Led · Equity · Apr 2022

impact.com provides a unified partnership management platform used by more than 2,000 brands to aggregate, orchestrate, and optimize partnerships across influencers and creators, traditional affiliate publishers, commerce content publishers, B2B, and agencies. The platform enables publishers, brands, and agencies to create, manage, and scale ecosystems of partnerships to drive revenue and growth. impact.com recently announced a strategic secondary investment of approximately $100 million to broaden its investor base and continue momentum. The company acquired Pressboard Media, an analytics and reporting platform for branded content, to strengthen publishers’ premium content offerings and measurement capabilities. impact.com cites enterprise clients such as Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, Fanatics, and Levi’s as users of its technology. Impact runs a marketplace and a “partnership cloud” that lets brands engage influencers and affiliates, lets publishers connect with brands and creators, and provides tracking and revenue-collection infrastructure. The platform is positioned as a big-data play to trace where and how content is used across the long tail of user-generated and sampled media. Impact serves major customers across technology, retail and other sectors — including Lenovo, Microsoft, Uber, eBay, Amex, Capital One, Disney, NBC’s Peacock, Walmart and Target — and its customer base grew 50% in the last year. The New York startup passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in the past year. Impact says it will use the new funds to expand its partnership network and build additional tools for brands, agencies and publishers. The company’s product began as a private marketplace offering and evolved into the broader “partnerships” category as customers adopted it in new ways. Impact provides the Partnership Cloud, a platform that automates the full partnership lifecycle—discovery, recruitment, onboarding, engagement and optimization—for a wide range of partnership types from affiliates and influencers to strategic B2B alliances. The company positions partnership programs as a major growth channel and cites clients such as Cabela’s, Fanatics, Getty Images, Lenovo, Levi’s, Shutterstock, Techstyle and Ticketmaster. Impact completed the acquisition of Mediarails (a CRM for influencer discovery and recruitment), expanded globally with local offices in Singapore and the Nordics, and has grown to over 400 employees and ten offices across the United States, Europe and Asia. The platform emphasizes measurement, attribution and fraud protection to help enterprises scale partnership-driven revenue. With the new funding, Impact plans to accelerate platform development, expand go-to-market efforts and pursue both organic and inorganic growth. Impact Radius provides digital marketing and affiliate solutions that let advertisers track media channels, automate tag management, and optimize and pay direct partners. Current customers named in the article include Lenovo, Ticketmaster, Shutterstock and TransferWise. The company had recently completed a $30 million funding round. Impact Radius acquired New York–based ad fraud prevention platform Forensiq to integrate fraud detection and remove non-human data points from its analysis. Forensiq was founded in 2010, had grown to about 45 employees, and never raised outside funding. Impact Radius and Forensiq have little overlap in technical capabilities, and Impact Radius plans to bring Forensiq’s tools in‑house while maintaining Forensiq’s brand and standalone services for the time being. The combined company will have about 275 employees and seven offices worldwide. Impact Radius provides a multi-channel performance advertising platform that connects advertisers and media partners directly to deliver performance campaigns across TV, radio, print and online media from a single platform. The company completed a $6M financing round led by Redpoint Ventures. It recently launched its platform and initially used funds to develop and test its Impact Radius Directory and Platform. The financing proceeds were also leveraged to support the company’s launch in the United States and the United Kingdom. Impact Radius intends to use funds to expand marketing of its performance advertising solution to advertisers, media partners and agencies. The article was published by FinSMEs on 14/01/2010.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2019

Workfront provides a cloud-based enterprise work management application platform enabling teams to see, measure and analyze resources, outcomes and priorities. The platform is designed to help organizations increase revenue, improve customer experiences, and reduce costs. Workfront serves thousands of companies, including BT, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Fender, Fossil Group, TSB, and Trek. In the prior 12 months the company added major capabilities such as Workfront Fusion (a codeless integration platform), Workfront Home (a configurable personal work environment), and Workfront Library (an enterprise content management hub). Alex Shootman is chief executive officer. The company is based in Lehi, Utah. Workfront offers a cloud-based Enterprise Work Management platform that centralizes work and collaboration across the entire work lifecycle to reduce excessive email, redundant status meetings, and disconnected tools. The product is used by thousands of global enterprises, including Cars.com, Cisco Systems, Comcast, iProspect, Schneider Electric, and Trek. Led by CEO Eric Morgan, the company serves marketing, IT, and other enterprise teams. Workfront plans to deploy the new capital toward business development and to expand sales, marketing, and product growth initiatives. The company is based in the Silicon Slopes region of Utah. No financial metrics beyond customer adoption were disclosed in the article. AtTask is a Silicon Slopes, Utah–based provider of cloud-based Enterprise Work Management SaaS. It offers a platform for marketing, IT and other enterprise teams to manage and collaborate on all types of work through the entire lifecycle. Led by CEO Eric Morgan, the company serves thousands of global enterprises, including Adobe, Cisco, HBO, Kellogg’s, REI, Trek, Schneider Electric, Tommy Hilfiger, Disney and ATB Financial. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate growth and product innovation. AtTask recently closed a $38M Series D financing to support those plans. AtTask is a Lehi, UT-based provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) project and work management solutions that help enterprise teams receive, plan, prioritize, and coordinate activities. Led by CEO Eric Morgan, the company serves Global 2000 customers including Nike, Cisco, ABC, ESPN, 3M, and Trek. AtTask offers cloud-based tools aimed at improving productivity for knowledge workers and enterprise teams. The company announced a $17M growth funding to support expansion. It intends to use the capital to grow its sales, marketing, development, and services teams. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article.

Participated · Series E · Nov 2016

xAd operates a location-based mobile advertising platform that serves ads in apps and mobile web pages using GPS, server integrations and location requests (it does not use Wi‑Fi). The company places ads across roughly 150,000 apps and reports reach of 500 million devices and 100 million places. As part of its strategy to grow audience and data, xAd acquired the WeatherBug app and an extended license to Earth Networks' sensor data (it did not acquire the sensors themselves). WeatherBug reportedly has about 20 million unique users per month, providing a regularly engaged, location-minded audience. xAd plans to invest in a global rollout of the weather-data integration and pursue further app acquisitions (categories mentioned include fitness and mapping) to strengthen its location offering. Management says the company is already profitable and is using the deal activity to help remain independent amid competition and consolidation in adtech. xAd operates a location-based mobile advertising technology platform that tailors ads to a user’s location and provides analytics for campaign performance. The platform serves about 40 billion impressions per month across roughly seven ad networks and exposes APIs that power third-party programmatic buying and back-end services. xAd says it is the first U.S.-based hyperlocal mobile advertising technology platform to expand globally and is live in Germany, the UK, Canada and India, with imminent launches in China and France. The company shifted in 2012 from an SMB focus to also serve national brands and now works with over 300 national advertisers. xAd is profitable, growing quickly (doubling year-over-year) and had “several million dollars in the bank” prior to this round. The company has not announced plans around iBeacons or NFC and describes the funding as padding its nest egg for future opportunities. xAd operates a local mobile search and advertising network in the U.S., using patented mobile optimization technology to identify who, what and where an end user is and serve relevant ads. The company aggregates and manages nearly half a billion location-specific ad requests per month, billions of business listings, and more than one million national and local advertisers. In May the company reported hitting 2 billion ads served. In March xAd acquired the remaining assets of Go2 Media, including its direct-to-consumer business and mobile web properties, brands and search sites. The startup said the new funding will be used to enhance tools for publishers and advertisers and to continue building and supporting its mobile ad-serving technology. The article does not disclose revenue or other financial metrics beyond the fundraising and operating metrics above. xAD operates a U.S. local mobile search and advertising network that uses patented mobile optimization technology to identify an end user’s who, what, and where and serve relevant ads. The platform is currently serving 200 million local search ad requests per month and partners with large mobile ad networks like Millennial Media to provide local inventory. Ads delivered through xAD include full business descriptions, images, offers, reviews, maps, and driving directions and are integrated into apps such as White Pages on iPhone and Android. The company says it returns relevant ad results 80% of the time. xAD is already profitable and raised new funding to expand and accelerate its technology platform. It competes with Google while the U.S. local mobile advertising market is expected to exceed $2 billion by 2014.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2016

FreshDirect operates an online grocery delivery service serving addresses across parts of the U.S. East Coast. It offers standard grocery delivery and has launched FoodKick for one-hour delivery in select locations. The company currently ships to New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Delaware and says FoodKick is driving significant customer-base expansion. FreshDirect plans to use new capital to build up manufacturing capacity and to open new geographies. The company reports about $600 million in revenue and says it is profitable and growing. It competes with Amazon, Instacart, Google, and on-demand platforms such as Postmates.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2016

Wearable IoT World operates a U.S.-Pan Asia IoT Superhighway accelerator offering advisory services, publishing, conference organization, venture acceleration, mentorship, corporate strategic partnerships and media support to the IoT and wearables community. Founded in May 2013 and based in San Francisco, the company runs WIoTW Labs, which has incubated startups including Skully and CreoPop. The organization launched a new 15-week accelerator led by Chief Labs Officer and co-founder Kyle Ellicott that focuses on IoT, wearables and emerging technologies and provides customized mentorship, education, office space and business services. Hong Kong Cyberport Management Company Limited is the official partner and will house WIoTW’s executive office and WIoTW Labs in Hong Kong. A 15-week program is also planned for Shenzhen in Q3 2016, with details for Singapore and Southeast Asia to be announced later. The company raised $4.5M in funding as reported.