• Paladin

  Led · Series A · May 2022

  Paladin’s core product is a pro bono management platform used by law firms, legal departments and legal services organizations to list, find, sign up for, and track pro bono opportunities. Its customers include major law firms such as Dentons, Clifford Chance, Wilson Sonsini, and McDermott Will & Emery, as well as companies including Verizon, Dell, and Zurich. The company says the platform helps legal teams run more efficient pro bono programs and increase access to justice. Paladin will use new funding to accelerate product development and to meet demand from organizations building out or scaling pro bono programs. The company also plans to continue expansion beyond the U.S. and Canada. As of the Series A, Paladin reports total financing of over $12 million. Paladin is a New York–based SaaS business that helps legal teams sign up for pro bono opportunities, enables coordinators to track attorneys’ donated time, and captures impact stories. The platform helps legal departments see the return on investment for pro bono work and is used by clients such as Verizon and Lyft. Founders Felicity Conrad and Kristen Sonday created the company about three years ago and it operates as a seven-person team. Paladin plans to build infrastructure that connects organizations on the ground with legal services and law firms worldwide, acting as a matchmaker for legal departments. The company acknowledges scalability challenges because many corporate lawyers do not practice the types of litigation often most needed, including immigration, social security, criminal, and domestic abuse matters. To support growth and product development, Paladin has raised $1.1 million from investors.

• Stax

  Led · Seed · Mar 2022

  Stax aggregates USSD codes from multiple bank and mobile-money accounts into a single offline-capable app so users can perform transactions without dialing individual codes. The product is active in 10 African markets and fully supports six countries — Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana and Ethiopia — with access to more than 100 banks and mobile-money accounts. The company came out of beta last May and has grown from fewer than 3,000 monthly active users in its first month to over 170,000 customers, of which about 40,000 are active monthly users. Stax currently makes no revenue and intends to charge commissions from partner brands for additional services in the future. The team is remote with employees in the U.S., the U.K., Nigeria and Kenya, and the product evolved from a prior Hover API platform after the founders pivoted to a vertical consumer app. Planned product work includes a self-custody crypto wallet starting with USDC and other features to improve offline transaction experiences. The company also plans to expand its services from 10 to 50 African countries by the close of its Series A and has longer-term ambitions to enter other USSD-prevalent markets such as South and Southeast Asia.

• Mesh++

  Led · Seed · Oct 2021

  Mesh++ develops plug-and-play wireless routers that form self-healing mesh networks to deliver internet connectivity to rural and underserved communities. Each router becomes a node that can blanket roughly 10 acres and support up to 100 people, sharing any available internet from ethernet or cellular modems and aggregating multiple sources for redundancy. The network can continue to operate for internal messaging and news alerts during local internet or power outages; the company says it remained online during Hurricane Ida in New Orleans. Mesh++ says its technology cuts installation infrastructure costs from over $400 per household to about $29, largely by reducing labor and simplifying deployment. The company has built test networks in several U.S. cities, maintains a five-person subsidiary in Nairobi, and is headquartered in Chicago and Nairobi. Following a $4.9M seed round, Mesh++ is shifting from R&D toward sales, partnerships and distribution to scale deployments.

• NeighborSchools

  Participated · Seed · Nov 2019

  NeighborSchools is a Boston, MA-based child care tech startup that blends technology and community to help early childhood educators go independent, get licensed, and open micro-daycares in their homes. Its daycare-in-a-box platform handles compliance, marketing, finance, and back-office requirements for educators. The company has launched over 70 home daycares across 10 markets and has helped more than 30,000 parents in their child care search. NeighborSchools raised $5M in a round that brings total fundraising to $9M. The round was led by Accomplice with participation from Chelsea Clinton's Metrodora Ventures, HannahGrey, and 186 Ventures. The company, led by CEO Brian Swartz and COO Bridget Garsh, intends to use the funds to scale its model and expand to ten new states in 2022. NeighborSchools operates a platform that assists prospective and existing home daycare providers with licensing, set‑up and business operations so they can run sustainable, licensed home daycares. The company connects parents to thousands of licensed home daycares throughout Massachusetts and says partnered Providers can double their income while offering care about 30% more affordable than large, center‑based programs. NeighborSchools focuses on empowering people passionate about early childhood development to become small business owners and on building a community and platform tailored to both Providers and parents. The platform frees Providers to focus on nurturing children by handling administrative and business tasks. The company was founded in 2018 and is based in Massachusetts/Boston. NeighborSchools plans to use new funding to expand throughout the region and accelerate its vision to make the platform the go‑to way for parents to discover and connect with licensed home daycares.

No current team members are available.