs a six-level verification process covering mobile number, work email, personal email, government ID, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The company plans to deploy its fresh seed capital toward building AI capabilities and investing further in technology and talent. Betterhalf.ai was founded in 2016 and operates out of Bengaluru and Massachusetts.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2016

Skymind offers an enterprise AI platform and tools—including its core SKIL framework—that let data scientists build end-to-end workflows from data ingestion and cleaning to model training and production. Its tooling aims to close the gap between data science and IT, with particular focus on text and time-series data for natural-language processing and stream predictions. Skymind is the company behind the Java open-source library Deeplearning4j and is a major contributor to the Python Keras framework. Customers include ServiceNow and Orange, and technology partners include Cisco and SoftBank. The company plans to use its new funding to grow its North American team, accelerate customer acquisition and expand into Asia, leveraging lead investor TransLink Capital's expertise connecting North America and Asia. Financially, Skymind just closed an $11.5M Series A and has now raised a total of $17.9M to date. Skymind develops Deeplearning4j, an open-source deep-learning library for Java, and complementary tools for implementing and deploying models (including the Skymind Intelligence Layer, SKIL). Deeplearning4j remains the core product, aimed at enabling the large population of Java developers to build AI solutions. SKIL is positioned to integrate with existing enterprise tooling like Hadoop and is already used by Orange SA for production deep-learning projects. The company employs 15 people who work remotely across Japan, South Korea and Australia, with a small SoMa headquarters. Skymind’s libraries were downloaded 22,000 times in the last month, growing about 17% month over month. Leadership says it will continue to build tools for data scientists and may add packages to democratize reinforcement learning for businesses.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2016

Lucid VR develops a pocket-sized VR camera that captures 3D 180-degree videos using binocular lenses and two microphones to recreate depth and peripheral vision. The camera is designed for instant viewing on mobile phones with Google Cardboard or other VR headsets. Led by co-founder and CEO Han Jin, the company crowdfunded its first production run in December 2015. Those first cameras were slated for delivery in the latter half of 2016. Lucid VR intends to use its recent funding to bring the 3D VR camera to mass production and has signed a partnership agreement with Wistron Corporation to support that effort. The company is based in San Francisco, CA.