Club of Angel Investors focusing on early stage strategic investments in scalable software platforms

ID345

Sierra Ventures is a Bay Area-based early-stage venture firm investing globally with a focus on Next Generation Enterprise and Emerging Technologies. With over three decades of experience and over $2 billion of assets under management, Sierra has created a vast network of successful entrepreneurs, Global 1000 CXOs, operational executives, and deep domain experts, providing a platform for entrepreneurs around the world. Sierra Ventures primarily invests in Seed and Series A rounds, with a preference to lead investment rounds and reserve capital for follow on rounds. Investment sectors include artificial intelligence/machine learning, big data, cloud, fintech, health tech, IoT/infrastructure, marketplaces, SaaS & enterprise apps, security, and emerging technologies such as 5G, devices, blockchain, robotics, and virtual reality / augmented reality. Sierra Ventures typically makes initial investments between $500,000 and $7 million on average and invests between $500,000 and $15 million over the life of an investment. The firm has invested in leading companies such as Intuit, Invensense, Greenplum, MakeMyTrip, OnLink, Teradata, StrataCom, Sourcefire, Treasure Data, and more. Sierra Ventures was founded in 1982 and is based in San Mateo, California.

Sierra Ventures

B Capital Group backs brash entrepreneurs building technology companies. With offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Singapore, B Capital Group focuses on pioneering start-ups that are ready to scale across the global stage. Partnering with Boston Consulting Group, and its incubation arm BCG Digital Ventures, B Capital delivers access to top corporations to match start-ups with the world's most powerful CEOs, platforms, and brands. B Capital Group's unique multinational presence, combined with deep industry expertise, has built a portfolio of B2B and B2B2C startups that are transforming large traditional industries across borders and geographies. It helps startups navigate business challenges, raise capital, and attract talented leadership at key points of their journeys to scale.

B Capital

Endeavor Catalyst is the co-investment fund set up to invest exclusively in led companies and to sustain Endeavor’s long-term operations in a mission-aligned way.

Endeavor Catalyst

Bossa Invest manages investment portfolios and provides asset management services to clients. It analyzes market trends to inform investment decisions. Bossa Invest serves multiple sectors, including finance, technology, and real estate.

Bossa Invest

Glisco Partners is a private equity firm focused on the Mexican middle market with a long, established track record of executing and exiting high-quality transactions.

Glisco Partners

Yalo

Yalo is a developer of an AI-based customer relationship management platform used to help businesses offer a delightful customer experience. It manages the digital workflow for sales and customer service through mini applications that run on top of messaging apps that allow customers to get what they want from businesses in a personalized way. It develops chatbots that enable businesses to sell and chat automatically with customers via Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other such applications and handle customer requests to the point of payment and fulfillment, thus enabling brands to effectively communicate with their customers. Yalo was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Yalo is a Mexican startup specializing in conversational commerce, offering an AI-driven platform that transforms traditional retail interactions. The company's technology operates primarily on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, guiding clients in purchasing decisions and helping maximize product potential. Yalo's platform enhances customer relations by providing a unique blend of customer service and sales support. The company's AI-powered solutions are designed to drive customer growth and improve conversion rates. Yalo's technology enables businesses to manage customer interactions through messaging channels, offering a more personalized, direct, and efficient way to connect with customers. As of November 2023, 1.6 million companies were using Yalo's platform to manage their customer interactions through messaging channels. The company's mission extends to democratizing technology for small businesses, which Yalo estimates represent a market of around USUSD 80 billion. Yalo's platform is designed to be accessible and user-friendly, allowing companies to integrate messaging into their business strategy easily.

Yalo Gains $20M for AI-Driven Retail Commerce

Yalo: Conversational Commerce Platform

The Power of AI and Conversational Commerce

Using AI to mimic and understand human language

Natural Language Processing Tools

Yalo is a software platform that utilizes AI-powered conversational agents to optimize the customer journey, driving increased conversions and customer satisfaction. Its technology facilitates direct communication between businesses and customers through popular messaging applications like WhatsApp. Yalo's platform empowers teams to collaborate on managing and tracking campaigns, automating workflows with insightful metrics.

Yalo Raises $50m Series C for Conversational Commerce

Empowering the digital revolution in retail

Digital Retail Enhancement Platforms

Atlanta Marketing Agency Yalo Acquires Media Agency DB Dynamo

Yalo is a Mexican startup specializing in conversational commerce, offering an AI-driven platform that transforms traditional retail interactions. The company's technology operates primarily on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, guiding clients in purchasing decisions and helping maximize product potential. Yalo's platform enhances customer relations by providing a unique blend of customer service and sales support. The company's AI-powered solutions are designed to drive customer growth and improve conversion rates. Yalo's technology enables businesses to manage customer interactions through messaging channels, offering a more personalized, direct, and efficient way to connect with customers. As of November 2023, 1.6 million companies were using Yalo's platform to manage their customer interactions through messaging channels. The company's mission extends to democratizing technology for small businesses, which Yalo estimates represent a market of around USUSD 80 billion. Yalo's platform is designed to be accessible and user-friendly, allowing companies to integrate messaging into their business strategy easily.
Key customers and partnerships
Yalo has attracted a significant portfolio of clients, including major global brands such as Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Mondelez, Coppel, Banco Azteca, and GPA. The company's technology is utilized across various industries, helping these brands enhance their customer experience and operational efficiency through AI-powered conversational commerce solutions.

Reduct is a cloud-based video editing and storage platform that enables users to transcribe, organize, and edit video content through text-based interfaces. The platform uses automated transcription technology to convert video and audio files into searchable text transcripts. Users can then highlight, tag, and edit these transcripts to create video clips and reels. Reduct's key differentiator is its ability to edit video by manipulating the corresponding transcript text, allowing for efficient review and compilation of interview footage and other video content. The platform supports various file formats and integrates with video conferencing tools like Zoom for direct import of recordings. Reduct also offers collaborative features, allowing multiple team members to work on projects simultaneously. In addition to its core editing capabilities, Reduct provides unlimited cloud storage for video files, making it a comprehensive solution for video post-production workflows.
Key customers and partnerships
Reduct caters to a range of industries and professionals, including researchers, content creators, marketers, and corporate teams. The platform has developed integrations with popular video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro, enabling users to export their Reduct projects as editable sequences in these applications. Reduct also supports Final Cut Pro through XML export.

Reduct

MonkeyLearn is an AI-powered text analysis and data visualization platform that enables businesses to extract insights from unstructured textual data. The platform offers both pre-built and custom machine learning models for tasks such as sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, topic detection, and intent classification. MonkeyLearn's no-code interface allows users to clean, label, and visualize customer feedback data without requiring programming skills. The platform can process various types of text data including customer reviews, surveys, social media posts, and support tickets. MonkeyLearn integrates with popular tools like Excel, Google Sheets, Zapier, and Zendesk, allowing users to connect their existing data sources. In 2023, MonkeyLearn launched an all-in-one text analysis and data visualization studio that provides instant insights with greater granularity. The platform offers customizable dashboards and templates for different business scenarios, enabling users to create visualizations tailored to their specific needs.

MonkeyLearn

Keatext is an AI-powered text analytics platform that specializes in interpreting customer feedback. The company's cloud-based solution synthesizes large volumes of unstructured feedback data from multiple channels, including open-survey questions, online reviews, support tickets, chats, and social media posts. Keatext's platform utilizes deep learning and natural language processing to analyze, cluster, correlate, and track customer opinions autonomously, providing actionable insights through a comprehensive dashboard.
The platform is designed to minimize response time and requires no setup, featuring multilingual analysis and context-sensitive, industry-agnostic understanding. It automatically visualizes correlations and trends, offering immediate report-sharing capabilities. Keatext's technology adapts to various industries without requiring algorithm customization, eliminating the need for keywords, lexicons, and semantic dictionaries.
Founded in 2010 by Narjès Boufaden, Keatext initially operated as a professional services provider. In 2015, the company transitioned to a product-based model with the launch of its cloud-based AI-powered text analytics platform. Keatext's solution helps businesses optimize profitability through customer feedback analysis, enabling them to move from assumption-based decision-making to data-driven, research-based strategies. The platform significantly reduces the time required for analyzing customer feedback, with users reporting that tasks that previously took eight hours can now be completed in 10 minutes using Keatext.

Keatext

Aircover is a sale assistant tool that leverages conversational AI and real-time technologies to enhance the efficiency of sales teams. The platform integrates with virtual meetings, providing sales representatives with up-to-date messaging and positioning information. This approach aims to reduce ramp time for new representatives and products, shorten sales cycles, and increase win rates. Aircover's AI-powered system enforces best practices throughout sales meetings, offering real-time answers to representatives and potentially reducing the number of follow-up meetings required per prospect. The tool is designed to serve a wide range of users, from individuals to large enterprises. Aircover also features a relationship management component, allowing users to store notes and track roles within deals. By putting sales enablement on autopilot, the platform seeks to streamline the sales process and improve overall performance.

Aircover

NeuralSpace is an AI SaaS company that specializes in providing advanced text and voice AI technologies in over 100 languages. Founded in 2019, the company focuses on delivering language AI solutions, particularly for Arabic, Indian, and other low-resource languages predominantly spoken in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. NeuralSpace's platform offers a suite of products including speech-to-text, machine translation, entity recognition, transliteration, data generation, language detection, and text-to-speech conversion. The company's flagship product, VoiceAI, launched in October 2023, provides highly accurate call transcription, translation, and speech analytics for Arabic and Indian languages and dialects, achieving an average accuracy rate of 91%. NeuralSpace utilizes proprietary speech-to-text technology trained on a dataset of 40,000 hours of audio data, which it aims to increase to 100,000 hours. The company's no-code modular toolkit enables enterprises to train and deploy AI models for language processing applications without extensive coding knowledge. NeuralSpace's technology leverages modeling techniques such as transfer learning, multilingual learning, and data augmentation to work effectively with limited text or speech data. The platform can be accessed through a command-line interface, REST APIs, or a no-code GUI, making it versatile for various integration needs.

NeuralSpace

Solutions that use techniques such as named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, or summarization to produce insights from unstructured textual documents.

Platforms that summarize conversations, audio, or video files including reactions into text formats.

Tools to identify and analyze the opinions or emotions expressed in survey responses or reviews to produce actionable insights.

Platforms that decipher search queries by analyzing structured and unstructured data based on user intent and behavior.

Solutions that enable real-time conversation through chatbots or automate ticket routing to relevant agents.

Tools that automatically translate text from one language to another.

Tools that detect plagiarism, punctuation errors, or style errors in text.

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for natural language processing.

NLP tools such as chatbots are used to cater to each individual

NLP tools are built using AI/ML technologies

Some NLP tools are built using foundation models

NLP tools are provided for other companies to integrate into their workflows

Yalo is a software platform that utilizes AI-powered conversational agents to optimize the customer journey, driving increased conversions and customer satisfaction. Its technology facilitates direct communication between businesses and customers through popular messaging applications like WhatsApp. Yalo's platform empowers teams to collaborate on managing and tracking campaigns, automating workflows with insightful metrics.
Primarily catering to marketers, small, and medium enterprises, Yalo's conversational commerce approach seamlessly guides customers through the purchasing process while maximizing product potential. By combining customer service and sales support, the platform offers a unique and engaging experience for users.
As of November 2023, Yalo reported having 1.6 million companies utilizing its platform to manage customer interactions via messaging channels. The company's innovative solutions have garnered a diverse clientele, including industry giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Mondelez, Coppel, Banco Azteca, and GPA.
In May 2021, Yalo secured a USD 50 million Series C funding round led by B Capital Group, bringing its total raised capital to USD 75 million since its inception in 2015. The funds were allocated to expand operations in Latin America and Southeast Asia while developing new products, such as a conversational marketing solution.
Key customers and partnerships
Yalo has established partnerships with major global brands across various industries. Notable customers included Unilever, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Walmart. Specifically, John Santa Maria, CEO of Coca-Cola FEMSA, acknowledged the significant sales uplift achieved through their conversational commerce partnership with Yalo, with nearly half a million corner stores placing orders via WhatsApp.

Intelligence Node is a leading provider of retail analytics solutions that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. The company offers dynamic pricing and market analytics tools to help businesses navigate the complexities of ecommerce, set competitive prices, and better understand market trends.
At the core of Intelligence Node's offerings is a massive database containing over 3.5 billion unique product SKUs across 1,400 categories and 29 languages. This extensive dataset, combined with proprietary algorithms and advanced matching capabilities, enables the company to provide highly accurate real-time insights into pricing, product availability, and market trends.
Intelligence Node's solutions are designed to address key challenges faced by retailers, such as the inability to effectively track competitors, difficulties in pricing products optimally, and identifying gaps in product catalogs. The company's tools collect and analyze real-time data on pricing, discounts, and catalog movements across the retail landscape, allowing decision-makers to benchmark against competitors and make informed pricing decisions.
In addition to pricing analytics, Intelligence Node also offers solutions for content optimization and product listing enhancement. By leveraging generative AI capabilities, the company helps retailers create compelling and search-optimized product descriptions, improving visibility and conversion rates across online channels.
Intelligence Node has formed strategic partnerships with major retailers to enhance the online shopping experience and empower third-party sellers. The company's solutions enable retailers to provide clearer and more informative product listings, better insights into product performance, and improved search rankings across digital marketplaces.

Intelligence Node

Obsess is an experiential ecommerce platform that leverages augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology to create immersive, shoppable 3D virtual retail environments for brands and retailers. The platform allows companies to construct photorealistic digital spaces where customers can explore products in a visually engaging and interactive manner. Obsess' virtual stores aim to drive product discovery, customer engagement, clickthrough rates, session duration, average order value, and conversion for its clients.
Obsess' proprietary technology enables brands to offer seamless and memorable branded virtual experiences without requiring customers to download an app or use a headset. The platform supports various features such as walking and talking avatars, gamification elements, educational content, and social media integrations to enhance the shopping experience. As of February 2023, Obsess had created virtual stores in over 45 countries, supporting more than 30 languages.
The company has partnered with renowned brands across industries, including Sam's Club, Charlotte Tilbury, Diesel, Dior, Party City, Tommy Hilfiger, J.Crew, and Elizabeth Arden, to launch immersive virtual shopping experiences. In June 2023, J.Crew unveiled the "Virtual Beach House," a 360-degree virtual store celebrating the brand's 40th anniversary, featuring themed rooms, product displays, historical catalogs, and interactive games. Similarly, Elizabeth Arden launched a shoppable virtual store in May 2023 to engage younger, tech-savvy consumers and showcase its heritage through digital storytelling.
Key customers and partnerships
In February 2024, Mytheresa, an ecommerce platform, collaborated with Obsess to launch an exclusive visionOS app for Apple's Vision Pro headset. The app offers users a hyper-realistic digital luxury shopping experience in virtual environments like Capri and Paris, featuring curated collections from brands such as Loewe, Valentino, and Saint Laurent. The partnership aims to transform traditional ecommerce into an emotional and engaging shopping journey.

Obsess

Namogoo is a pioneer in the Digital Journey Continuity platform space. The company offers a platform that autonomously adapts to each customer visit in real-time, shaping the customer journey to fit each shopper's needs while eliminating any distractions along the way. Namogoo's proprietary machine learning technology predicts each visitor's intent by learning from their unique digital behavior signals, empowering enterprises to act on this intent and ensure online shoppers complete their journeys.
The platform collects data from visitors' devices and their journeys, segmenting them into real-time audiences. It surfaces high-converting audiences that are 3-10 times more likely to purchase than average visitors. Additionally, Namogoo identifies user populations that do not convert due to UX conflicts, browser issues, or site design flaws, enabling brands to rectify these problems seamlessly.
In April 2022, Namogoo launched the "Customer Journey OS," a revolutionary software platform that enables ecommerce teams to deliver hyper-personalized journeys based on shoppers' real-time needs. It orchestrates all digital services running on the customer journey to work cohesively toward shared goals. The platform leverages Namogoo's vast network of over one billion unique visitors to provide real-time insights based on industry benchmarks.
Namogoo's solutions have been successfully implemented by leading brands such as Victoria's Secret, Neiman Marcus, ASICS, Marks & Spencer, Kurt Geiger, Carhartt, Eddie Bauer, GlassesUS.com, and Ariat, consistently driving uplifts in conversion rates, revenue per visitor (RPV), and overall revenue. The company was founded in 2014 and has raised USD 81 million to date.
In January 2023, Namogoo made a second round of layoffs, parting ways with 15% of its workforce, following an earlier round in November 2022 where 25% of employees were let go. Despite these cutbacks, the company reported continued growth and profitability.

Namogoo

NewStore is a modular, mobile-first omnichannel cloud platform that provides an Omnichannel-as-a-Service solution for retail brands worldwide. The platform enables retailers to deliver seamless shopping experiences across online, mobile, and in-store channels, leveraging modern technologies such as iOS devices for point-of-sale, inventory management, and order fulfillment.NewStore's platform comprises several modules, including POS, order management, clienteling, inventory, and native consumer apps. The order management and store fulfillment solutions utilize proprietary routing logic to allocate orders across a brand's brick-and-mortar locations and distribution centers based on predefined criteria, optimizing shipping times, inventory accuracy, and sell-through rates.The platform facilitates omnichannel capabilities like buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), buy online, return in-store (BORIS), and endless aisle, enhancing the customer experience while driving store traffic. NewStore's solutions seamlessly integrate with existing tech stacks, such as Salesforce systems and middleware platforms like MuleSoft and Azure.Prominent retail brands like Burton, Faherty Brand, G-Star RAW, Marine Layer, Roots Canada, Scotch &amp; Soda, UNTUCKit, and Vince have adopted NewStore's platform, benefiting from its comprehensive omnichannel retail solution. In March 2023, NewStore expanded its offerings to a global scale, assessing the omnichannel competence of 275 retail brands across Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK

NewStore

Solutions for retailers that offer insights to improve the product assortment they offer on their digital shelves, increase sales, improve conversions, and boost brand trust

Platforms for retailers and brands to build immersive ecommerce shopping experiences commonly leveraging AR, AI, digital twin, and 3D technologies

Solutions for retailers to enhance online shopping experiences, personalization, and conversion rates while delivering analytics on individual customer journeys to improve shopper engagement

Offers insights to retailers and brands by aggregating and analyzing data across multiple sales channels to boost sales

Solutions providing analytics for brands and retailers to improve competitive position, such as competitor pricing and assortment insights, high-level customer insights to reduce churn, and optimize web traffic

Platforms that provide retailers and brands with greater visibility on overall ecommerce operations to enhance decision-making—commonly through dashboards—including sales forecasting

Virtual stores may leverage digital twins to deliver immersive shopping experiences

Retail enhancement solutions can be offered in a B2B SaaS model

Retail enhancement solutions leverage AI to deliver better insights to businesses, to enable decision making

Improves the personalized offerings for retail customers

Virtual store solutions leverage 3D and AR to create an immersive digital shopping experience

Yalo

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