Participated · Series B · May 2024

Bolster detects, takes down, and monitors phishing, fraud, and scam activity across the web, social media, app stores, and the dark web. Its core product delivers multi-channel phishing protection by rendering verdicts within milliseconds using large language models (LLMs) and a large structured phishing dataset. Since 2017 the company has trained models on over 100TB of structured data including URLs, domains, natural language text, and emails. Bolster created CheckPhish in 2018, a phish and scam detection site with over 20% of the Fortune 500 registered as users. The company plans to use the new funding to invest in GTM initiatives prioritizing executive monitoring, business email compromise (BEC) attack detection and takedown, and threat-hunting automation. The Series B increases Bolster's funding base and supports scaling of its detection and takedown capabilities. Bolster provides an automated platform purpose-built to detect, monitor, and take down fraudsters on the Internet. Its solution covers the web, social media, app stores and the dark web to combat fraudulent sites and content. Led by CEO Abhishek Dubey and based in Los Altos, California, the company focuses on efficient, scalable digital risk protection. Bolster announced a $15M financing and intends to use the funds to accelerate growth. The company also added two new board members as part of the financing: Shirish Sathaye (General Partner at Cervin) and Manoj Apte (security industry veteran and former Chief Strategy Officer at Zscaler). RedMarlin provides a comprehensive fraud-prevention platform that uses deep learning and computer vision to detect counterfeit websites, fraudulent products, emails, and social media. The platform offers real-time monitoring, automated detection and immediate takedown of fraudulent sites and products, and integrates into existing systems. RedMarlin serves dozens of industries including retail, healthcare, pharma, and cryptocurrency. The company also publishes CheckPhish.ai, a free open-source community tool for security researchers and incident responders to get real-time detection on fraudulent links. RedMarlin plans to use the new funding to grow engineering and sales teams and to further develop its go-to-market strategy to reach new customers and industries. Its current financing event is a $10M Series A announced in May 2019.

Participated · Series B · Mar 2024

Lily AI provides a retail AI platform that leverages generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing, and machine and deep learning to bridge merchant-speak and customer-speak. The platform interoperates with eCommerce, marketplace, and product management systems to optimize existing technology investments and lift revenue through better product attribution, descriptions, discovery, and conversion. Lily AI serves retailers and brands including Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, J.Crew, ThredUP, Abercrombie & Fitch, ALC, Living Spaces, and Arhaus. Led by CEO Purva Gupta, the female-founded company focuses on injecting human-centered language throughout the retail ecosystem. The company plans to use the new funding to extend its leadership into international markets, expand social and eCommerce platform integrations, and accelerate its engineering team to ship enterprise-grade AI solutions across the retail value chain. To date the firm has raised $62M in total capital. Lily AI offers a plug-in, SaaS product that trains algorithms on curated product taxonomies and customer interactions to improve onsite search, recommendations and discovery carousels. The company builds detailed product attribute data (style, fit, occasion, etc.) with a team of fashion, home and beauty experts to convert attributes into a mathematical language for its models. Lily emphasizes configurability and a privacy-preserving approach, avoiding names, addresses and transaction data in favor of anonymized user interactions. It pivoted from a consumer-facing app to an enterprise-focused solution and now serves customers including Macy’s, The Gap (and its brands), Bloomingdale’s and thredUP. Lily declined to disclose revenue figures; the company has 87 employees and says it is well-positioned to expand despite macroeconomic headwinds. Product and roadmap plans include expanding into enterprise and mid-market retail e-commerce across home, beauty and fashion, extending the solution deeper into the retail stack, and building a richer analytics suite for customers. Lily AI develops deep‑learning software that extracts rich product attributes from retailer catalogs and combines them with hashed customer data to predict individual customers’ affinities. The platform maps traits like style, fit and occasion to create personalized recommendations intended to increase conversion and spend. Co‑founders Purva Gupta and Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan pivoted the company from a consumer iOS app to an enterprise product in early 2018. Lily charges customers on a volume basis and its website claims a 10x ROI on customer spend; the CEO also says 100% of customers have seen a step gain in metrics. The company plans to use the new capital to accelerate development and adoption of its e‑commerce recommendation technology. The approach emphasizes privacy through use of hashed customer data and is framed around an empathy‑driven product philosophy.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2024

ZeroLend is a decentralized lending protocol that focuses on DeFi lending, RWAs, privacy, and account abstraction. It is currently the largest lending protocol on zkSync and the third-largest on Manta by total value locked (TVL). The project plans to launch its native governance token ZERO in Q1 2024 and run a series of airdrop initiatives under its Zero Gravity campaign to engage users. ZeroLend reports rapid growth, with TVL rising roughly 1500% from $3 million to $50 million and averaging around 100k daily active users. The protocol highlights integrations with Pyth and potential future integrations across the Manta and zkSync ecosystems. Development and expansion have been incubated by MahaDAO and are funded in part by recent seed and private round financing.