Led · Series C · Dec 2021

Forethought develops AI products that assist customer service agents by surfacing information, automating simple responses, and routing inquiries to the most knowledgeable agent. Its core product suite includes Assist (knowledge surfacing), Solve (chatbot for simple answers and routing) and Triage (intelligent routing to specialist agents). The company says pandemic-driven digital transformation accelerated demand for its platform. In the past year Forethought reported 5x ARR growth and a tripling of its customer base. Headcount is 145 and the company expects to grow to around 250 employees by the end of next year. Management says the new capital will fund continued AI research, R&D, refinement of its customer-service focus and exploration of adjacent areas such as sales. Forethought develops AI and machine learning solutions for enterprise customer support, with its flagship product Agatha that learns from internal documents, email, chat and old support tickets. Agatha is designed to automatically resolve and auto-route tickets and surface the most relevant institutional knowledge. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Deon Nicholas. Forethought raised $17M in a Series B to expand operations and broaden its business reach. The funding reflects continued investor interest in its enterprise AI approach. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Forethought builds an AI-driven enterprise search system that moves beyond keyword matching to pull precise answers from a corpus of documents. The company launched publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt after a year in stealth and won the Disrupt Battlefield trophy in September. At launch its product can be embedded in Salesforce and Zendesk, with an initial focus on customer service. With new funding, the team plans to expand into other enterprise information-retrieval use cases. Since the public launch the three co-founders have added six employees and intend to hire more over the next year, particularly in machine learning, product and UX. The company announced a $9 million Series A to support those product and growth plans. Forethought’s core product, Agatha, is an AI-driven answer engine that indexes large document sets and uses NLP/NLU to read content like a human and surface the most relevant answers. The company has positioned Agatha first for customer support, integrating with help-desk platforms such as Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud to suggest answers and relevant knowledge-base articles. Forethought says Agatha can index millions of documents quickly and has increased agent efficiency by 20–30 percent in trials. The product debuted in private beta four months ago with six companies participating, one of which has converted to a paying customer. Forethought plans to expand Agatha beyond customer support to other enterprise workflows and to deliver the product as a cloud service where customers sign up and connect their support platforms for indexing. The team closed a pre-seed financing led by K9 Ventures and has founders and early employees in their mid-20s, with the company having launched last year.

Participated · Series E · Aug 2021

BharatPe is a fintech unicorn that secured Rs 85 crore in debt through non‑convertible debentures. The investment comprised Rs 50 crore from Trifecta Venture Debt Fund—II and Rs 35 crore from InnoVen Capital India Fund, per a regulatory filing. The board issued 500 Series E1 debentures at Rs 10,00,000 each and 3,500 Series F1 debentures at Rs 1,00,00 each. The company opted for debt financing to avoid equity dilution as it approaches break‑even. Earlier this year BharatPe completed a reported $100 million debt round; Entracker had said InnoVen and Credit Saison were expected to fund its NBFC arm, Trillion Loans, though that could not be confirmed. In August 2021 BharatPe raised $370 million in a Series E led by Tiger Global at a $2.85 billion valuation. In FY23 the startup narrowed losses by about 83% to Rs 941 crore (from Rs 5,615 crore a year earlier) and its revenue from operations rose over 125% to Rs 1,028 crore (from Rs 456 crore). BharatPe is a Delhi-based fintech that provides merchant loans and payments services through its platforms and NBFC partnerships. It acquired a 51% stake in Mumbai-based NBFC Trillion Loans in May 2023 and has installed new board members at the arm. The firm says it has provided loans worth over Rs 12,400 crore and recently facilitated about Rs 640 crore in merchant loans in a month. BharatPe crossed the Rs 1,000 crore revenue mark in FY23, reporting operating revenue of Rs 1,029 crore versus Rs 457 crore in FY22. Losses were Rs 941 crore in FY23, up from Rs 834 crore the prior year, though the company reported its first profitable month in October of the ongoing fiscal. Management appears close to break-even and has preferred raising debt rather than equity to avoid dilution. BharatPe operates a payments and lending platform that helps offline merchants accept digital payments via QR codes and point-of-sale machines built on India's UPI infrastructure. It serves more than 7 million merchants across over 130 Indian cities and has disbursed close to $300 million to merchant partners. The company does not charge merchants for universal QR code access and primarily monetizes through lending. BharatPe says it has US$0.5B cash on the books and plans to expand product offerings and pursue a small finance bank in partnership with Centrum Financial Services, with which it recently won a license from the Reserve Bank of India. The startup has seen executive departures and has appointed Suhail Sameer as CEO while co-founder Ashneer Grover will oversee strategy, product, technology, and capital. The company was valued at about $900 million in its Series D in February and at $425 million last year. BharatPe offers merchants a single interface to accept payments from all major UPI apps and provides loan facilities to its merchant partners. The company focuses on enabling credit for small merchants and kirana stores across India and aims to scale its lending business. It has disbursed loans to more than 1 lakh merchants and set a 2020–21 target of disbursing Rs 1,000 crore of which Rs 800 crore has already been disbursed. BharatPe aims to enable credit to 10 lakh small merchants in 2021 and targets disbursing USD 2 billion by March 2023. Management intends to raise close to USD 700 million of debt capital over the next two years to expand lending. The company was founded in 2018 and combines payment acceptance with B2B fintech lending for merchants. BharatPe operates an eponymous service that helps offline merchants accept digital payments using QR codes built on India’s government-backed UPI infrastructure. The company also offers short-term working capital loans to merchant partners as a primary monetization strategy. It has disbursed about $14 million in short-term loans to over 20,000 merchants in the past seven months; new merchants can secure roughly $500 for three months, rising to about $2,000 as they increase activity. BharatPe has amassed over 3 million merchants across 30 Indian cities and aims to more than double that number by March 2021. The startup will use much of the fresh capital to fund working capital for its merchant partners. To date the company has raised $140 million and was valued at over $400 million in the latest round.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2016

Sourcery is a SaaS-based commerce and payments platform that manages accounts payable for restaurants, commercial kitchens, food retailers and other hospitality businesses. Its platform offers digital invoicing and payments along with an advanced dashboard for real-time spend monitoring and cash flow management. The company was co-founded in 2012 by CEO Na’ama Moran and Peretz Partensky, a PhD in Biophysics from the University of California, San Francisco. Sourcery serves customers including Snap Kitchen, Elephants Deli, The Absinthe Group, Au Bon Repas and the corporate kitchens at Thumbtack, Dropbox and Airbnb. Following a $5M venture round led by Marker with participation from Steadfast Capital and existing investors, the company has raised $7.5M to date. It plans to use the proceeds to expand its invoice and payments processing technologies, add accounts receivable capabilities for vendor recipients, and build enterprise-level features to support large chain restaurants and retailers. Sourcery operates a web app that catalogs local wholesale food suppliers and prices, handles ordering and payments, and provides analytics and exportable accounting data (including QuickBooks and traditional invoices). The platform aims to replace manual catalogue, phone, check, and fax workflows with an online ordering experience for kitchen managers. Sourcery serves customers ranging from tech companies (Palantir, Dropbox, Airbnb) to restaurants (La Mar, ‘wichcraft, Hops & Hominy), catering companies, juice makers, and Munchery for supply acquisition. The company reports processing $25,000–$500,000 per month per customer and takes a percentage of transactions as revenue. Sourcery is exiting stealth out of early operations in San Francisco and has a waitlist of more than 55 companies. It plans to expand into Los Angeles, Portland, and New York City beginning in January.