Portfolio Spotlight: Auxa Health

We’re thrilled to share our newest investment in Auxa Health, which announced its $5.2 million seed financing round today. We are excited to co-invest alongside lead investor Zeal Capital, AlleyCorp, K50 Ventures (thank you, Adriel, for the connection!), and Chaac Ventures.

Auxa Health is an AI-powered health benefit navigation technology solution partnering with payers and providers to enable more efficient and effective care. Auxa supports value based care providers and enablement organizations and expects rapid growth in the provider and payer space this next year. With this new funding, Auxa can further develop its technology, expand benefit coverage, and grow the team. You can read Auxa’s announcement full announcement here.

As investors, we constantly harp on how important strong founders are to any company, particularly at the seed stage. This team is no exception. Auxa is co-founded by three experts with deep domain expertise and alignment with the mission of improvement health outcomes and the patient experience:

• Monica Chopra, Co-founder and CEO, is a seasoned healthcare leader with 24+ years of experience at Oscar, athenahealth, Greater New York Hospital Association, and New York Presbyterian Hospital

• Samantha Adelberg, Co-founder and SVP of Operations, brings over decade of operations expertise through Unite Us, NYC Opportunity, and others

• Dr. Jeffrey De Flavio, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, is a physician an entrepreneur, with an intensive track record including as Co-Founder of Pearl Health, Groups Recover Together, Diana Health, and more

Benefit navigation is an acute problem, with nearly $100 billion in health and social care benefits remaining unused each year despite 70% of Americans reporting at least one unmet need. Auxa addresses this head-on by offering an end-to-end solution that demystifies benefit and drug coverage details, surfaces eligibility and prior authorization requirements, and efficiently enrolls patients into high-value public benefits. 

Our investment in Auxa is a continuation of our focus on sub-sectors of healthtech such as value-based care and the caretaker economy, with our existing investments including Yuvo Health and Tender. We understand the urgent need for solutions that increase accessibility to care in equitable ways, and we are excited to support the teams driving these developments forward.

For now, please join us in congratulating the Auxa team on this milestone, and visit www.auxahealth.com to explore opportunities to partner with Auxa and discover how you can join their dynamic and growing team.

Portfolio Spotlight: ExecVision

We are excited to announce the acquisition of Laconia’s portfolio company, ExecVision, by Mediafly, the first complete revenue enablement and revenue intelligence platform. 

ExecVision is a conversation intelligence (CI) provider that is laser-focused on helping every organization’s most important asset — their people — outperform. As the latest addition to Mediafly’s modular Revenue360 Suite, ExecVision bolsters the company’s offerings in sales enablement, interactive content management, buyer engagement solutions, value selling tools, AI-powered forecasting and interactive analytics. Together, the two companies provide a complete solution for selling more effectively than ever before and closing “the last mile in rep development”.

When we first met the ExecVision team in early 2017, they immediately impressed us not only with their pioneering vision of what digitally enabled “conversation intelligence” could and would be; they also understood sales management and the necessity of integrating a coaching component to their platform. This key ExecVision differentiator helps their clients drive sales. 

The team also simply has the passion, commitment, and good character that has made us proud to be part of their journey. We are very excited about the future of the ExecVision/MediaFly combination.

We couldn’t be more proud of David, Steve, Reuben, and the ExecVision team. Congratulations to you all!

You can read more about the acquisition here.

Portfolio Spotlight: Wavy

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve led a $2.5M round in Wavy alongside Garage Capital, Two Small Fish Ventures, Archangel, Backbone Angels, and others. 

Wavy empowers people leaders to plan flexible events, collaborate across teams, gain visibility on spend and engagement, and measure the impact of their culture and team building initiatives. The company will use the funding to fuel the ongoing development of its culture platform, grow its global team of Wavers, expand its marketplace of experience creators, and engage one million employees across its customer base.

I first met Shawn in February 2021 through Alwar Pillai (thank you, Alwar! 🙏). After pivoting the business because of COVID, the company discovered an untapped opportunity in helping companies build better culture with remote/hybrid teams. A few months later, Wavy’s momentum and acceleration were even clearer, and we began discussing what a seed round would look like.

Fast forward to today, and Wavy has earned the trust of hundreds of companies for much more than planning team-building events. We all know there is more to work life than virtual happy hours, and Wavy is providing the blueprint for a better way.

Whether you’re looking for an experience as unique as your team or a platform that enables you to build culture with your people, not for them, the Wavy team is here to help 🌊

You can read more about the round from the Wavy team and Betakit.

Portfolio Spotlight: Paloma

We couldn’t be more excited to announce our newest investment: Paloma!

Paloma powers commerce on messaging channels, helping brands get >2x higher conversion rates with automated conversational shopping.

When I first met Paloma’s founder & CEO, Kelsey Hunter, I put all my cards on the table: “We’ve struggled with the e-commerce messaging space in the past because it is so crowded and the incumbent platforms have tremendous market leverage. I’m also the farthest person from Paloma’s end user -- I hate social media, and I do not shop. As someone who lives under a rock, I am not sure that I will get this, but I’d love to understand what I’m missing.”

If you’ve ever had the joy of meeting Kelsey, you can probably guess exactly how this meeting went. After roasting me just the right amount for my luddite ways, Kelsey blew me away with her expertise in the e-commerce messaging experience, her perspective of the market landscape and limitations of existing e-commerce infrastructure platforms and messaging tools, and her insights into the still nascent but burgeoning market of messaging-first -- and in some cases, messaging-only -- commerce. 

Over the course of our next few meetings, it became abundantly clear that Kelsey, her co-founder/CTO Zach Podbela, and their team are onto something special. With customers like Joybird, ThirdLove and M.Gemi seeing 2-10x increases in conversion rates and a unique product suite, they have set the foundation for a category-defining platform. 

Earlier this week, Paloma presented at Facebook’s F8 conference and launched the first version of IG DMs, with Paloma’s Instagram Sales Inbox. With the tailwinds of social commerce, we are thrilled to partner with Paloma as they empower not just leading brands but also the long-tail of indie merchants selling one-of-a-kind products in one-on-one exchanges.

If you run an e-commerce business searching for tooling to build your messaging storefront, sign up for a demo here. On that note, I’m off to try this online shopping thing ...

Legacy Portfolio Spotlight: TripleLift

Yesterday, we had the great fortune to announce TripleLift’s $1.4B majority acquisition by Vista Equity Partners. As I read through the excited messages on my subway ride home, I couldn’t help but think about the pride and joy that the TripleLift team must be feeling.

In many ways, TripleLift symbolizes the best of venture capital’s potential. We were blessed to invest in Eric Berry, Ari Lewine,  and Shaun Zacharia as they were coming out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA). From the very first pitch, their vision was clear: “The web is going visual.” Pinterest was beginning to gain traction, and they could see where the puck was going three moves out. 

Though they encountered some hurdles along the way, they never lost focus on their belief in the visualization of the Web. Laconia’s thesis today grew out of our legacy investment in Triplelift, but more so in Eric, Ari, and Shaun.

With each of our investments, we focus on three key pillars: operational execution, sales acceleration, and capital strategy. TripleLift nailed all three.

When it comes to operational execution, they ensured nothing was overlooked. Each investor update not only included the traditional boxes that needed to be checked, but also emphasized corporate culture and employee wellness, which we found forward-thinking. We were also impressed with how they continued to upgrade their team as the business evolved, balancing loyalty to the person and responsibility to the company. 

On the sales acceleration front, there was a period in the company's lifecycle when they saw the future of ad distribution becoming more programmatic. Those early partnerships accelerated their growth at a time when programmatic ad buying was also in its infancy. 

But what truly separates TripleLift from the rest of the pack is their capital strategy. They checked their ego at the door and based their success on their growth instead of valuation, building a market leader on less than $20 million of total capital raised. On numerous occasions over the past 9 years, I am sure they’ve had numerous options to exit, and the strong foundation of their business enabled them to stay on course toward their long-term vision. 

To our co-investors (True Ventures, Edison Partners, NextView Ventures, Inovia Capital, ERA and all the others): thank you for your partnership over these past nine years. And, most importantly, to Eric, Ari, Shaun, and the other team members we’ve had the pleasure of getting to know: thank you for your trust, and congratulations on your remarkable achievement. 

We are proud to remain investors in TripleLift and look forward to having Vista Equity as part of the team. The journey does not end, and one could say it is only the beginning.