Participated · Equity · May 2020

Social Asset Management (SAM) builds an AI engine that ingests billions of tweets, photos, videos and social posts to create a “global sensory network” for detecting early signals of emerging risks and crises. The platform analyzes unstructured, connected data to surface relevant on-the-ground information for customers in social, tech, public and aviation sectors, as well as emergency responders and NGOs. SAM reports record adoption and revenue growth and says it is also seeing interest from governments. During the COVID-19 pandemic the company has been notifying clients about lockdowns, closures, evacuations and other unexpected risks. The capital from the recent raise will be used to fuel growth and operations, support its client base, and further develop its AI to predict more crisis events. SAM was founded in 2013 and also maintains a hub in London, England.

Participated · Series A · Apr 2019

Trint provides an AI-driven speech-to-text platform that automatically transcribes and translates audio, video and text to make multimedia content verifiable, searchable, editable and shareable. The company positions itself in a new software category it calls “StoryTech,” and is releasing a tool to build stories from audio and video on the Trint platform. Trint serves enterprise and individual customers and lists clients including Nike, The Associated Press, Airbnb, CNN and Spotify. The company has offices in London and Toronto and was founded in 2014. Trint has been one of the UK’s fastest-growing startups, cited by Deloitte as the 28th fastest-growing company with a 1,571% growth rate over four years, and was named in the Top Ten of the UK Startup 100 List. The new funding will be used to drive product innovation and accelerate hiring in its London and Toronto offices as the company scales its team. Trint combines a text editor and an audio/video player into a single platform that produces searchable, editable transcripts and changes how professionals work with audio and video. The product targets video production, brands, news organisations, and researchers, and is used by more than a quarter million customers. Its client list includes major media organisations such as The Associated Press, Vice News, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel. Founder and CEO Jeff Kofman, an Emmy Award–winning former war and foreign correspondent, built the product from his experience manually transcribing thousands of hours of interviews. Since its 2016 launch Trint has grown from four to 45 employees (including seven in a North American office in Toronto) and has seen consistent double-digit revenue growth since 2017. In the coming months the company plans to roll out a suite of collaboration features and a tool combining a video player with an interactive transcript to make recorded content more searchable, discoverable, and shareable. Trint employs machine learning and speech-to-text technology and integrates a web-based audio/video player with a text editor so automated transcriptions are synced to the audio playhead for quick checking and editing. The company was co-founded by Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman and originally launched in September 2016 with early funding from the Knight Enterprise Fund and the Google Digital News Initiative, plus support from BBC Worldwide Labs and Cisco. Trint’s product makes recorded content searchable, turning otherwise hard-to-search audio and video into editable, indexable text, and the company claims close to 7,000 regular users in its first nine months. Financially, Trint has closed $3.1 million in pre-Series A funding. The startup plans to use the capital to develop technology to become an end-to-end publishing platform and to roll out a mobile app. It also intends to introduce a series of enterprise solutions targeting international media organizations, universities, businesses and government agencies, and to add features to make online videos and podcasts searchable, shareable and accessible. Trint is a UK-based workflow software company that provides a service to transcribe, verify, correct, search, edit and export usable content for professionals in media, PR, marketing, business, law and academia. The platform is currently in beta testing at NPR News, BBC News, Thomson Reuters, Oxford University and several newspapers and magazines. Trint raised a seed funding round of undisclosed amount from members of the Wild Blue Cohort, a West London business angel network. The company intends to use the funds to continue developing the platform and to expand operations. Wild Blue was founded in 2014 with support from the Innovative Projects Fund of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2018

Stringr began as a marketplace connecting news organizations with videographers and has expanded into a broader cloud-based video production platform. The company reports a network of more than 100,000 videographers and has added tools for live streaming, transcription, and editing to streamline production. Some customers use Stringr just for footage, while others rely on it as a purely cloud-based solution for producing news programming when staff cannot come into the office. Stringr also launched Embed Studios, a division that uses its videographer network to create branded content for clients including Corcoran, Zillow, HBO Max, Amazon, TikTok, Mastercard, United Way and MGM. The company says demand has increased amid COVID-19 as media companies seek more cost-effective production workflows. Financially, Stringr has raised new funding and says its total capital raised is $7.25 million. Stringr operates a comprehensive video marketplace that enables media organizations to source custom footage, edit and publish under tight deadlines. The company leverages a nationwide network of more than 60,000 responsive videographers who provide broadcast-quality video in every major U.S. market. Stringr collaborates with The Associated Press by providing a selection of daily video stories for syndication through AP’s VideoHub marketplace. The company was founded in 2014 by Lindsay Stewart and Brian McNeill, who met at The Wharton School, and is based in New York City. Stringr raised more than $1M in the latest funding and has raised $4.6M to date. It intends to use the new funds to accelerate growth, including integration of its service into partners’ products. Stringr operates a marketplace that lets media customers post requests for footage and receive submissions, often in under an hour. The platform is open to professional videographers and casual contributors, but emphasizes quality through a curation team that works with both newsrooms and shooters. CEO and co-founder Lindsay Stewart previously worked as a TV news producer for ABC, Bloomberg and Fox News, and says the service was born from newsroom needs. Stringr currently hosts 10,000 videographers on its platform. The company's present focus is editorial footage for breaking news and evergreen stories, with potential to expand to other businesses that need video. Stringr plans to apply learnings from pilot markets toward a nationwide push.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2018

Data.World is a cloud-native, SaaS enterprise data catalog that maps and documents an organization’s data assets using a knowledge-graph approach to provide semantically organized discovery, governance and analytics. The platform offers data discovery, lineage, metadata indexing, privacy controls (masking/hiding/anonymization), secure data virtualization and monitoring for security and compliance. Data.World has an open-source metadata model and integration toolkit called Kos and plans forthcoming automations for metadata and governance tasks alongside UI enhancements. The company reports more than 1.6 million members across customers including the Associated Press and Penguin Random House, and counts states, counties and local government agencies among its users. Management says the new funding will support global expansion, product innovation and talent acquisition as it pursues greater public-sector traction and broader enterprise adoption. Data.World provides a cloud-native enterprise data catalog and agile data governance solution that maps data to business concepts via a knowledge graph, plus on‑premises tools for inventorying and organizing data across systems. The platform supports metadata ingestion via collection agents, APIs, file transfers, and imports, and lets users save and share queries, analyses, and findings. It includes analytics for discovery, fine-grained permissions, automatic provenance and lineage tracking, and a collaboration dashboard with activity feeds and alerts. The company also operates a large open data community that surpassed one million users and includes members from more than two‑thirds of the Fortune 500. Data.World was co-founded by Brett Hurt (CEO), Bryon Jacob, Jon Loyens, and Matt Laessig; customers named in the article include the Associated Press, CareOregon, and Wunderman Thompson. The company has about 85 employees and has seen quarter‑over‑quarter customer expansion and a doubling of enterprise customers in the past 12 months. Data.World provides a data catalog that maps data to business concepts to create a unified body of knowledge, offering cloud and on-premises management tools for inventorying and organizing enterprise data. The platform lets users save and share queries, analyses, and findings in real time and supports metadata ingestion via agents, APIs, file transfers, and imports. It includes fine-grained permissions, automatic provenance and lineage tracking, and a collaboration dashboard built on a custom knowledge graph and visualization technologies. The company has launched initiatives like a free Coronavirus Data Resource Hub to support COVID-19 research. CEO Brett Hurt says proceeds from the new funding will be used to accelerate data governance efforts and scale to meet demand. Data.World reports quarter-over-quarter customer expansion and new customer acquisition and counts clients including the Associated Press, CareOregon, and Wunderman Thompson. Data.world operates a collaborative data community and enterprise platform that lets teams upload, exchange and catalog datasets and discuss findings internally. The platform integrates with Tableau, Microsoft Excel, Power BI, IBM SPSS, MicroStrategy, Google Data Studio and other analytics tools, and is widely used by journalists. Data.world says its product helps Fortune 500 companies close the “data divide” with digital-native firms by democratizing access to high-quality data. The company recently rolled out an enterprise offering and will use new capital to continue building that product; The Associated Press is a customer. CEO Brett Hurt cites GitHub as an inspiration for democratizing access to data, and the platform has been positioned as a tool for data journalism. Financially, Data.world has raised a total of $45.3M since its 2016 launch, including an $18.7M Series B in February 2017. data.world is a Certified B Corporation and social network for data people that builds a collaborative resource to ease data discovery and collaboration across sectors including health, education, finance, government, public safety, agriculture and weather. Led by co-founder and CEO Brett Hurt, the company offers collaborative workspaces and has launched initiatives such as dwSQL, a new SQL dialect bridging linked data and relational databases. Since its preview launch in July 2016, data.world has introduced core capabilities and projects to drive collaboration within public and private data workspaces. It has powered projects including the White House Opportunity Project workspace, an Anti-Defamation League public workspace, a joint-venture partnership with the U.S. Commerce Department NTIS, the DoD data.mil portal, and publication of metadata for the CIA Crest Archive. The company raised $18.7M in the reported round and has now raised a total of $32.7M. data.world intends to use the funds to continue building its data resource and expand its collaborative capabilities.

Participated · Series C · Oct 2017

Wibbitz builds an AI platform that automatically creates short videos from text news stories. Its technology is designed to supplement publishers' existing video teams by producing large quantities of low-cost videos while humans focus on higher-end work. The company aims to make its videos indistinguishable from human-created content and says publishers are increasingly open to AI for content creation. Wibbitz began a major push into the U.S. two years ago and has added partners including Bloomberg, Cox Media Group and The Weather Channel. It has raised a total of $30.8M to date, and the latest funding is earmarked to hire across the board, expand globally and improve its AI and automation. Co-founder and CEO Zohar Dayan framed the new round as a testament to the value the technology brings to large media companies. Wibbitz provides publishers with a text-to-video platform designed to increase video inventory and monetize their content with pre-roll ad space. Founded in 2011 by CEO Zohar Dayan, the company is based in Tel Aviv and New York City and maintains R&D and engineering teams in Israel. Wibbitz is launching a B2B platform and developing new features to expand its publisher services. It has invested in a comprehensive Control-Room solution that gives publishers editorial control over branding, visual components and the option for human voiceover. The company plans to expand into the U.S. market and will grow its business development, sales, marketing and editorial teams, aiming to hire about 20 new employees. Financially, Wibbitz raised $8m in a Series B round to fund these expansion and product efforts. Wibbitz provides a text-to-video service that converts article text into shareable HTML5 video summaries using images from its library or public Creative Commons image banks. Publishers implement Wibbitz with a single line of JavaScript and viewers can share videos to Facebook and Twitter or embed them elsewhere. The company has introduced a one-click video-creation solution and says it has improved its algorithms and player since launch. Wibbitz reports that more than 20,000 sites have generated videos (up from 1,600 in a private beta). The service supports monetization through pre-roll advertising, and the company says traction and ad performance are growing but declined to provide specific metrics. With new funding, Wibbitz plans to commercialize the technology further, expand R&D in Israel, and open offices in NYC; it is developing a premium publisher solution for scalable video creation. Wibbitz provides an automated service that converts an article's text into concise video summaries combining text, images and audio narration. The product is implemented with a single line of JavaScript and pulls images from the publisher's library or Creative Commons sources. The player supports both Flash and a mobile-friendly HTML5 interface and produces videos that can be shared to Facebook, Twitter or embedded elsewhere. Wibbitz was testing a more basic form of the service with about 1,600 sites in private beta and began accepting registrations for the newer player. The company plans a freemium pricing model with larger publishers billed by usage and an option for publishers to monetize via short pre-roll ads. Wibbitz was founded by Zohar Dayan and Yotam Cohen and is based in Tel Aviv.