AAF Seed Radar #16: Frontiers Market, Jericho Security, TopKey, Patented.ai & Tap
We track early stage investments of 250+ funds at AAF as part of our offensive strategy to have our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the overall startup ecosystem. This list is a handful of those seed investments that we invested in, or liked that we’ve found through Crunchbase, Pitchbook, and our own network. All information is publicly available and none of this is financial advice. :)
Frontiers Market
Summary: The $1.2T global livestock industry is stuck in the past. 1B cattle are sold every year, yet less than .5% of those sales are online while profits for ranchers have not grown since the 1990s. Frontiers Market is the premier destination to buy and sell livestock. Its mission is to turn every pasture into a real-time marketplace. The platform streamlines the discovery and transaction process of buying and selling livestock online. By leveraging AI it helps to significantly reduce the stress of the animals while improving the herd management practices of the everyday rancher.
Frontier’s AI-Powered Cattle management app allows farmers to produce a weight value with up to 95% accuracy in the field using advanced image processing and A.I. algorithms. Its future models will be able to detect not only the weight of cattle, but of all livestock. Future models will be able to predict health outcomes and operate using almost any camera system.
Team: Frontiers Market Co-Founder & CEO is Evon Onusic. Evon was previously the Founder of Algo which was acquired by Meltwater in 2017. Evon spent two years at MeltWater on its Product team where he integrated Algo’s assets — Algo’s patented artificial intelligence reads text data in real-time and determines what information is spreading fastest anywhere in the world.
Matt Michelson is the other Co-Founder of Frontiers Market. As Founder and CEO of Gothams, Matt Michelsen applies his three decades in business, technology, and venture capital in Silicon Valley to the challenges and crises facing communities across America. Michelsen is a proud American, father of three, and passionate philanthropist who calls the state of Texas home and is driven by a mission to uncover opportunities to aid communities nationwide. Matt is an Advisor or Venture Partner at AAF, Data Collective, Palantir, 8VC & Formation 8 with early investments in Wish, Uber and more.
Funding: The company is currently closing a Seed Round from several top angel investors to continue product growth and launch in key markets.
Jericho Security
Summary: Jericho Security focuses on aiding enterprises in defence against social engineering phishing attacks by using AI to create sophisticated simulations and educational materials. In essence, it “uses AI to fight AI”, acting as a white hat for organisations. The startup acknowledges that the recent surge of generative AI technologies creates an unprecedented threat, enabling the creation of hyper-personalised social engineering phishing attacks at scale.
Since the launch of OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT last year, AI-generated attacks are reported to have tripled and their sophistication continues to escalate. While the attack landscape advances, many firms have failed to update their cybersecurity strategy, making them more susceptible. Jericho’s platform deploys advanced language processing, privately hosted language models, and brokered data to train employees through realistic simulations, personalised to users and providing organisations with essential metrics and feedback.
Team: Jericho Security is the result of decades of collective observation of the evolution of cybersecurity threats by its founders. Sage Wohns is a veteran AI technologist and former CEO of Agolo, a natural language processing (NLP) company. Tim Hwang is the cofounder and CEO of FiscalNote, a government relations management platform. Dan Chyan is a cybersecurity expert and founding partner of PKC Security, a cybersecurity consulting firm.
“Corporate cybersecurity solutions are antiquated and have become virtually obsolete overnight due to the magnitude, personalisation and adaptive attacks from generative AI. Too often, companies only take proper cybersecurity action when it’s too late, following reputational harm and potential litigation.”
“We believe in proactive cybersecurity, empowering organisations to prevent attacks rather than reacting to breaches. Jericho equips companies and their employees with the tools and skills to identify and halt generative attacks effectively.” — Jericho Security CEO, Sage Wohns
Funding: Jericho recently closed a $3M pre-seed round led by venture capital firm Era and includes participation from Lux Capital, Textbook, FoundersXFund, MetaLabs, Alcove, Alumni Venture Group, Thorntree and several individual investors. The funding will be used to expand Jericho Security’s product offerings, grow its team and scale its operations globally.
TopKey
Summary: TopKey’s unique business model revolves around providing a comprehensive financial operation system to property managers similar to a Nitra, or Brex for Healthcare & Startups.
Initially launched as a marketplace for property owners and managers, the company pivoted in mid-2021 to focus on financial operations. Their platform, currently in a beta phase, offers an array of services, including billings, payments, and expense management. The aim is to streamline the process of payments, banking, invoicing, and business intelligence for property managers, thereby making their workflow less fragmented.
Team: Founder & CEO, Jonathan Sukhia was most recently the Head of Management Partnerships at Airbnb. He joined Airbnb post HotelTonight acquisition where he was Head of Global Partnerships for 4 years. Prior to HotelTonight, Jonathan was an Associate Director at Starwood Hotels on the M&A team.
In conversation with Axios, Topkey co-founder and CEO Jonathan Sukhia said, “It’s a very messy process and errors are rife. Property managers run at 10 to 15 per cent margin. They’re small businesses, often fast growing so there’s a lot of opportunity, but it’s not a business where they can afford to flush away thousands a month.”
Funding: TopKey recently closed a $5.2M Seed led by Felicis including participation from from 305 Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, YC, Liquid2, Assurant Ventures and others.
Patended.ai
Summary: Patented.ai is an intellectual property engine provider committed to safeguarding intellectual property and protecting it. The company works to empower innovators and businesses in a rapidly changing digital landscape with its product, LLM Shield, which provides an essential tool to help individuals and companies protect against inadvertently sharing personal identifying information, trade secrets and all other sensitive data with virtually all LLMs. A proactive approach to filtering data before it goes into LLMs allows individuals, companies and governments to leverage AI, without risking a catastrophic leak.
Team: Patended.ai was Founded by Wayne Chang. Wayne is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. His latest company, Crashlytics, was acquired by Twitter in its largest acquisition at the time ($100M+). He has been involved in other notable startups such as Dropbox, Napster, and others, now valued at over $10 billion. Wayne also Co-Founded fintech Digits and is an active angel investor with over 80+ investments from mobile to space worth over $150B in value.
LLM Shield is a first-of-its-kind product that companies across all industries have been waiting for. At Twitter and Google, I saw firsthand the risks pervasive IP leaks imposed and the Herculean efforts dedicated to product developments, innovation and legal disputes. Many developers, for example, wanted to publish work, but found it difficult to do so because they didn’t know what constituted confidential or sensitive information. LLM Shield is a game changer. — Tim Pham — Head of Patent Prosecution at Google.
Funding: The $4M pre-seed funding round was led by Steve Anderson at Baseline Ventures, who previously invested in one of Chang’s earlier successful ventures, Crashlytics, and was the first investor in Instagram, among a long list of other big-name tech investments. He was joined by other investors including Nicole Stata of Boston Seed Capital, Jeff Fagnan of Accomplice, Naval Ravikant, Cooley and many more leading angels.
The company intends to use the funds to to continue improving LLM Shield’s capabilities for the enterprise, disseminate resources to prevent AI data loss and continue developing AI-powered software to protect IP.
Tap
Summary: Tap is the first secondary trading platform for private funds. From market data to transactions infrastructure, Tap offers secondary market participants unparalleled ability to value and transact private funds.
To date the company has completed 50+ transactions worth $1.1B from its buyer network with $250B in AUM including Evercore, Carta, Apollo, Moelis & Co, Stepstone, Hamilton Lane and more.
Team: The Tap team members have launched leading Fintech products, moved billions of dollars in private market transactions, advised investors on major investments, and built multiple companies from the ground up.
Tap’s Co-Founder & CEO is Jeff Leathers. Before Tap, Jeff started and led the SPV and Fund Formations businesses at Carta. Other Co-Founding team members include Thomas Krueger & Adam Augusiak-Boro. Thomas previously built the Product and Go-to-market functions at NewStore, a fast-growing enterprise technology startup, raising over $150M in the process while Adam was an early employee at popular secondary marketplace EquityZen.
Funding: The company raised a $3M Seed backed by exceptional investors including Fin Capital, Courtside Ventures, Precursor Ventures, and founders and operators at Carta and AngelList.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Stay tuned for our next Seed Radar.
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