• FormaFina

  Participated · Seed · Sep 2013

  FormaFina operates a curated e-commerce marketplace offering limited-run decor collections, positioning exclusivity as a status symbol among affluent customers in Argentina and Brazil. The site typically runs 10–15 campaigns at once, each lasting 7–10 days with about 10 products per campaign. Items range from $20 to $5,000, with an average ticket of about $200; gross margins are currently around 30% with a target of 40–50% by year-end. The company’s curators source products by attending trade shows, reading design blogs, and studying similar sites abroad. FormaFina says roughly 20% of users shop on mobile and plans an iOS app for Q1 of next year. The founder and CEO is Nima Pourshasb, and the company has arranged logistics partnerships (with help from investor Hans Hickler) to keep costs down.

• Graphdive

  Led · Equity · Sep 2013

  GraphDive uses data from users who log in via Facebook Connect to analyze account activity and infer interests and key demographics such as age, income, education, and relationship status. The company currently offers three services: user segmentation, personalized recommendations, and Facebook ad targeting that finds new users similar to a business's most valuable existing users. Founders Shahram Seyedin-Noor and Sina Sohangir launched the company in 2011 and report customers including Walmart and Lyft. GraphDive has seen 10x growth in daily API usage over the past three months. Financially, it raised $2 million in new funding and previously raised a $1 million convertible note last year. Future plans include adding new platforms such as Twitter and Google+ and supporting other languages. GraphDive's flagship product, the Social API, analyzes publicly shared social media activity via tools like Facebook Connect to produce ranked user interests, inferred demographics and personalized recommendations. The company has built a Knowledge Graph that understands context around words, concepts and celebrity names to draw inferences from users' social chatter. The platform is launching on an invite-only basis and is already serving thousands of API calls per day to private beta customers in e-commerce and media. A company survey reported that 70% of GraphDive’s personalized results were rated “very relevant,” and a separate study cited that roughly 80% of Facebook users do not declare their age, supporting demand for inferred demographics. GraphDive is using its seed financing to scale its team and expand industry-specific product offerings for e-commerce, travel and media. The product is positioned to help merchants personalize shopping experiences, drive engagement and boost revenues.

• Fanzy

  Participated · Seed · Mar 2013

  Fanzy provides a SaaS social loyalty platform that lets organizations reward fans for their social activity around brands, TV shows, films, celebrities, sports teams and athletes. Members generate buzz and unlock real-life rewards, social achievement badges and leaderboard placement based on Fanzy’s proprietary FanScore influence measurement. The company is co‑founded by Jeff Marois and Tuhin Roy and is based in Paris and San Francisco. Fanzy raised an additional $550K in seed funding, bringing total funding to date to over $1.5M. The company intends to use the capital to scale up its enterprise business, tailor solutions for larger companies and build its sales team. No operating metrics (revenue/users) were disclosed in the article. Fanzy is a Paris-based Facebook application that rewards fans for activity around brands, TV shows, films, celebrities, sports teams and athletes. The platform issues incentives such as social achievement badges, physical rewards, exclusive content and online discounts. Marketers can use a rewards builder to offer rewards to influential social fans based on specific social achievements or levels of influence on particular topics. The application is currently used by more than 14,000 brands. The company plans to use new capital to expand its engineering and business development teams. Led by CEO Jeff Marois and co-founder Tuhin Roy, Fanzy has raised roughly $850k in total capital to date.

No current team members are available.