Led · Equity · Apr 2024

SWAT Mobility provides AI-driven mobility solutions focused on generating efficient travel routes for clients in the mobility sector, including transport operators and government agencies. Its core offering leverages artificial intelligence to optimize routing and operational planning for customers in the mobile mobility space. The company recently secured a $3.8M strategic investment. The financing was provided by NEC & Translink Orchestrating Future Fund, NX Global Innovation Fund and Chubu Electric Power. The funding was disclosed in an article dated April 19, 2024.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2022

Doola provides a toolset aimed at simplifying company formation and related workflows. The company has raised about $12 million total since its 2020 founding. TechCrunch published the 14-slide pitch deck Doola used to raise a $1 million strategic investment from HubSpot Ventures. The deck presents a bottom-up market-size estimate of $4.5 billion per year and includes slides on product, strategy and vision but offers few product screenshots or clear product detail. The deck also omits traction metrics, a go-to-market plan, pricing, unit economics and a clear team presentation, leaving the company’s operating status and monetization unclear. The article notes incumbent competitors such as Stripe Atlas, ZenBusiness, LegalZoom, Tailor Brands, IncFile and IncAuthority and indicates Doola positions itself toward international founders. Doola helps global founders remotely form U.S. limited liability companies and obtain related essentials such as EINs, a U.S. address, bank accounts, payments access, tax consultations, and a phone number. Since launching its MVP in 2021 the New York–based company says thousands of companies from over 130 countries have used its software. The company reports revenue growth of seven times year to date and has just under $12 million in total funding to date. Doola recently launched its own banking service in partnership with Piermont Bank, providing physical and virtual cards and international wires. Product road‑map items include expanded educational content, a soon-to-come credit product, and broader payments acceptance. Leadership plans to use the new capital to grow product, engineering and R&D teams, scale offices in New York and Germany, open new offices, and increase marketing spend. Doola provides end-to-end incorporation and operational services for global founders, including company formation, EIN acquisition, a U.S. address and bank account, access to U.S. payments, tax support, a phone number and $50,000 in startup perks. The product is positioned as more than a formation service — the company calls itself a full-service fintech operating system for creators, aiming to cover formation, financial and legal stacks. Doola began in 2020 as StartPack after a pivot from Standups and rebranded to doola; it participated in Y Combinator’s summer 2020 batch. Hundreds of companies have formed LLCs with doola, including founders without U.S. Social Security numbers. The company reports it is growing profitably from a unit economics perspective and currently has 14 employees. Doola plans to use the new capital to scale the team and invest in product and engineering.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2021

Lounge builds a virtual office experience that presents employees as personalized virtual desks grouped by teams, projects, or interests and supports multi-person "rooms" for synchronous and asynchronous interaction. Core features include richer profiles showing timezone, weather, location, team membership, and participation in company events, drop-in audio chat, photo sharing, and DM chat for locked rooms. Rooms can be locked or open, enabling private messages when someone is heads-down and instant audio conversations when they are available. The founders, Alex Kwon (CEO) and Jason Jardim (CTO), previously worked together at Life360 and pivoted to Lounge after experimenting with always-on audio and a scrapped to-do app. Lounge entered private beta in April, has hundreds of signups on its waitlist, has been targeting smaller teams under 20 employees, and is launching an open beta with Mac, web, and iOS apps prioritized. The company has raised $1.2 million from investors including Unusual Ventures, Hustle Fund, Translink, Unpopular Ventures, and other angels.

Participated · Series B · Feb 2017

Diamanti builds a purpose-built, fully integrated bare-metal hyperconverged platform for Kubernetes and containers, combining high-performance compute, plug-and-play networking, persistent NVMe-based storage, Docker, Linux and Kubernetes. The platform targets enterprises running containerized applications both on-premises and in public cloud environments, emphasizing performance, simplicity, security and enterprise features. Diamanti reports rapid growth in bookings and revenue over the past year and has won major enterprise customers across energy, financial services and internet service providers. The company plans to use new funding to ramp global go-to-market initiatives and increase engineering investment to drive its hybrid cloud roadmap and develop new software, SaaS, and hardware solutions. Diamanti has received industry recognition (Gartner Cool Vendor, CRN and other awards) and is backed by venture investors including ClearSky, CRV, Engineering Capital, Goldman Sachs, GSR Ventures, Northgate Capital, Threshold Ventures and Translink Capital. The company is based in San Jose, California. Diamanti offers the D10, a hyper‑converged appliance that ships pre‑integrated with container software, compute, networking and storage to deploy and operate Docker containers at production scale. The D10, now generally available, is designed to let enterprise IT organizations in media, financial services and web infrastructure deploy containers in seconds, plug into existing environments, and accelerate time‑to‑market while guaranteeing real‑time service levels. The company is led by CEO and co‑founder Jeff Chou. Diamanti closed an $18M Series B and intends to use the funds to increase product development, support, sales and marketing. The appliance is positioned for enterprises that need production‑grade container deployments and rapid time‑to‑value. The company is based in San Jose, CA. Diamanti emerged from stealth with an appliance that merges networking and storage hardware into a single box to address throughput problems for containerized workloads. The appliance is designed to deploy quickly—claims in just minutes—and to help get containers into production faster by providing extra horsepower missing from legacy infrastructure. The company intends to remain agnostic across Docker, Google Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift and plans to contribute to open source projects like Kubernetes. While in stealth, Diamanti ran beta tests with customers including NBC Universal and unnamed testers in the service provider, financial services, and web infrastructure sectors. The company launched 14 months prior to the article, is headquartered in San Jose, CA, and has about 30 employees. Diamanti announced $12.5 million in Series A funding and says it is still working on packaging and pricing the product.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2016

Workspot offers an Azure-native, turnkey cloud desktop fabric that delivers Windows 10 desktops and GPU workstations at the edge of the cloud region nearest users. Its SaaS solution features flat per-user pricing, rapid provisioning (desktops can be provisioned in five minutes via ITSM integration), and global scalability across cloud regions. The product targets enterprises moving away from on-premises VDI by offering customizability, simplified management and on-demand scale. Workspot reported more than 300% cloud business growth in the past year (318% stated) and a net revenue retention rate of 171%. To support continued expansion, the company is increasing investments in worldwide sales, marketing, research & development, and customer success. The company cites customer wins across use cases including faster drone-data processing, improved disaster recovery, and real-time collaboration for multi-company projects. Workspot provides virtual desktop infrastructure that delivers apps, desktops and data to mobile devices, Macs and PCs. Led by CEO Amitabh Sinha and based in Cupertino, California, the company serves enterprises across government, healthcare and education verticals. It connects users to apps and data while leveraging existing investments in the datacenter and without migrating data to the cloud. Workspot has announced partnerships with hyper-converged infrastructure vendors including Nutanix, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Scale Computing and Atlantis Computing. The company raised $6.2m in a Series B and intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations. Workspot builds a virtual desktop platform that lets employees open a client or app, enter a PIN, and access a full desktop with business apps, files and a VPN. The platform supports PCs, mobile devices and recently added Mac support to accommodate organizations and executives using Apple products. Workspot differentiates by allowing clients to run its platform without installing new servers or moving apps and data into third‑party clouds, which the company says avoids security and complexity issues associated with services like Amazon WorkSpaces. The company plans to use new funding to improve its technology, expand an enterprise sales team targeting Global 2000 companies and add more users at existing mid‑sized and Fortune 500 clients. Workspot is Cupertino‑based and raised $5 million in new funding led by Helion Ventures, with participation from Translink Capital and Qualcomm Ventures. Co-founder and CEO Amitabh Sinha emphasized that IT does not need to move business apps or data to use Workspot's solution. Workspot provides a Workspace-as-a-Service solution that lets firms deliver core business apps and data on personal mobile devices. It offers Workspot Control, a cloud-based management solution for IT administrators, and a mobile Workspot app for Android and iOS end users. The unified workspace allows end users to access data and apps behind a firewall from any mobile device. Founded in 2012 and launched in April 2013, the company is based in Cupertino, California. Workspot says it will use the Series A proceeds to scale operations. Prior to this round, the company had raised a $3.3M seed round. Workspot offers a consumer app (available through the iOS App Store) that enables employees to access corporate applications behind company firewalls on their personal devices. The app requires a one-time authentication with the employer's network security appliance and supports four leading VPN providers, including Cisco and Juniper, which the article says cover about 80% of the market. Employers can add apps for employees via a control dashboard in a matter of minutes, while end-users receive the product for free. Workspot monetizes through two paid employer services: Insights (analytics into software usage) and Events (visibility for compliance and auditing), with pricing ranging from $150 per month for 0–25 users to $4 per user per month for companies with more than 250 employees. The company has raised $1.9 million from Kleiner Perkins, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint and others and has 11 employees. Leadership includes CEO Amitabh Sinha (formerly at Citrix), CTO Puneet Chawla (formerly at VMware and an EIR at Redpoint) and co-founder Ty Wang (formerly at Twilio and Oracle), and the team is positioning the product to simplify bring-your-own-device adoption. Workspot debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York.