Participated · Equity · Oct 2024

Picnic Works develops intelligent robotic technology for food service and hospitality, with flagship products the PPS Leonardo and the smaller PPS Michelangelo designed for high-volume, low-customization environments. Its systems are deployed or piloted in sites including universities, stadiums, big-box retailers, commissaries, pizzerias, and a U.S. Navy base, and the company recently ran a pilot with one of the world’s largest retailers. Picnic positions its automation to address rising labor costs, productivity shortfalls, and food waste by improving consistency, reducing waste, and enabling staff to focus on higher-value tasks. The company said it will use new capital to scale operations, ramp up production, accelerate delivery capabilities, and meet growing North American demand. Picnic emphasizes customer-centric partnerships and has cited use cases ranging from traditional pizzerias to high-volume venues like sports arenas. Picnic is a Seattle-based food automation company that has developed the Picnic Pizza System, a pizza-assembly machine for restaurants and commercial kitchens. The system dispenses fresh ingredients onto hand-made dough and enables a single employee to produce up to 100 12-inch customized pizzas per hour. The recipe and ingredient dispensing can be tweaked to suit the restaurant or kitchen owner. Picnic positions the system as small-footprint, contactless, easy to install, and available with no upfront fees. The company has been iterating on system enhancements throughout 2021 and is preparing installations with additional customers. Recent financing will be used to grow the team, attract talent, and expand commercial operations to scale deployments. Picnic develops robotic systems that automate the pizza-making and assembly process. The company says interest in its pizza system has ramped up recently and it has announced partnerships with Orion Land Mark, Ethan Stowell Restaurants, National Service Cooperative and Baseline Hardware Financing. Picnic plans to roll its technology out to restaurants and other public gathering spaces, including schools, stadiums and hospitals. The latest financing will be used to add headcount and expand operations. The article positions Picnic as one of a handful of companies targeting pizza automation alongside peers such as XRobotics and the now-exited Zume. Picnic designs an internet-connected pizza-making robot that can produce up to 300 12-inch customized pizzas per hour, using a vision system, conveyor, and automated sauce, cheese and topping dispensers. The company is preparing for a commercial rollout and says demand has increased during the pandemic as operators seek lower-contact food preparation. Picnic’s business model is pizza-as-a-service: restaurant owners pay a recurring fee for the system plus maintenance and software/hardware updates. The recent funding will be used for product development, hiring, responding to customer interest, and marketing. Picnic has expanded its team, hiring a chief food scientist and a vice president of sales, and was a finalist for Hardware/Gadget of the Year at the GeekWire Awards. The company has operated under prior names Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics and is positioning itself amid competitors and pilots from larger players testing kitchen automation. Picnic develops a configurable, modular automated pizza assembly system that launched in October and integrates with cloud analytics. The platform focuses on high-volume pizza production, reaching rates of up to 180 18-inch pizzas or 300 12-inch pizzas per hour. It is designed to fit into existing kitchen layouts, including food trucks and kiosks, and connects to Picnic’s software for backend data to improve consistency, speed, and reduce food waste. Picnic operates on a robotics-as-a-service subscription model, with users paying for the system on a subscription basis. The company has deployed its system with customers including Centerplate and Washington-based Zaucer Pizza. Picnic recently raised $5 million in seed funding to support product development, hiring, and marketing and has added experienced hires including Kennard Nielsen (VP of engineering) and Mike McLaughlin (VP of product).

Participated · Equity · Oct 2023

Formant provides a data collection and assessment platform that centralizes the complex sensor data produced by deployed robots and brings humans into the loop for managing those assets. The product is hardware-agnostic and supports a wide range of platforms including flying, underwater, mowing, delivery robots, quadrupeds and bipeds. Customers include Blue River (John Deere-owned), security robotics firm Knightscope, and BP. The company reports platform usage at scale, with customers operating on the platform with tens of thousands of robots. Financially, Formant recently announced a $21 million funding round led by BMW i Ventures, following an $18 million Series A announced last January. The new capital will be used to accelerate go-to-market efforts as the company expands from underserved sectors like agriculture toward more mature categories such as warehouse and manufacturing. Formant offers a unified platform that combines remote-controlling of autonomous robots, analytics, and tools to inspect and debug robot behavior (branded as “observe”). The product focuses on operation, assists (teleoperations) and analytics workflows to measure fleet ROI, assist frequency and performance trends. Formant intentionally does not build autonomy itself but integrates data across heterogeneous vendors such as Boston Dynamics, Fanuc and DJI to give operators a single view. Founded in 2017 by Jeff Linnell after he left Google, the company began as an API enabling robots to request human assistance and expanded to a broader fleet-management solution. Its software has been used to run tens of thousands of robots. Formant plans to double headcount over the next 12–18 months, build out engineering and sales operations, expand into Europe, and is hiring in locations including Pittsburgh after acquiring a stealth teleoperations company there. Formant provides a cloud platform that collects robot "shaped data" (LiDAR, depth imagery, video, photos, log files, metrics, motor torques and scalar values) and aligns it so a single human can monitor and intervene across fleets. The software parses those streams, alerts a human "foreman" when the system is uncertain, suggests options for remediation, and turns human decisions into training data to improve automation. Formant is launching a closed beta and reports SaaS pilots across verticals including food manufacturing, heavy infrastructure inspection, construction, training animals and retail use cases. The founders and early team are ex-Googlers with prior robotics startups and acquisitions, positioning the product as a cloud layer for robotics analogous to AWS/Google Cloud for data companies. The company raised a $6 million seed round from SignalFire to fund development and go-to-market ahead of a wider customer launch. Formant sees competition from large tech companies and incumbent engineering firms, and emphasizes enterprise customization and security as differentiators.

Led · Seed · Mar 2022

Fishtail provides a data-driven, scalable solution that enables freight forwarders to offer financing to their customers within minutes. Its platform can arrange extended payment terms by financing freight or directly finance the goods logistics companies transport. Led by CEO Marc Held, the company aims to speed onboarding and credit decisions for logistics customers. Fishtail raised $4.5M in seed funding and intends to use the proceeds to expand operations and broaden its business reach. The seed round was led by Thursday Ventures with participation from Rackhouse Ventures, Amara Ventures, and project44 executives. The company is based in New York City.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2021

The Org builds a global, publicly viewable database of company organizational charts and a platform to power services such as recruiting and HR tools. Co-founded by Christian Wylonis and Andreas Jarbøl, the startup uses wiki-style, user-edited org charts and offers companies the ability to claim and manage their profiles. The company hosts about 130,000 public org charts, has more than 120,000 registered users, sees roughly 30,000 daily visitors and nearly 1 million monthly visitors. Monetization is nascent: building, editing and claiming profiles are free, job postings will be free with Greenhouse integration, and recruiters/HR professionals will be charged for sourcing and screening. The Org plans to hire more people, add more org charts and launch a recruitment toolkit first, with additional communications and HR features to follow via integrations, APIs and some in-house builds. Its go-to market focuses on early-stage startups (roughly 50–200 employees) while adding features to capture larger, more complex organizations. The Org provides a searchable platform for users to explore any company’s organizational chart and join their own company to make edits using a company email address. The company maintains a database of over 16,000 org charts built via a combination of AI, research, and crowdsourcing. It was founded in 2017 by Christian Wylonis and Andreas Jarbøl and operates out of New York City and Copenhagen, Denmark. The Org plans to use its recent funding to expand its growth and research teams and accelerate product development. As a complementary feature to its team pages, the company intends to launch a jobs platform so companies can create open positions within their org chart and showcase their teams.

Participated · Series F · Aug 2021

Whoop builds wearable fitness and health trackers paired with a subscription service that captures user biometric and performance data. The company ships millions of hardware units globally while operating a recurring-revenue subscription model, which management says makes bookings the most useful operating metric. Whoop exited last year at a $1.1 billion bookings run rate, representing 103% year-over-year growth. It has now raised roughly $900 million in total capital since founding. The company is investing raised capital in hiring and talent, marketing and brand awareness, continued R&D, and accelerating international expansion. Whoop is also pursuing deeper health and medical capabilities, underscored by strategic participation from Abbott and Mayo Clinic in the latest round.