Participated · Series A · Nov 2016

PeerStreet operates a technology-driven, two-sided marketplace that aggregates real-estate-backed loans from vetted private lenders for institutional and accredited retail investors. The platform reviews each investment opportunity both algorithmically and via in-house real estate and legal teams. Loans are sourced from regional lenders, enabling them to expand lending capital to finance property purchases, renovations, or rentals. PeerStreet plans to use the new equity to hire talent and scale its marketplace, bolster short-term bridge loan products, and grow a recently launched 30-year buy-to-rent loan program. Financially, the company had transacted over $2 billion on the platform as of March 2019 and has secured $4.25 billion in new capital commitments to purchase loans. The equity injection and institutional commitments are intended to support continued product expansion and marketplace growth. PeerStreet operates an award-winning two-sided marketplace that connects individual investors with private real-estate lenders to provide investments in short-term, real-estate-backed loans. The platform sources and curates loans from vetted private lenders across the U.S. and has funded over $900 million in loan volume to date. Over the past year PeerStreet more than doubled its volume, integrated with Wealthfront, Betterment, and Personal Capital, and released a short-term investment product to improve investor liquidity. The company has also significantly enhanced its suite of tools and analytics for lenders and plans to broaden the types of real estate loans it cultivates and hire additional talent. PeerStreet is led by CEO and co-founder Brew Johnson, COO and co-founder Brett Crosby, and Y Combinator alumnus Alex Perelman. Its model aims to lower marketplace acquisition costs and align incentives across lenders and investors to expand liquidity in real estate finance. PeerStreet operates an online marketplace that lets investors buy into real-estate-backed loans, using technology and big data to improve lenders' ability to purchase and sell loans. The company is led by CEO Brew Johnson and COO Brett Crosby. It launched in October 2015 and is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. To date it has funded over $165M in loan investments and returned more than $50M to investors. PeerStreet plans to use its new funding to grow operations and scale its marketplace. PeerStreet operates a marketplace for crowdfunding commercial and residential real estate-backed securities rather than direct loans or equity. The company bundles diversified sets of private loans into securities after conducting its own due diligence, supported by a proprietary data-crunching underwriting software program. Chief Executive and founder Brew Johnson led the platform through a private testing phase. During testing (April through launch) PeerStreet funded more than $35 million in real-estate-backed securities across 78 properties. The company reports annualized net yields to investors of 7–12% to date, with most loans carrying six- to 24-month terms. PeerStreet launched publicly and raised a $6.1 million seed round in the first quarter to expand the platform and scale beyond its testing phase.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2016

Beckon is a San Mateo, CA-based martech platform that provides an enterprise-class data management and real-time marketing intelligence platform. Its product offers visibility into cross-channel marketing performance, integrated campaign planning, omnichannel analytics, real-time dashboards and scorecards, and marketing KPIs. The platform is used by large brands including Coca-Cola, IBM, Gap and Reebok. Led by CEO Jennifer Zeszut, Beckon focuses on marketing performance analytics, planning and reporting. The company raised an additional $10M in funding and intends to use the proceeds to recruit and hire talent across departments and to accelerate development of its platform to further augment its analytics and reporting suite. Beckon is a San Mateo, CA–based provider of marketing intelligence software offering an omnichannel SaaS platform for management, planning, analytics and reporting. The platform integrates messy marketing data to deliver dashboards and scorecards for cross-channel marketing intelligence. Beckon’s software is used by global brands including Coca-Cola, Gap, Microsoft, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Converse, BSkyB, Union Bank, Reebok, Jive and Dolby. The company was founded in 2011 by Jennifer Zeszut (CEO) and Jochen Frey (CTO). Beckon raised $13m in a Series B round. The company intends to use the funds to continue development of its platform and to increase global customer adoption. Beckon builds a marketing data analytics platform that consolidates disparate marketing data sources and helps marketers track spend and performance in real time. Its product ingests data from multiple sources (including emails where users CC Beckon) and presents insights via a Flipboard-like dashboard and easy-to-use tools. The company positions itself as a marketing system of record that supports both experimentation and accountability for marketing teams. Beckon aims to win customers from large enterprise vendors by offering better user experience and leaner pricing than incumbents like SAP, IBM and SAS. The startup has secured customers including StubHub, Converse and Nokia and has raised capital to expand its product. Beckon was founded in 2011 by CEO Jennifer Zeszut and CTO Jochen Frey; Zeszut previously sold Scout Labs for $22.5 million in May 2010.