Participated · Series C · Oct 2021

Kentik provides a network observability platform for the network front line—digital business, corporate IT and service providers—relying on granularity, AI-driven insights and fast search. The system helps users make sense of network, cloud, host and container flow, internet routing, performance tests and network metrics. Led by co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman, Kentik positions its platform to plan, run and fix networks across environments. The company said it will use the new capital to continue expanding operations and its business reach and to accelerate investments in the platform. Open positions were noted in engineering, marketing, operations, product management and sales. Financially, Kentik closed a $40M Series C and has raised $102M in total funding to date. Kentik operates a network intelligence platform that enables enterprises to monitor network traffic across the public internet, private data centers and public clouds. The platform serves enterprises, SaaS companies, content and gaming providers, and cloud and communications service providers, and counts customers in 25 countries, including IBM, Zoom, Dropbox, eBay, Cisco and GoDaddy. Kentik launched in 2015 and reports 100% compounded year-over-year growth since inception. Financially, the company announced a $23.5M growth funding round that is structured as a combination of equity and growth debt, bringing total capital raised to $61.7M. Kentik said it will use proceeds to invest in product development as well as go-to-market and partner expansion. CEO Avi Freedman cited increased adoption of hybrid and internet-centric architectures as the rationale for accelerating investment. Kentik Technologies provides network infrastructure visibility and analytics to help companies detect network attacks, log performance, and plan and engineer systems. Its platform includes a 'time machine' feature that lets customers inspect network state at past points in time and turn very large volumes of traffic data into actionable insights. The company targets ISPs and enterprises with complex API and server infrastructures and is positioned against competitors such as Datadog. The article notes that companies are handling close to a zettabyte of information, which Kentik aims to help customers analyze. On a financial basis CEO Avi Freedman said Kentik is moving past 'single digit millions' in revenue into 'double digit' territory; the company has over 60 customers, roughly 80% of which are domestic. Kentik is developing a stronger presence in Western Europe as it scales. Kentik launched Kentik Detect, a SaaS product that offers full visibility across an unlimited number of networks with real-time, actionable insights into network traffic activity. The platform emphasizes unparalleled raw data retention, fast query responses, and proactive real-time alerting to help operators understand network behavior and reveal root causes. Kentik says its processing handles tens of billions of data records per day and has already signed customers including Yelp, Box, Netflix and Facebook. Co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman framed the product as aiming to be the single, unified source of intelligence for infrastructure data. The company positions itself to simplify analysis of massive and growing volumes of network data as global IP traffic expands. Kentik emerged from stealth concurrent with the product launch.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2017

Stream offers APIs for activity feeds and chat that developers can integrate into apps with a few lines of code. The company began with activity‑feed APIs and expanded into chat, currently integrating third‑party chatbots and using Dolby for audio and video while planning to bring more components in‑house. Stream has said it wants to add end‑to‑end encryption and build more chatbot and media capabilities itself. Its technology is used across sectors including healthcare, education, finance, virtual events, dating, gaming and social. Notable customers include TaskRabbit, NBC Sports, Unilever, Delivery Hero, Gojek, eToro and Stanford University. Apps that use Stream’s services collectively cover more than 1 billion users, and the company reported chat revenue grew 500% in 2020. Stream was co‑founded in Amsterdam in 2015 and now has its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, while retaining a substantial team in Amsterdam. Stream builds APIs focused on activity feeds and, more recently, chat to help product teams add social features to their apps. The company started with activity feeds and began developing a chat API about 10 months ago after customers tried to build chat on top of feeds. Customers named in the article include Harvard, Dubsmash and Healthline. Stream is a five-year-old, 60-person startup with offices in Boulder and Amsterdam and was founded by Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli. The founders entered Techstars when the company was two months old in 2015. During the COVID-19 pandemic some smaller customers folded and one larger customer went bankrupt, but demand rose from education, healthcare, online events and religious communities. Financially, Stream closed a $15 million Series A led by GGV Capital, bringing total funding to $20.25 million. Stream offers an API for creating personalized news feeds that app creators can embed and scale within their apps. Its clients include Product Hunt, Google's Fabric, and Unsplash, and its feeds reach around 200 million end users. The company says news feeds are the dominant way of discovering content online and are used in 22% of apps. Stream plans to use new funding to accelerate product development, expand support for larger customers, add multi-region capabilities, and enhance machine-learning for personalization. It also intends to build up a small marketing and sales effort and grow its team. Stream has raised a total of €4.75 million to date and maintains an office in Boulder, CO. Stream sells newsfeed development and management as a service, building on an open-source feed project its team created. The original open-source project is about three years old and has been downloaded 250,000 times. Founders Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli began working on Stream in August after leaving prior startups and participated in the Techstars NY accelerator. Originally founded in Amsterdam, the company relocated operations to Boulder due to visa issues. Stream reports 120 companies are "in production" with the service, including its largest customer, GoldenLine.pl. The company positions its managed feed offering as a scalable alternative to costly in-house feed solutions used by many apps.

Participated · Seed · Jul 2016

Section is a Boulder, Colorado–based Edge as a Service (EaaS) provider founded in 2012 in Sydney, Australia by CEO Stewart McGrath. The company offers a platform that removes the burdens of edge infrastructure provisioning, workload orchestration, scaling, monitoring, and traffic routing so application engineers can focus on their core product. Over the past year Section released several technologies, including Adaptive Edge Engine, Node.js Edge Hosting, and Traffic Monitor, to optimize edge workload placement, run mission‑critical Node.js at the network edge, and visualize traffic flows. The business plans to use the new funding to continue expanding operations and widen its business reach. The article does not disclose operating metrics or revenue figures. Product development and edge delivery remain central to the company’s near‑term strategy. section.io is a content delivery network (CDN) platform that enables website engineers to control the delivery of their web applications. Led by CEO Stewart McGrath and based in Boulder, Colorado and Sydney, Australia, the platform makes applications CDN-aware so every code deploy aligns with CDN configuration. It provides real-time metrics and logging built on Graphite, Elasticsearch, Kibana and Logstash, giving teams consistent logs and metrics across Dev, Test and Prod environments. The company closed a $1.5M seed funding round and intends to use the funds to continue developing the platform and expand operations. The product targets agile teams building web applications that require tight integration between application code and CDN behavior. section.io provides developers a platform to set up the open-source Varnish HTTP acceleration proxy for web applications, enabling cloud-based website caching. The platform includes SSL support, metrics, logs, and alerting to support production deployments. It was founded by Stewart McGrath and Daniel Bartholomew, who previously worked at Graysonline and other firms. section.io released its first open beta in May 2015 and has attracted more than 200 developers from the USA, Asia, Europe and Australia. The company launched with funding from the Australian Government’s Commercialization Australia program; the amount of that funding was not disclosed.

Led · Seed · Jan 2015

Bold Metrics builds machine learning-driven body models that use simple inputs (height, approximate weight, optional waist and shoe size) to create 3D representations of shoppers and clothing to predict fit. The product guides consumers on sizing without requiring complex steps like photo uploads or scans, aiming for “zero additional friction” on the shopper. Its technology can, for example, indicate if a medium T‑shirt will feel tight around the arms, and it is used by brands including French Toast and Vuori. The company’s solution targets high return rates in e-commerce apparel by addressing fit rather than downstream return logistics. In May the company completed an $8 million Series A led by Kent Bennett, signaling venture interest in fit technology. Bessemer’s partner framed Bold Metrics’ approach as having a strong value proposition and potential for network effects in the apparel industry. Fashion Metric provides a big-data SaaS platform for apparel retailers and brands that gathers customer intelligence to personalize shopping both online and in-store. Its technology calculates a customer’s body measurements in seconds through a few questions, helping shoppers find the best fit. The platform aims to reduce size ambiguity, lower return rates, and give retailers continuous analytics for better targeting and inventory management. The company says the new funding will support strong demand from retailers and brands and continue product development. Fashion Metric plans to use the round to build its Austin, Texas-based team. To date the company has received prior investments from Mark Cuban and Techstars, bringing total funding to $1.4 million.