Participated · Equity · Jun 2023

Soundtrack Your Brand is a Stockholm-based B2B music streaming service that provides licensed background music to thousands of businesses including stores, hotels, and restaurants. Founded in 2013 as a joint effort with Spotify (originally Spotify for Business), the company serves clients such as McDonald’s, Lululemon, Uniqlo, Joe & The Juice, Aesop and Tag Heuer. It offers a global music streaming platform tailored for commercial settings to strengthen customer relationships through music. The company raised $15M in pre-growth funding and intends to use the proceeds to expand operations and broaden its business reach. Leadership changes include Matt Pincus (MUSIC) joining the board as part of the investment. Moving into 2024, Soundtrack Your Brand plans an additional growth round to fund further consolidation of the global background music market. Soundtrack Your Brand operates a licensed music streaming service for public and commercial environments, combining data analysis and music expertise to deliver content that fits individual brands and can help increase sales. The service is marketed to large customers and thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, with named customers including McDonald’s, TAG Heuer and Toni & Guy. Co-founded by Andreas Liffgarden (formerly global head of business development at Spotify) and Ola Sars (formerly COO and co-founder of Beats Music), the company expanded from the Nordics into over 100 countries in 2016. During that expansion the company reported revenue and user base growth of nearly 400%. The company intends to use new funding to ramp up global expansion and improve its streaming service for businesses. It is based in Stockholm, Sweden. Soundtrack Your Brand is a Spotify-backed service that streams music into business locations using installable hardware and a Spotify-like app experience for employees and customers. The product also offers analytics and big-data features to show how music and streamed promotions interact with customer activity. The company is expanding into the U.S. and has signed a global framework deal to provide streaming services to McDonald’s, covering the chain’s more than 36,000 restaurants, though content will be fulfilled by other providers in some markets. Soundtrack must sign direct deals with franchise locations for installations to proceed; it already has installs in about 60% of McDonald’s restaurants in Sweden and is running pilots with large franchises outside Sweden. The company was co-founded by Spotify’s former head of business development and a founder of Beats Music. Financially, it has raised $20 million to date from its owners, up from $11 million previously, with backers including Spotify and other investors. Soundtrack Your Brand offers two services (Spotify Business and Spotify Enterprise) that let retailers and other businesses control and stream Spotify music in stores and venues, with a music controller and developing music analytics. The company works exclusively with Spotify for music supply today and is positioning itself as a Spotify satellite, though it may expand music sources as it grows. It is live only in Sweden, where it counts single-venue customers, McDonald’s restaurants nationwide, and a pilot with Starbucks. Pricing in Sweden is about SEK450 (~$55) per month for single-store deployments and SEK750 (~$92) per store per month for larger enterprise deployments. The product emphasizes legal, centralized, remotely managed in-venue streaming and is developing analytics that correlate music to customer behavior and sales. The startup has 32 employees and describes the recent financing as a “healthy B round.” The company plans to use the funding to expand across the Nordics and then into Europe, the U.S. and beyond.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2021

SlashNext, based in Pleasanton, CA, provides SaaS-based spear‑phishing and human‑hacking defense across digital channels and apps. The company’s SlashNext 360° Defense Service employs its patented AI SEER technology to detect zero‑hour phishing threats via dynamic run‑time analysis of billions of URLs per day using virtual browsers and machine learning. It protects mobile apps, browser extensions, and APIs and integrates with mobile endpoint management and incident response services. SlashNext has developed reseller partnerships with Palo Alto Networks XSOAR Marketplace, Microsoft Azure Marketplace, Synnex, and over 50 VAR partners. Led by CEO Patrick Harr, the company aims to expand its AI cloud and on‑device multi‑channel, multi‑language detection of SMiShing, Vishing, BEC, bank fraud, scams, credential theft, ransomware, social engineering, and other malicious digital attacks. It will use the new funding to scale customer acquisition and operations domestically and internationally. SlashNext is a Pleasanton, CA-based provider of advanced protection solutions against socially engineered attacks, malware, exploits and data theft. Led by founder and CEO Atif Mushtaq, the company’s core product is the Active Cyber Defense System, a cloud-based "Progressive Learning" platform built specifically for cybersecurity. The system is designed to detect and block socially engineered attacks, malware and exploits across all networked devices. It targets protection for all versions of Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS devices as well as IoT devices, smart TVs, printers, medical devices and SCADA systems. Financially, SlashNext closed a $9M Series A in April 2017 led by Norwest Venture Partners and Wing Venture Capital, bringing total funding to over $10M.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2020

Challengermode operates a competitive gaming platform that aims to enable anyone to participate in esports regardless of ability or experience, serving players, brands, content creators, game developers and professional tournament organisers. The platform emphasizes inclusivity and community, going beyond simple tournament hosting to offer monetisation and engagement tools. Founded in 2014 and based in Stockholm, the company has secured partnerships with FIFA, DreamHack and the Fnatic esports team. Challengermode raised $12 million from Alibaba's eWTP Innovation Fund alongside Telia Ventures, GP Bullhound, Back in Black Capital and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The financing will fund global expansion—particularly in North America—accelerated monetisation, product development and efforts to give game developers access to its technology. CEO Robel Efrem said the additional backing will allow the company to double down on delivering competitive gaming experiences into players' homes across games and skill levels.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2019

Aporeto provides an identity-based segmentation solution for cloud applications, containers, and microservices, enabling distributed Zero Trust security for apps, networks and users. The platform protects cloud applications and networks by authenticating, authorizing and encrypting all communications with a cryptographically signed identity assigned to every workload, preventing lateral movement. Led by CEO Jason Schmitt, Aporeto targets protection across apps, networks and users with its identity segmentation approach. The company raised $20M in a Series B to expand adoption of its solution. The round was led by Comcast Ventures with participation from Wing VC, Norwest Venture Partners, National Grid Partners (NGP) and Telia Ventures. In conjunction with the funding, David Zilberman, managing director of Comcast Ventures, will join Aporeto's board of directors. Aporeto builds developer-centric, enterprise-grade cloud-native security that is purpose-built for containers, microservices, serverless and legacy applications. The company offers solutions that work at any scale on public, private or hybrid clouds and aims to simplify security operations for modern distributed systems. Aporeto is launching a public beta of a SaaS service to simplify running cloud-native applications in zero-trust environments, with testing and production deployment scheduled later this year. Its product set includes policy and analytics capabilities and the company has an associated open-source Trireme project. Aporeto positions itself to reduce complexity for enterprise security teams while preserving developer speed and says it has demonstrated market traction with enterprise customers.

Participated · Series B · Feb 2018

Unacast delivers location intelligence that analyzes human mobility patterns, supplying clean, reliable datasets to enterprises and government agencies. Following its late-2023 merger with Gravy Analytics, the company integrated both firms’ technologies into a single, scaled platform that is now described as one of the world’s most comprehensive sources of location data. Management reports strong double-digit revenue growth and EBITDA-positive operations since the merger. Unacast’s value proposition centers on data quality, transparency, and a track record of regulatory compliance. The firm plans to accelerate its product roadmap, further improve data quality, and expand go-to-market efforts. It also intends to pursue strategic M&A to broaden its technology stack and data assets. Headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia, Unacast partners with organizations seeking trustworthy insights into population movement and community trends.