Participated · Series C · Mar 2021

Tylko is a Polish direct-to-consumer modular furniture company that sells made-to-order shelving and uses augmented reality in its sales cycle. Its products are based on parametric design, and Tylko's platform automates manufacturing for its production partners. The company reported a 132% increase in sales in 2020 and currently has a team of 140 employees, which it plans to more than double. Tylko intends to launch in new markets and expand its product portfolio beyond shelving. Founded in 2015, the company has raised a total of €33 million to date. Tylko offers customizable furniture via a user-facing application that uses augmented reality and parametric modelling to let customers design shelves and other pieces in minutes. Its products are manufactured in several selected factories in Europe and are designed to be easily assembled and disassembled. Since launching in 2013 the company has served almost 15,000 customers, sells to 28 countries and fulfills thousands of shelves orders each month, and its team comprises several dozen people. Tylko recently introduced a new product line, Tylko Type02, and emphasizes a combination of refined production, logistics and a digital design experience. The company plans to use new capital to accelerate international expansion, grow sales and further develop its product and application. Tylko sells customizable hardwood shelving units and some tables through an app-first, web and mobile channel using parametric design sliders that let customers adjust dimensions, styles and finishes. The company offers an iOS AR feature (using a printable context card) to help buyers visualize designs in situ. Manufacturing is fully automated via CNC machines in Poland and uses slow-growth Finnish birch; shipping is free within Europe and delivery typically takes three to six weeks. Tylko has sold to around 3,000 customers, with primary demand in Europe (notably German-speaking countries and the U.K.) and occasional shipments to Japan, Israel, Australia and the U.S. Per-unit pricing is positioned well above mass-market flat-pack competitors to target higher margins and designer-minded buyers; the company offers a 100-day return policy for bespoke pieces. With new financing, Tylko plans to boost marketing, expand its online product range (storage and custom cupboards cited) and work to reduce lead times.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2020

Cosmose AI builds AI analytics and shopper-engagement products, including the KaiKai discovery app and an online targeting platform that track in-store foot traffic and link it to online behavior. The company has integrated a blockchain payments stack into KaiKai, settling transactions in its native stablecoin Kai-Ching on Near’s network. Kai-Ching is pegged to U.S. dollar cents, is only tradable within the app, can be topped up with fiat, and the company says users may be able to convert it back to fiat in the future. Since launching crypto payments in Singapore, Kai-Ching has processed over 1 million transactions and about one-third of KaiKai transactions are paid with Kai-Ching. Cosmose is also working with Near to migrate user tracking data onto the blockchain and to store data on users’ phones via edge computing so users can control how they are tracked and rewarded. The company says it has served over 20 million stores, reached one billion phones worldwide (with China accounting for hundreds of millions), and has roughly 80 staff across Warsaw, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Paris. Cosmose analyzes in-store foot traffic to predict customer behavior and inform retail marketing, merchandising and ad targeting. It offers three products—Cosmose Analytics (in-store movement tracking), Cosmose AI (data analytics and prediction) and Cosmose Media (online ad targeting)—and does not require hardware installation after mapping a store. A PwC audit found the platform can track customers within 1.6 meters; Cosmose’s data ecosystem comprises more than one billion smartphones and 360,000 stores, with a target of two billion smartphones and 10 million stores by 2022. Clients include Walmart, Marriott, Samsung and LVMH, and the company has offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York and Warsaw (software engineering is based in Warsaw). Cosmose emphasizes anonymized IDs (OMNIcookies), no collection of personal identifiers, and opt-out options to address privacy concerns. The company says its valuation is now over $100 million and is using its product to help retailers respond to COVID-19; management aims to break even and generate profit by 2021. Founded by Miron Mironiuk, Cosmose AI builds an agentless analytics platform that draws on data from over 400,000 apps across more than a billion smartphones to map in-store shopper behavior. Its technology claims store-aisle-level location accuracy (about two meters) with up to 73% accuracy and is already deployed in roughly 300,000 stores in China. The product suite includes a predictive product, Cosmose Brain, which correlates offline purchasing with online advertising, and Cosmose Media, an advertising orchestration dashboard that measures ad-driven visits and conversions. Clients named in the article include Subway, Samsung, Walmart, Airbnb, Tencent, Burberry, Mercedes‑Benz, L’Oréal, Gucci, Cartier, P&G, Nestlé, and Coca‑Cola. Cosmose says it uses anonymized data and generates a nine-digit OMNIcookie for tracking, and that users can opt out via a form on its website. In the near term the company plans to expand into Japan and open a Paris office to better serve European luxury brands targeting Chinese travelers. The article also notes that revenue tripled in the year after the company graduated from a Founders Factory program.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2020

StethoMe is a Poznań, Poland–based medical device and digital health company that developed an integrated electronic stethoscope, a dedicated StethoMe application and AI algorithms. Its core product enables remote examination of the lungs and heart, with AI analysis providing immediate results about detected respiratory abnormalities. The company claims the solution is unique worldwide and cites research showing its AI algorithms are up to 29% more effective at detecting and classifying pathological sounds than pulmonologists. The StethoMe system is already present in France, Spain and Poland. StethoMe plans to use new funding to commercialize the solution across the European market. The company is led by CEO Wojciech Radomski and recently closed a financing round to support that expansion.

Led · Equity · Jan 2020

Neptune offers a lightweight collaboration tool for data scientists to track the entire experimentation process, visualise results, and share insights. It supports Python and R and integrates with common frameworks and tools such as Keras, TensorFlow, Scikit Learn, and PyTorch, and can be used with any cloud or in-house infrastructure. The product is positioned as a GitHub-like collaboration layer for data science teams to reduce chaos and improve project outcomes. The company cites broader market dysfunction—Gartner estimates 85% of data science projects fail—as part of the opportunity. Founder and CEO Piotr Niedźwiedź says the near-term focus is on refining the product and value proposition to deliver the best user experience and feature set. The recent funding will be used to support those product and user-experience priorities in the coming months.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2018

CallPage offers a widget that analyzes visitor behavior and offers a free callback in about 28 seconds. When a visitor leaves a phone number the system calls the first available manager’s mobile phone (then the next one if unanswered) and sends an SMS after the conversation. The product was born from a consultancy team’s experiments and the company was founded in 2015 by Ross Knap, Sergey Butko, and Andrew Tkachiv. It serves about 3,000 customers and facilitates roughly 280,000 calls monthly. CallPage raised a $4.5 million Series A and previously took a $50,000 seed check from an early investor. The company plans to evolve into a platform for “all your company calls in one place” and is developing machine learning and AI to analyze large volumes of calls to improve communications. CallPage provides a callback widget that converts commercial site page views into immediate inbound sales calls to real phone numbers. The product claims clients can “gain 75% more calls, conversion, leads and deals” and includes a behavioral scoring system that predicts consumers’ purchase decisions. The company says it serves more than 1,100 customers worldwide and the team totals 32 people. Management will use the latest funding to develop services in Poland and Western Europe. The startup was founded by three Ukrainians and has roots in both Ukraine and Poland. CallPage provides a service that converts commercial site page views into immediate callbacks to real phone numbers and uses a scoring system that it says can predict consumers’ purchase decisions based on online behavior. The company claims its clients can ‘‘gain 75% more calls, conversion, leads and deals.’’ CallPage was created by Ross Knap, Andrew Tkachiv and Sergey Butko in Krakow and the team now numbers about 20 people. Last month it secured $500,000 from Polish venture fund bValue and several individual investors; the terms of the deal were not disclosed. Previously it raised $50,000 in July 2015 from AIP Seed Capital at a $340,000 valuation and later €30,000 as part of the Startup Wise Guys accelerator. The newest funding will be used to attract English-speaking clients and for other business and marketing purposes, with the startup expecting 85–90% of its audience to come from the UK and the USA by year-end. Although several Ukrainian companies are among its clients, CallPage is not planning to launch in Ukraine.