Participated · Series A · Aug 2024

Melodi Health raised $10.75M in a Series A financing from HM Venture Partners, Engage Venture Partners, Southeast Minnesota Capital Fund and Three Bridges Private Capital. The company intends to use the funds to further enhance its clinical activities and additional product development activities. Its flagship offering, the Melodi Matrix, is a bioabsorbable mesh that elutes antibiotic agents and is fully absorbed by the body. Melodi announced the launch of the ARIA investigational device exemption (IDE) trial, a multicenter, nationwide, randomized, controlled study evaluating the safety and efficacy of the Melodi Matrix to support an FDA approval for an indication in breast reconstruction. The Melodi Matrix technology was licensed from Medtronic. The company is led by CEO Sarah Worrell and chief medical officer Hunter Moyer, MD, and is based in Minneapolis, MN.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2022

Cannaray operates a portfolio spanning a medical cannabis business and its flagship Cannaray CBD wellness brand. The company sells directly via a high-performing DTC site, on Amazon, and through more than 1,500 UK retail outlets including Tesco, Superdrug, ASDA, Waitrose and Harrods. In Summer 2021 Cannaray launched the UK’s first major CBD TV brand campaign featuring Claudia Winkleman. The business intends to use the majority of the newly raised funds to build a pan‑European medical cannabis operation, with 2022 activation focused on Germany and the UK through teams in Berlin and London. The company recently completed a £10m funding round, and also secured a media‑for‑equity arrangement that gives its CBD brand access to Channel 4’s TV audience.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2021

Cohesion provides a patented smart-building and digital twin SaaS platform that integrates the human aspect, building systems, and environmental elements into a single management and data solution. Its platform simulates building operations and uses AI and predictive modeling to forecast outcomes and optimize environment and health. Cohesion has built one of the world’s largest repositories of commercial real estate data and manages tens of millions of square feet of office space. The company plans product and market expansion to accelerate its digital twin technology and drive the industry transformation to autonomous buildings, while improving tenant experience, efficiency, sustainability, and operational transparency. It is pursuing strategic channel growth with partners such as Morgan Stanley, Transwestern, The John Buck Company, and Riverside Investment & Development. Founded in 2018 as a spin-off of ESD, Cohesion employs about 100 people worldwide. Cohesion offers an IoT- and AI-enabled platform that integrates tenant-facing apps with legacy building engineering systems to streamline operations and surface actionable insights. The platform is designed to boost operating efficiency, enhance tenant experience, and address real-time health and safety needs for building occupants. Cohesion positions itself as an all-in-one solution for owners and operators to centralize building systems and workflows. Its client roster includes The John Buck Company, Transwestern, Frasers Property, and Riverside Investment & Development. The company was founded in August 2018 as a spin-off venture of ESD and is headquartered in Chicago’s Central Business District. Cohesion plans to invest the new funding into its platform and is hiring for about 25 full-time roles across product development, sales, marketing, implementation, and customer success over the next year.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2016

Appvance is a Santa Clara, CA–based AI-driven software testing technology company led by CEO Andre Liao. Its core product is Appvance IQ (AIQ), a Level 5 unified test automation system that uses an AI/ML engine to design, generate and independently execute tests for sophisticated web and mobile applications with no human intervention. The platform is designed to improve application quality, performance and security while transforming the efficiency and output of testing teams. The company has additional offices in Costa Rica and India. Appvance raised $13M in a Series C financing and intends to use the funds to accelerate growth and expand operations. Appvance develops Appvance IQ, an AI-driven unified test automation platform that autonomously generates and executes end-to-end tests for web and mobile web applications. The system combines 19 machine-learning algorithms and a proprietary code generator to create open-source JavaScript tests, and the company claims the ability to create 6,000 unique scripts in under 10 minutes. Appvance models testing autonomy in Levels 0–5 and says it has achieved Level 5 true testing autonomy with features such as self-healing scripts and automatically generated data-driven regression tests. The product integrates with CI/CD and developer tools including Jenkins, TeamCity, CircleCI, TFS, GIT and Jira, and is available to select enterprise-class customers via an exclusive engagement process. Appvance reports customer-measured benefits including up to 90% reductions in QA time and 20x improvements in real-world test coverage. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with additional offices in Costa Rica and India. Appvance has raised a total of $12M to develop and deploy its AI-driven testing technology. Appvance offers a unified platform for enterprise software and application testing that consolidates multiple testing modules into a single solution. Its platform combines functional, performance, load, application penetration, compatibility, database, DDoS, mobile and other testing modules. Test teams can write or record use cases once and test applications the way users encounter them, including UX and API-level tests. The company plans to use new funds to expand operations, including product development, sales and customer support. Appvance was founded in 2012 and is led by CEO Kevin Surace, with additional offices in Costa Rica and India. Financially, the company has raised $7M in total to date. Appvance provides enterprise-grade performance validation and testing for Web, Mobile Web, HTML5, Ajax and RIA applications, and builds and runs test suites for SOAP and REST services. Its Appvance Enterprise platform offers a 100% graphical environment and can simulate up to millions of concurrent requests, enabling reuse of tests for functional, performance and production monitoring. The company emphasizes finding complex performance bottlenecks other platforms miss and targets large customers including Fortune 1000 accounts. Appvance reports rapid adoption within large enterprises and says the recent financing will support growth of features and customer support. Appvance was founded in 2012 as PushToTest Inc., acquired the assets of the TestMaker open-source project, and rebranded to Appvance in March 2013. The company is venture-backed and headquartered in San Jose, CA.

Led · Series A · Jun 2015

Volta operates free EV charging stations financed by integrated outdoor digital advertising and partners with businesses and real estate owners to install chargers in high‑traffic locations. The company launched in 2010 and is based in San Francisco. Volta has deployed stations in Hawaii, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Chicago and its suburbs, Phoenix, Dallas and Houston. It says it has delivered more than 45 million free electric miles to drivers. Volta makes money from the advertising on its charger designs and will use the new capital to expand its network, adding chargers in existing cities and entering new markets. Volta Charging operates an ad-supported electric-vehicle charging network that offers free power at outdoor, sponsor-funded charging stations. The company has deployed a network of 1,000 charging stations open for sponsorship and aims to reach 2,000 by the end of 2018. Volta launched initial stations in Hawaii and has expanded into the top 10 U.S. media markets. Its sponsored stations have delivered the equivalent of 22 million miles of driving and avoided about 9 million pounds of CO2 emissions. The company is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2010. Financially, Volta has raised $60 million in total to date, including the new Series C. Volta Industries operates a network of free electric car-charging stations underwritten by socially responsible brands. Its core product is outdoor charging stations deployed in retail locations, where charging is offered at no cost to drivers. The company has deployed more than 100 stations across five cities, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Honolulu. Volta intends to use proceeds from its recent financing to expand that network into more communities. Financially, the company closed a $4.5M Series A and secured a separate $3M project financing facility to support deployment. Volta was founded in 2010 and is based in San Francisco; Scott Mercer is CEO and Michael Menendez is CTO. Volta Industries designs, plans, constructs and installs free-to-use electric vehicle charging stations that are sponsored by advertising partners. Founded in 2010 by Scott Mercer (CEO) and based in Honolulu, the company places stations in high-visibility locations such as shopping centers and movie theaters. Volta supplies the energy to EV drivers at no charge and generates revenue through advertising that sponsors the charging units. Stations are active in Hawaii, California and Arizona. The company intends to use new funds to launch a station-finder mobile app and to accelerate expansion of its EV charging network throughout North America. To date it has raised $1.875M from a group of investors including EPIC Ventures, Blue Startups, 500 Startups and Ulupono Initiative. Volta designs, installs and maintains EV charging stations for properties and supplies the energy to drivers at no cost. The company’s kiosks display sponsor advertising on the front and back, which funds the free charging service. Its stations provide approximately 15 to 20 miles of range per hour of charging. Volta plans to expand its network first to California this year and then nationwide, and aims to install 30 kiosks by year-end. Company leadership is actively developing mainland projects, with Volta President Christopher Ching relocating to California to work with property owners. The company received a seed investment to support that expansion amid strong regional EV adoption metrics cited in the article.