• Yolo Tech Insurance

  Participated · Equity · May 2024

  Yolo is an insurtech startup headquartered in Milan that enables users to activate micro-insurance policies in real time and pay only for the exact period they need coverage. Its fully digital, paperless platform works on both PC and mobile, making it possible to buy protection for a specific day, week, or event. The company organizes its offering into four verticals: YOLO viaggi (travel), YOLO beni (everyday items), YOLO persone (personal coverage), and YOLO salute (health). All products follow a pay-per-use model designed for flexibility and immediacy. Co-founders Simone Ranucci Brandimarte and Gianluca De Cobelli aim to use the proceeds from their initial funding to accelerate technology and product development. To date, Yolo has secured €1 million in external financing through its first venture capital round.

• Okticket

  Participated · Equity · Jan 2023

  Okticket provides a digital platform that automates the full process of professional travel expense management, from payment and digitization to validation, control and ERP integration. The company emphasizes product quality and fast digitalization to improve customer experience. Okticket was founded in October 2017 and has pursued steady, capital-efficient growth, including through the pandemic. In 2022 it doubled its number of customers and subscription contracts. It currently serves more than 500 clients and has over 100,000 users across Spain, Portugal and France, from SMEs to multinationals such as Manpower, Orange, Central Lechera Asturiana and BASF. Management plans to use new capital to accelerate internationalization, add sales staff and continue product improvements, and expects to double sales in 2023. Okticket, founded in October 2017, provides a platform to digitize and manage business travel expenses end-to-end, from receipt capture to validation, control and ERP integration. The company emphasizes a powerful real-time data-extraction/recognition engine and offers bidirectional integrations with major management tools. It provides a free tier for sole traders and micro-SMEs of up to five users. Okticket reached break-even without prior external funding and continued growing in 2020 despite the pandemic's impact on business travel. The platform reports more than 70,000 users and over 3,000 client companies and is active in Spain and Portugal. The company plans to enter additional European markets during 2021 and will use the new funding to accelerate growth. Okticket provides a digital expense management platform focused on user experience, using an in-house optical character recognition engine to automate notes de gasto and invoice digitization. Its software is homologated by the Agencia Tributaria, giving digitized documents the same legal validity as paper originals. The platform supports bidirectional integration with ERPs, accounting modules, BI systems and payment methods to fit into corporate tech stacks. As of the article, Okticket serves more than 50,000 users across 2,500 companies. The company is pursuing international expansion (already active in Portugal) and plans short-term growth that includes the creation of about 20 jobs. Financially, it secured support to improve its technology and back its expansion initiatives through regional public financing.

• MEandMine

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2021

  MEandMine offers an AI-powered screening platform embedded in classroom games that captures 160+ in-game data points to flag students' psychological risks in real time. The system provides teachers and school counselors with early screening signals to enable tier 2 and tier 3 interventions. As students play, the AI-flagging supports rapid identification of psychological risk and data-informed decisions for support. The company is led by founder Elinor Huang and is focused on classroom well-being for young children. MEandMine recently raised $4.5M and intends to use the funds to expand operations and advance product development. The startup is based in Palo Alto, California. MEandMine was developed by Elinor Huang alongside pediatricians, psychologists, educators and parents to help children discover emotional strength and build resilience. Its core offerings are hands-on play experiences and interactive stories designed to develop early social-emotional skills, drawing on neuroscience and research from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard. The company is rolling out Phy-Gital classes that combine online curriculum with hands-on experiments, while developing play systems, enriched content and an IP strategy. MEandMine plans subscription products, global expansion, and future AI-powered prediction models to support autistic children and help therapists understand behavioral triggers. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area (Los Gatos, Calif.), the startup recently closed a $2.1 million seed financing to support product development and expansion.

• Cusa Tea

  Participated · Series A · May 2019

  Cusa Tea provides a premium organic instant tea made from USDA Organic-certified teas with real fruits and spices that are cold-steeped using proprietary technology. Current flavors include Organic English Breakfast, Organic Green Tea, Organic Oolong, Mango Green, Lemon Black, Chai, Peach Green and a Variety Pack. Led by founder and CEO Jim Lamancusa, the company has expanded since launching in 2017 to over 1,400 retail locations with partners such as Sprouts, REI, King Soopers, Safeway, HEB and Cost Plus World Market. It also sells direct-to-consumer through its own website and a registered brand store on Amazon. Cusa Tea has commitments from over 3,000 new retailers to launch in Q3 and Q4 2019. The company completed a $2.5M Series A that brings total funding to $3.6M and plans to use the proceeds to expand distribution, sales and marketing and to broaden and accelerate product development.

No current team members are available.