MoviePass
MoviePass, Inc. is an American subscription-based movie ticketing service majority-owned by Helios and Matheson Analytics. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in New York City, the service allows subscribers to purchase up to three movie tickets per month for a monthly fee. The service utilizes a mobile app, where users check in to a cinema and choose a movie and showtime, which results in the cost of the ticket being loaded to a prepaid debit card, which is used to purchase the ticket from the cinema as usual.
With its new and disruptive approach to the movie theater industry, MoviePass has been at the forefront of a revolution that has spurred competitors and new players to enter the market. In response to MoviePass’ offering, for example, AMC Theaters (the largest cinema operator in the United States) has developed its own subscription plan. Furthermore, other start-ups in the same industry, such as Sinemia, have started to sell similar products as well. Other companies – large or small – entering the market to compete with MoviePass have been a clear indication that MoviePass has set new standards and has been seen as a serious threat to the status quo that has prevailed for decades in the movie theater industry.
EIP has been an early investor in MoviePass since before the price for a subscription was lowered to $9.95, which resulted in user growth from 25,000 to over 3 million subscribers within less than a year, making it the fastest growing subscription service ever. As a company that is enabled by Enterprise Software and run by experienced industry veterans, EIP is looking forward to further establishing a platform that revolutionizes moviegoing for generations to come.
Post-Mortem: MoviePass filed for bankruptcy end of 2019. The company revolutionized the industry and was the first company to bring subscription to movie-going in the US. The business model was validated by AMC and Regal moving into subscription as well. The stumbling block for MoviePass was a combination of unsustainable pricing model, customer fraud and an inability to successfully partner with the major exhibitors.
Idea Fund Partners
Idea Fund is a Durham, North Carolina based early stage fund. It originated from the NC Idea Grant program that provides grants to promising startup companies in the state. Originally headquartered at the former Global HQ of Lucky Strike, it is now in an ecosystem within the Silicon Triangle or Research Triangle Park – the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. The area is known for providing quality business and engineering talent through the major universities – Duke, UNC and NC State.
We have a longstanding history with the Partners at Idea Fund – Lister Delgado and John Cambier. They have a strong track record of identifying quality companies at the earliest institutional stage. The focus of the fund is on companies at concept-stage and often pre-revenue. They invest exclusively in the Southeast US. In addition to the quality of the Universities, North Carolina is a major center for banking, energy and healthcare. Charlotte is the second largest banking center after New York, and is an excellent city for developing partnerships with financial institutions that ultimately become clients of many of the startups in the region.
From a portfolio standpoint, we felt it was good to have some exposure to a diverse set of assets. Additionally it provides opportunities to co-invest, especially where we have been able to see companies develop from the earliest stage. We also received access to the NC Idea companies and have witnessed the growth of such businesses as Pendo, Payzer and Filter Easy. We were able to co-invest in Payzer.
Dropthought
Customer and employee feedback are critical for companies and employers respectively to understand what their stakeholders are saying and help improve their business outcomes. The traditional method of collecting customer data is through surveys, however, a wealth of information exists on the web through existing websites and portals. However, this data is unstructured, making it difficult to analyze data in its totality to ascertain trends and patterns. This is where Dropthought, HQ in Santa Clara, comes in.
Dropthought is a machine-learning platform that generates insights from sentiment and unstructured data. It then categorizes this data by parsing information in various categories and delivering insights to clients. The company utilizes existing publicly available data and also helps collect new data from its clients via the web and partnerships with point-of-sale terminal providers such as First Data. It is more valuable to understand insights from text-based reviews rather than from survey’s that are either multiple choice or individual checkboxes. User reviews provide context, nuance and sentiment that is not provided in a traditional survey.
The company was founded by a Stanford Marketing Professor and one of his students. They found a gap in the market for employee and customer feedback and were early to identify this trend. The market-research and feedback segment is a competitive one with Survey Monkey and Medallia being the traditional leading players. Elevate invested based on the quality of the team, product and market opportunity. There was also strong initial traction from clients such as Cisco, Sony and JDS Uniphase.
Post-Mortem: Survey Monkey identified the value that Dropthought could provide and was both a client and had intentions to invest in the company. This is also what drew the interest from Elevate. Unfortunately the Survey Monkey CEO, David Goldberg, unexpectedly passed away. He was the leading proponent of his firm’s interest in Dropthought.
Like many startups, Dropthought had a great product and was focused on the engineering side of the business, reliant on partnerships with companies like Survey Monkey and First Data to be the leading source of driving sales. Because of the circumstances at both companies, Dropthought was eventually acquired by Bawan Cybertek with most of the team going over into the new company.
Imergy
Imergy is a unique battery-storage company HQ in Fremont, CA in the Bay Area. Imergy combines the power of proprietary chemistry and advanced technology to deliver groundbreaking sustainable solutions for storing and sharing energy. Its Energy Storage Platform (ESP) allows users to scale up power and storage capacity independently of one another, making it far more flexible and cost-effective than any other battery available. Flow batteries are used for 2-4 hours of high discharge whereas Lithium-ion batteries (the existing solution) are used for shorter bursts of 15-30 minutes
There were several themes that drove Elevate’s investment into Imergy, which was originally introduced to Elevate by our partners at Blue Run and NEA. It was an advanced stage company that had spent a number of years on R&D refining its core product. Many of our Partners at Elevate also have experience in the Renewable Energy sector and the company also fit into the sustainability theme. Battery storage is the most crucial element in the renewable energy business due to the intermittent nature of primary energy sources such as wind and solar. Bill Watkins, the former CEO of Seagate (and Forbes CEO of the year 2008) was brought on as the CEO of the company. Imergy also negotiated several promising global sales partnerships, particularly in Asia. However, the single largest client was Sun Edison, who had placed orders for several hundred units from Imergy.
Post-Mortem: One of the challenges of many startups is the exposure to one or two key clients. This was the case with Imergy. The team had spent several years focused on product development and signed a landmark deal with Sun Edison. At that point in time, Sun Edison was the largest renewable energy company in the world. Unfortunately it was highly over-leveraged and was not able to meet its debt payments. This resulted in Sun Edison going from a $11bn market cap to bankrupt within a year. And Imergy lost its main client. Because of this, the company had to shut down.
BlueRun Ventures
BlueRun Ventures is a veteran of the venture capital industry, HQ in Palo Alto and spinning out of the original Nokia VC arm. BRV is known for being the first institutional investor in PayPal, leading their Series A. BRV went on to lead the Series A rounds of successful startups such as Waze, Kabbage, Banjo and FreedomPay. BRV has a focus on the Fintech, Mobile and Enterprise Software segments.
We have had a longstanding relationship with the GPs at BRV, in particular Jonathan Ebinger. When we began investing at Elevate we felt it was important to have partnerships with well-run successful funds where we could collaborate and help develop companies. Elevate had the opportunity to invest in a new growth-stage fund of BRV along with some of the large pension funds and Corporate Tech firms in California. We did so because it gave us exposure to some fantastic companies such as Kabbage, FreedomPay, Banjo and Coupa.
From a portfolio standpoint, investing in later-stage companies allowed Elevate to have an exposure to companies that were closer to exit during the early years of Elevate’s fund life. We have already witnessed one of these successes with the IPO of Coupa in 2016. In addition there have been numerous opportunities where we have been able to collaborate in assisting companies in this BRV/Elevate portfolio with sales and strategy.
Pathgather/Degreed
The truth is that we never stop learning, whether we want to admit that or not. In fact, a certain thirst to learn more can give you an edge in your professional life, adding qualifications, improving your chances to get promoted, and, of course, being able to command a higher salary. A lot of major companies have realized that the education process should take place on the job to retain talent, rather than sending them off to college. Pathgather provides these companies with one of the smartest corporate learning and development systems out there.
We liked Pathgather, because it fit many of the parameters we set for investments in our enterprise software portfolio. The company has a very good and dedicated team that understands how to continuously innovate. It also boasts several prominent co-investors, such as Bloomberg, Techstars, and Matrix Partners, that helped us get comfortable with our thesis. We also believed that the company could scale quickly if they won their first major mandates. And winning mandates they did! Boasting clients, including T-Mobile, Hewlett-Packard, or Qualcomm, Pathgather quickly proved that there is demand for its software solutions. And finally, we thought that their business model could make them an attractive acquisition target for larger companies in the overall education space.
And our thesis proved correct in the sense that once Pathgather started to gain traction and generate revenues, the company became a target for acquisition fairly quickly, in fact, within less than two years of us investing. As a result, San Francisco-based education technology Degreed ended up acquiring Pathgather in 2018 in a nice deal for investors. That is because Pathgather perfectly fit Degreed’s focus on professional and lifelong learning.
From EIP’s perspective, it was nice to see a team execute on their business plan and provide a quick exit for investors, proving that our investment thesis and overall portfolio strategy worked once again. Today, Pathgather maintains a fair degree of independence as a sub-company under the Degreed umbrella, but with essentially the same leadership team. We will never stop learning, and we will certainly not stop telling you about this successful case study!
Planted
Planted aims to simplify and improve the hiring process for non-technical roles at startups and large established organizations. The company focuses on roles in customer service, marketing, social media and operations where quality, junior talent needs to be quickly added. The business model incentivizes the right people being found for the job by implementing a trial period and a success fee only if employee stays for longer than one year.
The target market for Planted is high growth startups and it has gained traction from big brand companies such as Casper and Hearst. They are focused in a market segment which reflects the future of contract working in the non-technical sector, both for new entrants and temporary workers. The business model of contractual pricing / and converted annual pricing for permanent employees is good and simplifies the onboarding process for clients. As the company has further progressed, it has found a niche within the Staffing and temp-to-perm segments.
Planted uniquely positioned itself to focus on the contingent W2 market, where the direct competitors are tech-laggard staffing agencies. Hiring for temps is a costly and time-consuming process. Recruiters receive 250 applicants per posting, and the agency fee is 20-40% of salary. Planted help solve those problems through its matching algorithm which delivers pre-vetted candidates to companies faster. Its machine learning feedback loop is based on 200+ real hiring outcomes and proprietary on-the-job performance data, which makes the process smarter overtime. Planted have partnered with over 2000+ companies and have an 80% repeat usage rate, which again, proves the strong demand for its product.
The founders – Susan Zheng and Connie Wong both come from the recruiting world and have had experience dealing with the challenges of hiring. It is expensive, difficult to source talent and even harder to retain good quality talent. These are some of the areas where Planted aims to reduce the friction for clients.
Crowded/Valilly
Crowded was is a company that has gone through multiple pivots, originally beginning as a marketplace for gig-economy workers. This business model was made successful by companies such as Fiverr and Upwork. However, it is a difficult one to execute with the cost of user acquisition being high on both sides of the marketplace. The company eventually pivoted to an enterprise HR solution with talent acquisition as the focus. Crowded was originally founded by three people that had experience in the ad-tech and consumer segments.
The recruiting process for finding, acquiring and onboarding talent is cumbersome and expensive. The traditional methods and tools for navigating this process are recruiters and applicant tracking systems (ATS). Crowded empowers HR professionals within organizations to make better and faster decisions about candidates, mitigating the need for external recruiters. For small high-growth organizations that don’t yet have an ATS or a structured onboarding process, the Crowded Recruit platform provides a solution for them. Through the various iterations of product development, the underlying strength of the company emerged as an AI-based talent acquisition matching and ranking process.
The Elevate team working in conjunction with the Board, took on a leadership and management position in the company. Over the past two years, Elevate has helped shape product, strategy, platform and marketing initiatives. At the end of 2019, the company rebranded to “Valilly Talent Intelligence.”
Through its various evolutions, Crowded has evolved to become a talent management platform. The company works with hiring managers and senior officers of small to midsized companies. The problem they have, is they can’t secure the talent they need to advance their business. The reason is… they are stuck with hiring methods that simply don’t work. This leaves them feeling anxious and overwhelmed. The Crowded Approach to solving this, has three elements: 1) Identify the best candidates; 2) Rank – by assigning confidence scores; and 3) curate candidate data for ongoing use.
Crowded has the largest sources of candidates. The company provides the fastest responses to both hiring managers and fastest responses to candidates. Crowded offers significant savings vs the cost of using recruiters. By using Crowded, clients can save up to 80% in both cost and time to recruit a candidate. It is these factors that made Crowded a compelling opportunity for Elevate to invest and participate.
Avlino
Avlino’s mission is to create and deploy AI using a solutions-oriented approach with deep expertise in the industry verticals that it serves. The company simplifies analytics by delivering vertical-specific solutions that disrupt the AI industry. Avlino enables clients to view, analyze and act on their data. The company is HQ in Holmdel, New Jersey; an area that is known for strong R&D being one of the former homes of Bell Labs. The company was founded by Ramana Jampala – a unique founder that has had successful experience building companies and also on the other side of the table as a technology VC investor.
Avlino originally began as a solution for improving and optimizing hardware performance. The competencies developed through this process enabled the company to pivot to the more relevant customer insights segment. Large enterprises have swathes of data for which they need actionable insights. Avlino helps with this process through its Alenza platform. Alenza orchestrates intelligent data ingestion and automated data science modeling to produce a remarkable and interactive output. Building upon the solid foundation provided by Alenza, avlino was able to create a suite of solutions that enable users to view, analyze, & act on their data to make mission-critical decisions, automate specific daily processes, and to deliver operational efficiencies that bring their organization to a whole new level.
The company focuses on sectors including logistics, telecom and oil and gas. Avlino has formed partnerships with major port operators. The company also formed strategic partnership with industry leaders including Jio, Verizon, etc. The team has expertise in Hadoop technologies, data science, and in the Telecom/Wireless domains.
The combination of a veteran team that has deep technology and domain expertise, in conjunction with an astute investor mindset is what made Avlino a compelling investment opportunity.
Liftmetrix
Social media is an important part of companies’ marketing efforts. Many brands spend millions of dollars a year on social media to engage with customers and stakeholders. It is important to have a set of metrics that can accurately measure the success of their social media engagements.
LiftMetrix helps brands justify their accelerating social media spend by turning raw data into specific ROI metrics and recommendations. The platform pulls in all possible data – organic social data, paid social data and website data, then using the data to learn what drives ROI and providing recommendations. LiftMetrix was an early player to measure social media ROI. It formed a partnership with Facebook and Twitter early on back in 2015, and was one of the first non-advertising platforms to access Facecbook’s API.
Liftmetrix was acquired by Hootsuite in 2017 who saw the value in the team and platform. Hootsuite is the most widely used platform for social media management. The acquisition enables organizations to drive more effective marketing campaigns by giving them tangible insight into the ROI of their paid, earned and owned social campaigns. LiftMetrix also helps Hootsuite to turn data into specific insights and recommendations. Prior to this acquisition, Hootsuite has been a key LiftMetrix partner for several years. Through this acquisition, EIP is a shareholder of Hootsuite.
ToneTag
ToneTag is a payment solution company HQ in Bangalore, India. The company harness sound technology in mobile devices to process payments. This technology enables contactless payments and proximity customer engagement services, independent of existing infrastructure, so the technology can work without the internet, which can benefit unbanked community who don’t have smart devices.
According to a study by BCG and Google, India currently ranks number 2 in the world with over 1 billion mobile subscriptions. In addition to the high number of mobile subscriptions, the favorable regulatory environment also paves way for the breakthrough in payment system in India. KYC relaxation for small transactions and the advent of Aadhar as a national identity instrument has made the KYC process easy. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is expected to have multiple use cases including peer to peer payments, person to merchant payments and business to business payments. According to a study by Brookings India, around 47% of the population is unbanked in India. Therefore, it will be easier for new payment solution to penetrate the market.
Elevate invested in the Seed and Series A rounds of Tonetag participating alongside Mastercard and Amazon. Amazon views Tonetag as an important piece of its payment strategy in India. Tonetag’s solution is better than many other digital payments solutions because it does not require a hardware update to a POS terminal; it is also compatible with a whole range of mobile devices including feature phones (the old Nokia phones that everyone used to use!). the combination of these factors enable cashless, contactless payments anywhere – this is particularly helpful in emerging markets where banks do not provide merchant acquiring services for small businesses, particularly in remote geographies.
In the past few years, ToneTag has made tremendous progress with rapid adoption and institutional support from financial institutions such as ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, and Amazon India. ToneTag today operates the world’s largest sound-based payment acceptance network with 52 million users and 314,000 merchants. ToneTag has a global expansion plan, including partnerships with major processors in the US being considered.
AMORQA (SwitchMe)
AMORQA simplifies mortgage origination. The company is a B2B platform bringing together lenders, developments and customers to have a smooth integrated process. It is the first mortgage tech company in India to use algorithms to drive decision making and self-adapting workflows to solve the industry’s complexities.
AMORQA has access to developer’s databases so buyers can obtain home loans through AMORQA. It is also embedded in the sales and collection workflows of the leading builders so that it gains access to high-quality borrowers. Developers enjoy accelerated sales, funding and lower interest costs. This process creates a network effect for developers and buyers.
Elevate invested in AMORQA because it is the first mortgage tech company in India and has an experienced founder, Aditya Mishra, that has experience in mortgage originations and banking products. The platform has increased the efficiency for the loan underwriting process by cutting down the processing time by 60%; improving accuracy by over 200% and thereby provides a superior customer experience. Customers receive doorstep service and an efficient, error-free experience. Thereby AMORQA improves housing sales and home ownership rate in India.
Lenders realize the value that AMORQA creates by providing quick access to active consumers without HR costs. Due to this the company has won concessions from lenders that allow AMORQA to receive full revenue at first disbursement in most instances.
Radius8
Our investment in Radius8 was based on a simple thesis that ecommerce in the digital world will continue to grow significantly, while brick-and-mortar stores in the real world are likely not going to go away entirely. As a result, large retailers, such as Kohl’s, Michael Kors, or Bonobos, with both online and physical presences, would have to solve the problem of scaling and optimizing both sales channels. Introducing Radius8.
Radius8 brings together the digital and physical world of retailers by creating store-centric online experiences and in-store experiences based on local digital demand. They are in essence the bridge between a company’s website and store, using local data to drive consumers into stores or tailor people’s online experiences based on their specific regional needs.
Therefore, we believe that companies that feel threatened by the likes of Amazon should turn to Radius8 as a tech-driven partner to take on the competition. The outcome is measurable results, such as increased foot traffic, improved e-commerce conversion, and increased store productivity.
Radius8 is also part of our larger portfolio strategy to focus on enterprise software, and more specifically in the sub-category of data-driven localization. So just like our other investment in Cuebiq, Radius8 uses data, smart analysis, and effective retail recommendations to improve the shopping experience for all of us, in order for retailers to sell items to us we are really looking for. As the digital and physical worlds continue to merge, look out for Radius8 to make an impact on your experience.
GVNG
Charitable work, giving back to the community, or helping people in need is becoming an increasingly more important focus of our society, which is a trend that EIP has been excited to observe. Especially young citizens from Generation Y and Generation Z are making philanthropy an integral part of their lives. But doing good things needs to be facilitated so that more people can help more of those in need.
EIP portfolio company GVNG does just that. GVNG is an extraordinary tech platform that enables really anyone to start, run, and operate a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization within minutes. Their mantra is that doing good should be fast, affordable, and easy, thereby democratizing philanthropy.
Before GVNG and from our own personal efforts, we have discovered first-hand how tough and daunting a task it can be to set up a charitable organization. Many people want to do good things, but clearly the barriers of entry that would enable people to participate are quite high. Thanks to GVNG’s revolutionary approach, all this is now possible with the click of a button. The administrative work is now the easy and not the hard part, and with the distraction of lengthy, tricky paperwork gone, those driven by passion can finally focus on what truly matters: the causes that make the world a better place.
We believe that the PhilTech (Philanthropy Tech) industry is only at the beginning. There remains a lot of potential to be realized. EIP continues to support GVNG with its mission, realizing that a return on investment is important, but not always everything.
Aggrigator
Aggrigator is the world’s first marketplace connecting small, local farmers to commercial buyers, such as schools, corporate campuses, restaurants, and grocery stores. Driven by technology, the company is able to efficiently discover pricing and reduce wastage, leading to better prices and a more effective use of produce.
For EIP, Aggrigator checks several boxes. First, the company falls within the Enterprise Software category of our investment focus. Secondly, the experienced team of founders boasts a successful track record, having started businesses before. And third, it disrupts an industry that is ripe for technology breakthrough, changing the way business has been done for decades.
We believe that the trend towards healthy, local food options will continue globally. Aggrigator aims to expand from its roots in California eastwards to other states to eventually reach customers across the country. This will lead to a network effect, addressing seasonality in certain regions and ensuring a steady supply of produce nationwide.
EIP is excited be part of a journey to offer small farmers an opportunity to access a centralized marketplace to sell their produce, while customers benefit from Aggrigator’s quality control as the company educates farmers and aggregates supply to meet the ever-growing demand. Commercial buyer will be able to offer their audience healthy solutions that can be tracked to local farms, ensuring that high quality food is available throughout the year.
Cuebiq
One of the most important aspects of making investment decisions is to make sure that the companies that we invest in are ready for the future and have a business model that will still be relevant in five, ten, or twenty years. There is no faster way to destroy value than losing your technological edge. EIP’s portfolio company Cuebiq is ready for the future. It is a is a business intelligence company that provides its clients with consumer behavior and trend insights.
The company offers its clients with marketing, retail, research, and publisher services. Its marketing platform offers audience targeting, offline campaign attribution, performance analytics, and location insights. Its retail platform offers footfall analysis, site selection, and audience and geo-behavioral consumer insights. Its publisher platform offers audience segmentation, campaign attribution, and data monetization services. Cuebiq is ready for the future, because it is one of only a few companies in the industry that are prepared to work within strict data privacy guidelines that are being set around the world, such as being CCPA-Ready, GDPR-Compliant, and TrustArc & TAG certified. Adapting to new rules and regulations is key to maintaining margins, effectiveness, and revenue momentum.
We were impressed early on with the Cuebiq team and its precisely defined vision to become a leader in location intelligence and measurement. This vision quickly translated into an actionable business model, strong revenue growth, and a massive expansion of its team within just a few years of its founding in 2015. In addition to us, investors, like NASDAQ, Tribeca Venture Partners, Thomson Reuters, Goldman Sachs, and many more were attracted to Cuebiq as well creating a strong investor base.
Making sense of large amounts of data and coming up with the correct conclusions to predict consumer behavior is hugely valuable to Cuebiq’s clients and we have observed growing demand for these services. We fully expect Cuebiq to continue its strong growth through the later stages of the venture lifecycle and continue to support the company with access to clients and expertise along the journey.
ScoreData (EDIT)
ScoreData has developed a unique platform that offers AI/ML technologies to solve problems in customer engagement, operational efficiency, and increase net promoter scores. The platform supports a broad range of use cases in banking and financial services and insurance industries. It’s scalable and extensible with the latest open-source algorithms.
Scoredata assists enterprises with various pain points in customer engagement where inefficient information transfer and outdated signals lead to significant customer friction. The company combines proprietary data sets with AI/ML to extract insights and synergies (“Scorefast”) to enhance outcomes for consumers and enterprises.
ScoreData helps enterprises manage multivariate data sets and evolve from manual decision making to predictive techniques. Like many AI companies, Scoredata began testing the market with a broad range of use cases such as Advertising, Retail, Airlines and Finance; the company found particular success with management of call centers and in financial services applications. In these verticals – Scoredata has helped improve call center routing and wait times, improved loan application processing and debt collections.
Elevate invested in ScoreData because the CEO, Vas Bhandarkar is a successful multiple-time founder, assisting companies such as Selectica, and Remedy Corp reach IPOs. Members of the EIP team have worked with him in successful predecessor companies that exited. In addition, Scoredata has a number of data science and startup veterans such as Dr Moidin Mohiuddin and Prasanta Behera who have played major roles at IBM, Yahoo and Netscape. The company has already seen customer success with Visa, Avaya, TATA, NTT Data, and Recruit as major clients.
Ocrolus
Ocrolus analyzes financial documents, regardless of format and quality, with high accuracy. Its technology impacts financial firm’s back office by helping with monitoring, anti-fraud & risk, legal and compliance, and credit, insurance, investment and contracting. Ocrolus, headquartered in New York, delivers an elegant blend of artificial intelligence and crowdsourced human quality control to firms across the financial sectors enabling them to automate high-stakes business processes with precision.
Elevate initially helped to lead the seed round of funding with a syndicate of Angel groups in New York – Westchester Angels, ARC and HBS. The founding team brings a combination of experience and energized youth, with a good balance of responsibilities between the CEO (Sam Bobley), President (Victoria Meakin) and COO (Vikas Dua). They have had success in founding and running startup enterprises and have had success in leading offshore development teams. In addition, the founders have a strong vested interest in the success of the company by investing a lot of the initial capital themselves with a lot of “skin in the game.”
We like the simplicity of the user experience on the platform, a clearly defined value proposition and target market. Ocrolus began by focusing on small business lenders. This is a large market in the US and requires historical financial data in order to assist with accurate credit decisions. The other large target market is the government sector that provides benefit programs, such as Medicaid. Programs such as Medicaid require five years of financial history in order to ascertain eligibility. For lenders and government clients, Ocrolus saves a substantial amount of time and cost to help clients with their financial decision making process.
SquareFoot
Real estate is not necessarily the first industry that comes to mind when you think of technological innovation. It has been a fairly stale sector for many years, where homes are still built the same way, offices leased through agents just like decades ago, and apartments rented in still a very opaque and daunting process. So what happens when there is no progress in a certain sector? It becomes ripe for innovation!
And the innovation factor was a major appeal to us at EIP, similar in this particular way to how we looked at Aggrigator in the agriculture sector, where technology has also been lagging behind. SquareFoot is revolutionizing the leasing of office space by introducing technology, transparency, and data into the process. Target clients are companies that are growing quickly and require flexible lease options in a quick and easy way. Think about Uber, for example, that was a start-up just a few years ago with maybe a few dozen employees, but that expanded quickly to thousands of employees due to stratospheric growth.
What we at EIP like about SquareFoot is that both the human touch and technology matter at the same time. The website provides the right data to clients and offers the solutions they need unlike any competitor due to its flexible options. However, agents still play a role to show the spaces and educate the clients about their choices. It is this interaction between tech and people that makes this an efficient, yet personal experience.
In addition, management always had a keen eye on branding and scalability. The founders developed a company name that is both straightforward and has intangible value, which is hugely important in today’s world. They developed a process that takes away the stress of finding much-needed office space in little time. And the company is set up in a way that allows for it to scale quickly from its initial markets in New York City and Houston to the rest of the United States. If you’re looking for office space, SquareFoot will be able to get you the smartest solution. We look forward to the company taking the country by storm one square foot at a time.
YouPlus (Pyxis.ai)
Pyxis.ai is able to captures authentic, emotional opinions of individuals through video data and formulates unbiased, market intelligence at scale and speed. It is currently working with some major consumer brands to obtain feedbacks on their products’ performance.
With the rise of YouTube and other video platforms, video makes up 74% of all traffic on the internet is driven by video. There are 5 billion of searches for video every day. Brands invest their budgets on research and marketing to drive consumer purchase activities. However, the current businesses attempt to capture market intelligence through labor-intensive (e.g. focus groups), inefficient timeline (i.e. months to define and interpret), and ultimately the conclusions are human-driven and subjective. The intelligence of what makes something important and tying this understanding to produce a successful sale outcome is the key. Therefore, there is a huge demand for brands to analyze how consumers are reviewing their products in videos.
Pyxis has gone through a few evolutions, with the firm originally branded as YouPlus. The company was founded by Anand Srinivasan and Shaukat Shamim – two of the members that helped build Yahoo Mobile and Yahoo Messenger. The company is trying to disrupt the marketing and customer insights segment where Nielsen has traditionally been the leading player. Through a combination of aggregating existing content and client provided content (all on video), the company aims to parse, index and provide actionable insights for consumer brands and enterprises. The company has done pilot projects with US sports leagues and major global consumer brands. The key strategic client is Proctor & Gamble, which the company is working alongside as a strategic vendor to build insights into the workflow of P&G’s consumer brands.
Pyxis is currently lead by Vic Bhagat as CEO who was formerly the CIO at Verizon Enterprise and former CIO of EMC Corporation. Alongside Vic is Anand Srinivasan as the CTO who was formerly Lead Architect at Spotify and Dailymotion, in addition to senior roles at Yahoo.
FairCent
Faircent is India's first peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform to receive a Certificate of Registration (CoR) as an NBFC-P2P from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The company’s mission is to provide a marketplace that connects individuals in need for credit with individuals and institutes willing to lend their access funds. It uses technology to speed up the process and cut costs. Thus, Faircent provides an opportunity to the borrowers to get their requirements funded at viable rates and help lenders get the best possible return on their investment.
Faircent provides a virtual marketplace where borrowers and lenders can interact directly, without having to go through the traditional financial intermediaries like banks. India has 190 million of unbanked population, and a large underbanked population. The lack of credit history of unbanked or underbanked population gives them limited access to loans. Evidence from a variety of studies suggests that growing access to financial instruments has a positive impact on self-employment, business activities and household consumption. Access to microcredit also leads to a general increase in consumption levels as it lowers the need for precautionary savings. Companies like Faircent help solve this problem and accelerate financial inclusion to individuals and SMBs. Faircent’s deep penetration in tier 2 and 3 cities India and its fast growth rate show the strong demand.
The product benefits both lenders and borrowers as Faircent has a stringent verification process to ensure that borrowers can repay the loan. Lenders’ money is allocated to a diversified portfolio of borrowers to mitigate the risk. For borrowers, Faircent offers a variety of loans to meet their needs, ranging from home mortgages to business funding.
An automated system suggests the loan period, loan amount and interest rate against each Borrower’s profile, which is indicative of the Borrower’s capability to efficiently repay the loan. Lenders can make offers to fund borrower’s requirement which are accepted on first come first serve basis. Both borrowers and lenders can strike deals with multiple members. Thus, lenders can fund a portion of the total loan requirement of multiple borrowers and borrowers can seek to raise money from multiple lenders.
Faircent was founded by Rajat Gandhi and Vinay Mathews – both of whom have had over 15 years experience, launching and building portals, digital advertising and enterprise sales, most recently with Times of India. The company has a diverse international investor base and has received interest to expand the platform in Southeast Asia. It currently operates only in India from its headquarters in Gurgaon.
Begin/Speakaboos
Reading proficiency at 3rd grade is the biggest determinant of a child’s future academic success, yet even in highly literate countries like the U.S., two thirds of all children cannot read at grade level at this age. Begin is a reading motivation platform featuring engaging educational interactive books delivered across web, mobile and tablet via subscription that connects school and home usage. Begin motivates children from PreK to 3rd grade to read, read more an read independently on any device in schools and homes.
49% of parents don’t believe their children read enough, however, 80% believe that digital books motivate their children to read more and more proficiently. Educators also agree. Additionally, 56% of schools are moving to digital textbooks.
The addressable market for digital reading includes 1.8M+ schools, 250M+ students and 140M+ households in the U.S./BRIC/Korea/Japan/Middle East along with total annual spend of $25B+ on literacy and reading motivation.
Begin is one of the strongest companies in Elevate portfolio with consistent revenue and subscriber growth YoY. The company has a strong management team who has savvy experience working in SaaS sector. Its unique position and clear vision in digital reading and education sector attracted strategic partners globally, such as PBS, Naver, Babytree, and investors including Wellington Management and Interlock Partners.
The management team of Begin consists of employees that have had multi-billion dollar exits. Neal Shenoy, the founder and CEO, was the co-founder of Saavn, a music subscription service that sold to Reliance for $1.2 billion. He was also a Director of Liftmetrix (an existing Elevate portfolio company) which sold to Hootsuite. The Director of Learning for Begin was the former Head of Content for Nickelodeon. The CFO helped lead Zynga and Spotify to IPOs.
Begin is the combination of a mission-driven, focused, metrics-oriented company that has domain leaders and a management team capable of building companies to scale.
Neev
Neev is a Bangalore based prop-tech company. It invests in the debt and equity of real estate development projects.
Neev’s investment strategy is to build a portfolio that will be balanced with exposure across various locations, asset classes and investment positions. This diversifies the portfolio allowing better risk and return management.
Annum Health
Annum provides a fully integrated platform that provides support services to people who self- identify as having a problem with alcohol. This platform integrates therapy, coaching, medication and peer support and provides a superior alternative to rehab for heavy drinkers.
32 million Americans either have or at high risk of having an Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). Over two thirds of all such individuals are employed, costing employers over $80 Billion annually on lost productivity, in the form of absenteeism and presenteeism. Annum, in collaboration with its health plan partners, will sell its services to large employers – generally, 3,000 employers or greater – seeking to recoup a substantial percentage of this lost productivity.
Annum Health transforms the treatment experience while eliminating profound barriers to care. Annum fully integrates therapy, coaching, medication and peer support to help employees of large enterprises (3,000 employees or more) change their behavior and reach their goals. After voluntarily opting into its program, participants receive up to one year of treatment by a licensed therapist, a physician and a behavioral health coach. The employer pays the full cost of participation: therapy is provided by phone, a medical evaluation is offered by video, coaching happens through Annum’s proprietary phone app, and anonymous, moderated peer support is available online. If prescribed, medication is covered through the participant’s prescription plan and can be delivered to their home or picked up at a local pharmacy.
The Annum founder is Michael Laskoff, an experienced health tech entrepreneur. Prior to co-founding Annum Health in 2016 he founded AbleTo. Now a recognized telehealth leader, AbleTo uses behavioral change to reduce medical expense and improve health outcomes. As CEO, Michael raised three rounds of venture funding and secured health plan partnerships to cover over 30 million people.
Post-Mortem: Annum faced the challenge that many startups endure of experiencing client concentration risk. Annum was meant to benefit from a strategic partnership with AETNA, one of the leading insurance groups with US. However, shortly prior to the execution of the partnership, AETNA was acquired by CVS Pharmacies, a transaction which took a long time to close. Annum had built its business from the outset to be one of large scale. However, with revenue outcomes pushed further out due to the delayed partnership, the business simply ran out of funding. It was an unfortunate case of timing. The behavioral health market and the Annum business model has been validated by many entrants that followed, most notably Roman Health.
Finch Capital
Finch Capital portfolio companies focus on fintech companies in Europe and Southeast Asia (SEA). In SEA, Finch invests in Indonesia, which is the largest SEA market and highest contributor to the region digital economy growth followed by Singapore. Another reason to pick SEA is that since 2012, SEA has given rise to 10 unicorns, so the market has been very bullish. Additionally, about half of Indonesia population is unbanked, the MSME credit facilitation has been inefficient, which all contribute to the high adoption rates of Fintech in SEA.
Finch picks fintech sector because the large annual spending in software technologies by financial institutions pave way for collaborative business model with Fintech, which resulting in accelerated penetration of fintech companies globally. Fintech also creates impactful contribution on financial inclusion efforts in rising markets such as SEA. Meanwhile, fintech will also have a profound impact in other segments of consumer spending categories such as entertainment, healthcare and education. Since 2016, fintech related themes have represent a large portion of total SEA tech investments.
In traditional fintech, Finch invests in verticals such as payment, lending, insurance tech, personal finance and wealth management. In payment, the trend is from cash, ATM to mobile payment. Ayopop is a bill payment platform based in Indonesia. In lending vertical, Finch sees the trend is going from traditional financial institution to P2P lending. In this vertical, Finch invested in Pintek, Indonesia’s student and education SME lender. In insurance technology vertical, Finch predicts the insurances are going from off the shelf to on demand insurance. In this vertical, Finch invested in Digital Insurance Group, which is a digital insurance distribution platform based in Netherlands. As for personal finance vertical, Finch believes the trend is going from financial advisor to robo advisory, and the transformation from wealth manager to AI. In this vertical, Finch invested in TaxScouts, a UK based company combining automation and accountants to make tax filing simple.
Payzer
Contractors want to improve close rate, collect payments faster, eliminate redundant back-office data entry. The current tools on the market have poor user experience. Payzer is a payments and software company that provides mobile and online apps to Specialty Trade Contractors. Payzer is an all-in-one financial tool. Payzerware is the all-in-one management tool that manages inbound call, technician scheduling and dispatch, sales proposals, appointments and reminders, maintenance agreements, instant, paperless financing, etc. The SaaS license is $399-$999/month.
Payzer has a unique business model in the payment sector. It provides operational support and payment solution for Special Trade Contractors. The company consistently beats its sales target and steadily expand its team and opening new business relationships. Payzer also draws attention from other investors including Metabank and AXA Venture Partners. Payzer has formed relationship with some of the largest manufacturers of Heating, Ventilation, AC and plumbing wholesalers.
Payzer has gone through multiple evolutions as a startup – it originally began by offering point-of-sale payments and then loan originations for white goods. The company identified an underserved market segment of contractors and consumers that needed to make high value purchases to replace household items such as HVACs and white goods. It struck partnerships with various banks (such as Square 1 and GreenSky) to originate loans without having to keep them on balance sheet. The value provided to contractors was evident and Payzer developed Payzerware as a CRM for managing workflow of its enterprise clients.
The value proposition of Payzer garnered attention from Ferguson Enterprises, the largest supplier of plumbing in the US. Ferguson lead Payzer’s most recent Series C round. The company was founded by Jo Giordano, who was formerly the Head of Payments at Exxon Mobil and the Head of Merchant Acquiring at Bank of America – he brings significant experience in the payments industry.
Saykara
Saykara is a Seattle-based startup which was founded in 2015 to provide a virtual scribe for physicians. Doctors’ visits produce a lot of patient data which must be captured and updated in an EMR platform. Currently, physicians use one of three approaches to capture this data: they enter notes into an EMR while they see the patient (pain point: distracting), they dictate notes after the visit and have an offshore assistant enter the notes into an EMR (pain point: costly, laborious), or they hire a scribe to sit in the exam room with them and handle the documentation (pain point: expensive and long ramp up time). Saykara offers a fourth alternative – a virtual assistant that uses natural language processing to capture the most important elements of the doctor-client interaction and then automatically populates the EMR. The EMR entries which are created by the platform undergo a manual review by a human scribe for accuracy.
Saykara’s solution is compelling – it promises doctors both an improved quality of life and increased earning potential. Virtual scribes (~$12k per annum) are also much less expensive than the current alternatives: an in-person human scribe (~$42k per annum) or an offshore tech-enabled scribe (~$30k per annum).
The analogue with one of Elevate’s existing portfolio companies is Ocrolus. The fundamental technology serves a simple pain point of voice transcription into EMR with highly targeted Machine Learning. It benefits from having a “human in the loop” that reviews and smooths this data, making it more accurate and viable, while not wasting hours performing verbatim transcription.
Saykara benefits from having an excellent founding team that all have deep engineering and domain expertise (coming over from Amazon/Alex and Nuance). The founding CEO, Harjinder Sandhu, is a technical founder that was also a Computer Science professor. Prior to founding Saykara, Harjinder was at Nuance, which was a leader in the voice-to-text space (best known for the software Dragon Naturally Speaking). The combination of founding team and market opportunity and initial customer feedback make Saykara a compelling company.
UGRO Capital
India has a $300 billion+ SME credit availability problem, so there is a strong market demand for SMB loans. UGro Capital aims to solve this problem through deep sector specialization, leveraging the best practices of traditional NBFs and the modern fintech providers and addressing the ‘needs’ of rating agencies and liability providers.
U Gro Capital is a technology enabled, highly specialized, small business lending platform that solves the challenges for traditional lenders such as difficult to understand businesses/cashflows, fragmented set of customers, high cost of customer acquisition, high dependence on the ecosystem and lack of data. U Gro Capital focuses on 8 sector specialization and 38 sub sectors. The company created 8 sector specific scorecards after analyzing 8 million loans. The scorecards can accurately evaluate loans efficiently.
Elevate invested in U Gro Capital because it is positioned to better bridge the SME credit gap than traditional NBFCs and banks because it is more nimble than traditional banks. The investor syndicate consists of the most astute financial sector private equity investors in India. The company adopts technologies and sector focused expertise to better evaluate the loans. Additionally, U Gro Capital has an experienced management team. Founder Mr. Shachindra Nath has over 25 years of experience in financial service sector and holds the “CEO of the Year” Award at the Asia Banking, Financial Services & Insurance Excellence Awards.
Elevate invested into U Gro capital pre-IPO, in Q2 2018; U Gro subsequently IPO’d on the Bombay Stock Exchange in October 2018. The company has traded above the IPO price throughout its existence as a publicly traded company.