Innovation, Impact and Imagining the Future: Part 3
In Part 3 of our Medium series Innovation, Impact, and Imagining the Future, we reflect on our portfolio companies’ work across 3 key investment themes: 1) Energy Efficiency, 2) Enterprise Productivity and 3) Frictionless Retail.
From scalable silicon solution for lithium-ion batteries, to IoT solutions to monitor the energy efficiency in buildings to continuous automated SOC 2 compliance software, our portfolio companies have excelled in finding innovative solutions to pervasive problems in their respective industries.
Investing in Energy Efficiency
Advano
Advano combines nanotechnology with fundamental chemical engineering principles to accelerate the renewable energy revolution. As the marketplace for E.V.s, gigafactories and the electrification of everything continues to experience exponential growth, Advano is positioning itself to be a trusted silicon partner to the battery supply chain and help drive the energy transition.
Advano has initiated discussions with 25+ market leaders in electronic transportation and consumer electronics on potential development agreements. Tony Fadell recently invested and joined as a Board Observer to Advano. Tony is the inventor of the iPod, co-inventor of the iPhone, and founder and former CEO of Nest Labs
Funding: The company has raised over $23M from Future Shape, Social Impact Capital, DCVC, Thiel Capital, Cantos, PeopleFund, Fifty Years, Y Combinator, and several others.
Founder: Alexander Girau, Shiva Adireddy
Latest Funding Round: $18.5M Series A
Headcount: 28
Senseware
Senseware is accelerating digital transformation with a structured method of real-time capture of Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing and Environmental data. Built on the founding vision of providing a simple solution of delivering real-time data from the physical environment to the web, Senseware’s complete IoT Technology Stack integrates plug-and-play configurable IoT Edge hardware with IoT Core software in the cloud
Today, Senseware has over 100+ leading corporate and CRE customers including Boston Properties, CARR Properties, Uptake, Clark Construction, CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield to highlight a few.
Funding: The company has raised over $5M from Blu Venture Investors, Forum Ventures & CIT GAP Funds
Founder: Julien Stamatakis, Serene Almomen
Latest Funding Round: $3M Series A
Headcount: 16
Enertiv
Enertiv deploys IoT devices to continuously track every critical piece of equipment and tenant space in a building. The data feeds the company’s Operations Performance System, a comprehensive platform for reducing operating costs and maximizing tenant comfort across real estate portfolios.
Enertiv goes beyond visualizing data from a BMS or a few meters. The company tracks every critical piece of equipment and indoor environmental condition to deliver targeted insights around building operations and tenant comfort in real time. This level of transparency makes buildings easier to operate, healthier to occupy, and more profitable to own.
Enertiv has over 250M sq. ft deployed, 50K pieces of equipment and 16B hours of data being tracked at any given time. Customers include Prologis, Colliers, CBRE, Rudin and Related to name a few.
Funding: The company has raised over $10M from Fifth Wall & MetaProp.
Founder: Connell McGill Jr., Pavel Khodorkovskiy
Latest Funding Round: $5M Seed Extension
Headcount: 31
Wright Electric
Wright Electric is developing the world’s first family of zero-emissions commercial aircraft. By focusing its resources on the technological and component challenges to electrification, Wright Electric is establishing the path towards a carbon-free aviation footprint. Wright Electric plans to bring an electric regional aircraft to market by 2026, aiming to serve short, but busy routes such as London-Paris or Seoul-Juju.
Wright works with airlines such as easyJet and VivaAerobus, and has development contracts with BAE Systems, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E
Funding: The company has raised over $5M from NASA, Urban Us, Proton Enterprises, Endure Capital & Toro Ventures
Founder: Jeff Engler
Latest Funding Round: $5M Seed
Headcount: 22
Investing in Enterprise Productivity
Tara
Tara leverages machine learning to help enterprise organizations scope, allocate resources and build cutting-edge software products, enabling product teams to be on-time, on-budget and on-roadmap.
Tara is reinventing the slow, antiquated and completely manual product development process that causes enterprises to lose an average of $66B annually through inefficiencies in project scoping. Enterprises today are sitting on valuable data in their project management systems, git version control and workforce directories. Tara connects to this data and using machine learning models, predicts how to best build the software (technical tasks), how long projects should take (timeline) and who should execute (resources).
Today, Tara has 30K+ users who completed over 400K tasks on the platform from companies such as Cisco, Mercari and Scribe.
Funding: The company has raised $13M from Slack Fund, Alumni Ventures, Moment Ventures & Aspect Ventures
Founder: Iba Masood, Syed Ahmed
Latest Funding Round: $10M Series A
Headcount: 19
Agolo
Agolo is the world’s most advanced summarization software. Agolo’s platform uses artificial intelligence to create summaries from your information in real-time. Unlike the limits of manual summarization, Agolo is powerful enough to create millions of human-quality summaries per day in real time, and capture insights across multiple sources, creating personalized summaries for any user class or device
Agolo’s customers include market leading clients across Federal, Finserv and Media such as Reddit, Air Force, Microsoft, AP, Deloitte, FactSet and Moody’s.
Funding: The company has raised over $10M from M12, Google, Touchdown Ventures, Tensility Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and CRV.
Founder: Mohamed AlTantawy, Sage Wohns
Latest Funding Round: $8M Series A
Headcount: 23
Karmacheck
KarmaCheck aims to reimagine the background check and speeds up the entire overall process by focusing on the slowest most expensive screenings, employment verifications and educational verifications, through data re-use and data integration — which will lead to 4x faster checks.
KarmaCheck was cofounded by Eric Ly who was previously the founding CTO of LinkedIn which sold to Microsoft for $26.2B. Since launching in 2020, KarmaCheck has completed over 50K background checks from over 100+ customers including McDonalds, Dominoes, Capsule, Recruiter.cm, Yoshi, Mosaic, Drata and Clover Health
Funding: The company has raised over $25M from Velvet Sea Ventures, Accel, Index Ventures, NextView Ventures & Social Leverage.
Founder: Eric Ly
Latest Funding Round: $15M Series A
Headcount: 21
Drata
Drata is the world’s most advanced security and compliance automation platform with the mission to help businesses earn and keep the trust of their users, customers, partners, and prospects. With Drata, companies streamline SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliance through continuous, automated control monitoring and evidence collection, resulting in a strong security posture, lower costs, and less time spent preparing for annual audits.
Since its public launch in January 2021 Drata has achieved exceptional milestones, including securing its first 100 customers, building a team of 100 full-time employees and raising over $125M in new capital to become one of the fastest SaaS startups to reach a billion dollar valuation.
Funding: The company has raised over $125M from ICONIQ Capital, SV Angel, Leaders Fund, Cowboy Ventures, GGV Capital, Alkeon Capital, Okta Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and a few others.
Founder: Adam Markowitz, Daniel Marashlian, Troy Markowitz
Latest Funding Round: $100M Series B
Headcount: 100
BlockApps
BlockApps is the leading provider of blockchain technology for business networks. BlockApps STRATO, powers industry networks in energy, finance, agriculture, live events, travel and many more. BlockApps has created several industry innovations including the launch of Blockchain as a Service with Microsoft, founding the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (the world’s largest open standard blockchain organization) and being the first blockchain company to partner with all major cloud platforms (Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform).
BlockApps recently launched the TraceHarvest network with AWS & Bayer/Monsanto. TraceHarvest allows customers to track and trace the full lifecycle of agricultural products starting at the seed source using blockchain. In collaboration with the Crop Science Division at Bayer, the platform has been built and tested to the highest industry standard for traceability and provides a first and best-in-class solution for the grain industry.
Funding: The company has raised over $15M from Morgan Creek Digital, Fitz Gate Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Consensys Ventures & Galaxy Ventures.
Founder: James Hormuzdiar, Kieren James Lubin, Victor Wong
Latest Funding Round: $10M Series B
Headcount: 28
Investing in Frictionless Retail
Radius Networks
Radius Networks is the leading enterprise platform to automate staff operations and simplify the guest experience. The company’s Flybuy SaaS platform is leveraged by restaurants, retailers, hospitality, and grocers around the world and includes: Flybuy Pickup for curbside, delivery, and in-store pickup; Flybuy Pay for mobile payment optimization; Flybuy Drive-Thru for loyalty identification and offer redemption, and Flybuy Tableside for innovative dine-in experiences.
Radius Networks technology is installed globally in 450,000+ locations across more than 60 countries and its system now handles over 100M location requests for customer pickups every week! Customers include Yum Brands, Belk, Nando’s, Chickfila, IHOP and Cava to name a few. Radius Networks was named #71 on Deloitte’s Fastest Growing Companies in North America list (and #1 in DC).
Funding: The company has raised over $25M from Contour Venture Partners, Core Capital Partners, Trilogy Equity Partners, ALBA Holdings, and Pendrell Corp.
Founder: David Steinberg, Joe Grajewski, Marc R. Wallace, Scott Smith, Stillman Bradish
Latest Funding Round: $15M Series A
Headcount: 67
BulkMRO
Bulk MRO is a full stack supply chain and finance platform for global trade. Bulk MRO is offering India’s widest product range of more than 1,400,000 products from 5,000 Domestic and International brands across 50+ categories.
Today BulkMRO is working with hundreds of large corporations, governments and healthcare networks including ABB, Abbott, Boeing, US Government, GSK, Bosch, Reliance, Unilever Exxon and Samsung to highlight a few.
During the Covid-19 crisis, Bulk was able to supply over 2B+ individual PPE items such as gloves and gowns that benefitted 100M people.
Funding: The company has raised over $9M from Stride Ventures, Bain Capital, Industry Ventures, FJ Labs and Ace & Company.
Founder: Devang Shah, Gaurang Shah
Latest Funding Round: $6.6M Series A
Headcount: 170
Stay tuned for the final Part 4 of the Series
AAF Management Ltd. (AAF) is a leading early stage venture capital firm focused on direct investments into pre-Seed, Seed and Series A stage technology companies in North America. We are sector agnostic but have a core focus on Fintech, Enterprise SaaS, Digital Healthcare, E-Commerce and Deep Tech. To-date, AAF and its partners have invested in over 120 venture-backed companies. The firm has over $100M in AUM.
In 5 years, our portfolio companies have raised over $3.9B of which $2.6B was raised after we initially invested, Today, we share the cap table with over 60 venture capital firms with more than $1B in AUM.
