Participated · Series E · Nov 2021

OpenWeb provides a B2B2C platform that powers end-to-end user experiences, including user activation and management, first-party data aggregation and management, AI moderation, and social experiences. Its proprietary technology is used by top publishers such as The New York Times, Hearst, Yahoo!, Penske Media Corporation, and News Corp. The company works with more than 1,000 top-tier publishers and hosts over 100 million active users each month. OpenWeb has more than 265 employees across New York City, Tel Aviv, Kiev, San Diego, Canada, London, and Paris. The business partners directly with publishers and brands to build and monetize communities rooted in conversations. It plans to use recent funding to continue expanding, pursue new publishers and advertisers, and develop innovative partnerships and applications. OpenWeb provides a technology platform that enables publishers to build direct relationships with their audiences. Led by co-founder and CEO Nadav Shoval, the company was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in New York City with teams in Tel Aviv and Kiev. OpenWeb works with more than 1,000 top-tier publishers, including Hearst, Yahoo!, Penske Media Corporation, and News Corp., and hosts more than 100 million active users each month. The company has over 150 employees across its offices. OpenWeb plans to expand its global presence with new offices in Canada, the APAC (China) region, and the EMEA region, and to explore strategic acquisitions to enhance its product offerings. Financially, the company has raised capital to support growth and scale its platform. Spot.IM started as a commenting platform and is expanding into a broader community platform that includes commenting, moderation, community pages and tools to highlight and monetize user-generated content. The company positions these tools as ways for publishers to focus on loyal readers rather than transient users. Spot.IM provides data to help publishers understand user behavior and value; the CEO said that for some publishers a Spot.IM user delivers five times the lifetime revenue of a non-Spot.IM user. Customers mentioned include Hearst, Refinery29, Fox News, Engadget and AOL.com. The company has attracted institutional capital and remains venture-backed, having raised a total of $63 million to date. Leadership changes announced alongside the funding include the appointment of Itzik Ben-Bassat as president and a member of the board. Spot.IM builds a comments and community platform for publishers, aiming to keep readers on-site and increase advertising revenue. Its clients include Time Inc., NBC, HuffPost and Engadget. The company offers additional ad units and operates on a revenue-share model with media partners. Spot.IM uses machine learning to moderate comments, removing illicit content and spam. CEO Nadav Shoval says the company provides technology “like a social network” and aims to build communities across the open web. Spot.IM plans to invest in R&D and hiring and is preparing to launch a major new platform. Spot.IM provides a social engagement platform that lets digital publishers curate their communities' social interactions and keep ad revenue rather than ceding it to third-party social networks. The company partners with publishers to encourage organic site engagement and claims to enable over 3 billion monthly page views. Spot.IM works with 4,600 active sites and serves more than 300 million unique monthly users for its media partners. Its publisher customers include News Corp., Meredith Corporation, Time Inc.’s The Drive, Little Things and Advertising Age. Founded in 2012 by Nadav Shoval and Ishay Green and based in New York, Spot.IM intends to use new funding to expand R&D, hire additional staff, and further disrupt the online publishing industry by building capabilities that foster social interactions within partners' communities.

Led · Series A · Dec 2020

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 · Seed · Aug 2019

Holloway’s core product is a library of book-length online guides on startup- and work-related topics, designed for easy reading and searching. Its flagship title, Raising Venture Capital, is a 340-page guide organized into 15 sections and three appendices with a cited 14-hour total read time; the company estimates the guide contains roughly $40,000 worth of legal fees in distilled expertise. Guides are written and maintained by contributors and editors from industry — including lead author and CEO Andy Sparks and contributors such as Brad Feld, Darby Wong, Ozzie Osman and Aditya Agarwal — and are sold with perpetual updates. The company charges $100 per guide (current pricing), with plans to adjust pricing to remain affordable while covering production costs. Holloway is investing heavily in its reading software (search that breaks out sections and sources, a left-hand index view, an in-house glossary and expert notes) to improve discoverability and the digital reading experience. The startup intends to expand its library to additional topics (next up: technical hiring) and to compete with traditional publishing by democratizing access to high-quality, practical knowledge.

Participated · Series A · Apr 2018

Shine began as a messaging bot delivering daily life advice and positive reinforcement via SMS and Facebook Messenger and has expanded into a freemium iOS app offering meditations, affirmations, and five-minute "Shine Stories" voiced by influencers. The company reports 2 million users across 189 countries, with 88% under 35 and 70% female. Shine experimented with a paid life-coaching subscription that did not scale, then relaunched subscriptions in December as a freemium model ($59.99/year or $7.99/month) though founders declined to disclose exact conversion rates, saying they are on par with industry standards. The team is eight people and plans to double headcount this year, launch an Android app, and develop additional products and audio offerings while avoiding ads in audio content near-term. The product roadmap includes exploring broader audio distribution (e.g., podcasts or voice platforms) but the team has not committed to a single approach. Shine provides a free daily messaging service that delivers personalized well-being "intentions" via SMS, Facebook Messenger and Kik. The Shine bot collects and analyzes custom inputs to tailor short messages users receive at set times to practice or meditate on. The cofounders emphasize text messaging for its high open rates and position the product toward millennials. The company is testing monetization strategies while keeping sign-up free on its website. Shine plans to expand the team and develop new products, including a voice-based product built with Betaworks. Founded in 2016, the startup currently has four employees. Shine is an NYC startup that sends a daily text message intended to help millennials live with more intentionality and mindfulness. Its product delivers curated, conversational morning messages about confidence, daily happiness, mental health, and productivity, designed to feel like a trusted friend. The service is interactive (users are encouraged to reply) and places particular focus on serving millennial women. Founders Marah Lidey and Naomi Hirabayashi developed the idea from their work at DoSomething.org and leverage that experience in messaging to young people. The company recently closed a seed round led by Flybridge Capital Partners with participation from Comcast Ventures and BBG Ventures. Over the next six months Shine's primary milestone is growth.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2016

theSkimm produces daily newsletters that summarize news and pop culture for a loyal audience of roughly seven million readers and recruits "Skimm’bassadors" for word‑of‑mouth growth. Co‑founded in 2012 by former TV news producers Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, the company has expanded beyond its core newsletters into subscription products, an app with a calendar of upcoming news and televised events, podcasts, and an e‑commerce business. Revenue has more than doubled year over year since 2016, driven by subscriptions, native advertising, and affiliate licensing. The staff has doubled and the company recently moved into a new headquarters. TheSkimm plans to add more subscription services, further expand into video and podcasting, and pursue data analysis efforts. Recent hiring and product expansion appear to be funded by the new raise to support these initiatives. theSkimm is a newsletter startup that distills the day's headlines into a few key points conveyed in a conversational, friendly style. The company says it has 4 million subscribers, mostly women between the ages of 22 and 34. It has expanded beyond newsletters with Skimm Ahead, a calendar of upcoming events that costs $2.99 per month. theSkimm also introduced Skimm Studies, free reports drawn from surveys of its readers intended to provide an inside look into what female millennials think. The company has run initiatives with partners such as Rock the Vote and says it has helped 60,000 people register to vote. Financially, the article notes an $8 million round led by 21st Century Fox announced in June and a subsequent $500,000 investment from The New York Times and several strategic and individual backers. theSkimm is a New York–based newsletter startup that delivers concise 'CliffsNotes' style summaries of important news events to a largely female millennial readership. The four-year-old company has grown its subscriber base to 3.5 million worldwide. Content is distributed for free and the 20-person company generates revenue through product endorsements and native advertising. It recently launched a paid calendar service priced at $2.99 per month, though subscription numbers for that product have not been disclosed. theSkimm plans to expand into video and other formats under a unit named Skimm Studios as part of a broader ambition to become a multi-platform audience company. According to CrunchBase, the company has raised roughly $18 million to date. theSkimm is a NYC-based provider of a daily email newsletter that simplifies headlines for educated professionals, primarily women. Led by Carly Zakin, the company delivers editorial content that explains and contextualizes the news. It raised $1.1M in seed financing to support growth. The funds will be used to scale the team and operations. The company plans to focus on improving the user experience and implementing partnerships.