Participated · Equity · Apr 2022

Gripnr builds Web3 tabletop games and is preparing to launch its first 5E game and accompanying NFT ecosystem. Its inaugural title, The Glimmering, features a genesis NFT collection of 10,000 individual characters with hand-drawn attributes designed specifically for gameplay. Each character will carry unique rarities—classes, ancestry, skills, and background—and ongoing character data will be stored on-chain. Members who mint the genesis collection will receive immediate community benefits while on-chain play is developed. The team includes CEO Brent McCrossen, CTO Luke Ledet, creative director Kyle Mortensen, lead artist Justin Kamerer, D&D game creator Stephen Radney-MacFarland, and Patrick Comer (whose research platform Lucid was acquired for over $1 billion). Gripnr raised $2.5M to fund the launch of its first game and genesis NFT collection.

Participated · Seed · Mar 2013

Dashboard.io is a Mountain View, CA-based community platform for startups that enables founders to talk to other founders and mentors from across accelerator networks. The platform connects users with mentors and founders from 500 Startups, TechStars, Y Combinator and Startup Chile. It provides tools to collaborate, get answers from across their network and to privately benchmark against their investors’ portfolios. The company was spun out by Paul Singh, the Venture Partner at 500 Startups, who will become its Founder & CEO. Dashboard.io recently raised seed financing as reported by FinSMEs.

Led · Series A · Nov 2011

Lucid operates a programmatic market research platform, including Fulcrum, its automated sample marketplace, that enables marketers to test ads and survey consumers with speed and scale. Founder and CEO Patrick Comer says the company is used by more than 500 customers and that revenue has grown 70 percent year-over-year for the past three years. The company rebranded from Federated Sample in 2015 as its offerings expanded. Lucid positions itself as a programmatic disruptor that complements platforms like SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics by supplying audiences to take surveys on those platforms. It already has offices in London and Delhi and is headquartered in New Orleans. With new funding Lucid plans to expand its own presence across Europe, the Middle East and Africa to become the number one player in market research. Federated Sample’s flagship product, Fulcrum, is an enterprise sample management platform and white‑label routing solution that automates sample delivery via proprietary APIs connecting to panel companies and data collection software. The company offers an optimization engine and routing tools that let customers use proprietary panels to reduce dependence on third‑party sample providers, improving margins and deliverability. Federated Sample is developing realtime validation from public records to verify respondents without collecting personally identifiable information. It already counts three of the top five market research firms as clients, has 3.5 million respondents available per month, and reported revenue growth of 200% year‑over‑year for this quarter. The startup will use new capital to roll out additional Fulcrum features and ramp up hiring across all divisions.