Participated · Series A · Oct 2025

Founded in 2021, Uluu develops plastic alternatives made by extracting sugars from seaweed, feeding them to PHA-producing microbes, and processing the resulting polyhydroxyalkanoates into pellets using a process the company likens to brewing beer. The startup is commercialising materials for use in cosmetics packaging, fashion accessories and textiles, and has run product collaborations with brands including Good Citizens (seaweed glasses), Quiksilver (wax scraper) and Papinelle (biodegradable buttons for pajamas). Uluu currently produces about 100 kg of material per year and aims to scale to one tonne per year with the new grant and to a 10-tonne-per-year demonstration plant by 2027. Financially, the company recently closed a $16 million Series A and has received grants including $1.5 million from the WA Government and the new $2.1 million from the federal Industry Growth Program. The funding will support regulatory certification, commercial trials, increased production capacity, and team expansion from 25 toward 30–35 staff.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2023

Funnel provides a renter-centric RMS platform that treats the renter — not the property — as the source of truth, enabling enterprise-wide visibility across the entire renter journey. Its completed front-office suite includes CRM, a virtual leasing agent, online leasing, onboarding, and a resident portal. The platform leverages AI and automation to reduce rote tasks, enable shared services and role specialization, and allow operators to move away from antiquated 1:100 leasing models to improve margins and team experience. Funnel says its centralized operating model is already embraced by eight companies that rank among the top 20 owners or operators, along with many other customers. The company is expanding its sales and marketing teams and recently added multifamily veteran Johnny Hanna to the team. Financially, Funnel announced a $32 million Series B-2 financing to expedite adoption of its new operating model. Funnel provides a full-stack, renter-centric leasing and marketing platform that centralizes leasing operations and automates the renter journey for multifamily owners and operators. Its product suite includes Engage (CRM and lead management), Amplify (natural language virtual leasing agent), Convert (online leasing with instant income verification via a FinTech integration), and Signal (listing syndication and data capture). The company emphasizes placing the renter at the center of interactions to improve leasing efficiency, reduce operational costs, and optimize marketing spend. Funnel has expanded from an apartment marketing platform founded in 2010 to a broader end-to-end leasing solution since 2018. The business reports 115% year-over-year revenue growth and has doubled headcount from 40 to 80; its platform is used by 17 of the NMHC Top 50 and Engage is deployed by 5 of the NMHC Top 20 owners. Funnel plans to develop renter onboarding, resident portal, and retention tools to complete the end-to-end renter journey. Nestio offers a next-generation marketing and leasing automation platform that streamlines the entire rental process for multifamily owners, operators and renters. The platform centralizes inventory distribution, lead tracking and management, renter engagement and touring, and delivers advanced real-time reporting within a single dashboard. Enhancements include automated workflows and machine learning to expedite responses and improve efficiency across the leasing lifecycle. CEO Caren Maio, who founded the company from a renter’s perspective, says the product aims to make finding and renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel or restaurant. Nestio’s customers manage hundreds of thousands of listings across major U.S. markets including New York, Boston, Chicago, Houston and Dallas. The company emphasizes delivering effortless, on-demand and personalized experiences for renters while improving operator efficiency. Nestio began as a renter-focused tool and has evolved into a full-service leasing and marketing platform for residential landlords and brokers. The product allows customers to manage inventory, track leads, advertise listings, and communicate in real time with consumer-facing sites such as Trulia and Zillow. Nestio says it now originates half of New York City’s rental listings and has generated over $20 million in additional revenue for clients. The company is currently live in NYC and plans to expand to Boston, Chicago, Miami and Washington, D.C. New funding will be used to execute that geographic expansion, advance the product roadmap, and grow the sales, marketing, and engineering teams. The company also announced the addition of Scott Wolfgang as CFO; he previously worked at Quotidian Ventures and served on the Hootsuite board. Nestio launched out of TechStars in 2011 as a consumer-facing apartment search tool but pivoted in 2013 to focus on landlords and brokers. It builds back-end tools that let landlords and brokers constantly update inventory and availability in real time, replacing workflows that relied on Google Docs, faxes, phone calls and paper files. The platform has been adopted widely in New York and now handles more than 30 percent of New York’s rental market. The Real Estate Board of New York named Nestio’s platform one of four approved technology vendors. The company says it is operating “above the line” and is growing rapidly in the real estate community. Recent funding will be used to accelerate growth and add hires, predominantly on the sales side.

Participated · Series E · Feb 2023

InfluxData originated from Errplane and builds InfluxDB, a time-series database and associated cloud service for real-time metrics, logs, events and tracing. The company recently launched InfluxDB IOx, a rebuilt columnar engine that adds SQL support, removes cardinality limits and is marketed as enabling much faster real-time queries. InfluxData offers dedicated cloud tiers and is developing a new on-premises, enterprise-focused product built atop IOx. The platform is used for observability, IoT and other high-volume, high-velocity data use cases and lists customers such as Hulu, Siemens, Tesla, Cisco and IBM. Operating metrics disclosed by the company include roughly 750,000 users on its cloud service, about 6,000 new users per month and more than 1,900 commercial clients; the company has about 165 employees and expects ~10% headcount growth by end of 2023. CEO Evan Kaplan says the company will use the new capital to expand IOx, cloud tiers and its enterprise offering. InfluxData develops InfluxDB, a purpose-built open-source time series database and platform for analyzing metrics and events for DevOps and IoT applications. The platform ingests data from humans, sensors, and machines to power monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications and is developer-focused with strong open-source demand. The company more than doubled revenue, new customer logos, and employees in 2018 and reports more than 450 customers, including Cisco, eBay, IBM and Siemens. InfluxData plans increased investment in product innovation with a heightened focus on the cloud, plus expanded sales, marketing, and customer support. It will begin marketing solutions for specific uses, including industrial IoT and network monitoring, and target industries such as e-commerce, gaming, and financial services. The company is led by CEO Evan Kaplan and is based in San Francisco. InfluxData builds an open source time series database platform that enables collection, storage and analysis of high-volume, time-stamped data. It offers a commercial, closed-source edition for enterprise-scale deployments that provides added security and availability; the commercial product has been available for 18 months. The company reports 120,000 sites running the open-source project and 400 enterprise customers, including IBM, SAP, Cisco, PayPal, Tesla and Siemens. CTO Paul Dix began building the underlying open-source toolkit in 2014 and Evan Kaplan is CEO. Influx currently employs 80 people and plans to double headcount in the coming year. Management is focused on expanding the time series database business to serve larger enterprise needs. InfluxData develops InfluxDB, an open-source time-series database and the accompanying TICK stack for collection, storage, visualization and processing of time-series data. The platform is designed to be easy to consume and to serve as a foundation that other SaaS providers can run on top of. Its technology is deployed across nearly 40,000 unique sites and is used by customers including Nordstrom, eBay, Solar City and Mozilla for real-time metrics and monitoring. InfluxEnterprise, the company’s commercial clustering product, reduces deployment and scaling time and forms a key part of its monetization path. The company says the open-source model has helped build a developer community but has not directly driven revenue growth to date. With the new capital, InfluxData plans to expand marketing and customer acquisition to position itself as a go-to solution for IoT and other high-volume time-series use cases. InfluxData began as Errplane and pivoted to build InfluxDB, an open-source time-series database designed to handle data that changes over time. Founders Paul Dix and Todd Persen shifted from a SaaS anomaly-detection service after customers signaled demand for the underlying infrastructure. The project gained early traction after mentions on O’Reilly Radar and Hacker News, and the community has contributed additional libraries beyond the core team’s work. The company went through Y Combinator and subsequently discontinued its original service to focus strictly on InfluxDB. InfluxData announced $8.1M in funding to continue building the product and to create a commercial entity around the open-source component. For now the team is optimizing for developer happiness and growing the community while planning commercial services later.

Participated · Series B · Nov 2022

Brightside provides an employer-facing financial care platform that offers unbiased, individualized, hands-on support for employees and their families. Its platform leverages a proprietary rules engine and a suite of products designed to help families save money, boost emergency savings, and reduce debt. The company says these outcomes lead to improved productivity, retention, greater workforce diversity, and lower healthcare costs. Brightside currently supports over 300,000 families and serves leading Fortune 500 employers with frontline workers in industries such as manufacturing, distribution, and healthcare. The company plans continued rapid growth and platform enhancements, including additional AI-driven capabilities to further elevate the product experience. Brightside provides an employer-based financial care platform that combines a human approach to financial health with technology. Its offering includes Dedicated Financial Assistants available to employee families, advanced rules engines, and products linked to paychecks to address employees’ financial stress. The company is led by CEO and co‑founder Tom Spann. Brightside is based in Francisco, CA, Chandler, AZ, and Philadelphia, PA. The company intends to use the funds to improve its financial health offering and expand its business reach. The article does not disclose operating metrics such as revenue or users. Brightside offers an employer-based financial wellness solution whose mobile app and personal financial assistants engage employees, establish trust, and provide tailored support. The platform combines smart technology with access to financial products to help employees save money and reduce financial stress. The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand its reach. Brightside raised $4M in seed funding according to the article. The company was founded in 2017 by Tom Spann and is based in San Francisco, California. The founding team mentioned includes Callum King (Comcast Ventures), Christine Tozzi (Willis Towers Watson), Jacky Chiu (LifeLock) and Petrina Thompson (American Express).

Participated · Seed · Aug 2022

Tradeblock operates a social, barter-based marketplace for sneaker collectors that facilitates trades through a community-first experience and a simultaneous inspection/authentication logistics workflow. Launched in 2020, the app has grown from 300 users and ~5,000 shoes to more than 250,000 users and over one million sneakers listed. The platform emphasizes accessibility, sustainability, and representation, with a workforce that is more than 80% BIPOC and senior leadership over 75% BIPOC. Tradeblock is investing in expanding its authentication and logistics operations and building out data-science capabilities to improve the virtual bartering experience. The company plans to use recent financing to drive growth in its sneaker business and further develop the marketplace. Its mission is to level access to sneaker culture for communities historically priced out by resale markets.