• Credit Sesame

  Participated · Equity · Oct 2017

  Credit Sesame is a San Francisco–based financial wellness platform that leverages technology, AI and analytics to help consumers achieve financial health and stability. Led by CEO Adrian Nazari, the company offers tools to monitor and improve credit profiles and personal finances. In summer 2021 the company acquired Zingo, a fintech software services startup, to integrate rent reporting into its offerings. Using Zingo’s intelligent data platform, Credit Sesame will collect, verify, and report rental payments to the credit bureaus to help consumers establish or improve credit based on consistent rental payments. Later in 2021 the company plans to launch a feature that allows consumers to use cash to build and enhance their credit profile with no credit check. Credit Sesame completed a $51M growth funding round to support these product expansions. Credit Sesame provides a Personal Credit Management (PCM) platform that surfaces actionable insights to help consumers improve credit scores and overall financial health. Its RoboCredit algorithm builds on a TransUnion score and additional factors to recommend debt-rebalancing and other actions. Initial score checks are free; the company earns fees when users take referred products (refinances, new credit, balance transfers) and from premium services such as advanced identity-theft protection. Credit Sesame says it is already profitable and has grown revenues roughly 90% each year for the last five years. The company plans to use new funding to further develop its AI algorithms and expand the business, delaying major M&A until after an expected IPO. CEO and founder Adrian Nazari positions the product as differentiated from competitors by focusing specifically on credit management rather than broader personal financial management. Credit Sesame provides a mobile and web robo-advisor platform that leverages consumer data, analytics and thousands of rules to simplify and automate management of consumer credit and loans. The product gives users free access to their credit profile, including credit score, credit report grades, credit monitoring, and interactive step-by-step tools with recommendations for better lending options. Launched in 2011 and led by founder and CEO Adrian Nazari, the company reports over 12 million members. The recent financing will be used to accelerate growth, drive member acquisition, hire over 100 new employees, and advance its analytics, robo-advisor and machine-learning technologies. Credit Sesame positions its core offering around financial wellness and automated credit-management insights. Credit Sesame provides online and mobile tools for consumers to monitor credit, protect against identity theft, and reduce debt through credit and loan management. It focuses on the liability side of personal finance—helping users consolidate or refinance debt and find lower-rate credit options—and competes with services like Credit Karma and ReadyForZero. The company reports $50 billion in active user loans under management (up from $20 billion in 2012) and over $2 billion in consumer loan originations by partner platforms. CEO Adrian Nazari says last year the company saw threefold revenue growth and sevenfold growth in its alternative lending vertical. Credit Sesame offers free products plus premium paid services, and plans to expand customer acquisition and its credit and loan management offerings. It is expanding its team (now over 50, expected to roughly double in 12 months) and its offices in San Francisco, and is preparing new products including an Apple Watch app, Siri integration, and a millennial-focused product. Credit Sesame provides a proprietary analytics engine that analyzes a consumer’s credit profile against thousands of available financial products to identify opportunities to save money and meet individual financial goals. The company offers a free service and a mobile app that centralizes credit and loan monitoring in one place. Its solutions were developed by Stanford University scientists and the analytics tools are patent-pending. Founded in 2010 by CEO Adrian Nazari, the company has been expanding product capabilities and reach. In November 2012 Credit Sesame raised $12M in new funding to support those efforts. The company intends to use the proceeds to expand the reach of its services, continue developing its analytics, and hire marketing and engineering staff.

• iovox

  Led · Series A · Feb 2017

  IOVOX provides call analytics and collaboration solutions designed to make data from business phone calls as useful and actionable as email or chat. The product lets users seamlessly sync, store, organize, and search call data across mobile and desktop devices. IOVOX serves large brands such as British Telecom, Zoopla, AutoTrader U.K., and Pizza Express, and has global customers in more than 30 countries. The company recently expanded into the United States and operates an office in Mill Valley, California as a hub for U.S. growth. With new funding, IOVOX plans to widen its addressable market by executing a product strategy and expanding its U.S. presence. The company completed a $10M Series A round of equity and debt financing to support these plans. IOVOX is a VaaS (Voice as a Service) provider whose telephony platform gives real-time visibility into all aspects of telephone traffic, enabling customers to track, analyse and optimise lead generation from telephone campaigns. The platform allows companies to build services on the telephone network that perform tasks that would normally require call centres; customers include News International and others. IOVOX has built a reputation in Europe as a bespoke enterprise player and competes with AdInsight, Tropo and Twilio. The company has taken investment from Octopus Investment (specifically the Octopus Titan 4 VCT and Octopus Titan 5 VCT) to fund expansion. Terms of the investment were unreleased, though the deal reportedly allows the founders to retain control and was characterised as an institutional round that is neither very small nor a blockbuster. CEO and founder Ryan Gallagher said the cash will be used to scale up the business based on demand from customers such as BT and to expand services into new geographies.

• FiscalNote

  Participated · Series C · Feb 2016

  FiscalNote delivers legislative and regulatory data, policy news and analysis, stakeholder management, collaboration and advocacy tools to customers worldwide. The company serves more than 4,000 clients, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Reserve Board, 3M, AstraZeneca and the American Hospital Association. Led by Founder & CEO Tim Hwang, FiscalNote operates offices in the US, Belgium, India and Korea. The product suite focuses on aggregating and analyzing regulatory and legislative information to help organizations manage policy risk and advocacy. FiscalNote intends to use recent financing to accelerate technology and service development, pursue strategic acquisitions, expand into new international markets and refinance existing debt. FiscalNote builds a platform for analyzing government risk, using proprietary code to parse millions of regulatory and legislative actions and generate actionable insights for investor, compliance, and legal professionals. Its product suite includes powerful legislative searching, tracking, and forecasting tools alongside federal and state regulatory data and analytics. The company offers a mobile application that lets users access and analyze every bill at every stage from all fifty states, D.C., and Congress. FiscalNote's customers include Southwest Airlines, Aetna, Lyft, the Democratic Governors Association, VMWare, Planned Parenthood, Allergan, the University of Virginia, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. The company emphasizes design and real-time analytics and says it aims to unlock legislative and regulatory data with best-in-class analytics, insights, and predictions. Financially, the company has raised multiple rounds and recently completed a financing that increased its total funding to over $30 million. Founded in 2013 by CEO Tim Hwang, FiscalNote provides legislative searching, tracking, and forecasting products built on artificial intelligence and design. Its flagship product is Prophecy, and the company said it will introduce a regulatory product called Sonar later this year. FiscalNote's product suite is used by customers including Uber, the Democratic and Republican Governors Associations, VMWare, Planned Parenthood, United Therapeutics, Allergan, Auction.com, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. In March 2015 FiscalNote raised $10M in a Series B funding round to support expansion into new markets. The company previously raised a $7M Series A in November 2014. FiscalNote provides the Prophecy platform, which applies artificial intelligence to real-time and historic legislative data and offers search and advanced notification functionality. The Prophecy platform was launched in early 2014. Customers include Planned Parenthood, New Balance, VMware, Natural Resource Defense Council, Ally Financial, Allergan, both the Republican and Democratic Governors Associations, and the University of Virginia School of Law. FiscalNote closed a $7M Series A led by Visionnaire Ventures with participation from AME Cloud Ventures, NEA, Green Visor Capital, Winklevoss Capital and angel investor Duke Chung. The company intends to use the funds to continue content expansion, increase engineering capacity to cover information domestically and globally, and grow its sales and marketing teams. FiscalNote was co-founded by CEO Tim Hwang, Jonathan Chen and Gerald Yao. FiscalNote aggregates legislative data posted to public sources to help businesses stay up-to-date with state and local legislation. It is developing the PoliticalGenome Project, which analyzes bill language and the histories of legislators to predict a bill's success. The nine-person startup uses machine learning and natural language processing and plans to boost its algorithm and expand its ML/NLP team. FiscalNote is conducting a closed beta with customers that include legal and marketing departments within Fortune 500 companies, national advocacy groups, and financial institutions. Founders include CEO Tim Hwang, CTO Jonathan C. Chen, and CFO Gerald Yao, and the advisory board includes Chris Lu, Youngsuk "Y.S." Chi, and LegalZoom CEO John Suh. The company intends to expand beyond legislation into other industries and geographies.

• TodayTix

  Led · Series A · Dec 2014

  TodayTix is a mobile ticketing platform that helps users discover and buy tickets to theater and other live experiences. Founded in 2013, it began as a mobile equivalent of New York’s TKTS booths and has sold more than 4 million tickets. Those sales represent about 8% of annual Broadway ticket sales and 4% of London’s West End; the app currently offers tickets to 297 shows in New York and operates in 15 markets. The company plans to add more cities driven by partnerships and user demand and to expand offerings beyond traditional theater into comedy and experiential shows. TodayTix runs a TodayTix Presents program to produce shows at a smaller scale and is positioning itself as a media and discovery platform with curated content. Product investments include improved personalization, curation, and faster checkout flows (targeting purchases in 30 seconds or less). TodayTix is a mobile app that provides on-demand access to discounted and full-price last-minute theater tickets across key markets. Launched in December 2013 by Merritt Baer and Brian Fenty in New York City, the app operates in six markets including New York City, London, San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Washington DC and Chicago. The company has partnerships with more than 150 theater institutions globally and reports more than one million users. TodayTix says it now sells an average of two tickets per minute worldwide, quadrupled its sales and user base year-over-year, and accounts for four percent of all Broadway tickets; 54% of transactions are from repeat customers, 91% of users report seeing more shows due to the app, and over 45% see at least three additional shows per year. The Series B proceeds will be used to invest in product innovation, technology, geographic expansion and marketing to grow the user base and market reach. TodayTix offers a mobile-first ticketing app that lets users browse shows, pick showtimes and seats, pay on mobile, and optionally have tickets handed to them outside the theater. Launched by two Broadway producers (including Merritt Baer) and co-founder Brian Fenty, the app has gained rapid traction selling roughly 2–3% of tickets for most Broadway shows in New York City. In nine months since founding it hit a $20 million annual revenue run rate. The product is available on iOS, Android, and Amazon devices and targets a younger demographic (average customer age 32). The company plans to use funding to deepen its NYC presence, launch in London in Q1 2015, build a team of data scientists and technologists, and expand to other cities where touring theater is popular. TodayTix offers simple iOS and Android apps for buying last‑minute theater tickets up to a week in advance, with listings, seating charts and discounted and full‑price options. Six months after launch it had 120,000 users, 15 employees and was earning a 12% margin on purchases while sales were growing 40% per month. Forty percent of its users are active monthly, 40% of sales come from repeat customers, and roughly 50% of purchases in the app are for full‑price tickets. The app charges a flat $5 convenience fee per ticket, collects small commissions on box‑office pickups, and offers a $5 concierge pickup option. Currently only in New York City, TodayTix is preparing to launch in London’s West End this year and has expansion plans for Chicago, Las Vegas and beyond. To support growth it is working with mobile deep‑link retargeting systems like URX and has raised early capital to fund expansion.

• OnDeck

  Participated · Debt Financing · Aug 2012

  OnDeck provides working capital and short-term loans to small businesses, using proprietary FICO-like credit models that evaluate business data such as revenue and repeat customers. The platform can make lending decisions within minutes and fund within a day. Average loan size is $40,000, with loans up to $250,000 and typical terms of 3–24 months. Tens of thousands of businesses across 725 industries have taken loans, and the company grew 150% in 2013. Financially, OnDeck has raised $180 million in equity and secured over $300 million in debt financing, and expects to have deployed $1 billion in capital to small businesses by mid-March. The company plans to use new funds to accelerate product development, geographic expansion, marketing and hiring, and is installing public-company discipline though an IPO is not the current focus. OnDeck operates a technology platform that aggregates data and uses electronic payment signals to evaluate the financial health and creditworthiness of small and medium-sized businesses and deliver capital to an underserved market. Launched in 2007 and led by CEO Noah Breslow, the company has deployed over $600 million in capital to tens of thousands of businesses across roughly 700 industries. OnDeck received funding commitments in the form of credit facilities totaling more than $130 million and intends to use the proceeds to deploy additional funding and develop new products. The platform focuses on faster, data-driven underwriting and distribution of loans to Main Street businesses. The company's current financial activity centers on expanding lending capacity via institutional credit backers. Launched in 2007, On Deck Capital offers short-term online loans to Main Street small businesses, using data aggregation and electronic payment technologies to evaluate creditworthiness. The company has deployed $400 million in loans and in 2012 secured $100 million in credit facility commitments from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Investment Group. It expanded distribution to 1,500 partners, grew to 160 employees, and saw revenue rise from $1.5M in 2008 to just under $20M in 2011 and $37M in 2012. Repeat customer base grew 34% in 2012. Management says the new funding will let On Deck provide more capital to small businesses in 2013 than in the previous five years combined and bring improved online lending tools to market. The company also ended acquisition discussions with Wonga (offers reportedly as high as $250M) and added IVP General Partner Sandy Miller to its board, which the CEO said could signal IPO ambitions. On Deck Capital provides simplified lending to small businesses using a proprietary platform that aggregates electronic data and ePayment information. The platform enables merchants to link online banking, accounting and payment processing while aggregating social, tax and industry data to create merchant profiles. On Deck’s software analyzes data points — customers, cash flow, sales and registered complaints — to assign a “Business Credit Score” focused on business performance rather than personal credit. The company has deployed $275M in capital to SMBs and expects to cross $300M early next month; loan originations have increased 50% in the last four months. To scale lending nationally, On Deck has been beefing up its capital reserves and expanding lending capacity. The product aims to give banks new principles to evaluate SMB credit potential and improve access to capital for millions of underserved small businesses. On Deck Capital matches small and medium-sized businesses with lenders by aggregating electronic data sources and using payment data to assess creditworthiness. The company developed an "On Deck Score" in partnership with Equifax to provide lenders a business-focused credit metric beyond owner personal credit scores. Its platform links online banking, accounting, merchant processing and aggregates social, tax and industry data to streamline underwriting for sub-$250K loans. On Deck has connected small businesses with over $125 million in capital at an average loan size of $30K and reported growth in customer acquisitions and loan applications in 2011. The startup says its recent funding will help it continue to bring disruptive technology to an underserved Main Street segment. Launched in 2006, the company has added senior sales and business-development executives and increased customer acquisition momentum to roughly 4,000 customers.

No current team members are available.