• User Interviews

  Participated · Series B · Dec 2022

  User Interviews offers two core products: Recruit, which sources study participants across demographics and behaviors, and Research Hub, a CRM-like tool for building and managing user panels and study logistics. More than 2.4 million people have signed up on the platform, with roughly 50,000 participants active each month. The company reports using machine learning to detect survey fraud, flagging about 0.3% (~150) of monthly active participants as suspicious. Researchers can double-screen participants, require NDAs or consent, and typically compensate participants between $50 and $200 per study. User Interviews counts "thousands" of brand customers, including Adobe, CNN, Amazon, Intuit, the Mayo Clinic, Spotify, Pinterest and Citibank. The company did not disclose revenue figures; management says the new funding will fuel growth and further build its core products. User Interviews built Recruit, an a la carte participant procurement product, and Research Hub, a CRM and recruiting tool for research teams to manage panels and participant logistics. The company does not run surveys or A/B tests itself but connects clients with qualified participants and manages workflows. It recently added a subscription layer so customers can buy annual access in addition to usage pricing, enabling trials before full commitment. User Interviews reports 140% annual growth that accelerated during the pandemic and counts clients including Amazon, Microsoft, Colgate and Spotify. The team is roughly 50 people, fully remote, with nearly half the workforce female. The company plans to use new funding to hire more product staff and build integrations with user-testing software and clients' data management systems. User Interviews began after its founders pivoted from an unsuccessful amenities logistics product (Mobile Suites) to a user-research platform after discovering the difficulty of recruiting and managing participants. Its core product, Recruit, matches companies with non-users for feedback and is priced at $30 per matched person. It also offers Research Hub, a CRM-like product for tracking feedback, managing outreach frequency, and facilitating researcher workflows; Research Hub pricing starts at $150/month. The company has enterprise and growth customers including Eventbrite, Glassdoor, AT&T, DirecTV, Lola, LogMeIn, Thumbtack, Casper, ClassPass, Fandango, NNG, Pinterest, Pandora, Colgate, Uber and REI. CEO Basel Fakhoury said the company has a large pipeline of product ideas clients want and is focused on building new features quickly. Financially, the company sells Recruit per participant and Research Hub subscriptions and has just raised fresh seed capital to support growth.

• Teampay

  Participated · Series B · Nov 2022

  Teampay provides a purchasing platform that issues virtual and physical cards, handles invoices and reimbursements, and automates workflows to keep employees in policy while reconciling transactions into customers' accounting systems. The company emphasizes employee-friendly purchasing combined with finance controls to eliminate unauthorized and out-of-policy spending and increase visibility for finance teams. Teampay offers a digital corporate card (Catalyst by Teampay) powered by the Mastercard network and integrates payment methods with built-in controls. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York City, Teampay has focused on serving high-growth companies and has tripled headcount in the last 12 months. The company plans to deepen its accounts payable solution, expand cross-border payments and international payment capabilities, and accelerate its enterprise offering. Teampay will also invest in go-to-market activities, sales and marketing, and continued hiring to support larger account needs. Teampay builds spend-management software aimed at midmarket companies to help them control bank accounts and manage outflows across formats (ACH, virtual cards, etc.). The company emphasizes software fees as its primary revenue source rather than interchange, with the ability to derive more spend-based revenue over time. Teampay has seen strong usage and monetization growth: annual recurring revenue (ARR) is up 320% since its Series A and total spend managed is up 800%. The pandemic has shortened its sales cycle roughly in half and attracted larger customers. It competes with offerings such as Brex, Ramp, Divvy, Airbase and legacy products like Concur and Expensify. Management has used opportunistic extension capital to accelerate growth ahead of a larger, traditional Series B. Teampay provides a platform that gives employees a streamlined interface to buy goods, tools, and services while keeping purchases within defined company policy. It acts as a collaboration software layer on top of a company’s existing card infrastructure so customers don’t have to switch card programs. The company targets larger enterprises with complex spend controls and counts customers including Wistia, Chime, Mixpanel, and RiskIQ. Since launching the platform Teampay has been hiring in sales and engineering and added senior executives including a VP of Finance, VP of Marketing, and head of sales. The company reported double-digit month-over-month growth in 2018 and recently raised a $12 million Series A to support expansion. Planned uses for the capital include expanding partnerships and integrations (for example with IT ticketing systems) and increasing sales and marketing. Teampay issues virtual credit cards to every employee and pairs those cards with approval workflows, procurement policy enforcement, and vendor analytics. The platform integrates with Slack and Google Apps and will add a Microsoft integration shortly. Its analytics surface top spending vendors and recurring subscriptions so procurement can negotiate rates and eliminate wasted expenses. Teampay targets mid-market companies of roughly 200–1,000 employees that are too small for a full purchasing department but too large to rely on the CEO’s card. Founder and CEO Andrew Hoag built the product from procurement problems he encountered at prior startups, and the company reports several paying customers on the platform. Early customer data shows roughly half of employee transactions are recurring, which the company flags to reduce waste.

• Stylitics

  Participated · Series B · Aug 2019

  Stylitics builds AI-powered digital merchandising and styling technology that delivers automated outfitting and bundling recommendations across e-commerce, email, advertising, in-store, and social channels. Its fourth-generation platform introduces first-of-its-kind automated styling technology using 50x more training data, more than 20 new algorithms, and capabilities for one-to-one personalization; it also adds support for beauty, hard goods, toys, dozens of new regions, and 1,500 additional categories and styles. The release reports more than 10x faster content creation, support for 25+ additional visual layouts and formats, expanded dynamic styling engines, improved quality and variety scoring, and expanded attribution and personalization features. The platform was beta-tested with several large retailers over six months following more than two years of R&D, and the product will be activated for existing customers without requiring upgrades or technical rollouts. Stylitics said the new generation processes an order of magnitude more transactions and data than a year ago and engages more than 100 million shoppers daily through customers such as Walmart, Macy’s, Kohl’s, and Revolve. The company reported it recently closed an $80 million Series C, bringing total funding to $100 million, and says it has driven more than $4 billion in incremental revenue for customers with 200 million-plus additional units sold. Stylitics’ platform recommends outfits and bundles in over 50 billion shopper sessions a year, producing a 23% increase in units per transaction and a 21% increase in average order value. The company also appointed Margaret (MJ) Jastrebski as Chief Product Officer to lead personalization and product innovation. Stylitics provides outfit-level product recommendations to ecommerce retailers via widgets like "Ways to Wear It" and "Wear It With" that surface complementary products on merchant sites. The company builds recommendations using brand merchandising guidelines, retailer engagement and purchase data, broader trend data, and stylists' expertise, and updates suggestions as products sell out. Stylitics began as the consumer mobile app ClosetSpace, which remains live, but the business has shifted focus to retailer tools under CEO Rohan Deuskar. The firm says it can deliver useful recommendations on day one, drawing on billions of data points from powering outfitting on dozens of sites for more than four years. Stylitics reports it has driven $300 million in sales for retail partners, which include Ann Taylor, Calvin Klein, Chico’s, Gap, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Under Armour, and White House Black Market. The company plans to use the new funding to grow sales and marketing and to develop new types of shoppable content and in-store experiences.

• Videolicious

  Participated · Equity · Aug 2013

  Videolicious makes a mobile app that lets users easily create videos from their phones, stitching together photos and clips and recording voiceovers. The company targets businesses and newsrooms and is used for employee training, real estate listings, and increasingly by journalists and broadcasters. It has recently focused on driving adoption among news organizations and has added enterprise-style tools to link the app and produced videos to content management systems. Those tools help news organizations manage and monetize the additional content created on the platform. More than 100 newspapers, magazines, and TV stations signed up in the last few months, and the Washington Post has 30 reporters using the app. Financially, Videolicious has raised $2.25M in the latest round and more than $4M in total to date. Videolicious offers an automatic video-creation platform that enables users to produce sales, marketing and communications videos in real time on desktops, tablets and mobile devices. The company launched Videolicious 2.0 and provides a mobile version that can be downloaded for free on iTunes. Videolicious serves more than 800,000 users across over 100 countries, including social media marketers, Fortune 500 companies, real estate agents and local businesses. Founded in 2007 and led by CEO Matt Singer, the company focuses on tools for creating video content quickly and at scale. Videolicious recently raised funding to support its product development. It intends to use the new financing for research and development efforts.

• Careerminds

  Participated · Equity · May 2011

  Careerminds Group provides affordable online outplacement and career transition services to organizations that are downsizing or reorganizing, leveraging a Web 2.0 e-learning platform. The company is based in Hockessin, Delaware, and is led by CEO Raymond Lee. Its core product is a web-based career transition platform aimed at supporting employees through job search and transition processes. Careerminds closed a $1.285M venture capital financing to support growth. It intends to use the funds for sales and marketing development, technology and core-platform enhancements, and general working capital. Strategic investor Jack Gavin will serve as Chairman of the Board.

No current team members are available.