Ocrolus, a leading fintech infrastructure company that transforms documents into actionable data with over 99% accuracy, today announced a new premium extension to its core technology platform. At a reception held tonight in New York, the company introduced Ocrolus+, the first turnkey solution for ingesting documents and digital data streams through a single API.
Announcing Availability of a Free Edition of the TowerIQ Platform
TowerIQ is excited to announce the launch of a new Free Edition of the towerIQ platform which will be generally available in January 2020. This permanently free product marks a major step forward in towerIQ’s mission to democratize end-to-end digital experiences for all commercial P&C insurance brokers, agents, and their insureds. The days of emailing untrackable spreadsheets, faxing paper documents, and manually rekeying data into PDFs is over, as towerIQ has now removed all barriers to digitizing client applications.
Portfolio Spotlight: Wethos
We are thrilled to announce that we’ve led a $3 million seed round in Wethos!
Wethos curates innovative teams of marketing specialists to work with meaningful brands. Wethos doesn’t neatly fit into any single investment category - Instead, it’s what you’d get if a network, managed marketplace, and future of work platform had a futuristic baby. This atypical model is one of the keys to Wethos’ momentum and traction in the market.
By delivering on the promise of curating the right people for every project in a compelling time frame and price bracket, Wethos’ offering exceeds that of traditional solutions by an order of magnitude. At the same time, Wethos provides freelancers with an alternative to the lonely, uncertain, and “race to the bottom” reality of most independent work. By enabling users to find work they actually care about, removing the burden of administrative work management, and always putting freelancers’ rights at the forefront, Wethos repairs the broken trust of the gig economy and, as one of their specialists aptly said, creates “what freelance work was actually meant to be”.
No one is better equipped to tackle this opportunity than the Wethos team. They have remained uncompromising on both building a better world for freelancers while simultaneously tackling the highest pain points in the market, and we can’t wait to see them embark on this next stage.
We were initially introduced to Rachel by Mike MacCombie two years ago (thanks again, Mike!). At the time, Wethos was still in the earlier stages of building its bench of freelance specialists, with a focus on matching individuals to projects. Because of the b2c-esque nature of freelance community-building, the company was not a fit for Laconia’s b2b SaaS-focused investment strategy at the time. Still, we had no doubts about Rachel’s focus, passion, and inevitable success. Over the next two years, we stayed in touch, regularly meeting for working sessions, catching up more casually, and collaborating on tech/VC community events.
Fast forward to our latest catch-up this past February. Wethos had built a community of 4,000+ freelance specialists, in large part cracking the chicken-or-egg problem that b2b/b2c companies often have. They had launched dozens of teams for leading organizations after having successfully navigated a major business model pivot, all while building out a formidable distributed team and figuring out how to scalably create, launch, and manage curated teams in a new and unique way. As we dove into the mechanics of the business, I was blown away by the level of detailed thought in every component. So it was no surprise that when Rachel asked, “Which funds do you recommend we talk to about this round?”, my answer was 🙋.
After Rachel got the rest of our team up to speed (they were stoked as well!), we dove right into our due diligence process, which got us even more excited about the company for multiple reasons. One of the core components of our due diligence process is introducing companies to 6-12 prospective customers in order to gauge market demand, value proposition strength, differentiation, and our ability to add value by opening doors, all while simultaneously generating sales leads for the company. With Wethos, we received resoundingly positive feedback, with about half of the organizations immediately moving forward with the process to hire Wethos teams. This conviction was echoed by Wethos’ existing customers and freelancers, who highlighted the exceptional quality of the specialists and Wethos’ seamless workflows as the main selling points.
We’ve found that how companies handle due diligence is often strongly correlated with how they run their business. We often see CEOs paralyzed during fundraising due to the bandwidth drain, but Rachel had everything ready to go and seamlessly collaborated with her team throughout the whole process. This delegation, responsiveness, and thoroughness were strong signals of the Wethos team’s high level of trust and efficiency. Our impression of this team dynamic was cemented by the group meeting we had with co-founders Rachel, Kristen, and Claire. The three of them demonstrated a deep mutual respect, complementary skills, individual adaptability within their evolving roles, and an unwavering shared vision for the company.
As with all of our investments, we worked in partnership with the founders to identify a strong co-investor group for this round. We couldn’t be more excited to be working with ValueStream Ventures, Loup Ventures, and Overton, among others, as well as existing investors including Flybridge and BBV.
We could go on for days about the massive market opportunity, innovative structure, and many other things that excite us about this company -- but instead we’ll leave you to check out some of their incredible work, follow them to stay posted in real time, and explore opportunities to join them as a specialist, customer, or teammate.
For more on their latest fundraise, visit their blog.
Portfolio Spotlight: PromoteIQ
We are thrilled to announce today that our portfolio company, PromoteIQ, has been acquired by Microsoft!
PromoteIQ automates vendor marketing for e-commerce. Their platform enables brands to promote their products on e-commerce sites, increasing brand awareness, driving incremental product sales and generating unprecedented product performance insight. For retailers, vendor marketing is quickly becoming a strategic business line and critical source of incremental margin. Today, PromoteIQ's technology powers the core vendor marketing programs for the largest online retailers and brands, and we couldn’t imagine a better partner for the next stage of PromoteIQ’s growth than Microsoft.
In August of 2016, Alex Sherman and Peter Schwartz, the co-founders of PromoteIQ, walked into our office after being introduced to us by another founder in our Laconia family, Liz Zalman (Co-founder & CEO, @strongDM).
Investing in PromoteIQ wasn’t an immediately obvious decision. Though we had a number of exciting adtech investments in our legacy portfolio (TripleLift, C3 Metrics, FreeWheel, Localytics, to name a few), our fund focus had shifted away from the sector as it became increasingly tough to navigate for both entrepreneurs and investors alike. The space had become oversaturated with investment, and obtaining fresh capital and/or liquidity was proving to be difficult.
Any reservations we had about the sector quickly disappeared as Alex and Peter presented a clear articulation of PromoteIQ as building an entirely new category at the forefront of the "Digital Shelf". At the time, vendor marketing had not yet gained serious momentum; even Amazon's now multi-billion-dollar advertising business was mostly under the radar. Alex and Peter cleanly outlined the tremendous growth opportunity in this new category at the intersection of marketing and commerce. PromoteIQ's platform enabled e-commerce sites to create another revenue stream and allowed brands to promote themselves to shoppers at the critical moment of conversion in their purchasing pathway.
Confident and grounded entrepreneurs, Alex and Peter possessed a clear vision of the market opportunity and the potential challenges ahead. They were also fully versed in the metrics and milestones needed to drive the business and reach the next stage of company growth. We felt a strong sense of 'fit' - these were entrepreneurs that we wanted to work with.
We introduced Alex and Peter to Nauta Capital and co-led their seed round. Over the last thirty months, we have had the honor of working closely with them on opening doors at key enterprise clients, fine-tuning strategy, helping them find some star hires (including our very own former intern Reena!), and everything in between. Their business has grown at breathtaking speed and in a short period of time, the company has become the dominant player within their category, easily outmaneuvering some of their larger competitors to build the defining solution for retailers.
We are so proud of Alex, Peter, and the entire team for building and establishing the company as a leading global vendor marketing platform -- no small feat by any means. From board meetings to late night phone calls and summer retreats, we have learned a great deal from them as investors, partners, and friends -- and who knew they would help us find love and tranquility in fishing? We can’t wait to see them expand their global presence through their continued growth with Microsoft’s powerhouse behind them.
Ocrolus raises $24 million to scan financial documents with computer vision
Ocrolus, a New York startup that taps AI and machine learning to parse financial documents, today announced it has raised $24 million in a series B round led by venture growth equity firm Oak HC/FT. Ocrolus cofounder and CEO Sam Bobley said the fresh capital, which follows a $4 million series A in April 2018 and brings the company’s total raised to about $30 million, will fuel expansion into verticals like consumer and auto lending and advance development of the company’s underwriting solutions for banks.