Participated · Equity · Aug 2021

The company is a newly formed subsidiary of CivicScience that will offer digital ad-targeting using CivicScience’s first-party consumer data. It aims to help marketers target ads in a landscape where third-party cookies are being blocked and regulation around personal data control is growing. Leadership is headed by media executive Doug Lauretano, formerly of Media.net. CivicScience is a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based consumer intelligence startup and the new unit will leverage its existing data assets. The company currently has at least two Seattle-based employees, including former Cheezburger executive Cyrus Krohn. Financially, the new venture has secured external investment to launch operations. CivicScience operates a polling platform that publishers can license for free and embed via a widget or API to collect poll responses and anonymous user data. The company aggregates answers and behavioral signals from users across partner sites, social networks, and mobile platforms, then provides deep analysis of sentiment and emerging trends. CivicScience sells that data and research to brands, advertisers, political groups, financial institutions, and research firms, and offers publishers analytics and audience-measurement tools to boost CPMs. It has been expanding its publishing partner base — including Scripps Digital, McClatchy, Hearst, and the NY Daily News — which the company says has dramatically increased the number of users taking its polls and the value of its data. Cox Enterprises has begun deploying CivicScience polls across its digital properties and will be a client of its research services. The company recently raised additional funding to support that growth. CivicScience is an intelligent polling utility that provides audience measurement and analytics tools to publishers and advertisers via an API and customizable widgets. Its technology delivers up to three owner-approved poll questions per visit, uses machine learning and predictive modeling to identify return users, and builds anonymous profiles broken down by categories and demographics. The service polls roughly 11 million people per month and counts organizations such as The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and The National Rifle Association among its users. CivicScience licenses its polling technology to publishers at no cost and monetizes by selling syndicated and custom research products from aggregated data, sharing revenue with partners when their data is used. The company plans to expand platform partnerships, automation technology, and hiring, and to broaden polling work to brands, government agencies, political sites, and educational institutions. Financially, CivicScience has raised a $1.2 million seed round, adding to a prior $1.6 million for a total of $2.8 million in funding.

Led · Seed · Aug 2016

Revuze provides real-time consumer insights via cloud-based software that uses AI-based natural language processing to gather, cleanse, analyze and deliver consumer sentiment and feedback. The platform enables brands to generate deep consumer insights in nearly real time, positioning itself as a faster, more efficient alternative to traditional market research. Revuze says it built a data warehouse of ready market research answers and serves some of the world’s largest brands. The company is backed by investors such as Nielsen and SAP and was founded in 2013. Revuze is headquartered in Netanya, Israel, with offices in New York and Montréal. The company plans to accelerate geographic expansion into the U.S., scale its technology, and continue to innovate and grow its solution set. Revuze provides an all-automated customer opinions analyzer whose flagship product, Revuze Explorer, scans millions of consumer opinions daily from public and internal sources. The platform uses machine learning and AI semantic analysis to divide and organize information into the most relevant subjects for each brand and product. It delivers immediate, real-time feedback about a company’s products and those of competitors. Revuze recently began providing customer loyalty reports such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) in real time without needing traditional surveys. Led by CEO Boaz Grinvald, the company intends to use new funding to ramp up sales and marketing and to hire additional R&D talent. Financially, the company has raised a total of $12M to date. Revuze offers an AI-driven, self-service consumer product feedback analytics platform that enables brands to extract customer experience (CX) insights. Its solution allows any role in an organization to gain insights from any data sources without manual labor or experts. The company sells its platform across multiple industries and emphasizes fast international adoption. Revuze reports deployment across geographies from China to the US and Europe. Dolby is leveraging Revuze to understand mobile consumer preferences when consuming audio and video. The company is led by CEO Boaz Grinvald and is based in Netanya, Israel. Revuze is a Netanya, Israel-based company that brings AI to brand and product management. Led by co-founder and CEO Ido Ramati, it offers an AI-powered product experience analyst that combines artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning. The platform aggregates feedback across thousands of internal and external data sources and delivers insights via a single screen about how products are bought, experienced and viewed. Revuze serves Fortune 500 companies in CPG, food service, leisure and manufacturing for use cases including customer experience tuning, marketing, product development, business intelligence, operations, customer service and sales management. The company has opened U.S. offices in San Francisco and New York City and plans to use recent funding to expand its U.S. operations. It raised $4M in seed funding led by strategic investors Nielsen, The NPD Group and TIC Group.

Participated · Series B · Aug 2013

Slice is a Palo Alto–based technology company that turns the digital receipts found in a consumer’s email inbox into actionable shopping tools. Its flagship app automatically organizes purchases, stores receipts, tracks packages across multiple carriers, and notifies users about price-adjustment opportunities. The platform also exposes a set of APIs that partners can integrate to personalize shopping experiences or embed package-tracking features, an approach already employed by TheFind in its iPad and web applications. Beyond core purchase management, the company recently launched Slice Bookshelf, which synchronizes with a user’s inbox to catalogue past book purchases and enable social discovery and sharing. Slice’s strategy centers on leveraging purchase data to create new consumer services and third-party integrations. Financially, the firm has just closed a $23 million funding round led by Rakuten with additional participation from Siguler Guff’s Russia Partners, NPD Group, and prior backers DCM, Innovation Endeavors, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.