Thomson Reuters Ventures

Helping employers provide personalized, high-touch, and holistic financial wellness tools to their entire workforce.

Financial Wellness Tools

Northstar provides a financial wellness platform for employers which connects employees with certified financial advisors to obtain personalized financial coaching. The platform also offers a compensation management solution that allows to manage fringe benefits. Northstar’s mobile app for employees links with the user’s bank accounts and helps them to set and track financial goals such as retirement planning, building emergency funds, and managing debt. The platform provides recommendations and tools to automate savings, debt payoffs and investments to achieve these goals.&nbsp;Northstar also provides financial coaching via a direct-to-consumer subscription model, and charges USD 25 in monthly subscription fee per user.Key customers and partnershipsNorthstar’s platform is in use by companies such as Snap, Zoom, 23andMe, Virgin Orbit, and NerdWallet. While Northstar’s platform is primarily offered as an employee benefit, the company also sells a direct-to-consumer personal membership at USD 25 per month.

Headquartered in Spain, Payflow offers a platform that enables organizations to provide early access to earned wages. It operates through a mobile app, allowing employees to instantly access their salaries without having to wait for payday, along with a debit card that helps them save on expenses such as meals and public transportation, and obtain additional benefits like childcare and education. It also offers an automated savings tool and an interactive platform with educational content for users to improve their financial well-being.Payflow integrates with existing payroll solutions and charges employees on a per-transaction basis. The cash advances are offered by Payflow and are deducted from the employee’s payroll automatically on payday. The company had operations in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Columbia, and Peru as of August 2024.Key customers and partnershipsAs of August 2024, Payflow served over 1,000 companies and more than 500,000 employees. Its notable clients include Grupo Ilunion, Telefónica, Mango, Alcampo, Grupo Hospitalario Quirón, Webhelp, ISDIN, and NH Hoteles.

The on-demand economy has finally reached white collar work.

Online Freelancing Platforms

Priori Legal is a legal marketplace that connects in-house legal teams with vetted attorneys, paralegals, firm administrators, and legal operations professionals. The company claims its vetted network of attorneys offer rates at least 25% below market rates. Priori's rigorous vetting process results in the acceptance of only ~20% of lawyer applicants to its network. In&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/22254">September 2023</a>, it broadened its product offerings by including legal operations professionals. This included professionals specialized in supporting legal functions, implementing legal tech solutions, and managing change within legal departments. Further, the company introduced RFP, reviews, and scorecarding features for legal teams in&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27161">February 2024</a> to improve procurement capabilities.&nbsp;In addition to its freelancer marketplace, Priori offers Scout, an outside counsel panel management SaaS. Scout provides in-house legal teams with data-driven insights about their trusted law firm relationships to enable more informed hiring decisions. Additionally, the company added GenAI features to Scout in&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/25128">December 2023</a>.Priori clients pay a composite "Priori Rate" for projects, which includes legal fees plus a management fee. This applies to all fee types except expense reimbursements.Key customers and partnershipsIts notable clients include Meta, Hearst, and Verizon. As of October 2024, Priori had over 8,000 legal freelancers on its platform, covering all 50 US states.&nbsp;

Now anyone can become a software developer.

No-code Software

Redbird, previously known as Cube Analytics, offers a no-code platform that connects all of an enterprise’s data sources for users to build applications that automate data analytics workflows. The platform integrates with a number of data sources such as Databricks, Snowflake, Oracle, and PostgreSQL and enables transformation and wrangling operations via automated tools. These include statistical summaries, pivots, cross tabs, and organic cluster maps. Users can then build custom applications on top of this data for specific use cases such as market research, customer insights, supply chain optimization, people analytics, and personalization. Key customers and partnerships As of October 2022, the company served a number of large companies such as Hudson’s Bay, Audacy, and Mondelez International, which led to revenue growth reaching 9X year-over-year. Funding and financialsIn October 2022, Redbird <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13764">raised USD 7.6 million </a>in seed funding, led by B Capital, to invest in product developments including adding new no-code capabilities and building out its app marketplace.

New data privacy regulations have opened up space for a new wave of compliance-focused startups.

Digital Privacy Tools

DataGrail provides a platform for privacy management, specifically designed to comply with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, etc. The company’s Live Data Map feature integrates with existing applications and automatically carries out data discovery and mapping, enabling organizations to automate data subject rights requests, data protection impact assessments, among other data-related requirements. The platform provides organizations the ability to monitor their privacy program and the ability to deploy a user-facing portal that can be used to manage their consent and email preferences, which are then enforced organization-wide. In March 2024, the company reported it had more than tripled revenue since late 2022.DataGrail’s Risk Monitor leverages intelligent workflows and pre-populated documentation to build risk assessments such as automated Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs), Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs), or third-party assessments.The company supported integrations with over 2,000 enterprise apps, data platforms, and internal systems with pre-built connectors as of September 2024.Key customers and partnershipsAs of September 2024, DataGrail’s customer base included notable companies such as Bed Bath &amp; Beyond, Fanduel, Okta, and Salesforce.DataGrail partnered with the cloud-based CRM platform HubSpot in July 2021 to offer unified preference management, maintain continuous data discovery, and automate data subject requests (DSRs and DSARs) in compliance with CCPA, CPRA, and GDPR.

Promises increased productivity, cost-efficiency, and competitiveness in the legal industry

LegalTech

Spellbook (formerly Rally) is a Canadian developer of generative AI tools for legal work, capable of assisting lawyers with drafting and reviewing contracts. The tool is available as a Microsoft Word extension and offers the following functions:1) Language suggestions: Drafts contract clauses or sections based on context2) Aggressive term detection: Detects unusual or tricky language3) Missing clauses: Lists clauses or language that might be missing from the contract4) Negotiation suggestions: Suggests points to be negotiated between partiesThe tool also surfaces examples and references documents when a contract is loaded. Spellbook’s AI is built on OpenAI’s GPT-4 and other fine-tuned large language models (LLMs), further trained on legal data and proprietary databases.Key customers and partnershipsIn May 2023, Spellbook claimed that 600 legal teams already use its service, and over 53,000 lawyers had signed up to a waitlist for its platform.Funding and financials<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/25871">In January 2024, </a>Spellbook raised USD 20 million in a Series A financing round led by Inovia Capital, for product innovation, intending to expand partnerships with law firms. Previously, in May 2023, Spellbook raised USD 10.9 million in a funding round led by Moxxie Ventures, also formally rebranding from Rally to Spellbook. The firm intended to use the funds to expand its team and develop new platform features.

The toolkit to build machine learning applications at scale

Machine Learning Infrastructure

CentML offers a ML platform called DeepView that optimizes AI inference and training workloads. It enables clients to optimize and deploy ML models with improved performance and cost-efficiency. DeepView enables developers to visually identify model bottlenecks, do rapid iterative profiling, evaluate the energy consumption and the environmental impact of training operations, and anticipate the time and cost of deployment to cloud hardware. In addition, the company offers Hidet, an open-source deep-learning compiler, written in Python. It supports end-to-end compilation of deep neural network models from PyTorch and ONNX on modern accelerators.Funding and financialsIn October 2023, CentML raised USD 27 million in <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/23094">seed funding</a> led by Gradient Ventures (Google's AI-focused venture fund). It planned to use the funds for R&amp;D and to scale its engineering team.

Exploring the limitless possibilities of AI

Generative AI Applications

Based in Italy, Contents.com is a generative AI-powered multimedia creation tool directed at marketing teams, bloggers, publishers, web agencies, ecommerce sites, and large corporations looking to scale content output. The company operates as a SaaS platform that provides tools to support the entire content creation workflow, combining AI-generated output with manual finishing. Contents.com’s features include:1) Industry trends: Uses AI to provide an overview of popular content trends during a specified time period2) AI Chat: A natural language chatbot that can answer questions on any topic or be used to generate content ideas3) AI Writer: Generates content based on a selected template, including blog posts, social media posts, product descriptions, marketing emails, search engine optimized content, and summarized and rephrased content4) AI Art: Generates images based on text inputs, a selected style, and destination content type5) Text to Audio: Converts text documents into audio, with several AI voices available for selection and generates text transcripts from audio input6) AI Translation: Translates content into 25+ languages (January 2024) and offers human translation7) Professional writing services: Completion and review of AI-generated content or fully outsourced content creation by human writersContents.com also offers a customizable enterprise solution, enabling large organizations to automate their content creation processes.The firm claims that its solution can generate content 10x faster.In April 2023, Contents.com acquired Scribeur, its main French competitor, expanding its customer base to include major French and European brands. In the same month, the firm also acquired translation company Traduzione.it. In addition, in May 2023, the company acquired Scribox, an Italian content marketing marketplace, to leverage Scribox's expertise in custom content creation, SEO, and social media marketing.Key customers and partnershipsAs of May 2023, Contents.com’s users included Allianz, Billboard, IKEA, Oppo, and Accenture.

Propense.ai is a SaaS platform that identifies new revenue streams for businesses, augmented with AI technology. Our B2B predictive sales intelligence model enables firms to streamline and maximize their cross-selling revenue by analyzing historical and market data points to reveal revenue opportunities hiding in plain sight. Propense.ai makes it easier for businesses to know what they should be selling to their clients next, effectively bringing the recommendation revolution to the B2B market.

Noetica is an artificial intelligence-powered software platform that assists dealmakers in benchmarking corporate loan transactions.

Payflow is an employee benefit that companies can offer to their employees. Payflow provides employees instant access to earned salary to improve their financial well-being. Companies benefit from improved productivity and engagement, with no impact on cash-flow. Payflow was founded in 2020, and it is a Rocket Internet backed venture based in Spain.

Materia Enhancing public accountants' lives by automating tedious tasks, freeing time for higher-value activities, and improving overall efficiency.

HerculesAI is a generative AI company that brings the power of large language models inside the security perimeter of enterprises. Hercules, enables enterprises to quickly create, deploy, and run generative AI apps without compromising security standards.

Wisedocs offers a machine-learning SaaS platform for insurance, legal, and independent medical evaluation firms to review medical records with ease. It was created to help the IME, diagnostics, medico-legal, and insurance industries organize and understand unstructured medical data. The company caters to the auto, liability, disability, workers' compensation, tort law, and similar markets. It offers an easy-to-integrate solution that enhances accuracy and speed to improve outcomes in processing medical records.

Spellbook is a legal software startup that develops a generative artificial intelligence contract drafting tool for lawyers. The technology, which is powered by huge language models such as OpenAI's GPT-4, is optimized for contracting performance utilizing legal datasets.

Detected was created to help significant business partnerships advance more quickly and confidently in the direction of greater results. Love Ventures, a prestigious angel investment group, and Thomson Reuters Ventures support the startup.

Contents is Series B company leader in AI content creation for enterprise, providing a robust AI platform that facilitates the generation of diverse content types including text, audio, video, and animations. The platform is equipped with advanced tools tailored to support a variety of content needs. Its innovative Brand Voice service stands out, allowing businesses to craft content that resonates with their unique brand identity through AI-driven customization. Designed for a wide range of users, from small bloggers to large corporations, Contents.com makes content creation more efficient, creative, and accessible in multiple languages, catering to a global audience.

CentML is a machine learning startup that offers optimization solutions for ML inference and training. Its software allows data scientists and engineers to find and apply value optimizations to their training and inference loads and helps clients have a platform that lowers compute costs.

At Northstar, we believe financial wellness starts with a single paycheck. We work with leading companies to provide 1-on-1 financial advisors and personal finance tools as an employee benefit. Northstar’s financial wellness program helps employees make the most of their total compensation, and helps companies support their teams at scale. Our employer customers include Zoom, Snap, NerdWallet, Superhuman, Virgin Orbit, and more.

Redbird is an AI-powered analytics platform for teams to easily automate advanced analytics work in minutes, without writing code. Redbird's solution offers a comprehensive set of automated data services, including collection, wrangling, modeling, and reporting, as well as a user-friendly interface that does not require specialized engineering knowledge to use. Redbird allows data engineers to be freed up to work on more complex or technical assignments.

At DataGrail, we believe in a world where people are in control of their privacy and identity. The world's most trusted brands like Salesforce, Overstock.com, Restoration Hardware, NETGEAR, and MyFitnessPal use DataGrail.  DataGrail is a Gartner Cool Vendor and has 4.8/5 stars on G2.

Priori is the global legal marketplace for in-house teams. We use data and technology to rapidly connect legal departments from 1 to 1000+ with the right outside counsel for projects globally, saving them time and money. Our clients include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading technology companies, who use our platform to find vetted boutique firms for projects requiring niche expertise, local counsel, cost-control, overflow, or temporary support. We were shortlisted in both 2018 and 2019 as a Financial Times Intelligent Business for our work reducing the cost of legal services for corporate clients by 60-80%.

Verady provides accounting and audit products and infrastructure networks through the Ledgible platform, where financial institutions, corporations, and regulators can audit, account, and verify blockchain assets. Verady believes traditional accounting systems, firms, and standards are currently lacking functionality around blockchain assets. Verady's Ledgible platform will be the bridge between these new assets and traditional financial verification and accounting which is needed to further their acceptance and growth.

Thomson Reuters Ventures is an early-stage investment arm of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters Ventures will invest primarily in earlier-stage companies via Series A and B rounds

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