Participated · Seed · Sep 2021

The Vendry operates an online marketplace and community that digitizes the manual process of requesting, collecting, and comparing proposals from venues and vendors. Led by CEO and founder Daphne Hoppenot, the platform enables event professionals to connect with each other and source venues and vendors for live and virtual events. The company positions itself to empower corporate event professionals as they navigate the return to live events. The Vendry intends to use the seed proceeds to expand its product and engineering teams and invest in new platform developments. Management also plans to scale the product, expand into new markets, and grow the team. As of September 2021, The Vendry has over 18,000 members and has helped plan thousands of live and virtual events.

Participated · Series D · Apr 2019

OpenWeb provides a B2B2C platform that powers end-to-end user experiences, including user activation and management, first-party data aggregation and management, AI moderation, and social experiences. Its proprietary technology is used by top publishers such as The New York Times, Hearst, Yahoo!, Penske Media Corporation, and News Corp. The company works with more than 1,000 top-tier publishers and hosts over 100 million active users each month. OpenWeb has more than 265 employees across New York City, Tel Aviv, Kiev, San Diego, Canada, London, and Paris. The business partners directly with publishers and brands to build and monetize communities rooted in conversations. It plans to use recent funding to continue expanding, pursue new publishers and advertisers, and develop innovative partnerships and applications. OpenWeb provides a technology platform that enables publishers to build direct relationships with their audiences. Led by co-founder and CEO Nadav Shoval, the company was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in New York City with teams in Tel Aviv and Kiev. OpenWeb works with more than 1,000 top-tier publishers, including Hearst, Yahoo!, Penske Media Corporation, and News Corp., and hosts more than 100 million active users each month. The company has over 150 employees across its offices. OpenWeb plans to expand its global presence with new offices in Canada, the APAC (China) region, and the EMEA region, and to explore strategic acquisitions to enhance its product offerings. Financially, the company has raised capital to support growth and scale its platform. Spot.IM started as a commenting platform and is expanding into a broader community platform that includes commenting, moderation, community pages and tools to highlight and monetize user-generated content. The company positions these tools as ways for publishers to focus on loyal readers rather than transient users. Spot.IM provides data to help publishers understand user behavior and value; the CEO said that for some publishers a Spot.IM user delivers five times the lifetime revenue of a non-Spot.IM user. Customers mentioned include Hearst, Refinery29, Fox News, Engadget and AOL.com. The company has attracted institutional capital and remains venture-backed, having raised a total of $63 million to date. Leadership changes announced alongside the funding include the appointment of Itzik Ben-Bassat as president and a member of the board. Spot.IM builds a comments and community platform for publishers, aiming to keep readers on-site and increase advertising revenue. Its clients include Time Inc., NBC, HuffPost and Engadget. The company offers additional ad units and operates on a revenue-share model with media partners. Spot.IM uses machine learning to moderate comments, removing illicit content and spam. CEO Nadav Shoval says the company provides technology “like a social network” and aims to build communities across the open web. Spot.IM plans to invest in R&D and hiring and is preparing to launch a major new platform. Spot.IM provides a social engagement platform that lets digital publishers curate their communities' social interactions and keep ad revenue rather than ceding it to third-party social networks. The company partners with publishers to encourage organic site engagement and claims to enable over 3 billion monthly page views. Spot.IM works with 4,600 active sites and serves more than 300 million unique monthly users for its media partners. Its publisher customers include News Corp., Meredith Corporation, Time Inc.’s The Drive, Little Things and Advertising Age. Founded in 2012 by Nadav Shoval and Ishay Green and based in New York, Spot.IM intends to use new funding to expand R&D, hire additional staff, and further disrupt the online publishing industry by building capabilities that foster social interactions within partners' communities.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2018

Edo is a data, measurement and analytics software company that informs media, creative and audience advertising investments across Convergent TV platforms by measuring and optimizing for what triggers consumer behavior. Founded in 2015 by Edward Norton and Dr. Daniel Nadler, Edo has offices in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company's core product is the Ad EnGage Convergent TV analytics platform, which applies data science and behavioral metrics to help marketers, TV networks and agencies generate greater value from creative and media decisions. Edo counts leading global brands and media networks among its clients, including NBCUniversal, IBM, Subway, Royal Caribbean, New Balance, Amazon Studios, Fox, Nissan and others. The company raised an $80M strategic growth investment from Shamrock Capital. Edo will use the funds to scale outcome measurement for Convergent TV by growing its team, further enhancing its Ad EnGage platform, and expanding its partner network of data sources. In connection with the investment, Edo will expand its board to add Shamrock Capital partner Laura Held, Shamrock Vice President Alicia Zhu, and Edo President & CEO Kevin Krim alongside existing directors Norton, Nadler and investor Jim Breyer. Edo measures TV ad effectiveness by pulling data from search engines and content sites and applying data science to detect changes in consumer engagement and intent. Since its 2015 founding the company has built a database of 47 million ad airings, enabling advertisers to benchmark their ads against competitors. Edo’s platform reports near‑real‑time changes in consumer behavior, and the company says some clients adjust ad rotation the same night based on overnight data. Kevin Krim serves as CEO; Edo was founded by Daniel Nadler and Edward Norton. Customers named in the article include ESPN, Turner, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. The company recently completed a $12M Series A financing.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2017

boostr provides an omnichannel CRM and Order Management solution built specifically for media and advertising sales teams. The product was developed by ad sales experts and is positioned to manage orders and customer relationships across channels. The company is led by founder and CEO Patrick O’Leary and is based in NYC. In 2020 boostr added a record amount of new customers and experienced revenue growth. The company plans to use the new funds to support broader market penetration, accelerate product enhancements, and hire personnel across marketing, sales, engineering and customer success. boostr is a CRM platform built specifically for media and ad sales teams, led by CEO Patrick O’Leary. The solution works across display, content, video, programmatic, TV and print, unifying pipeline, sales and delivery workflows, forecasting and delivery actualization. The company is based in New York City and San Francisco. boostr has attracted over 25 customers in less than two years. It closed a $1M seed funding round to support growth. The company intends to use the funds to expand marketing, sales, and customer success.

Participated · Seed · Mar 2016

Confide is a messaging platform that keeps communications confidential by revealing messages only as users drag a finger across text and automatically destroying messages when exited or when a recipient starts a response. The product now includes a desktop app and lets users send photos and documents with the same partial-reveal mechanism so full content is never shown at once. Confide is launching its first premium feature—message retraction—to let senders pull back an unread message; pricing is being tested between $1.99 and $3.99 per month. The company is also exploring additional disappearing-media features, including disappearing video and potentially voice chat. Confide has raised a $1.6 million extension to its seed round, bringing total funding to $3.6 million. Founder and CEO Jon Brod said message retraction performed extremely well in testing. Confide offers an ephemeral messaging app designed to make professional backchannel communications secure, hiding text behind orange boxes that are revealed one or two words at a time. The app uses end-to-end encryption, stores no message data on its servers, and includes anti-screenshot measures that kick users out and notify senders. Launched early last month, the app has been used in 110 different countries and recently expanded language support to cover a wide set of languages. Co-founders Howard Lerman (chairman, also CEO of Yext) and Jon Brod (former AOL exec and Patch co-founder) lead the company. Confide plans to bring the app to Android, explore a desktop client or browser extension, and hire five to ten employees over the next 18 months to support those ambitions.