Led · Seed · Mar 2023

Videowise is an eCommerce video platform founded in 2021 by product designer Claudiu Cioba that helps brands and retailers create interactive, shoppable video experiences on online stores. Its commerce-centric infrastructure is built to publish video at scale across product, collection and blog pages while protecting page speed, reportedly loading up to 5x faster than traditional video platforms. More than 100 design and development agencies use Videowise’s customizable video components and analytics to automate publishing and build next-generation video shopping experiences. In 2022 its shoppable videos generated more than $1M in added purchase revenue and influenced over $25M in revenue, with conversion lifts of up to 328% and viewers spending up to four minutes more per page. After switching to Videowise, Dr. Squatch saw a 3.2% increase in revenue per session in the first 30 days, illustrating measurable conversion benefits. With the new funding, Videowise plans to further develop its video commerce technology stack for omnichannel shopping and expand to Salesforce Commerce Cloud and other commerce platforms.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2022

Primer is a San Francisco-based software company that provides hyper-precise targeting for B2B marketers. Its platform orchestrates multiple first- and third-party data sources to create a large marketplace of unified, usable data, enabling customers to build hyper-targeted audiences. Those audiences can be activated in any destination—from CRMs to ad platforms—and can be enhanced with additional data points to improve activation effectiveness. Fast-growing business software companies such as Rippling, Air, Vouch, Carta, and Verkada use Primer to power their sales and marketing efforts. Primer raised $12M in a Series A and plans to use the proceeds to make the product more intuitive, expand the breadth and depth of data sources and destinations, and roll out new features to help teams more intelligently know which audiences to activate and for what ROI. The company also intends to expand its engineering, product, and go-to-market teams under founder & CEO Keith Putnam-Delaney.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2022

Hone delivers live, small-group, executive-focused instruction with curriculum-based modules, practice labs, peer discussion and reinforcement rather than pre-recorded content or one-on-one coaching. New learners enter a four-week bootcamp selected by their company and then gain unlimited access to classes year-round; the platform also offers automation tools for HR admins such as automatic scheduling and attendance tracking. Hone has integrations with Workday, Rippling and SAP SuccessFactors and says instructors are paid “hundreds of dollars per hour,” reportedly four to five times typical one-on-one coaching rates. The startup cites customer wins including Indeed, ConocoPhillips, Pacific Sunwear, Allscripts, TomTom and Aramark and says the pandemic was a significant tailwind for its growth. The company currently has about 70 employees and plans to hire roughly 30 more by the end of the year. Future plans include experimenting with “intelligent” recommendations and reinforcement, expanding electives and learning pathways, and hosting in-person events for executives. Hone offers leadership training via live, intimate online classes led by coaches, with new students entering a four-week bootcamp and then receiving unlimited access to classes throughout the year. The platform emphasizes practice-based learning for difficult conversations, coaching, and communication skills that benefit managers more than one-off in-person conferences. Hone’s software simplifies scheduling across geographies and time zones for distributed workforces. Co-founders Savina Perez and Tom Griffiths say meeting strong enterprise demand requires work on localization and translation. The company notes scaling is challenging because the product depends heavily on human coaches rather than a pure SaaS model. To date, Hone has over 100 organizational customers, 300 classes per month, 400% year-over-year growth, and a 30-person team (50% female, 43% people of color). Hone combines research-backed, live online classes led by expert executive coaches with a technology platform to reinforce and measure training’s impact at scale. Its hybrid humans-plus-technology approach targets leadership, management, and people-skills training for distributed teams. Customers cited in the announcement include GoFundMe, Rosetta Stone, Casper, World Remit and Dashlane. Launched in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco and New York City, Hone was co-founded by Tom Griffiths and Savina Perez. The company announced a $2.75M seed extension, bringing total funding to date to $6.4M, and said it will use the funds to expand its platform and develop programs to meet rising demand from increasingly distributed companies. Hone offers live, coach-led training modules for leadership and people management, typically delivered as 60- to 90-minute weekly sessions over seven weeks to groups of about eight to a dozen. The company eschews pre-recorded video and traditional workshops, instead working with vetted professional coaches and an underlying platform that tracks attendance, learner feedback and engagement metrics such as questions asked. Hone has run pilots with early, paying customers including WeWork, Clear, App Annie, Dashlane, Omada Health and SoulCycle and says it has used those pilots to refine product-market fit. The platform includes reporting interfaces that allow employers to measure learning outcomes and iterate on modules. Hone is about 10 months old and is opening more widely for business while planning to bake lessons from early customers into future products. The company has not disclosed pricing publicly and works with customers to create customized packages.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2022

Courier offers an API and a notification "studio" that lets apps emit events, generate templates, and route messages to multiple channels and providers (Postmark, Slack, Twilio, SendGrid), while logging delivery, open, and engagement metrics. The platform supports dynamic, customized digests and a notification designer for building and shipping notifications quickly. Founded in 2019 by CEO Troy Goode, Courier has attracted over 150 paying customers and operates on a usage-based pricing model. The company has raised $47.5 million to date and says it can grow revenue as customers' user bases and notification volumes expand. Courier is rolling out new functionality focused on mobile push consistency and an in-app notification inbox so users can access messages even if they've opted out of push. The company expects headcount to grow from about 40 employees to 65 by the end of the year. Courier provides a single platform and APIs for building, routing, and managing multichannel notifications, pairing a no-code flow/template builder with developer APIs. It integrates with channels and providers such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun, MessageBird, Twilio and Nexmo. The product targets teams that don’t want to build bespoke notification infrastructure and aims to simplify provider routing, backups, and per-geography provider selection. Courier is exploring automation to route messages to the channel where recipients are most likely to respond or convert. Founder and CEO Troy Goode built the product during Y Combinator and draws on prior experience at Eloqua and other roles. The company faces the challenge of converting large companies that already have in-house systems but plans to partner early and be patient to win deployments.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2022

Five to Nine offers a platform that helps enterprises plan ERG programs and provides attendance and feedback analytics to measure ERG effectiveness. Launched in 2018 by Jasmine Shells and Denise Umubyeyi, the product integrates with Okta, Workday and Slack. The company already counts Yahoo, UpWork and Expedia as clients. Founders created the company to consolidate tools used to run internal events and to surface data on ERG impact and leader burden. With the new funding, Five to Nine plans to expand engineering, build new products, increase hiring and double its clientele. The analytics aim to demonstrate ERG ROI and highlight the work of ERG leaders often shouldering a diversity tax.