Participated · Equity · Apr 2023

TipHaus provides software that links with point-of-sale systems to combine tips, classify them, and allocate them to the relevant staff member. The company charges a monthly price of $99 per location and is live in more than 2,000 locations nationwide. In September TipHaus launched a banking tool that lets enterprise customers digitally distribute tips to employees the same day tips are received. The startup is testing its technology with several large enterprise customers, including stadiums and theme parks, and counts customers such as Kerbey Lane Cafe, Tikis, and Ivar’s. TipHaus was founded in 2018 and weathered pandemic-related closures that nearly forced the founders to shut down. The company is currently unprofitable but says it is “default alive,” on track to reach profitability without additional resources. Tiphaus is a tipping software startup launched in 2018 in the Seattle area that automates tip distribution for restaurants. Its software aims to reduce errors related to tip distribution, increase transparency for employees, and lets waitstaff send tips to hosts and others who helped during a shift. Tiphaus is used by more than 300 restaurants and charges $99 per month or $69 per month for quick service restaurants. The company nearly shuttered during the pandemic, earning only one sale in 2020 while the founders burned through life savings and significant personal funds. Sales recovered by February of last year, allowing Tiphaus to hire more staff and grow to 15 full-time employees, and the company is preparing to launch an "earned tip access program" to send tips to direct deposit at the end of the night.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2020

Barn2Door provides software that enables independent farmers to create and promote their brand, sell online and in-person, and save time managing their business. The platform is built to make farmers' products available across all channels and to simplify order management. Barn2Door gathers data insights from millions of orders to inform its product and services. The company serves 1,000 farms across all 50 states. It recently received revenue-based funding from Decathlon Capital Partners. Barn2Door plans to use the funds to invest in new platform functionality and to expand its go-to-market and customer service functions. Barn2Door offers e-commerce software that enables farmers to sell food directly to consumers and manage sales, inventory, logistics, and related operations. The company serves thousands of farmers across the U.S. and focuses narrowly on providing software while leaving fulfillment and delivery to the farmers. CEO Janelle Maiocco said Barn2Door was experiencing strong growth prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and that the pandemic has added a tailwind to that growth. Maiocco founded Barn2Door after shutting down Farmstr, a broader organic food marketplace that proved too expensive to be profitable. The startup raised $6 million to support its growth amid rising online grocery demand. Total funding to date is $11.6 million. Barn2Door builds e-commerce software that enables farms to sell directly to customers while farmers handle fulfillment and delivery. The company focuses narrowly on providing tools to streamline operations, enable payments, and manage customers rather than aggregating and fulfilling orders. It serves farm clients across 40 states, with its heaviest concentration in the Midwest, and employs about 25 people. Founded in 2015 and led by CEO Janelle Maiocco, the company grew out of Maiocco's prior experience with Farmstr and her background in farming and food. Barn2Door raised $3.4M in a recent Series A to continue building its technology and has now raised more than $4.5M in total. The startup positions itself as a niche software provider akin to Mindbody or ChowNow but focused specifically on family-owned farms and sustainable food producers.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2018

Human is a Seattle, WA–based company that builds products intended to bridge the gap between humanity and technology. Its core product is Human Headphones, a wireless, voice-controlled headphone focused on intelligent voice control, comfort and fit, and powerful sound. The company closed a $21M Series B and said it will use the funds to accelerate innovation and launch its next-generation Human Headphones. The funding was reported on 02/10/2018. Backers included Sage Venture Partners (Fred Warren), Sugar Mountain Capital (Kurt Dammeier), Ropart Asset Management II, Microsoft, Mountain Nazca, and Darling Ventures. Human is led by CEO Bill Moore and co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer Ben Willis. Human is a Seattle, WA-based stealth-mode audio startup co-founded in late 2014 by Ben Willis (CEO) and Joe Dieter (CMO) that has been developing audio technology to bridge the gap between people and technology. The company has assembled a roughly 40-person team of designers and engineers, including hires from multiple Microsoft divisions (wearables and Xbox), and Bill Moore joined as Executive Chairman and President. Human is building yet-to-be announced audio products focused on purposeful, natural, utility-driven experiences. The company intends to use the $5M seed proceeds to expand its team of designers and engineers and continue product development. This financing follows an initial $700k seed round raised in 2015.

Participated · Seed · Mar 2015

Kitchenbowl offers an iPhone app that publishes recipes broken down into discrete steps, using photos for simple actions and GIFs for techniques that benefit from motion. The product emphasizes easy recipe creation—about half of its roughly 1,000 published recipes were posted in 30 minutes or fewer. The app surfaces recipes and cooks to follow, and its recommendation signals include whether users have posted photos of completed dishes. Founders Ryan Waliany (CEO) and Serena Wu (chief creative officer) built the app to address vague or SEO-driven recipe content online. The team says its longer-term vision includes covering the broader recipe ecosystem, potentially enabling ingredient purchasing or serving as a marketplace for small food brands. The company is headquartered in Seattle, and the founders are spending time in New York City as part of the Food-X accelerator.