The Venture Codex

Participated · Equity · Sep 2014

Dwolla provides an API that enables companies to build and facilitate fast, customizable ACH bank transfers and white‑label payment services. The platform emphasizes programmatic flexibility for customers that need more customization than off‑the‑shelf ACH products. Its customer base includes about 500 customers (including GOAT, Ibotta and Rally) serving roughly 3 million end users, a figure growing by roughly 1.5 million each quarter. Gross payment volume on the platform rose from $11 billion in 2019 to $20 billion in 2020 and is projected at $30 billion this year. Dwolla plans to use new funding to add functionality that provides more card‑like responsiveness, hire talent, and begin expanding its rails into Canada, the U.K. and Australia. The company has raised just over $50 million since 2009 prior to this round and is keeping its valuation undisclosed, describing it as competitive in the payments market. Dwolla builds a white‑label payments platform and the Access API to enable money transfers, including same‑day transfers, via software that aims to lower fees versus traditional banking routes. Today the company relaunched its white‑label API as the Access API, consolidating same‑day transfer service and a new transaction dashboard. Dwolla has shifted its focus away from consumers, government relationships, and mobile payments toward expanding its API and serving business customers. The company says it will use the new funding to hire sales staff, based out of its headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. Ben Milne is founder and CEO and emphasized that building an ideal API to move money is part of the company’s DNA. Financially, Dwolla has raised just under $40 million to date, including a prior $9.7M round from CME Group. Dwolla operates a payments platform that enables peer-to-peer and merchant transactions while aiming to reduce money-transfer and bank payment fees. The company has expanded its product set with Dwolla Direct, which lets users link traditional bank accounts and uses a light, API-based infrastructure to integrate with partners. Dwolla has pursued partnerships — including a tie-up with GoDaddy to power e-invoicing — and said more partnership announcements are coming in the next couple of months. The firm positions its infrastructure for enterprise use cases, pitching the platform as a backend for transactions beyond consumer and mobile payments. Founder and CEO Ben Milne said CME Group's involvement recognizes the potential economic impact of a modernized payment system. The company plans to continue launching services and partnerships while using the new capital to accelerate enterprise-focused opportunities. Dwolla has rebuilt payments infrastructure to operate a network that supports mass payments and real-time bank transfers (FiSync) as an alternative to legacy ACH flows. The company offers products including a MassPay service and FiSync, and has partnerships such as a deal with the state of Iowa and distribution via mFoundry to banks and credit unions. Dwolla reports an annual transaction processing run rate topping $1 billion, has grown 15% month-over-month to roughly 250,000 account holders (up from 80,000 in early 2012), and serves more than 100 large customers across enterprise and government. Management says the bulk of volume is one-to-many payments and that growth is coming from payroll companies, governments, and platforms rather than retail consumer adoption. The company plans to expand engineering, business development, and relationship teams to service larger customers, update its mobile apps, and build support for additional transaction types such as authorizations and captures. Dwolla is also opening a San Francisco office to focus on product, business development, and marketing. Dwolla operates an online and mobile payments platform that positions itself as a new payments network rather than a tool that runs on existing credit‑card infrastructure. Founder Ben Milne describes the company’s goal as rethinking payments network architecture to disrupt the $32 trillion electronic payments landscape. By eliminating legacy issues, fraud and overhead, Dwolla aims to lower costs for end users and merchants. The company has rolled out features and services including Spots, FiSync, Proxi, GRiD and Instant. Over 2011 Dwolla grew its user base roughly 3,200% to over 80,000 accounts and its merchant community roughly 3,000% to over 7,500 accounts, and it processes between $30 million and $50 million per month. The company says its lower fees save users roughly 2%–8% compared with traditional transactions and avoid the typical $0.30 processing fee.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2014

SimpleReach is a content data platform that powers measurement and predictive insights for publishers' branded content programs. The platform collects, verifies, normalizes and benchmarks content data to provide marketers with actionable, real-time insights. SimpleReach counts partners such as The New York Times, Condé Nast, Time Inc., and brand customers including Chase, Intel and Accenture. As content marketing has grown among Fortune 500 companies, the company positions itself as the first content data platform to unify fragmented site and channel data and surface content ROI. SimpleReach has raised $24 million in total funding, including $13.3 million since its last disclosed raise. The company says the new capital and recent leadership changes are intended to accelerate growth in the next phase of the business. SimpleReach provides analytics that measure the effectiveness of content and native advertising and assigns each article a 0–99 score predicting how much social traffic it will drive. The platform tracks performance on publisher sites and social channels and enables marketers to promote top articles via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Outbrain, Nativo, StumbleUpon and TripleLift. Major publishers such as The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post and The Atlantic use SimpleReach for native ad measurement, while brands including Intel and Xerox use it for content marketing analysis and promotion. CEO and co‑founder Edward Kim frames the company’s strategy around building a many‑to‑many data marketplace to become a harder‑to‑displace layer in the ecosystem, comparing the ambition to Nielsen and comScore. The company aims to bring content marketing to the same level of technology as online display advertising. SimpleReach previously raised a $1.6M seed round two years earlier. SimpleReach is a NYC-based company that integrates with major social networks' APIs to track engagement for any link in real time and analyze millions of social actions and pageviews daily. Its product, Insight, builds statistical models to predict which pieces of content will be most social and can push interval- or event-based alerts. The team pivoted from an earlier product, The Slide, after the widget was adopted by thousands of publishers and after graduating from AngelPad. SimpleReach targets publishers, brands, and marketers with a freemium approach—focusing on wide free adoption and upselling to paid plans—and already counts launch partners and early paying clients such as Time Inc, Demand Media, and Hearst. The company is staffed by ten employees, nine of whom are engineers or data scientists. SimpleReach raised funding to hire engineers and scale its product.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2014

GutCheck offers a global, online agile market research platform that instantly recruits target audiences and delivers quick consumer reads. The company pairs its flexible quantitative and qualitative platform with a full-service team to provide insights customers need to act. GutCheck reports triple‑digit growth and sees rising demand for agile research across technology, financial services, and healthcare. Recent hires include a Chief Research Officer and a Chief Commercial Officer; the company will use new capital to invest in research, products, and engineering to create new offerings. GutCheck has raised a total of $25 million and closed a $12 million Series D. Headquartered in Denver, the company said it will announce additional strategic initiatives and will release an e-book on the state of agile market research in November. GutCheck offers an on-demand solution that enables researchers, marketers, brand managers and product managers at corporations and agencies to conduct internet-based research at any stage of the customer or product lifecycle and obtain immediate insights from specific consumer segments. The company is led by CEO Matt Warta and counts clients such as Subway, Logitech, The Home Depot, P&G, Hallmark, Intel and Symantec. GutCheck is based in Denver, CO. It closed a $4M funding round to support its operations. The company intends to use the funds to continue expansion of sales, marketing and product development. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article. GutCheck provides a self-service online platform that lets marketing agencies, brand managers and enterprise clients recruit and conduct one-on-one qualitative interviews. Users sign up, define target demographics, build a project and chat guide, and GutCheck sources qualified participants from a roughly 4 million-person pool supplied by partner providers. Interviews are delivered via a web-based client at a listed price of $40 per 30-minute interview, with partner providers receiving a cut of revenues. The company positions itself as the "SurveyMonkey for qualitative research" and aims to simplify and bring qualitative research online. GutCheck was founded by Matt Warta, Carl Rossow and Jen Drolet and is currently in beta testing, with an official launch expected in the next few weeks. The startup has raised a $2 million Series A to support its growth.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2013

Zipmark provides small to midsize businesses with a proprietary hybrid payment and risk management platform to invoice and collect payments. The platform connects payer and payee accounts so money can be received and available the next business day. Launched in 2010 by CEO Jay Bhattacharya and Jake Howerton, the company is based in New York City. Zipmark completed a $1.5M funding round in August 2013. The company intends to grow its market share within the SMB space and to increase the size of its development team. Zipmark builds a mobile payments platform that uses the existing check processing network to let users pay bills, invoices, and friends from their checking accounts while avoiding credit card fees and bounced checks. The service clears funds from a user’s account on the next business day and uses Check21-compliant digital checks. Zipmark charges low fees—1% per transaction capped at $5.00—and does not need to hold customer funds for extended verification periods. The company launched a developer program and Biller API to let businesses and app developers integrate Zipmark for online and mobile transactions. At launch several partners announced support, including Sunshine Suites, Singular Payments, UnitConnect, and InvoiceASAP. Zipmark said it will also release a consumer-facing iPhone app in time for SXSW. The company is invite-only and was founded by Jay Bhattacharya and CTO Jake Howerton.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2013

BlueTarp Financial provides trade credit and manages in-house trade credit programs for building supply dealers across the United States. The company offers credit solutions tailored to building supply distributors and their dealer customers. Founded in 1998 and led by CEO Scott Simpson, BlueTarp operates from Portland, Maine. It closed a $15M equity funding and concurrently obtained a credit facility from Wells Fargo Capital Finance. Jim Brown of Long Ridge Equity Partners joined BlueTarp’s board as part of the round. BlueTarp intends to use the proceeds to expand the number of building supply dealers in its program.