Led · Equity · Sep 2025

Brilliant NextGen develops an all‑in‑one smart home control platform delivered through a portfolio of devices including in‑wall touchscreen control panels, smart dimmers, plugs and supporting accessories. The company’s products provide integrators, builders and homeowners a unified way to manage lighting, climate, security and music. Brilliant is focused on design, simplicity and performance, and works with Custom Integrators, Distributors, residential developers and homebuilders to deploy its solutions. The company announced a $9.7 million funding round to support product expansion, strategic partnerships, and deeper customer engagement across North America. With this financing Brilliant plans to launch a second‑generation Power over Ethernet (PoE) product and invest in development of AI‑driven features to advance the smart home experience. Tony Smalls has joined the company’s Board, and Lisa Petrucci serves as CEO. Brilliant designs and manufactures touchscreen control panels, smart dimmer switches, and smart plugs that integrate lighting, thermostats, cameras, locks, music, garage openers and more into a single smart home experience. Its panels install where standard light switches are located and the system works with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit, Resideo, Ring, Sonos, Nest, Philips Hue, and other popular smart-home products. The company sells through homebuilder, multifamily, property manager, and professional integrator channels and is trusted by hundreds of builders, developers, and property managers across the U.S. and Canada. Brilliant says it has grown over 400% since February 2020 and its Smart Home Control is the highest-rated smart home system on Amazon.com and HomeDepot.com. Product launches include a $69.99 Smart Dimmer Switch (shipping summer 2020) and a $29.99 Smart Plug (shipping 2021). The company plans to use new capital to expand product offerings and double down on its sales strategy in its key channels. Brilliant develops the Brilliant Control, a touch-and-voice control panel that integrates with smart-home devices to manage lighting, music, climate and more. The product includes Amazon Alexa built in, a video intercom and mobile app control. CEO and co-founder Aaron Emigh leads the company. Brilliant Controls are priced starting at $199 and were slated to be available for sale in early 2018. The company plans to use new funding to expand retail channels and partnerships and to continue investing in research and product development. No operating metrics or revenue figures are provided in the article.

Participated · Series A · Feb 2025

Salience Labs develops silicon photonics optical switches to connect AI datacenter clusters, targeting high bandwidth, low latency and significant power savings. Its switches are designed to be compatible with existing infrastructure and enable scalable, energy-efficient interconnect fabrics for large AI clusters. The company draws on over a decade of research from the University of Oxford and the University of Münster and was founded in 2021 in Oxford, England. Salience plans to further develop its optical switches, bring products to customers, and expand to the U.S. to serve key customers. It recently closed a $30 million Series A to accelerate development and go-to-market; no revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article. Salience Labs develops an ultra-high-speed multi-chip processor that packages a photonics chip with standard electronics to accelerate AI computation. Its proprietary “on-memory compute” architecture combines the speed of photonics, the flexibility of electronics, and the manufacturability of CMOS. The company says its approach uses a broad bandwidth of light to execute operations and can stack up to 64 vectors into a beam, enabling highly scalable, densely parallel processing. Salience positions the technology as delivering far more calculation for the same power requirement, targeting more efficient AI systems. The company spun out of Oxford University and the University of Münster in 2021 and is based in Oxford. It recently raised funding to advance development and scaling of its photonics-enabled processors.

Led · Convertible Note · Aug 2020

Zoom.ai is a Toronto-based startup that offers smart meeting-scheduling software that integrates with Slack, Skype, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams. Founded in 2016, the company pivoted from a broader automated personal assistant to focus on scheduling and now targets recruiters, salespeople and mid-market and SMB customers. The startup reported a surge in traction during the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming new user registrations, customers, and active users grew five-fold in March and meetings scheduled through its platform grew six-fold since mid-March. Zoom.ai plans to release a new payment processing product to enable bookings where users sell their time, a use case the company has explored as "virtual e-commerce." Financially, the company said it raised C$600,000 in a combination of equity and debt classified as bridge financing to extend its runway, and it hopes to close an additional C$300,000 in the next quarter. The product focus narrowed after a 2019 product-market fit exercise that reduced staff and concentrated the team on scheduling, integrations and faster learning cycles. Zoom.ai, founded in 2016 by Roy Pereira and based in Toronto, builds Ava Zoom, an automated virtual assistant and chat-based productivity tool for enterprises. Ava Zoom automates meeting scheduling, meeting preparedness, introductions, travel logistics, searching files and document generation, acting as an intelligent layer between a company's chat application and its tech stack. The product centralizes corporate data and applies machine learning to surface and stitch together insights through chat. Zoom.ai reports that the assistant saves employees 10+ hours per month and boosts productivity by 14%. The company has partnerships with Microsoft and Google and has received awards including IDC Research’s Top 5 Canadian AI Innovator, OpenText’s Best Enterprise Software, and Best New Startup at the Canadian Innovation Awards. Zoom.ai plans to use recent funding to accelerate product development, grow the team, expand sales into the US and Europe, and emphasize enterprise security. Zoom.ai is a Toronto-based developer of an automated virtual assistant that helps users offload menial administrative and administrative tasks. The company has been incorporating learnings from enterprise customers into its product and pitches to enterprise buyers. Financially, Zoom.ai recently closed a $2.1M seed round and won a C$100,000 grand prize at the OpenText Enterprise World Pitch Contest. The company says the prize extends its runway by about two months, giving it “more buffer room” to hit metrics needed for a Series A. The award also includes one year of free entrance into the OpenText Global Partner Program, which provides training and product knowledge to help achieve business targets. Founder and CEO Roy Pereira characterized the win as validation of Zoom.ai’s vision to enhance employee experience in the modern enterprise. Zoom.ai positions itself as an automated executive assistant for enterprise rather than a consumer chatbot, aiming to save managers time on scheduling, contact lookups, and meeting logistics. The product runs across many messaging platforms (Slack, Telegram, Messenger, Kik, Line, Skype, Hangouts, Cisco Spark, SMS and email) and is available as a free preview. The company emphasizes robust NLP and user-aware memory, training its models to recognize varied phrasings and context across different chat UIs. Zoom.ai has built much of its machine‑learning stack in‑house, recruiting talent (including from the University of Toronto) and enhancing off‑the‑shelf tools to meet its needs. The team says it uses available user data to inform personalization and reduce error rates, and is open to integrating better external ML tools as they become available. At the time of the article the startup was roughly six months old and focused on expanding its domain capabilities while keeping error risk low.

Participated · Series C · Oct 2010

Abionyx Pharma is a biotech company based in Balma developing therapies to combat sepsis, with its lead investigational candidate CER-001 aimed at treating septic shock. The company has launched an €18.7M capital increase with preferential subscription rights and secured a subscription agreement with Fenja Capital for up to €14M in two tranches. Those financings provide immediate funding of €28.7M and could total €32.7M if the second tranche is exercised. Abionyx says the proceeds will be used to accelerate development of CER-001. No prior funding rounds or operating metrics were disclosed in the article.