Participated · Series A · Nov 2024

LUUM builds A.I. and robotics-powered eyelash extension systems and brands the category as Beauty Experience Automation. The company combines robotics, AI, and a global patent portfolio to automate and standardize salon-quality lash services. LUUM has run retail pilots with Ulta Beauty and Nordstrom to demonstrate its location-based service model and to drive retailer traffic. The company plans a next-generation product launch and is securing additional strategic retail partners to roll out its technology at scale beginning June 2025. Leadership recently changed with Jo Lawson named CEO and co-founder Nathan Harding returning to CTO; Lawson helped lead the latest financing. Financially, LUUM closed a Series A that brings total capital raised to $30M to fund product and market expansion. Founded in 2017 and based in Oakland, Calif., LUUM positions itself as the future of beauty services that augments lash artists and retail partners. Oakland-based LUUM Precision Lash builds the world’s first AI-powered robotic technology specifically for applying eyelash extensions. The company’s system aims to make the service roughly 3X faster while delivering a more consistent, luxury experience that can triple salon throughput and revenues. LUUM plans to leverage its latest funding to build a next-generation machine and run a soon-to-be-announced pilot with a top-five U.S. cosmetics brand. The company says it will launch commercially with a top-5 cosmetics retailer in 2022 and is planning additional funding rounds and partnerships to support rapid growth. LUUM touts a robust global patent portfolio, a Net Promoter Score of 82, a 5-star review from PopSugar, and national exposure including the Today Show. Earlier this year LUUM completed a crowd-funding campaign on the StartEngine platform.

Participated · Series B · Dec 2023

Lolli operates a rewards app that awards users bitcoin or cashback for purchases, partnering with merchants so users can earn on online and in-store spending. The app currently partners with more than 25,000 stores and aims to expand to over 100,000 stores by 2025. Rewards can be as high as 30% back, with an average of about 7% returned in bitcoin or cashback; since inception Lolli has given over $10 million in bitcoin rewards. Lolli launched Card Boosts last year, letting users add bitcoin rewards to debit and credit cards — a product the company calls a major growth driver. Active shoppers increased more than 35% year-over-year as of October 2023. The company plans to use new capital to build more products, secure big partnerships, expand financial education, and roll out its rewards program to enterprise partners. Lolli operates a bitcoin rewards platform and recently launched a mobile app that converts typical fiat cashback from merchant partnerships into bitcoin for users. The app currently offers an average of 7% back in bitcoin and users have earned more than $3.5 million in bitcoin rewards to date. Lolli has direct partnerships with roughly 1,000 merchants across e-commerce sites. The company plans to use new funding to expand operations, further develop the mobile app, and be more active in the gaming community to drive user growth. Lolli currently has 20 employees and intends to double its headcount over the next year, hiring engineering, marketing, and support staff. The firm leverages social media influencers and gaming talent to distribute bitcoin and expand its user base. Lolli operates an e-commerce bitcoin rewards app that incentivizes shoppers by sending bitcoin to a wallet as cashback. The company partners with more than 1,000 merchants and has over 250,000 users. Lolli reports users have earned over $3 million in bitcoin rewards to date and offers an average of about 7% bitcoin-back rewards at retailers such as Kroger, Microsoft, Booking.com and Ulta. Co-founder Alex Adelman says the product began as a way to educate people about bitcoin and was attached to everyday shopping. The company frames its mission around financial empowerment and inclusion and aims to make bitcoin more accessible by enabling people to “stack sats” through shopping. Lolli is a consumer-facing shopping app that pays users cryptocurrency rewards for purchases at partner stores. The company supports over 1,000 top stores and is available only to U.S.-based customers. Lolli recently renewed its partnership with Samsung, enabling users to earn up to 4.5% back in Bitcoin on Samsung purchases, and has added support for Garmin and Fenty Beauty. In November it attempted to offer crypto awards to American users of Alibaba, but that partnership fell through. Financially, the startup completed a $3 million seed round in May. Founded in 2018, Lolli was included on CNBC’s “Upstart 100” list in 2019. Lolli is a rewards platform that allows users to earn bitcoin when they shop at partner brands. It operates via a browser extension (Chrome and Safari) that notifies users on partner sites and assigns bitcoin rewards at checkout. Users can spend, save, or convert earned bitcoins to cash from the Lolli wallet, and the company says it stores users' bitcoins in offline cold storage. Lolli reports arrangements with over 500 brands, including Hilton, Marriott, Walmart, and Forever 21, offering "up to 30 percent back in bitcoin." The company reports over a 9 percent conversion rate and says it has already generated over six figures in sales for its merchants. CEO and co‑founder Alex Adelman stated the platform has created a "real use case" for bitcoin.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2022

Revea is a precision skincare company using advanced diagnostics, personal analysis, and machine learning to deliver skincare tailored to each individual's biology. The company was founded in 2020 by a team of skincare enthusiasts, biologists, and data scientists. Revea is based in San Francisco, CA. It recently closed a $6 million seed round. Investors named in the announcement include Alpha Edison, retailer Ulta Beauty, Waldencast Ventures, GISEV and Verlinvest, among others.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2021

Adeptmind offers a human-and-AI powered software solution that improves online search and product discovery by mining customer intent from sources like reviews and articles and deriving topics/keywords. The company’s architecture combines deep active learning and human curation to bootstrap data quickly and claim high accuracy in consumer-facing use cases. Adeptmind plans to use new capital to double down on R&D, build new online tools based on customer-intent analysis, and pursue AI-guided reviews and guided discovery paradigms. The startup aims to reach more retailers and shopping centres across North America and internationally (Asia, the Middle East, South America). Today it serves more than 400 retailers, shopping centres, and SMBs in North America and Europe. Prior to the raise it was cash-flow positive; the CEO said the funding was needed because the company could not serve new customers without more resources. The company currently employs about 30 people and plans to add roughly 10 more by year-end; the CEO estimates the raise provides about three years of runway if the team doubles. Adeptmind builds a self-aware search engine for e-commerce that applies deep learning, active learning, reinforcement learning, and transfer learning to improve product discoverability and reduce "no results" outcomes. The product emphasizes easy integration without altering site look-and-feel, continuous learning, self-adapting metadata scraping of user sentiment, and question-answering and free-form query support. Adeptmind positions its technology to increase conversion, reduce metadata-tagging costs, and replicate in-store sales assistance online. The company announced additional seed funding and reports total funding of $5.5 million to date. A sizeable portion of the funding will launch the Adeptmind Scholar Fellowship, which grants $30k scholarships to 20 university students; scholarships have been awarded at NYU’s Center for Data Science and The Courant Institute, with additional gifts pending internationally. Adeptmind was founded in 2016 by G Wu and Jing He and is based in Toronto, Ontario.