Led · Equity · Apr 2025

Kintsugi is an AI-enabled sales tax compliance platform that automates tax calculations and filings and integrates with Shopify, Stripe, Chargebee, QuickBooks, or custom APIs. The product offers free tax liability calculations, charges for tax filing, and provides an auto-remit option to file taxes automatically after ingesting revenue data. The company aims to support compliance across 171 countries and plans expansion into South America, Africa, India, and China. Founded in 2023 and based in San Francisco, Kintsugi targets small and medium businesses as well as larger customers. Kintsugi generated $3 million in annual revenue last year, reports profit margins above 93%, and targets over $10 million in revenue by the end of 2025. The startup serves 2,400 customers (45% SaaS), processes 5.5 million transactions valued at $7.7 billion, employs 95 people, and reports a 0.1% churn rate. Kintsugi automates sales tax compliance by connecting to companies’ billing and payment systems to determine state liabilities, register businesses in the correct jurisdictions, calculate taxes, and remit payments. The company uses in‑house AI models with humans in the loop, which the CEO says produces more accurate results than competitors relying on large language models. Founded in 2022 and based in San Francisco, Kintsugi launched its website in August 2023 and has grown to more than 1,100 users in the past year. The company has earned $1 million in revenue and offers a freemium approach: free, regularly updated analyses, $100 per tax filing, or custom plans. Competitors include Anrok, CereTax, and legacy outsourcing providers, but Kintsugi emphasizes easier onboarding and free ongoing reports as differentiators. Kintsugi plans to use new capital to expand its technology and to prepare for expansion into Canada and Europe. Kintsugi AI offers an end-to-end sales tax automation platform that handles real-time nexus monitoring, AI-enabled product categorization, rooftop-level tax calculation and validation, sales tax registration, filing, exemption certificate handling, and back-tax compliance. The platform is secure and encrypted, GDPR-compliant, and SOC 2 Type II compliant, aligning with the Trust Services Criteria for security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. The company was co-founded by Pujun Bhatnagar, Barkin Doganay, and Jeff Gibson. Kintsugi intends to use the Series A proceeds to further develop its sales tax management solution. Financially, the company completed a $6M Series A at a $40M valuation. The product targets automation of sales tax compliance workflows for businesses.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2024

Vectara offers an end-to-end RAG-as-a-service platform that embeds generative AI features into applications while asserting it never trains on customer data. The company has developed Mockingbird, a fine-tuned LLM optimized for RAG that Vectara says reduces hallucinations, improves structured outputs, and runs with low latency and cost efficiency. Vectara couples Mockingbird with its open-source Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM) and leaderboard, which thousands reportedly use to mitigate hallucinations. The product positioning targets regulated sectors such as health, legal, finance, and manufacturing where accuracy, security, and explainability are critical. With the new model and tooling, Vectara aims to support integrations with downstream systems and functional calls for autonomous agents. The company plans to ramp go-to-market resources and expand its offering in Australia and EMEA. Vectara was founded by three former Googlers to build a conversational search platform for enterprises that lets developers retrieve and summarize text from large corporate data stores. The company offers an AI-powered, API-based search that can handle queries of arbitrary length, ambiguity and language and returns summaries with citations. Its platform ingests documents in real time and supports client-configurable data retention so organizations can discard originals after indexing to limit residual data. Vectara says it grounds summarization by constraining models to customer-indexed data while training on publicly licensed sources such as Wikipedia. Customers include Conversica, Apex Chat, Metus and Oncotelic Therapeutics, and the company competes with cognitive search products like Amazon Kendra and Microsoft SharePoint Syntex. Vectara has 24 employees and plans to use its recent funding to expand engineering and go-to-market teams with emphasis on European, Middle Eastern and Asia Pacific regions. Vectara offers a neural search-as-a-service that converts queries into vector space and indexes an organization’s data to surface results via vector proximity and cross-attentional ranking. The platform encompasses the full data pipeline, ingesting diverse file types (Word, PDF) and understanding document structure rather than just providing a standalone vector database. Founders Amr Awadallah (CEO), Amin Ahmad (CTO) and Tallat Shafaat (chief architect) are former Google staffers and built the company in stealth under the name ZIR AI. Vectara emphasizes transformer-based models and fine-tuning to capture context and improve query relevance. The company launched its neural search offering with $20 million in seed funding and made the technology available upon emerging from stealth. Vectara plans to expand beyond search over time to add services such as recommendations and tools to surface related topics.

Led · Series A · May 2024

Firefly offers an infrastructure-as-code solution that automatically discovers an organization’s entire cloud footprint across major providers (Google, Microsoft Azure, AWS), private clouds, containers and apps. Using AI, it creates a snapshot of assets, highlights conflicts or misconfigurations and suggests remediations delivered as infrastructure-as-code for DevOps teams to review and apply. The company experimented with an AI feature that could suggest and execute code automatically but disabled that capability for some larger customers over concerns about hallucinations and errors. Firefly aims to be the cloud "source of truth" or control plane for cloud operations, positioning its remediation suggestions as defaults while leaving final decisions to DevOps. The startup says revenue grew fourfold in 2023 and that it doubled sales and customer counts in the last six months, having signed some large Fortune 500 customers. Founded in 2021 amid post-COVID digital transformation, the company is headquartered in Foster City and retains significant operations in Israel.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2024

Anecdotes provides a data-driven GRC platform that collects, structures, and operationalizes GRC data to automate workflows and make complex GRC programs scalable and audit-ready. Its Compliance OS and GRC Data Engine enable automated evidence collection and integration with existing GRC workflow tools. The company leverages AI to enhance compliance automation and help enterprises navigate evolving AI regulations and rising cybersecurity threats. Anecdotes counts enterprise customers including Snowflake, SoFi, and Well Health across North America and Europe. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate development of its AI-powered GRC automation solutions, expand its global go-to-market strategy, and grow its Managed Service Provider (MSP) program. It will also strengthen strategic alliances with partners including Coalfire, Schellman, Google Cloud, and ServiceNow and continue enhancing integration capabilities for seamless connection to existing GRC environments. Anecdotes provides a platform that automatically collects GRC-related artifacts from public clouds, on-prem data centers, private clouds and SaaS tools and places them in a central hub for compliance activities. The product supports policy management and user access reviews via automated workflows, plugins and app integrations. A recent addition, AI Toolkit, is open source and offers risks, controls and policies for deploying generative AI apps into production. The company serves about 100 customers, including Snowflake, Coinbase, SoFi, Grafana and Payscale. Anecdotes reports selling millions of dollars with 3x year-over-year growth and a healthy SaaS gross margin. Management plans to expand into new markets and double its 60-person team in the next 12–24 months. anecdotes built a compliance operating system platform that continuously collects and maps data from AWS, Snowflake, Cloudflare, GitHub, Datadog and more to power audit management, risk analysis, policy management and customer-evidence applications. The platform replaces manual activities with automation, breaks down siloed processes, and offers customized controls and frameworks to help companies scale compliance alongside rapid growth. The product targets fast-growing clients who need ongoing visibility and data-backed intelligence rather than one-off audit tooling. anecdotes was founded in 2020 by Yair Kuznitsov (CEO), Roi Amior (CPO) and Eitan Adler (R&D VP), all with cybersecurity backgrounds. The company has R&D offices in Israel, plans to open a New York office, and intends to double its headcount from 60 to 120 with global hiring. Its commercial customers include Similarweb, Riskified, Fiverr and Unity, and it added 70 integrations in 2021. anecdotes offers an enterprise-class SaaS compliance platform that provides automated evidence collection from multiple sources in cloud environments and SaaS products and performs data normalization without requiring specialized expertise. The platform gives unified visibility and transparency for compliance leaders, auditors, and internal stakeholders, a capability the company highlights as especially important for remote work and evolving regulations. Led by co-founder and CEO Yair Kuznitsov, anecdotes targets mature enterprises and hyper-growth companies with complex compliance needs. The company intends to use its recent funding to expand adoption of the platform among those customer segments. The article identifies the company as Tel Aviv, Israel–based. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2022

TipTip operates a creator marketplace that helps local chefs, musicians and other creators grow followers and sell digital content, live sessions and one-on-one interactions. The platform provides end-to-end tools including content management, distribution, livestreaming, KYC, payment systems and scheduling, and it takes a cut from every sale. TipTip also recruits promoters who act as affiliates/resellers to help creators sell to their own communities. The startup launched its platform in July and reports revenue has grown 20x since October; creators earn more than $200 on average within 30 days of activity. TipTip currently has 2,500 creators and over 30,000 users, with a presence in 40 Indonesian cities. It aims to recruit more than 30,000 creators and 300,000 users by early next year and plans to expand its offline/online presence into 250 cities and towns across Indonesia by mid next year.