• Adzuna

  Participated · Series A · Jul 2013

  Adzuna aggregates job listings from thousands of sources to provide a unified job search experience and data-driven tools for job seekers. Founded by the team behind Gumtree, Zoopla and Qype, it launched in the U.K. in 2011 and has expanded to 16 countries. The company highlights strong markets in the U.K., U.S., Germany, Netherlands, France and Brazil and says it is growing quickly in several others, notably the U.S. Across its 16 sites Adzuna reports 10 million monthly visitors and 7 million registered users, with "millions" of CVs uploaded. It currently aggregates listings from 5,000 sources and offers tools such as ValueMyCV and machine‑learning matching. Adzuna monetizes via CPC promotions for advertisers, referrals to jobs, and labor market data sales, and disclosed more than £1 million in monthly revenue as of the article. Adzuna operates a job search engine that brings together vacancies in one place and has developed ValueMyCV to help jobseekers understand their market value. The site lists over 1 million UK vacancies. Launched in July 2011 by Doug Monro, the company is based in London. It is backed by venture capital firms Index Ventures, The Accelerator Group and Passion Capital. Adzuna intends to use recent funding to grow internationally and invest in its technology. The company has combined consumer-facing search with tools aimed at improving matches between candidates and employers. Adzuna indexes job vacancies and classified ads across the web to power a search engine and provide labour-market data. The company attracts about 2 million monthly unique visitors and indexes over 100 million classified ads; it processes roughly 500,000 U.K. job ads daily, about half of which lack salary information. Adzuna has built a social layer (Adzuna Connect) for Facebook and LinkedIn sign-ins and recently launched Jobsworth, a neural-network-based system developed with the data science community (via a Kaggle competition) to predict missing salaries. The startup says Jobsworth is within 10% accuracy the vast majority of the time and is continually improving. Since launch it has expanded jobs search to six countries, including Germany, Australia, South Africa, Canada and Brazil, and reports revenue growing at 50% per quarter. Management plans to use new capital to fuel international expansion and invest in social job search, data and mobile. Adzuna collates classified job ads in real time from hundreds of sites, totaling about 500,000 vacancies, and adds a social layer called Adzuna Connect to link users to jobs where they have first- or second-degree connections on LinkedIn or Facebook. The product also pulls contextual data about roles, including average salary data, employee reviews, interview questions and “CEO Approval ratings.” Launched in July 2011 and initially starting in the UK, the company aims to be a global search engine for job listings. The founders, Andrew Hunter and Doug Monro, previously worked at Gumtree, Qype and Zoopla. The startup plans to use funding to scale the service and expand into other verticals and international markets. Financially, Adzuna has now raised a total of £800,000. Adzuna operates a search engine that pulls job ads in real time from major job boards as well as sources like Crunchboard and LinkedIn, aggregating classifieds that are otherwise fragmented across providers. Its core product includes an "Adzuna Connect" feature that links users' LinkedIn or Facebook accounts to show contacts and direct links to current vacancies at contacts' companies, with built-in messaging links. The company targets a UK market it estimates at roughly 300,000 live vacancies representing about £7 billion in salaries. Adzuna launched with founders Andrew Hunter (formerly VP Marketing & UK GM of Qype) and Doug Monro (formerly COO of Zoopla); the pair previously met at Gumtree in 2005. The site is UK-focused, hosted on a .co.uk domain (Adzuna.com maps to the UK site). Adzuna has so far raised seed funding to support its market entry and product rollout.

• Riskified

  Participated · Seed · Jul 2013

  Riskified provides AI-powered fraud-prevention and payments solutions that operate at the intersection of merchants, banks and consumers to optimize online and omnichannel paths-to-purchase. Its machine-learning models and chargeback-guarantee approach distinguish legitimate customers from fraudsters, boost conversion rates, increase bank authorization rates, protect customer accounts, and enable alternate payment methods. The company positions its model as an alternative to scoring-based solutions by aligning incentives with merchants through guaranteed chargebacks. Customers typically see order approval rate increases up to 20% and reductions in fraud-related costs up to 50%; Riskified analyzes transactions from 235 countries and territories. The company has experienced hyper growth (250% CAGR over the past five years), with ARR surpassing $100M in 2018 and projected high double-digit growth in 2019. Riskified employs 420+ people in New York and Tel Aviv and plans to open a Shanghai office before the end of 2019; the new funding is intended to accelerate domestic and international scaling and expand its product footprint. Riskified provides an e-commerce fraud prevention solution that leverages machine learning, behavioral analytics and its broad merchant network to detect fraudulent transactions while preserving customer experience. Its platform reviews transactions for signs of fraud and has processed hundreds of millions of transactions, approving billions of dollars of merchant revenue. Customers include retailers such as Foot Locker, Simplehuman and Macy’s. The company plans to use new funding to continue technology development, grow its teams in Tel Aviv and New York, and expand into new markets. Riskified emphasizes network-driven fraud insights to give merchants a fuller picture than in-house solutions can provide. The company opened a New York office last fall and says it will accelerate market penetration and international expansion with the new capital. Riskified provides an e-commerce fraud prevention solution that leverages proprietary behavioral analytics technology and machine learning. The platform guarantees the business of hundreds of global brands across sectors including luxury fashion, retail chains, gift card and ticket marketplaces. Led by cofounder and CEO Eido Gal, the company was founded in 2013 and is based in Tel Aviv, with U.S. offices in Boston. Riskified secured $25M in a funding round that increased its total capital raised to $31M. The company intends to use the funds to further accelerate growth and customer success. Riskified provides e-commerce companies with a proprietary risk enablement platform designed to increase sales by verifying, approving and guaranteeing high-risk transactions. Retailers determine which transactions to review and pay only when a transaction is approved. All approved transactions carry a 100% money-back guarantee. Co-founded in 2012 by Eido Gal and Assaf Feldman and based in Tel Aviv, the company intends to use its newly raised capital to grow and develop its platform. Riskified raised $1.65M in seed funding from a syndicate of investors.

• Wise

  Participated · Seed · Apr 2012

  TransferWise, launched in 2011, builds cross-border money-transfer services and multi-currency accounts that let customers hold funds in 54 currencies. The company processes about £4 billion in cross-border transactions every month and serves over 8 million customers worldwide. TransferWise grew in popularity due to the simplicity and low cost of its international transfers. It has been profitable and does not require outside capital for growth, having rejected cash-burning hypergrowth strategies. Since 2017 it has offered multi-currency accounts, and it recently received clearance to offer retail investment services in Britain, indicating service expansion plans. The company positioned the recent secondary share sale as a response to investor demand rather than an operating need for funds. TransferWise is a London-headquartered international money-transfer service that enables low-cost cross-border payments. The company supports 49 currencies across 1,600 currency routes and serves 5 million customers, processing £4 billion per month. It estimates customers save £1 billion annually in bank fees. Audited financials for the year ending March 2018 showed 77% revenue growth to £117 million and a net profit of £6.2 million after tax. TransferWise employs more than 1,600 people across 12 global offices and plans to hire 750 more over the next 12 months. Management says capital is not an issue, a public offering remains a long way off, and recent regulatory changes (including the EU outlawing exchange-rate mark-ups) are favorable for the business. TransferWise provides low-cost international money transfers for consumers and SMEs and offers multi-currency Borderless accounts. Its core products include direct consumer and business transfer services, third-party integrations, and the Borderless account aimed at businesses, sole traders and freelancers. The company serves over two million customers, supports 750 currency routes, handles more than £1 billion in transfers per month and has roughly a 10% U.K. market share. TransferWise has been profitable since early 2017. Management plans continued global expansion with a focus on the APAC region, further development of the Borderless account, and a consumer version with a debit card planned for the U.K. and Europe in early 2018. It is also partnering with banks such as N26 (and soon Starling) and pursuing markets including India and Brazil. TransferWise provides online money-transfer services and has built a strong brand around its product. The company is London-headquartered and employs over 600 people across the U.K., Europe and the U.S., including roughly 100 product staff. TransferWise is currently loss-making and reinvests all revenue into growth. Management says the business is closer to obtaining its own U.S. banking licence and prefers to control its own banking arrangements. The company noted that a U.S. money-transfer licence is required for each state, and that the fundraising climate has cooled, giving it a range of equity and debt financing options. TransferWise built a P2P money-transfer platform (founded in 2011 by ex-Skype and PayPal engineers) that matches transfers between users to avoid traditional bank fees and use mid-market rates. It targets expats, freelancers, sole traders, retirees living abroad and small businesses, with an average transaction around £1,500. The company reports about £3 billion ($4.5 billion) transferred through its platform and customer cost savings of more than £135 million versus traditional bank transfers. TransferWise currently operates 292 currency routes and plans to add 300 more in the next year. It is opening a U.S. office next month and will launch outposts in Germany and Austria in the coming months as part of a global expansion. The new funding is intended to ramp up its P2P transfer business and help bolster the company against competition from banks, PayPal and other startups.

• UserVoice

  Participated · Equity · Nov 2011

  UserVoice offers hosted customer engagement products including UserVoice Feedback for gathering and prioritizing product ideas, a Helpdesk ticketing system, Instant Answers, website widgets, an iPhone SDK, and a Facebook app. The company reports 75,000 signups and 40 million user interactions across its offerings. It serves customers such as Seesmic, Posterous, Meebo, Miso, Rapportive, and HootSuite. UserVoice is expanding its engineering footprint by opening a new office in Raleigh, North Carolina, and plans to grow its development, design, and sales teams in the coming months. Founded in 2008 and based in San Francisco, the startup is positioning its products to help SMBs and web developers streamline feedback and customer support workflows. UserVoice, based in Santa Cruz, CA, provides a hosted service that helps businesses intelligently process feedback from employees and customers. Its core product aggregates suggestions, enables voting and moderation, and acts as a social idea generator for software companies and web application developers to extend product feedback channels. The company is packaging a white‑label solution to let customers embed branded widgets and communities with customizable CSS, templates, language files and more, targeting corporations and institutions such as education, healthcare and government bodies. UserVoice also introduced ZeroLogin, which allows users to sign in to UserVoice with the same username and password as the company website that deployed its solution. The startup announced it raised an extra $800,000 from a group led by Baseline Ventures and joined by FF Angel (Founders Fund), Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, The Accelerator Group, Net Discovery and Howard Lindzon. UserVoice added Bob Pearson, who spearheaded IdeaStorm at Dell, as an advisor to help the company gain more traction.

• Skimlinks

  Participated · Series B · Nov 2011

  Skimlinks is a platform that helps online publishers make money by automating affiliate links so publishers earn a cut when links drive purchases. The company has built a network of 1.5 million websites and apps and counts Vox Media, Time Inc, Gawker Media, and Condé Nast among its partners. In 2014 Skimlinks generated $625 million in sales for more than 20,000 retailers. Founded in 2006, the company is pursuing "intelligent linking"—affiliate links that are automatically updated without work from writers or editors. Its product simplifies the affiliate marketing process by handling the technical and commercial integration with retailers. The existing publisher network and merchant sales volume underpin its monetization strategy as it scales. Skimlinks provides a content-monetization platform that automates affiliate linking so publishers can earn commerce revenue from their content. The company says it serves 140,000 active publishers and is generating seven-figures in revenue monthly, with 100–200% year-over-year growth for four consecutive years. Skimlinks expects to drive over $500 million of e-commerce sales globally this year, according to its investors. It is headquartered in London with additional offices in San Francisco and New York and 55 employees. The company has opened a Japanese site and plans further expansion across the US, Asia and Europe; a full Japanese office is still in the works. Capital from the recent round will be used to develop the platform and support that international expansion. Skimlinks provides an in-text monetization platform that enables Web publishers to monetize content through automated product and price linking. The company recently launched SkimWords 2.0, a real-time, automated content monetization solution that features in-text product and price comparison across multiple vertical categories. It has a team of 30 people based in London, San Francisco and New York. Skimlinks plans to use new capital for growth in existing and new vertical markets in the United States and globally, as well as for product research and development. Financially, the company completed a $4.5M Series B and has raised $7.5M in total to date. The business was co-founded in 2008 by CEO Alicia Navarro and Joe Stepniewski. Skimlinks provides an affiliate links tool that lets publishers monetize content by automatically converting retailer links into affiliate links when users click them. Publishers add a snippet of code to their site footer and Skimlinks retains a percentage of the commission paid by affiliate networks. The platform supports 7,000 merchants across 22 affiliate networks and powers publishers including Hachette Filipacchi Media US, Mirror.co.uk, AVForums.com and Future Publishing UK. Skimlinks says it has seen month-on-month growth of 35% over the past year and that November alone processed £6 million in merchant sales through the platform. The company currently generates over half of its revenue in the US and plans to use new funding to expand US operations, and to invest in sales, marketing and product development. Skimlinks launched in December 2008 and is co-founded by CEO Alicia Navarro and Biz Dev Director Joe Stepniewski. Skimlinks re‑engineered from a Web 2.0 decision‑making tool to an affiliate aggregator for publishers, relaunching as Skimlinks to focus on publisher monetization. The service works by inserting a line of code that converts normal product links into affiliate links on‑the‑fly and populates entire sites including archives. The company aggregates affiliate networks (the coverage cites 11 networks) and the article also notes access to affiliate programs of over 7,000 international merchants across 16 affiliate networks. The service is currently free to use for publishers; Skimlinks retains a small cut of the commissions earned. Clients named include Future Publishing and The Daily Mail, and the company sees an opportunity to expand in the UK and Europe versus North America‑focused competitors. Skimlinks attracted a first round investment understood to be around £700,000 to support growth and broader publisher adoption.

No current team members are available.