Starfish Ventures is a venture capital firm. That specializes in seed, start-up, expansion, emerging growth, early venture, mid venture, late venture, growth capital, middle market, and buyouts investments. The company prefers to invests in life sciences, clean technology, materials science, and information technology. Within life sciences, it focuses on biotechnology, medical devices, therapeutics, and drug development. Within clean technology, the firm invests in energy, water, and other environmental technologies. Within information technology, it considers investments in software, mobile, Internet and cloud based enterprise systems, semiconductor, instrumentation, hardware, and telecommunications.  It seeks to exit its investments through mergers and acquisitions, trade sale, or an initial public offer within two to five years. Starfish Ventures was founded by John Dyson and Michael Panaccio in 2001, and is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.

Starfish Ventures

Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. (NYSE: SFE) has a distinguished track record of fostering innovation and building market leaders. For more than 60 years, Safeguard has been providing growth capital and operational support to entrepreneurs across an evolving spectrum of industries. Today, Safeguard is focused specifically on healthcare and technology. Safeguard is a proven partner for entrepreneurs looking to accelerate growth and build long-term value in their businesses. Investors in NYSE:SFE have a unique opportunity to tap into the high potential of Safeguard's early- and growth-stage partners companies.

Safeguard Scientifics

Leerink Transformation Partners is focused on growth equity investments in privately held innovative companies in the healthcare technology & services sectors.

Leerink Transformation Partners

Founded in 2015, dRx Capital is Novartis' Digital Health Venture Fund investing in entrepreneurs transforming healthcare through data and digital technology. The fund invests in technology platforms improving access to healthcare and reimagining the practice of medicine, with a focus on AI & ML, big data, R&D optimization, patient care, and pharma supply chain and commercialization.

dRx Capital

Norwest is a venture capital and growth equity investment firm that specializes in venture and growth equity companies. Since its inception, it has invested in more than 600 companies and partnered with over 140 active companies across our venture and growth equity portfolio. The firm invests in early to late-stage companies across a wide range of sectors with a focus on consumer, enterprise, and healthcare. It offers a deep network of connections, operating experience, and a wide range of impactful services to help CEOs and founders scale their businesses.

Norwest Venture Partners

Transformation Capital is the successor management company to Leerink Transformation Partners LLC (“LTP”).11  LTP was founded in 2016 by Todd Cozzens and Jared Kesselheim, MD together with SVB Leerink Capital LLC (formerly Leerink Capital Partners LLC) (“Leerink Capital”), an affiliate of SVB Leerink LLC (“Leerink”), a leading healthcare investment bank.  Leerink Capital provided seed capital to Fund I (approximately 3% of capital commitments) and operational support. In January 2019, SVB Financial Group (“SVB”), the holding company of Silicon Valley Bank, a U.S.-based high-tech commercial bank, acquired the Leerink businesses including Leerink Capital.  Todd Cozzens, Jared Kesselheim, MD, and SVB expect to agree to a mutually beneficial ongoing relationship in which Transformation Capital (as an independent management company owned by Todd Cozzens, Jared Kesselheim, MD, and Michael Dixon and not affiliated with SVB or Leerink Capital) shall manage Fund II and whereby Transformation Capital shall manage Fund I’s investment portfolio pursuant to a sub-advisory agreement with SVB (or an affiliate).  Transformation Capital has the same operational leader, Kevin Brown, formerly CFO of Leerink Capital, and Transformation Capital expects to continue to derive benefits from its ongoing relationship with Leerink and SVB.

Transformation Capital

Aktana

Aktana helps life science companies get the most out of artificial intelligence for commercializing their products. Its platform harnesses machine learning algorithms to enable marketing and sales teams to optimize their engagement with prescribing physicians. Aktana supports more than 100 brands and more than half the top 20 pharmaceutical companies worldwide to increase revenue, capitalize on data investments, and drive channel productivity and results.  The company’s focus on the life sciences market allows Aktana to understand and incorporate unique market dynamics more deeply than the major AI players. Headquartered in San Francisco, Aktana also has offices in New York, Philadelphia, London, Barcelona, Tokyo, Osaka, and Shanghai.

<div>Aktana specializes in providing data and intelligence solutions for life sciences industries. In October 2021, Aktana unveiled "Contextual Intelligence 360," a modular sales intelligence platform, to scale AI-driven programs that personalize the customer engagement process for life science commercial teams. Its contextual intelligence engine (CIE) uses machine learning (ML) algorithms to plan and arrange multi-channel interactions with healthcare providers (HCPs). The platform also features personalized next-best-action recommendations, customer journey mapping tools, automated workflows, a template library, and analytics and reporting. Additionally, it has native integration with customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms (MAP) as well as an API for custom integration. By December 2022, it had served 700,000 users across 300+ brands, including over half of the top 20 pharmaceutical firms in the world, such as Pfizer, Janssen, Merck, and Novartis.</div>

Artificial intelligence is helping sales teams manage relationships and optimize the customer lifecycle.

Sales Engagement Platforms

Cooley Disqualified From Aktana IP Case Over ‘Troubling’ Overlap

<div>
 
 Aktana specializes in providing data and intelligence solutions for life sciences industries. In October 2021, Aktana unveiled "Contextual Intelligence 360," a modular sales intelligence platform, to scale AI-driven programs that personalize the customer engagement process for life science commercial teams. Its contextual intelligence engine (CIE) uses machine learning (ML) algorithms to plan and arrange multi-channel interactions with healthcare providers (HCPs). The platform also features personalized next-best-action recommendations, customer journey mapping tools, automated workflows, a template library, and analytics and reporting. Additionally, it has native integration with customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms (MAP) as well as an API for custom integration. By December 2022, it had served 700,000 users across 300+ brands, including over half of the top 20 pharmaceutical firms in the world, such as Pfizer, Janssen, Merck, and Novartis.
 
 
 The company claimed that its solutions improved sales growth by 14% during the indication launch for an innovative oncology drug and a 10% increase in goal attainment for primary care representatives carrying multiple products.
 
 
 In October 2021, The company acquired Ople.AI, a predictive analytics platform, to increase the use and adoption of AI, particularly among developing or mid-market businesses.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 In May 2022, Spanish pharmaceutical firm Almirall announced that it would roll out the CIE solution across two well-known brands in the US. This goes further than the company's early January deployment of Aktana's technology to boost consumer interaction.
 
 
 In September 2022, the company entered into a strategic partnership with Envision Pharma Group, a comprehensive global medical communications group, to provide personalized solutions that blend Envision's scientific expertise and Aktana's intelligence platform for medical affairs teams.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In January 2021, the company raised USD 30 million in debt financing from Armentum Partners. 
 
</div>

Outreach is a sales intelligence platform that offers a suite of tools to help sales reps improve communication with prospects and close deals. The platform integrates with existing customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and provides sales sequences, personalization tools, and multi-channel communication capabilities. The company is deeply integrated with third-party apps to attract large enterprise customers and claims to have a network of around 1,000 partners. As of June 2021, the platform served more than 4,800 companies, with the majority being mid-market tech companies in North America. It opened its London office in February 2020 to further establish a presence in the European market, which represents around 5% of its customer base. As of June 2021, the company has more than 800 employees globally across Seattle, San Francisco, and new global offices in London and Prague.The platform offers insights on the most effective content channels and the optimal times to contact prospects using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology. Further, managers can track sales rep and team-wide performance paving the way for sales coaching using customer interactions. Outreach’s “Amplify AI suite”, launched in 2018, leverages ML to categorize buyer intent based on responses to email communication. In May 2020, the company announced the beta launch of “Outreach Kaia”, a voice-based AI sales assistant. In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16031?industryIds=27">January 2023, </a>Outreach introduced Smart Email Assist, an AI-powered automatic email response generator, to streamline workflows for sales teams. In March 2023, the firm introduced <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17465">multiple new features </a>to improve sales pipeline performance and efficiency, including the Create and Close Dashboard, Create Pipeline Calculator, Buyer Topics and Reactions, Success Plans Methodologies, Deal Grid, and Deal Overview. In May 2024, the company launched <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/29898">Smart Account Plans, </a>a new feature in its Sales Execution Platform designed to help sales teams engage, manage, and increase the number of accounts.The company also opted to bolster its product offering by acquiring revenue intelligence platform Canopy.io in October 2021. With this acquisition, Outreach strengthens its sales analytics and forecasting capabilities. Canopy.io will be the foundation of “Outreach Commit,” a new forecasting tool under Outreach’s suite of products.Key customers and partnershipsIn March 2023, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17465?industryIds=27">expanded its partnership with Snowflake, </a>a data platform, to introduce a new offering called “Outreach Data Sharing,” which enables organisations to connect Outreach's datasets with other enterprise data and improve sales cycle.Funding and financialsIn June 2021, the company raised USD 200 million in a Series G funding round, valuing the company at USD 4.4 billion, a significant jump from its USD 1.3 billion valuation in June 2020. The significant jump in valuation may be justified by the company's notable growth over the past 12 months. The funds will be allocated toward expanding into new markets, growing its sales and marketing teams, and platform development.Additionally, in June 2021, the company stated that its annual recurring revenue doubled in Q1 2021 compared to the previous year. In 2020, the company reported a run-rate revenue of USD 100 million.

Outreach

<div>
 
 Salesloft offers customer relationship management (CRM) integration, sales cadence, sales pipeline management and analytics reporting. It appeals to sales professionals working across the customer lifecycle. The company has offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, London, Indianapolis, New York City, and Guadalajara, Mexico. In August 2021, it announced growth plans in the European market by opening a data center in Germany and doubling headcount in the market. As of February 2022, the platform served 2,000+ customers and has established a partner ecosystem of 100+ companies. In January 2021, Salesloft reported that its client profile had shifted from mid-market to large enterprises such as Google, LinkedIn, Cisco, and Dell. 
 
 
 Salesloft strengthened its product offering in 2021, launched its &ldquo;Deal Engagement Score,&rdquo; an AI-driven function that can prioritize deals based on more than 30 data elements across its Cadence, Conversations, and Deals product offerings, in March 2021. Furthermore, the company announced Cadence Step Analytics and Pre-Built Cadence Frameworks. Cadence Step Analytics allows the user to gain insights on the most effective approach taken through Cadence. Pre-Built Cadence Frameworks is powered by best practices developed through positive sales interactions and the best-performing sales teams. More recently, in April 2022, the company launched its proprietary forecasting tool &ldquo;Forecast by Salesloft&rdquo;, to support organisations in generating predictable growth. 
 
 
 In February 2022, the company announced the launch of its four tier 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8630">
 Technology Partner Program
 </a>
 to provide growth opportunities for its partner ecosystem. Additionally, Salesloft also announced the launch of its Market Development Fund, which aims to support the funding of partner programs and pipeline development and create awareness among the Salesloft ecosystem. In September 2022, the firm unveiled 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/12862">
 Salesloft Rhythm
 </a>
 , a platform to unify sales workflows to be launched in 2023. The firm claims that a unique aspect of this next generation solution is that the platform will provide an explanation as to why the action is important and what the likely outcome will be. 
 
 
 Salesloft has been active in the M&amp;A space. In July 2021, the company acquired InStereo, a sales strategy consulting firm. The acquisition of InStereo established Salesloft's focus on buyer engagement in sales and marketing campaigns. InStereo initially partnered with Salesloft in 2018 and had completed more than 150 client engagements for companies such as 3M (American multinational conglomerate), Cargill (global food company), and Pegasystems (American software company). In February 2024, the company 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27169">
 acquired Drift,
 </a>
 a conversational B2B marketing platform, to improve its customer journey orchestration tools for B2B sales teams.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 In August 2022, the firm 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/12545">
 partnered with Highspot,
 </a>
 a sales coaching platform, to further streamline the client engagement process for sales teams.&nbsp;
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In December 2021, the company raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Vista Equity Partners at a valuation of USD 2.3 billion, to expand beyond North America and particularly in Europe. In January 2021, Salesloft raised USD 100 million in a funding round led by Owl Rock Capital, to expanding its operations globally while investing in new vertical markets, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-driven insights, and product innovation, as well as growing its headcount by more than 30% within the next year. 
 
 
 In August 2022, the firm reported that annual recurring revenue (ARR) surpassed USD 100 million in Q2 2021.
 
</div>

Salesloft

<div>
 
 People.ai began as a revenue intelligence platform but has widened its product to cover marketing and sales. 
 Its 
 artificial intelligence-based (AI-based) sales and marketing solutions offer sales playbooks and recommendations, automated customer relationship management (CRM), and pipeline visibility. In May 2019, the company launched &ldquo;The Wire&rdquo; which offers a real-time feed of recommended actions based on data collected from sales activity on emails, calendars and CRM systems.The platform is well integrated counting over 90 application programming interface (API) integrations with video conferencing and collaboration tools such as Zoom, GSuite, and Slack. 
 
 
 In September 2022, the firm 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13046">
 launched new features
 </a>
 1) Engagement Dashboards which contain visualisations that provide insight on buyer/seller engagement and 2) Account Planning with a native Salesforce integration which allows sales teams to operationalize account plans and provide customer insights. In May 2023, the firm 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18990">
 launched AccountGPT,
 </a>
 an AI-driven enhancement to its account planning application that leverages generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to automate sections of account plans, including market research, by extracting data from publicly available sources such as company websites and earnings reports.&nbsp;
 
 
 Further, the company claimed to have around 70 patents combined (secured and in progress) for its AI-based intelligent matching of customer data and profiles. The platform claimed its AI system has been trained on 1.1 billion sales activities and over USD 239 billion in closed deals. The company planned to deploy its platform outside of the sales realm and into verticals such as real estate, financial services, and recruitment, which already account for a small share of use cases.
 
 
 In October 2020, the company acquired ClosePlan, a sales intelligence app, to further strengthen its AI sales solution. ClosePlan offers sales playbooks, deal scoring, and account planning solutions. 
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 In July 2022, the company 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11924">
 partnered with integrated solution provider Oracle,
 </a>
 to use AI-powered sales automation tool &quot;Oracle Fusion Sales&quot; to support its sales process.
 
 
 Funding and financials 
 
 
 People.ai raised USD 100 million in a Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of USD 1.1 billion in August 2021. The round was co-led by new investors Akkadian Ventures and Mubadala Capital. The fresh funds are expected to be allocated to product development through investments in its SmartData platform, and to expand into new industry segments and geographies. The company also revealed that its customer base grew 260% over the 12 months preceding the funding, likely leading to its unicorn valuation. 
 
</div>

People.ai

<div>
 
 Revenue.io (formerly RingDNA) is a sales intelligence platform that offers sales playbooks, multichannel outreach, performance insights, and customer relationship management (CRM) integrations. In addition, the platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to transform conversational data between customers and sales reps into actionable insights on sales rep performance which can be used in building buyer profiles. Revenue.io’s AI-based guided selling features integrate with its sales playbook to create a list of priority leads and then recommends the best way to reach out to a potential buyer.  
 
 
 Revenue.io released its conversation AI solution in November 2019 based on data from more than 130 million sales conversations. This allowed the platform to add sales coaching features to its platform.
 
 
 Guided selling capabilities were introduced in September 2020 and made accessible through its Salesforce CRM integration.
 
 
 The company’s most recent funding round was an October 2018 Series B for USD 30 million led by Goldman Sachs. The funds were allocated for product development and recruitment. Revenue.io’s customers include Hewlett Packard, Amazon Web Services, Autodesk, SAP Concur, Lyft, and Twilio.
 
</div>

Revenue.io

<div>
 
 Apollo.io (formerly known as ZenProspect) is a sales intelligence and sales workflow automation platform which offers an end-to-end offering featuring a native lead database with over 200 million contacts from over 25 million companies. The platform offers prospect routing,&nbsp; leads scoring, multi-channel campaigns, and analytics capabilities. As of March 2022, Apollo.io had over 1 million total users and around 16,000 paying customers consisting of startups as well as&nbsp; Fortune 500 companies including WeWork, Peloton, and Colliers.
 
 
 Funding and financials 
 
 
 In August 2023, the 
 company
 raised 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/21434">
 USD 100 million in a Series D funding
 </a>
 round led by Bain Capital Ventures, bringing the company&rsquo;s post-money valuation to USD 1.6 billion. The funds were expected to drive platform development and workforce expansion, with a goal to double employee count by 2025. It also reported a revenue growth of 9x over the last two years. 
 The company was also a part of the Y Combinator (YC) Winter 2016 batch. Apollo.io generated USD 1 million in annual recurring revenue at YC and was profitable immediately. 
 
</div>

Apollo.io

All in one platform which offers a variety of tools for sales collaboration and for optimizing the entire sales process.

Tools for recording & analyzing live sales calls over voice & video.

Tools used for automating routine sales functions to improve the efficiency of sales teams.

Tools for preparing & automating sales campaigns via email, SMS & other channels.

Tools for discovering & building customer and company databases to generate sales leads.

Tools for discovering & analyzing customer interactions for improving customer success.

Tools for preparing sales content & coaching sales teams to improve performance.

Tools used to continuously  improve the product experience by understanding customer pain points.

Sales engagement platforms use personalization to enhance the effectiveness of sales outreach

AI/ML solutions automate and streamline sales processes by providing insights

Sales workflow automation platforms provide solutions for distributed sales teams

Aktana

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