As we discussed when we invested in awe.sm, the company fits comfortably into our Glue and Protocol themes, and the company caught our eye because several of our portfolio companies, including Topspin Media and StockTwits, were creating value from its technology platform. Companies with developer-facing products are compelling to us, as evidenced by our investments in companies like SendGrid, Urban Airship, MongoLab, and Chute.
But beyond awe.sm’s usage as a developer tool to empower sophisticated social sharing and analytics in third-party applications, the company constantly found itself fielding inbound interest from brands and marketers living in the world of social media marketing. These end-users wanted to know the ROI of their social activity, but they did not want to wade into the developer side of the pool to unlock the benefit of awe.sm’s powerful tools.
awe.sm for marketers meets this demand head-on. It’s built on awe.sm’s platform but with features and pricing for brands and agencies. It’s now possible to see the ROI of social media marketing without any engineering help: What did each post get me? What works? Why?
Beyond announcing a great new product launch from one of portfolio companies, we think this also illustrates a common evolutionary process many of our platform-focused companies have experienced: as their initial platform gains adoption and distribution, opportunities to build more focused applications and use-cases on the platform emerge from users inside and outside the company.
We are pleased to announce that we’ve completed an investment in Modria. Located in San Jose, CA, Modria is building an online dispute resolution and mediation platform.
With the explosion of online activities, people are transacting at a rate never before seen. This obviously includes ecommerce, but also includes mundane things like paying bills online, reviewing property assessments, filing insurance claims, and other things that used to be non-digital activities. It is inevitable that all of these new transactions will generate an enormous amount of disputes that need to be resolved.
Companies like eBay have long known that the challenge of providing effective redress can either be an asset or a curse. In a well-functioning online marketplace, technology allows the participants to quickly resolve their issues without human intervention most of the time. In the case where human mediation is needed, the light touch of a customer service representative takes the place of lawyers and courtrooms. In the case of eBay, dispute resolution has become one of their most important customer loyalty programs.
In our marketplace theme, we surmise that good companies will be built that remove friction from folks who want to conduct business with each other, but due to lack of technology cannot. We believe that the dispute marketplace is ready for this change. As an aside, just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that arbitration clauses in contracts are enforceable in almost all situations, meaning that companies who wish to avoid the courtroom legally have the right to. We believe this will only increase the situations where disputes are handled in alternative and technologically-enhanced methods.
Modria is a spin-off from eBay that has recently released their online dispute platform. They deliver a SaaS solution that allows anyone to use the tools that have defined the clear market leader’s (eBay) dispute center. The company intends on focusing on the $1.1 billion market that includes ecommerce, property tax assessment, state and local government disputes, and insurance disputes.
The company was founded by Colin Rule who previously created and built the dispute resolution platform that eBay uses today. He is also widely seen as the thought leader in the online dispute resolution ecosystem and has written what is considered the definitive book on the subject. As part of this financing, we are also bringing on Scott Carr as CEO. Previously Scott was CEO at YottaMark and head of sales and marketing at Digimarc.
The company met Jason at a “future of the law” conference where both Colin and Jason were speakers. Jason mentioned on stage that he believed most startups focused on the legal industry would fail due to the complications of selling into law firms and legal departments. Colin approached Jason directly with a different approach, which fits nicely into our marketplace theme
Welcome Scott, Colin and team to the Foundry family!
Chute fits squarely into our Glue theme. We continue to be enthusiastic about companies that provide on-demand application infrastructure for mobile and web developers. Multiple companies in our Protocol and Glue themes fit this description, including SendGrid, MongoLab, Urban Airship, and Pantheon.
We’ve long been intrigued by the massive explosion in the number of photos taken and shared every year, from 86 billion in 2000 up to 500 billion in 2012, driven over the last five years by the rise of the smartphone and social media. Images, and increasingly video, have become a hugely important component of the online conversation in both mainstream and user-generated social media.
A third thread of interest for us is the notion of the “hashtag economy” and the conversations that occur across the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram and others, which are united by the ad-hoc creations of hashtags by users in real-time that bind together discussions occurring about specific news events, areas of interest, conferences, random internet memes and more.
Chute brings together these three areas of interest for us by providing a cloud platform offered to publishers, brands and other web and mobile developers who wish to easily incorporate and scale the use of visual media in their applications.
Photos can be ingested into the Chute platform via upload directly from users’ mobile devices, uploaded via the web, or captured from images bearing specific hashtags that are flowing on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, or Twitter. Post-ingestion, Chute enables manipulation and distribution of the images, workflow to power editorial curation and pre-publication rights-clearing, caching and CDN delivery, and integration with a publisher’s CMS and advertising systems.
In a nutshell, Chute helps power the visual revolution: enabling developers, brands, and publishers to easily integrate photo and video content that originates anywhere into their mobile apps, websites, CMS and advertising platforms.
We are excited to be working with Chute’s co-founders Ranvir Gujral and Gregarious Narain and our co-investors Freestyle and USVP to help build Chute into one of the fundamental online media infrastructure layers.
We hope you’ve noticed that foundrygroup.com has a new look and feel. Designed by our friends at Slice of Lime, we felt that it was time to give a bit of a refresh to the Foundry site, which was feeling rather stale and outdated. We’ve tried to streamline things, make information more readily available and to highlight our investments more on our homepage.
With this site redesign we also took the opportunity to take some new group and individual shots of the Foundry team. Some have been posted here, others we’ll roll out in a later update.
We’re particularly excited about our “Album Cover” series of photos of the four Foundry partners. We’ve adapted a few of iconic album covers for our use – they should be instantly recognizable to you, we’re sure. Of course this is all done in tongue and cheek and in the spirit of good fun. We’ve often said that the entrepreneurs we back are the real rock stars – we’re the groupies – and we hope you won’t take these photos as an indication otherwise. That being said, in the past we’ve had fun with our website photos and don’t intend to stop any time soon.
In that spirit we’re offering up a bit of a challenge to the entrepreneurial community. Our hope is that these album shots will inspire entrepreneurs to come up with their own take on iconic albums. Send them our way, and we’ll feature them on the site. It would be fun to start a little meme around the “company founders as famous album cover” idea!
Joining The Board of Harmonix
We are pleased to announce that Brad will be joining the board of Harmonix. The company, best known for developing three massive game franchises – Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Central – is hard at work on a new generation of games that transform the way humans and computers interact.
Given our deep focus on human-computer interaction, it was easy for us to decide to get involved with Harmonix. We’ve learned an enormous amount about the intersection of human-computer interaction and video games over the past five years through our investments in Zynga, Sifteo, and Orbotix. We’ve continued to stretch the envelope of human-computer interaction with investments in Oblong, Occipital, and Organic Motion. We’ve seen, and experienced, first hand the power of using different HCI paradigms to capture human emotion and interaction in different contexts.
We’ve known the Harmonix founders, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, for 18 years. What they and their team have accomplished is the stuff of legends, and the new games they’ve showed us are all mind-blowing. We believe once again they are about to give us a window into the future. It’s an honor and a delight to get to work with them.
