Participated · Series A · Jun 2024

Fuze Technology is a Los Angeles-based IoT company that operates a network of IoT utilities backed by data-driven advertising. Its flagship product, chargeFUZE, provides a pay-per-use mobile charging solution. The company’s adFUZE product delivers contextually relevant content to targeted audiences by combining its IoT hardware and software. Led by CEO Brandon Afari, Fuze plans to use the $11.5M Series A to accelerate demand and support international expansion. The company also intends to invest the proceeds in new product innovations. The Series A involved both strategic and institutional partners, including live-entertainment and venue investors named in the round. ChargeFUZE provides high-speed, on-the-go mobile charging via a network of autonomous kiosks where users scan a QR code to rent an all-in-one portable charger. The service removes the need to buy a battery, carry charging cords, or use tethered public chargers. Its kiosk network is expanding to span over 40 states and more than 50 professional sports stadiums and has been deployed at major venues and events such as Crypto.com Arena, SoFi Stadium, the US Open, Super Bowl LVI and the Miami F1 Grand Prix. The company partners with venue operators and property owners including Simon Property Group, Live Nation Entertainment, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, Brookfield Properties and Oak View Group. Co-founded by Brandon Afari and Ryan Levy and based in Los Angeles, ChargeFUZE intends to use recent funding to scale its team, expand its global partner roster, accelerate growth, and explore new sectors of interest. The company announced a $5M Seed funding round in May 2022.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2023

Genetica develops AI-driven retail solutions for the cannabis market, including its Flora Match product for retailers and brands and Flora OS, currently in beta. The company reports rapid adoption with over 300 clients globally and 280% month-over-month growth. Genetica is on pace to deploy its software to north of 2,500 locations by the end of 2024. The team plans to use the recent funding to expand in U.S. and European markets and to grow headcount over the next quarter. Its product suite focuses on improving consumer education, increasing basket sizes, and delivering deep consumer insights for brands. Genetica is an AI-powered cannabis retail platform founded in 2020 and based in San Francesco, CA, led by CEO Ben York. Its core product is Flora AI, which analyzes over 650 million data points to deliver precise product recommendations. The flagship offering, Flora Match, personalizes recommendations using in-store inventory, customers’ dietary habits, activity levels, age, medical conditions, and desired effects, complementing store employees and enabling upselling. The product suite is set to expand later this year with Flora OS, an all-in-one operating system using AI to optimize retail operations. The company intends to use the $500K seed funds to expand into more dispensaries nationwide and into other retailers such as grocery stores and pharmacies. It is on pace to launch its software into more than 350 U.S. locations and dozens of retail and pharmacy entities over the next quarter.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2023

CentML provides a platform and compiler that identifies training bottlenecks, predicts total time and cost to deploy models, and automatically optimizes model training workloads to run better on target GPUs. The company says its optimizations can cut expenses by up to 80% without degrading model accuracy and cites a customer case that ran Llama 2 three times faster on Nvidia A10 cards. CentML’s compiler produces optimized code for a variety of GPUs and aims to reduce memory needed to deploy models so teams can use smaller, cheaper hardware. The startup competes with firms like MosaicML and OctoML and claims its techniques avoid accuracy loss and offer a newer-generation compiler. In the near term CentML plans to expand its work from training optimizations into inference optimization. The company has a workforce of about 30 people across the U.S. and Canada and will use new capital to bolster product development, research, and engineering headcount.

Led · Seed · Feb 2020

Papa's Pops is a relaunched snack brand that makes skinless popcorn using a proprietary popping process to remove the hull from traditional popcorn kernels. Founder Vic Bauer originally introduced the product to the U.S. as New Pop in 2016 but discontinued it after a manufacturing partnership ended badly. The company completed a $1.25 million seed round led by Chetrit Ventures with participation from WorldState, Talent Resource Ventures, Tinder founder Justin Mateen and RXBAR founder Peter Rahal. Investors are contributing strategic support on supermarket distribution, consumer communication and packaging. Papa's Pops is launching in major retailers, with first bags hitting Walmart the first week in March, a 14–16 week program at Sam’s Club, and placements at Wakefern, Jewel-Osco, King’s and others. Go-to-market plans include six initial flavors made with clean ingredients, aggressive promotions (BOGO and discounted pricing), hiring an experienced VP in the popcorn business, and heavy trade-show engagement.