11 January 2022

Cervin Ventures 2021 Recap

Reflecting on the milestones of 2021.

2021 was a very eventful year at Cervin. We welcomed new team members and portfolio companies, participated in funding rounds for existing companies and had some significant exits with Tynker, Punchh and Nexient.

Here are some highlights from 2021:

 

Investments and Team

 

We are pleased to share that the hard work of our founders and their teams is widely recognized by the market, as their companies have successfully raised follow on rounds. Two of these companies - LaunchDarkly and Snaplogic - are now valued north of $1 billion.

 

 - LaunchDarkly - Raised a $200 million Series D and achieved a $3 billion valuation. We are fortunate to have been the first institutional investor in the company. 

 

- Snaplogic - Raised $165 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation.

 

- Privacera - Raised a $50 million Series B. The round was led by Insight Partners with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, and existing investors Accel, Point 72, and Cervin Ventures.

 

- Paystand - Raised a $50 million Series C. NewView Capital led the round with participation from existing investors including Cervin Ventures.

 

- Akridata - Raised a $15 million Series A. 

 

- Blink Technologies - Raised a $14 million Series A. InCapital Partners led the round with participation from Trilogy, Eldridge, Elysian Park, and Cervin Ventures. 

 

- Catch&Release - Raised a $14 million Series A. Accel led the round with participation from existing investors including Cervin Ventures.

 

- Bedrock Analytics - Raised a $5 million funding round from Cervin Ventures and Illuminate Ventures. 

 

- Slapdash - Raised $3.7 million in seed funding. Cervin Ventures participated in the round along with S28 Capital, Quiet Capital, Quarry Ventures, UP2398, and Twenty Two Ventures. Angels participating in the round include co-founders at companies such as Patreon, Docker, and Zynga. 


In 2021, we welcomed four new companies to our portfolio:

 

- ThirdAI is an Artificial Intelligence startup building tools to speed up deep learning without the need for specialized hardware. In the second half of 2021, they raised a $6 million seed round that was co-led by Cervin Ventures and Neotribe Ventures, with participation from Firebolt Ventures. 

 

- Anvilogic is a leading cyber-security automated threat detection company. In 2021, they raised a $10 million Series A led by Cervin Ventures with participation from Foundation Capital, Point 72 Ventures, and Dan Warmenhoven.

 

- WEVO is a customer experience platform that provides the fastest, most accurate insights to optimize digital experiences. WEVO’s human-augmented AI model allows organizations to test live websites and concept designs, without the need for live traffic.

 

- salesDNA is developing an AI-first sales acceleration platform to help enterprise sales organizations get real-time visibility into their entire funnel operations. Its AI-driven recommendations bring machine-like objectivity and consistency to sales execution and helps teams accelerate sales with higher accuracy and efficiency.

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The year was also marked by several significant exits:

- Punchh - $500 million exit to PAR Technologies Corporation. This acquisition makes PAR a unified commerce cloud platform for enterprise restaurants with integrated point-of-sale, back office, payment and guest engagement solutions. Congratulations to Shyam Rao, co-founder/CEO and the entire Punchh team. We are happy to have been part of their exciting journey since leading the seed round!

- Tynker - Acquired by BYJU’S, India’s largest ed-tech company. Becoming part of the BYJU’S brand will allow Tynker to further expand and build upon this momentum. Congratulations to serial entrepreneurs Krishna Vedati, Srinivas Mandyam, and Kelvin Chong and the entire Tynker team for building a great platform. Good luck to you as you scale globally with BYJU’S!

- Nexient - Acquired by NTT DATA Services. Nexient will expand NTT DATA’s differentiating transformation, modernization and cloud app development capabilities. Nexient was one of Cervin’s early investments that we incubated as an adjunct to our software investments to drive collaborative agile development with F-500 customers with an all US staff based in Michigan and Ohio. Congratulations to Mark Orttung and the Nexient team of 800+ employees for having built a phenomenal platform and an incredible outcome!

- Ampool - Acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Ampool’s team and products will be extending the high-performance analytics capabilities of HPE’s flagship Ezmeral software platform, playing a pivotal role in accelerating Ezmeral’s analytics runtime for interactive SQL workloads, helping to improve quality, repeatability, throughput, and time to value for customers’ AI/ML, analytics and data-intensive workloads. Congratulations to Milind Bhandarkar and the Ampool team!

We welcomed new team members Rohit Rao and Katelyn Ketterling. Rohit has joined us as an Associate, helping source deals and research new companies, themes, and industries for current and future investments. Katelyn has joined us as our Office Manager. She’ll be keeping day-to-day operations running smoothly.

Portfolio Spotlights and Thought Leadership

In 2021, we showcased a few of our portfolio companies and founders who are making waves in their respective industries. Our partners also wrote articles on their particular areas of expertise and interest, including infrastructure investing, the commercialization of computer vision, and data accessibility.

We are all looking forward to what 2022 has in store for Cervin and our portfolio companies!