The Venture Codex

Participated · Series B · Jan 2022

Esusu operates a financial technology platform that reports on-time rent payments to the major credit bureaus, enabling renters to establish or boost their credit scores. The product is used by multifamily property owners, operators, and financial institutions to integrate rent reporting seamlessly into their workflows. Today, Esusu’s network spans 5 million units and reaches approximately 12 million residents while processing about $100 billion in annual gross lease volume. Key enterprise partners include major real estate players such as Blackstone, Invitation Homes, and Nuveen Real Estate. The company monetizes through SaaS-style agreements with property managers and ancillary services tied to resident financial products. With more than $200 million raised to date, Esusu aims to deepen product development and scale operations further across the U.S. The fresh capital supports its mission of closing the racial wealth gap and enhancing financial stability for underserved renters.

Participated · Series A · Dec 2021

Clasp applies a military-inspired ROTC model to healthcare by enabling employers to commit to clinicians before graduation and repay student loans over time in exchange for tenure. Its Loan-Linked Hiring approach replaces transactional sign-on bonuses with retention-based student loan repayment that vests with tenure; Clasp reports retention rates 2.5x higher than traditional hiring models. Across its network, employers have committed more than $130M in student loan repayment across thousands of programs, and customers include Boston Children’s Hospital, Memorial Sloan Kettering, MyEyeDr., Northwestern Medicine, Novant Health, OhioHealth, VCA Animal Hospitals, and others. The company plans to use the Series B proceeds to expand across health systems nationwide, deepen university partnerships, and scale the infrastructure that connects employers, schools, students, and financial institutions. Clasp was founded by Tess Michaels in 2018 and is based in Boston. The company positions student loan repayment as workforce infrastructure to reduce clinician turnover and support longer tenures.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2019

Verisart builds a blockchain-based certification and provenance platform for fine art, limited editions and collectibles. The company provides digital certification services and was the first blockchain certification provider on Shopify. It has worked with prominent artists including Ai Weiwei and Shepard Fairey and won the “Hottest Blockchain DApp” award at The Europas in 2018. Verisart plans to expand its commercial authentication platform, ramp up partnership integrations, and launch a suite of premium services aimed at artists, galleries and collectors. The company recently appointed Paul Duncan, formerly the founding CTO of Borro, to lead the engineering team. Founded in 2015, Verisart spent several years perfecting its model and building partnerships before taking outside capital. Verisart builds a worldwide, blockchain-backed ledger that couples museum-standard metadata with cryptographic tokens to provide digital provenance for physical artworks and collectibles. Its platform enables artists and collectors to certify, document and verify works online and in real time. The company plans to launch a mobile app in the next few months for artists and to follow with an API for online sellers. Verisart will always be free for artists and is designed to help them manage their works and collector databases long term. Founder Robert Norton says the cryptographic token can address privacy and security concerns by masking buyer and seller identities, potentially benefiting artists, collectors, appraisers and insurers. The team includes co-founder and CTO Daniel Riley and has added Bitcoin developer Peter Todd as a board advisor.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2019

Dutchie provides software and services to cannabis dispensaries, charging a monthly fee to create and run websites and manage orders. The company says it works with over 5,000 dispensaries in North America and processed $14 billion in annualized sales for those customers. Dutchie reports 100% year-over-year growth with dispensaries and employs about 500 people across 40 U.S. states and Canada. Management plans to deploy capital to accelerate efforts to streamline dispensary operations and to expand R&D and hiring. The company has committed $100 million to R&D over the next 12 months and is scaling its team to keep up with demand. Dutchie’s growth is being driven by wider consumer adoption, health-and-wellness use cases, and more states passing friendlier cannabis regulations. Dutchie is a nearly four-year-old Bend, Oregon company that charges cannabis dispensaries a monthly fee to create and run their websites, process orders and track what needs to be prepared for pick up. The company recently acquired Greenbits and Leaflogix—ERP and POS providers—and folded their roughly 150 employees into Dutchie, effectively doubling the team to about 300 employees. Its valuation surged to $1.7 billion in this round, roughly eight times the value assigned last August after a $35 million Series B. Dutchie says it will use the new capital to develop new products, including discovery and education tools, and to begin expanding internationally. The company is benefiting from pandemic-driven online order growth, recent state-level legalization tailwinds and what it sees as a shifting federal stance toward decriminalization. CEO Ross Lipson emphasizes a retail-first, hyperlocal model even as more customers order online. Dutchie operates a subscription platform that builds and maintains dispensary websites, processes orders, manages payments and tracks items for pickup. The company added contactless payments and a curbside pickup workflow that notifies dispensaries when customers arrive and helps locate vehicles. Dutchie says it works with over 1,300 dispensaries across 32 markets, processes more than 75,000 orders a day, powers over 25% of dispensaries and handles roughly 10% of all legal cannabis sales worldwide. The business grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic—reporting a roughly 600% spike in one month and an overall 700% surge in sales volume—and it scaled its technology for approximately six times the prior load. Headcount rose from 36 to 102 employees and the company aims to double the team by the end of 2021. Dutchie plans to keep online ordering and e-commerce features as core offerings as customers continue to expect them. Dutchie builds online ordering and website software for cannabis dispensaries, positioned as a Shopify-like platform focused on pickup ordering. Dispensaries pay a monthly subscription fee; Dutchie does not take transaction cuts and it does not provide delivery (dispensaries handle that). The two-year-old, 36-person company says its software is used by 450 dispensaries across 18 states and is processing roughly $140 million in gross merchandise volume. Dutchie emphasizes product and user experience for both consumers and dispensaries and provides operational support to ensure orders are ready for pickup. The company is led by brothers Ross (CEO) and Zach Lipson (chief product officer), who have prior entrepreneurial experience. Financially, Dutchie has now raised $18 million in total, including the newly closed Series A. Dutchie, founded in 2017 in Bend, Oregon, is an on-demand marijuana and cannabis delivery service that builds online ordering tools to help consumers navigate the delivery market. The product aims to replicate the choice and convenience of online food ordering for legal cannabis purchases. The company operates in Oregon, Washington and Michigan and is launching in Colorado, Nevada and California this month, working with about 100 dispensaries. In its first year Dutchie recorded $2.5 million in gross merchandise volume and it employs 14 people, many of whom work remotely. Dutchie has signed an agreement with Canopy Rivers to operate in Canada and plans aggressive rollouts across states where medical marijuana is legal and into Canada. CEO Ross Lipson says scalability is the company’s central strategy as it expands.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2019

Ethyca provides an enterprise-grade data privacy and AI governance platform that embeds privacy into technical infrastructure through an engineering-first approach. Its open-source project, Fides, is described in the article as the most widely adopted open-source privacy platform and powers privacy management for enterprises. Ethyca focuses on improving data visibility and governance to help customers accelerate use of proprietary data while meeting compliance and ethics requirements. The company reports rapid enterprise adoption, adding customers such as Mozilla, Axios, Remitly, Ramp and others in 2024. Ethyca plans to enhance product capabilities, grow its team, and expand globally following a recent rebrand and fresh funding. The company says it will use the new investment to support continued product development and customer success. Ethyca is a New York–based privacy-by-design technology startup that builds APIs, detection tools and analytics to help organizations adhere to data privacy laws such as GDPR. Its commercial Pro tools integrate with some 700 apps to monitor privacy policy alignment and it counts dozens of customers, including Away, IDEO and InVision, plus unnamed public enterprises. The company has open sourced Fides, a definition and configuration language and toolkit (initially Fides Ops and Fides Control) to let developers embed privacy checks into CI/CD workflows and orchestrate privacy rights. Fides integrates with databases and platforms including DynamoDB, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB, MariaDB, SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL, and has Slack and GitHub as supporters. Ethyca's proprietary APIs also automate data-rights requests and detect problematic data patterns before code reaches production. The company intends to use the newly raised capital to continue commercial development, hire staff and contribute to the Fides open-source community; it has raised $27.5M to date. Ethyca provides an infrastructure platform that gives developers and product teams tools to ensure consumer data privacy throughout application and service design. Its premium product, Ethyca Pro+, is used by consumer-driven brands such as Away, Parachute Home and Aspire IQ. The company was founded in 2018 by Cillian Kieran and Miguel Burger-Calderon and is headquartered in New York. Ethyca has raised capital to date, bringing total funding to $20M. The company intends to use the Series A proceeds to continue to expand operations and broaden its business reach. No revenue or user metrics are disclosed in the article. Ethyca offers a data platform that discovers sensitive data, lets customers view, edit, or delete their records, and enforces access controls across an organization to support GDPR compliance. The product emphasizes automation and privacy-by-design at the infrastructure level to reduce reliance on consultants and manual remediation. Ethyca says it does not capture raw personal data, instead locating information via unique identifiers. The company has been around for more than a year and spent its first year developing the solution. Management frames the recent financing as validation of the market need and intends to use the product to address multiple privacy frameworks beyond GDPR. The platform’s automation is positioned to lower the complexity and cost of compliance for customers.