The Venture Codex

Participated · Equity · May 2018

MeVitae offers a DE&I ecosystem of HR tools designed to detect and mitigate cognitive and algorithmic bias across hiring processes. Its platform identifies imbalances in applicant success rates, recommends targeted interventions, and provides analytics to quantify the impact of those interventions. The company serves clients across finance, government and technology, including HS2, TfL and The Good Food Institute, and has partnerships with Oracle and Microsoft. MeVitae reports clients have seen roughly a 30% increase in gender and ethnic diversity and the business grew 350% over the past 12 months while operating profitably. Founded by Oxford alumni neuroscientist Riham Satti and computer scientist Vivek Doraiswamy, MeVitae is based in the Harwell innovation hub in Oxford. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate product development and support rapid expansion into the United States and Canada. MeVitae develops an “Augmented Intelligence” recruitment product that plugs into existing applicant tracking systems to score CVs against job specs, provide a transparent roadmap for each score, and redact potentially biasing information. The system analyses every CV component, uses web reasoning and NLP to validate and identify details that could lead to discrimination, then returns ranked, anonymised shortlists inside the employer’s ATS. MeVitae’s software learns from each employer’s choices over time so recommendations become more responsive to company-specific hiring priorities. The startup’s initial focus is scaling high-volume hiring while removing unconscious bias from shortlisting decisions. MeVitae was founded by neuroscientist Riham Satti and computer scientist Vivek Doriaiswamy and is based in Oxford. Financially, the company has disclosed a £500,000 funding round and previously received about £250,000 in grants used to finance three years of R&D.

Led · Series A · Jul 2015

SuperAwesome offers a platform of kid-safe advertising, social engagement tools, authentication and parental controls used by more than 300 customers, including major kids’ brands. The company says its technology is powering over 12 billion kids’ digital transactions per month. SuperAwesome is fully profitable, reported $55 million in revenue last year and was on track for $80–$90 million in revenue in 2020. The startup positions itself to help companies comply with emergent kids’ privacy laws such as COPPA and GDPR-K, a market dynamic that the company says has boosted demand. SuperAwesome is discussing partnership opportunities with Microsoft around family identity following a strategic investment from M12, though details of cooperation have not been disclosed. SuperAwesome provides kid-safe infrastructure used by hundreds of children’s brands to enable anonymous content, advertising, and other digital services. Its Popjam platform is a community-management tool for young influencers and brands engaging under-13 audiences on YouTube. The company says it has defined digital standards that keep more than half a billion children anonymous during online games and videos and is COPPA- and GDPR-K‑compliant. SuperAwesome works with customers including Mattel, Disney, Hasbro and Lego. Management disclosed strong financial performance, reporting revenue growth of more than 75% in 2018 and a revenue run rate of almost $60 million. The company also said profitability has been growing and has significantly beaten targets. SuperAwesome plans to launch a dedicated kids ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) service offering free streaming content tailored to family YouTubers and influencers. SuperAwesome is a U.K.-headquartered 'kid-safe' digital marketing platform that helps brands put their wares in front of children. Its infrastructure includes an ad platform claiming an audience of a quarter of a billion kids and a compliance suite, Kids Web Services (KWS), offering cloud-based tools such as a parent portal and kid-safe authentication to address COPPA and forthcoming European rules. Major clients include Hasbro, Mattel and LEGO. The company has grown in part through acquisitive hires — Ad4kids, MobiGirl Media, and the sales and ad teams of Bin Weevils — and pursued other deals such as an aborted MyFamilyClub acquisition. SuperAwesome plans to use new funding to grow faster and reach more territories, expanding its team in North America and Southeast Asia and hiring across the U.S., U.K. and Asia while pursuing regional partnerships. Financially, the company says it is profitable or break-even, expects to drive tens of millions of advertising dollars into the kids digital content ecosystem this year with 4–5x annual growth, and sees a clear route to revenues of $100M+ over the next couple of years.