• Zoove

  Participated · Series E · May 2013

  Zoove operates the StarStar platform and StarStarMe, which let brands and individuals use unique vanity mobile numbers to drive offline-to-online engagement. The company has secured relationships with all four major U.S. carriers and says StarStar drives millions of calls annually for customers including AT&T, CBS Radio, Dunkin' Donuts, Ford, Hyatt, the NFL and Viacom. Zoove offers solutions for enterprise marketers and consumers, including individual vanity numbers such as CHLOE or MOVIEGUY through major carriers. The company plans to expand the StarStar platform across product, business development and marketing channels, and to roll out enhancements to the StarStar Me mobile app and experience. Zoove serves clients across media, entertainment, retail, travel, financial services and non-profits from offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. The company recently secured a $15 million strategic investment to accelerate national growth and demand-generation initiatives. Zoove operates the National StarStar Registry and is the exclusive provider of StarStar numbers for the four largest U.S. mobile operators, reaching over 250 million consumers. Its service lets consumers dial a company using short, memorable codes (for example, FLOWERS) and typically triggers a follow-up text or voicemail prompting opt-in to view websites, download apps, or receive coupons. Participating brands pay Zoove an annual fee for their number, with pricing that varies by length and scarcity. StarStar numbers have been used in promotions from the NFL, X-Factor, and EA’s Madden game, demonstrating marketing integrations with major brands. The company says the new capital will be used to further accelerate its U.S. operations. Current financials include a total of $20 million in funding after the most recent investment. Zoove runs the StarStar Numbers registry, leasing memorable vanity phone numbers (e.g., WEATHER, SUZUKI) that route consumers to a brand’s mobile app, website, coupon, video or other content. The company exclusively provides StarStar Numbers for the largest U.S. wireless operators and powers the National StarStar Registry in cooperation with the four major mobile operators. Through those operator partnerships Zoove reaches more than 250 million people. Consumers are not charged extra to call a StarStar Number; after the initial call they typically receive a text message or voicemail prompting further engagement. Brands pay Zoove an annual fee to lease StarStar Numbers, with pricing that varies based on the length and “scarcity” of the number. The product is positioned as an alternative to QR codes and unbranded short codes by enabling name-based dialing (for example, dialing ESPN). Zoove is a Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of an abbreviated dialing mobile direct response marketing service. The company offers a patented mobile direct response marketing platform that enables marketers to engage consumers in interactive campaigns via a mobile phone by dialing a ## or ** code. Zoove closed a $13 million Series C funding round. Investors in the round include Highland Capital Partners, Worldview Technology Partners and Cardinal Capital Partners. Co-founder and CEO Tim Jemison said the funds will be used to roll out the abbreviated dialing platform across the major US carriers. The company is focused on deploying its carrier-level interactive dialing technology. Zoove is a Palo Alto startup focused on connecting mobile phone users with advertisers. Its core product lets users dial "**" followed by a short keyword (for example, "CAR") when they see an advertisement. The system is designed to bypass the multiple steps required to text short codes, which the company's executives argue are too complex. Keywords are effectively exclusive to advertisers — for example, only one car company could use the word "CAR" — so available keywords will vary. The company was reported to have $6.8 million in funding. VentureWire covered the company and Zoove's website contains additional details about how the service works.

• Visage Mobile

  Participated · Series C · May 2012

  Visage Mobile, led by CEO Bzur Haun, is a San Francisco-based provider of a SaaS enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution. Its core product, MobilityCentral, aggregates and organizes data about enterprise mobility spend, devices and users. The company also launched Visage MXP, an automated expense management solution that addresses Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) mobility. Visage has previously integrated its core expense products with Concur, and the recent transaction is the third strategic initiative between the two companies. Concur made an investment via the Concur Perfect Trip Fund. The amount of the investment was not disclosed in the report. Visage Mobile provides a SaaS application, MobilityCentral, that gives businesses control and visibility over wireless devices and corporate mobile spend. MobilityCentral organizes how many wireless devices are in use, which employee is using each device, monthly wireless spend and how spending breaks down. The service helps businesses set policies to govern employee smartphone and mobile broadband usage and aggregates carrier data, device management and usage data for analysis. CEO Bzur Haun says the company's goal is to help enterprises 'organize disparate data sources to make better decisions around managing mobility.' MobilityCentral is deployed with more than 200 enterprise customers, including several Fortune 500 companies. The company has raised $8M in this Series C and $16.1M in total funding to date. Visage Mobile provides a SaaS enterprise mobility management application that gives businesses control and visibility over wireless devices and spend. The service organizes device counts, maps devices to employees, reports monthly wireless spend and spending breakdowns, and helps set policies governing smartphone and mobile broadband usage. The startup’s platform is currently used by over 150 companies and is tracking more than 100,000 devices. Visage Mobile raised $3.6 million in new funding from Qualcomm Ventures, Worldview Technology Partners, and Vesbridge Partners. Earlier this year the company raised $4.5 million from Qualcomm and others, bringing total capital raised to $8.1 million to date. The new funding will be used for product development and customer acquisition. Visage Mobile provides a SaaS application that lets businesses control and gain visibility over all wireless devices and related spend across their companies. The service organizes how many wireless devices are used, which employee is using each device, monthly wireless spend, and how spending breaks down. It also helps businesses set policies to govern employee usage of smartphones and mobile broadband. The company sells enterprise mobility management and inventory controls to help firms manage mobility budgets. Visage Mobile says the new funding will be used to invest in product development and additional services to further these capabilities. The company has raised nearly $100 million in total funding to date. Visage Mobile has reemerged as a San Francisco software company offering tools to help IT directors manage employees' mobile phones. The pivot followed a recapitalization that allowed the company to buy out past investors who objected to the rebranding, clear debt, and grant employees new equity stakes. It recently secured $2 million in venture backing from Vesbridge Partners and Emergence Capital Partners and is seeking an additional $1 million to reach break-even. In its prior incarnation the company built software for mobile virtual network operators, served clients such as Disney and ESPN, raised upwards of $90 million in venture capital, and reached a $200 million valuation in 2007. Since restructuring it acquired Agistics, an early-stage SaaS company, and sold unrelated business units to Convergys Corp. The company is positioned to focus on corporate phone-management software and pursue profitability under the new capital structure.

• Stretch

  Led · Series C · Feb 2012

  Stretch is a fabless semiconductor company that delivers a family of software configurable processors, including the S7000 family. Its devices are configurable through C/C++ programming tools and are used worldwide in video processing, machine vision, networking, and wireless applications. The company is led by president and CEO Craig Lytle and has more than sixty employees with offices in Sunnyvale, Shanghai, Krefeld, and Tokyo. Stretch has received 23 patent awards. The company raised capital in a Series C and plans to use proceeds to expand adoption of its S7000-based solutions and to develop next-generation products. Stretch develops software-configurable processors and provides related hardware and software solutions. The company is based in Sunnyvale, California and also operates offices in Krefeld, Germany and Tokyo, Japan. It has more than sixty employees across its offices. Stretch announced a $10M mezzanine financing to support increased manufacturing capacity and the tape-out of its third-generation devices. Management says the funds provide the financial security to scale operations and pursue profitability. The raise is intended to help the company move its product roadmap into higher-volume production. Stretch designs hybrid RISC–FPGA chips and tailored software targeted at surveillance cameras and other markets that need low-cost, high-performance programmability, including wireless, broadcast, and machine vision. Its chips take analog video and compress it into forms that can be more easily stored and transmitted for increasingly sophisticated cameras (including H.264-capable systems). The company says it can make its chips for as little as a quarter of rival DSP costs and competes with digital signal processors from firms such as Texas Instruments. Stretch began shipping its first chips in 2005, shipped a second-generation chip in October, and is planning a third generation; the company has 60 employees. It has licensed processor technology and tools from Tensilica and was founded in 2002 by Albert Wang, formerly chief scientist at Synopsys and Tensilica. Stretch is using new funding to expand production and roll out new chip versions.

• ChoozOn (d.b.a. Blue Kangaroo)

  Led · Series A · Aug 2011

  ChoozOn offers a personalized deal-discovery and social shopping platform that enables consumers to build customized personal deal networks of favorite stores, brands, product categories, loyalty programs, deal clubs, daily deal services, and shopping pals. The service combines deal-matching algorithms with social networking so members ("Choozers") can sift through offers, start or join deal clubs, post wish lists, and share offers with shopping pals. The company was founded and is led by former Yahoo! executives and digital marketing experts including Nick Weir, Usama Fayyad, and Hunter Madsen. ChoozOn reported that over 1,000 leading brands signed on within three months of the founding announcement. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate development and launch its consumer service later this quarter. It closed a $3.2 million Series A angel round to support these efforts and to improve the value exchange between consumers and brands.

• Delivery Agent

  Participated · Series D · Oct 2009

  Delivery Agent operates a multi-channel commerce platform that maps and delivers products tied to entertainment and advertising content across web, social, mobile and television. The company serves more than 350 major media and entertainment properties, including NBCUniversal, Twentieth Century Fox, CBS, Discovery Communications, A+E Networks, HBO, Showtime, UFC and the New York Knicks. Delivery Agent reports it has processed millions of entertainment-commerce transactions tied to network and cable content. Its platform and products include commerce applications, video and mobile products, interactive advertising solutions and the TV Wallet™ transaction engine. Delivery Agent plans to use the new funding to aggressively expand and manage deployment of commerce applications tied to entertainment content across connected devices, including Smart TVs and mobile. The company maintains offices in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Denver and London. Delivery Agent creates online marketplaces that catalogue products and merchandise appearing in movies and TV shows and enables viewers to purchase those items. The company has signed all the major networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, and MTV Networks. Its second core service indexes products that will air in episodes and sells ad packages to the brands behind those products. Delivery Agent processes entertainment-commerce transactions across traditional web, social, mobile and connected television and has processed millions of such transactions to date. The company has expanded through acquisitions, including media firm The Band and flash-sales site Billion Dollar Babes. On the financial side, Delivery Agent recently raised $35.5M in a Series E, bringing total funding to date to $107.3M. Delivery Agent is a San Francisco-based provider of shopping-enabled programming and content monetization. Its technology is deployed across more than 125 entertainment properties, including ABC, CBS, NBC Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, MTV Networks, HBO and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. The company plans to extend its platform to support click-to-buy applications for online video, mobile and set-top boxes. It will use the financing to fuel global growth, build a European client base and offer U.S.-based clients opportunities to transact with audiences in international markets. Delivery Agent received $5M in venture debt from ATEL Ventures to support these efforts. Delivery Agent creates online marketplaces that catalog products appearing in TV shows and enables viewers to purchase those items through e-commerce sites it operates for networks. The company outsources e-commerce for networks so they can monetize content while keeping overhead low. Delivery Agent also coordinates advertising by indexing products that will air and selling ad packages to brands before episodes run. It has signed partnerships with major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, and MTV Networks. The company recently raised a $25 million Series D, bringing total funding to $60 million. Delivery Agent plans to develop click-to-buy applications for online video and mobile, launch a click-and-buy remote control partnership with a major cable operator, and pursue international expansion into Europe and Asia. Delivery Agent provides a service and retail site, SeenOn, that lets viewers find and purchase products that appear in TV shows and movies. The company helps producers create an index of products appearing in content; that index is exposed on SeenOn so users can browse by network, show, character, and episode and buy items. Delivery Agent has developed a proprietary Shopisode video player that synchronously highlights products as they appear on screen to make videos "shoppable." The company secured a deal with Viacom giving four years of exclusive access to product-placement data from Viacom’s MTV, VH1, CMT, and Logo networks. Delivery Agent raised $18.5M in a third round of funding and has $35M invested to date. Based in San Francisco, it is targeting "hardcore consumers" and competes with services such as StarStyle.com/Entertainment Media Works.

No current team members are available.