Participated · Series A · Jun 2025

Compyl provides a governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platform that converts complexity into data-driven insights and AI-guided action to reduce risk, ensure compliance, and drive growth. The platform unifies and contextualizes enterprise data in real time and provides flexibility to adapt to business processes, enabling compliance and security teams to proactively manage risk, streamline workflows, and maintain continuous compliance. Founded in 2020 and based in New York City, Compyl has delivered a comprehensive GRC platform since its inception. The company raised $12M in a Series A and plans to use the funds to accelerate go-to-market initiatives and expand its team across key departments. It also intends to further enhance the platform’s AI-supported GRC innovation with the new capital.

Participated · Series A · Apr 2025

Respondology operates a Comment Activation Platform that delivers AI-powered social media comment moderation and intelligence. It offers two flagship products—Moderate, which protects brands in real time from toxic comments, abuse, spam, and bots; and Discover, which analyzes comment trends and sentiment to surface insights in about 30 seconds. The platform supports over 100 languages and turns unstructured comment data into strategic marketing intelligence to help brands enhance engagement and refine marketing strategies. Respondology serves over 450 brands across sports, entertainment, consumer goods, and marketing agencies, protecting over two billion followers and moderating more than 365 million comments globally. Clients report performance improvements including a 17.6% average increase in ROAS on TikTok and a 7.35% lift on Meta, along with time savings and improved brand sentiment. The company is expanding beyond moderation to provide actionable insights and plans to accelerate product development, launch a third flagship product, grow the team, and scale go-to-market efforts. Respondology operates a comment-moderation platform that removes toxic and bot comments across social platforms. Its technology supports 22 languages and removes toxic comments and spam from public view in less than a second. The platform aims to create more engaging environments for brands and followers and to improve return on ad spend for social media advertisers. The company serves 240 customers across sports, entertainment and leading consumer brands. Respondology plans to use the Series A funds to hire talent to meet global demand and to accelerate its technology and features roadmap. Led by CEO Erik Swain and based in Boulder, CO, Respondology is a Boulder Heavy Industries portfolio company.

Participated · Series B · Apr 2025

Ocient builds data analytics software that delivers high-performance, compute-intensive analysis of very large and complex datasets using technologies such as Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA), Megalane™, OcientML®, and OcientGeo®. The company offers pilot-to-production deployments on premises, in the OcientCloud®, or in public clouds and emphasizes up to 90% price savings and reduced environmental impact. Ocient plans to use new capital to advance development and delivery of energy-efficient solutions for costly, complex, and operationally burdensome data and AI workloads and to expand customer deployments globally. The startup reported doubling revenues for the third straight year as it transitions into growth stage and has deepening industry partnerships with AMD, Solidigm, Amdocs, and others. Ocient was also accepted into the NVIDIA Inception program and recently launched a named telecommunications solution for data retention and disclosure. The company appointed Henry Marshall as CFO to manage financial operations as it scales. Ocient provides data analytics software that enables always-on, compute-intensive analysis of large, complex datasets, including in-database ML and geospatial capabilities. Its Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA) removes network bottlenecks to facilitate rapid data access and supports always-on loading, ETL/ELT, Zero Copy Reliability™, OcientML™, and OcientGeo™. The company says its platform delivers energy and cost efficiencies—including up to 80% price savings—and is positioned for next-generation, growth-scale analytics. Enterprises can deploy Ocient on premises, in OcientCloud™, or in the public cloud with minimal integration from pilot to production. Ocient reported 109% year-over-year revenue growth in its last fiscal year and plans to use new funding to advance product capabilities and deliver hyperscale data analytics solutions to a growing global customer base. Founded in 2016, Ocient is a global, carbon-neutral company headquartered in Chicago and has been recognized in the GigaOm Radar for Data Warehouses as a Fast Mover and Challenger. Ocient provides a proprietary data analytics solution (Ocient DAS) designed to enable rapid analysis of extremely large datasets. The platform can hold quadrillions of rows, ingest billions of rows per second, and filter and compute across trillions of rows per second. Ocient is deploying its DAS in Auction & Exchange Analytics, Security, and Geospatial customer use cases using industry-standard interfaces and hardware. The company was co‑founded in March 2016 by Chris Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski, and George Kondiles. Ocient closed a $40M Series B that brought total invested capital to $65M. The company plans to use the funds to grow engineering, customer success, operations, and sales and marketing, and expects headcount to double to 150 by the end of 2021. Ocient builds an ultra-large-scale relational database platform and SaaS designed to analyze multi-petabyte to exabyte-class datasets with interactive, sub-second query latency. Its DAS product can hold quadrillions of rows, ingest billions of rows per second, and filter/compute trillions of rows per second, and runs on commodity hardware or public cloud. The system targets use cases where NoSQL and Hadoop fall short, offering massively parallel processing and benchmarks that are typically ~50× faster than alternatives such as Presto (and up to 1,000× in some comparisons). The company says analytics that once took an hour can now take 10 seconds or less, enabling interactive insights on previously intractable datasets. Ocient has been expanding its team (hiring 15 employees and 9 interns in 2020 to reach over 50 employees) and plans to more than double headcount over the following year. The company also added senior management and advisory board members as it scales commercial and technical efforts. Ocient builds a relational database and analytics software platform designed to handle petabyte- to exabyte-scale data sets. Its platform is engineered to hold quadrillions of rows, ingest data at speeds of billions of rows per second, and filter and compute results at rates up to trillions of rows per second. The product targets organizations that need to analyze immense amounts of data at extreme scale. The company will use the new capital to support its engineering team, continue research and development, and activate a new development lab. Ocient was co-founded by Chris Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles and is based in Chicago, IL. It secured about $10M in Series A funding to advance product and engineering work.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2024

Fora offers an Executive Relationship Management (ERM) platform aimed at helping C-suite and other executive leaders turn the constant flow of organizational information into clear, strategic guidance. The software ingests unstructured qualitative data and produces concise insights, giving executives a simplified view of complex relationships and issues. By emerging from stealth with its initial capital raise, the company signals an intent to scale product development and market entry quickly. CEO Joe Essenfeld leads the firm, and its board now includes Nilanjana Bhowmik of Converge and former iCIMS CMO Susan Vitale. Although revenue, user counts, and growth metrics have not been disclosed, Fora’s $3.8 million in fresh capital provides runway for early customer acquisition and product refinement. The platform positions itself within the growing SaaS category focused on relationship intelligence and qualitative analytics for enterprise leadership teams.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2024

Fora is a New York City–based startup offering an executive relationship management (ERM) platform purpose-built for C-suite leaders at mid- to large-sized enterprises. The software channels an organization’s continuous information flow—such as meeting recordings and transcripts—into actionable insights that sharpen strategic decision-making and relationship building. Unlike many AI tools focused on knowledge and task workers, Fora emphasizes leadership effectiveness, data security, and liability reduction around sensitive executive content. CEO Joe Essenfeld highlights the product’s role as a “safeguard,” integrating AI while minimizing the risks associated with retaining executive communications. Recent board additions Nilanjana Bhowmik (Converge) and Susan Vitale (formerly iCIMS) add domain and go-to-market expertise. The company has raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding and plans to use the capital to expand operations and broaden its market reach. No revenue or user metrics have been disclosed.