Participated · Series C · Sep 2023

ELSA, founded in 2016, offers speaking lessons with personalized learning plans, test and interview preparation, and a speech analyzer to help users improve conversational skills. The company recently launched ELSA AI Tutor, a voice-based generative-AI tutor that role-plays conversations and uses speech recognition to give feedback on pronunciation, grammar, cadence and professional tone. The AI Tutor remembers users’ past performance to customize lessons and is aimed at learners who lack access to live tutors. ELSA has offices in San Francisco, Lisbon and Ho Chi Minh City. The company said it will use the new funding to support and grow its platform, expand further in Taiwan, enter the Middle East and Turkey, build on success in Japan, and increase its focus on B2B. To date ELSA has raised $60 million. ELSA is a pronunciation-focused English learning app that uses proprietary speech-recognition AI trained on accented English from millions of users to provide detailed feedback on sounds, intonation, rhythm and fluency. The app offers fine-grained correction of individual sounds and advanced prosodic coaching to help learners speak more naturally. ELSA claims more than 13 million users and was founded in 2015; it is based in San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City. The company has partnerships with IDP (which now recommends ELSA for IELTS test preparation), language schools in Vietnam (IMAP and Speak Up), online platform YOLA, and corporate clients including Kimberly Clark, Intel and ATAD. Going forward, ELSA plans to expand operations in Latin America, Vietnam, India and Japan and to build a scalable B2B platform to offer its coaching services to companies and educational organizations. Elsa provides an AI and voice-recognition app that grades users' English speaking and pronunciation against standard American English and gives detailed feedback. The service is freemium, offering full access to 1,000 courses for roughly $3–6 per month, with new content added weekly. Elsa reports users in more than 100 countries and two million paying users in its top market, Vietnam. The company supports localized payments and a local sales team in Vietnam and has opened an office in Tokyo as part of expansion into Japan, Indonesia and India. Elsa is preparing to support additional languages (Spanish announced as next) by building voice-recognition models and collecting voice data to train them. It is also pursuing the education market by licensing the app to schools (subsidized per‑student fees) and allowing teachers to upload curriculum and track students' oral homework. ELSA provides an AI- and speech-recognition-powered app that gives personalized pronunciation feedback and coaching to English learners. Users take a five-minute assessment that builds a tailored curriculum from roughly 600 lessons and 3,000+ words; lessons are bite-sized (about two minutes) and include five progressively harder exercises. The app listens to learners, compares speech to American English targets, highlights performance (red/yellow/green) and offers corrective tips on mouth and tongue placement. Since launch the product has been adopted by a few million users in over 100 countries (about half in Southeast Asia) who practice a few million exercises per week. ELSA generates revenue via subscriptions (about $3.99/month or $29.99/year, with a quarterly option and regional price variance). Future plans include building a teacher tool to import classroom curriculum, adding new languages, developing a voice-recognition API, and hiring additional AI talent.

Participated · Equity · May 2017

Sea, which rebranded from Garena, operates three core products: Garena (games), Shopee (a C2C marketplace) and AirPay (an e-wallet). The company says it will use new capital to expand Shopee in Indonesia, a major and fast-growing e-commerce market. Shopee’s annualized gross merchandise value has doubled over the past nine months to more than $3 billion. Sea is reportedly preparing for an IPO that may raise $1 billion. The company added several high-profile advisors as it pursues global expansion. Sea is Singapore-headquartered and Garena was founded in 2009; the games unit will retain the Garena name.

Participated · Series C · Dec 2014

Eat Just develops plant-based egg alternatives (JUST Egg) and operates a cultivated meat business (GOOD Meat). JUST Egg is made with mung bean protein and is the company’s core consumer product, with a 51% repeat purchase rate and distribution in 48,000+ North American retail points plus ~10,000 additional branded partnership points. Foodservice sales grew 15% and 39% in Q1 and Q2 respectively, and foodservice is now gross-margin-positive, while the company has said JUST Egg is “closer to operational profitability.” The company has taken cost and headcount actions (an 18% layoff earlier this year) and is focused on improving margins through more efficient mung bean sourcing, increased scale, monetizing co-products (mung bean starch), and better protein extraction. GOOD Meat currently sells limited amounts in the U.S. and Singapore but will need to raise significant capital to fund a large-scale U.S. plant. Eat Just was launched in December 2011 and has previously raised roughly $850 million in total financing, including about $270 million for GOOD Meat. Eat Just, founded in 2011 and formerly known as Hampton Creek, makes mung bean–based plant eggs and is advancing cultivated meat made from animal cells grown in a lab. Its plant-based eggs are already sold on Alibaba’s e-commerce platform in China, where it has operated for three years. The company plans to file with Chinese regulators for its cultivated meat "sometime this year" and previously obtained permission to sell lab-grown meat in Singapore in late 2020. Eat Just has raised over $400 million from investors including Khosla Ventures and Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures. China currently accounts for about 5% of Eat Just’s global sales, and the company sees local production as a priority to cut logistics costs and compete on price with conventional eggs and meat. It faces competition from both local alternative-protein startups and lower-cost traditional animal products, and is focusing on consumer education and taste-driven innovation. Eat Just, launched in 2011 as Hampton Creek, develops plant-based egg replacements and lab-grown poultry under its GOOD Meat line. The company’s product set includes plant-based egg replacement products and eggless mayonnaise alongside its lab-grown chicken offerings, and it is described as the first government-approved vendor of lab-grown chicken. Eat Just sells products in more than 20,000 retail outlets and 1,000 foodservice locations, has moved over 100 million eggs to roughly one million U.S. households, and has distribution deals including Dicos in China and placements at Peet’s Coffee; it has expanded eggless distribution into Canada. GOOD Meat was available for a short time in Singapore, and the company says it expects to slash production costs and expand commercial operations while working on other kinds of meats. The company went through governance turmoil in 2017, including a failed coup, executive firings and a full board resignation that was later replaced. Eat Just has raised capital to build out capacity for its egg replacement products and its lab-grown meat business. Hampton Creek develops plant-based food products using novel ingredients and food‑science techniques; its newest product, Just Scramble, is a mung-bean scramble that tastes like egg and is free of antibiotics and cholesterol. The company launched Just Scramble first in San Francisco with plans to expand to additional locations and cities in 2018 and said the new capital will be used to scale the product. Hampton Creek reported having grown from zero to 100,000 points of distribution over four years and described several of its SKUs as among the fastest-selling in multiple categories. The company received FDA confirmation of GRAS status for its mung bean protein isolate prior to the launch. Hampton Creek published sustainability metrics showing Just-branded products save fresh water and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions versus conventional egg-based products; those metrics were independently validated by Third Partners. Management said it is reviewing additional sustainability factors such as soil health, fossil fuel use, and fertilizer run-off to broaden its environmental analysis. Hampton Creek makes plant‑based food products (notably Just Mayo and Just Cookies) using ingredients like yellow pea protein and is rapidly expanding retail and food‑service distribution. Its products now appear in major U.S. retailers including Whole Foods, Costco, Walmart, Target, Kroger and food‑service Compass Group, and it has expanded internationally into Hong Kong’s PARKnSHOP. The company plans to scale R&D with lab automation, a robotic lab and a project to build the world’s largest database of plants to accelerate ingredient discovery. Hampton Creek is developing additional products including scrambled eggs, pasta, healthier sugar substitutes and improved oils, and says some new capital will accelerate expansion in Western Europe and Asia. The startup has grown quickly and is adding office space to relieve crowded conditions among employees. Founder Josh Tetrick has signaled aggressive long‑term ambitions to become a global household food brand. The company has attracted major backers including Bill Gates (indirectly via Khosla) and Li Ka‑Shing and is navigating a public legal dispute with Unilever over the right to use the word “Mayo.”