Let’s start here…
As our name implies, we assist companies in the early stages of their life cycle providing both consulting services and capital. Our principals have a long track record of successfully investing in digital media and related industries, generating impressive returns for ourselves and for our partners.
Here’s a list of who we’re currently working with…
AirKast, Inc.
AirKast, Inc. is the leader in mobile services and technology that blends best practices in strategy, development and technology. Its AirBridge platform delivers innovative and profitable mobile programs for the best media companies in the world. AirKast customers include ESPN, Disney, DIRECTV, Universal Music, Interactive One, Salem Communications, Bonneville International, Alpha Broadcasting, Citadel Broadcasting and NextMedia. AirKast is headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley with an office strategically located in New York City.
BETASPRING FUND I, LLC
Betaspring is a mentorship-driven Providence-based startup accelerator program for technology and design entrepreneurs who are ready to build a product, launch a company, and change the world.
Betaspring takes teams with ideas and turns them into functional, fundable companies. We recruit 8-12 teams of 2-4 entrepreneurs who have a concept or an early prototype for a high-growth startup. The teams go through a competitive application process and agree to locate themselves in Providence at Betaspring HQ for the 12 week program.
Over twelve weeks, the startup teams build and refine their prototype product, launch it to an initial group of customers for feedback, and test their delivery and/or business models. During the last two weeks, through diligent practice with Betaspring Mentors and internal audiences each startup creates a polished company pitch and demo to present to seed investors and potential partners at a demo event in Week Twelve.
The Betaspring fund owns 6% of each of the 60 companies that have graduated from the 2010-2013 programs. Some of these companies include; Manpacks, SensibleSelf, Tracelytics, Jobzle, Periscape, DataBraid, NuLabel, Crowdsurf, Momba, TennisHub, Splitwise, Tweetwall, MoveableCode, and Ape Systems.
Closely brings local merchant marketing tools together in one platform.
Closely has just launched Perch 2.0 which brings reviews, social posts and promotions for you and your competition, all in one place. A significant change in this new version is the new Home screen where activity of all watched businesses is shown in a live stream. Popular posts are highlighted, so it’s really easy to understand which activity is most popular with consumers.
CMP.LY
CMP.LY’s patent-pending system of iconic compliance tools is the first, and only, commercial solution to address the unique challenges of disclosure in social media. CMP.LY codes and badges provide clear disclosure on their own and also link back to complete disclosures as required for regulatory needs and documented best practices. CMP.LY makes it easy for marketers to include the disclosures required by the FTC and the OFT in sponsored blog posts, Facebook updates, and even Tweets. The company is developing similar tools to allow companies to comply with FDA, SEC/FINRA and other regulations. The company also provides tools to document and report on compliance and measure campaign-specific ROI.
Draft Kings
Boston start-up DraftKings completed a Series B financing at the end of 2013 raising $24 Million. Angel Street participated in this round as the Company seeks to dramatically improve the experience of playing online fantasy sports. Read more about the financing of Draft Kings, here.
The company offers daily fantasy sports games (as opposed to season-long commitments), on-demand draft, daily payouts and on-site transactions — “stripping away the most time intensive and and obstructive elements of conventional games” and “distilling the game to players’ favorite aspects of fantasy sports,”
Founded in 2011 by former Vistaprint managers Jason Robins, Matt Kalish and Paul Liberman, the site has seen player volume that has “exceeded expectations” so far for its first sport, major league fantasy baseball.
flexReceipts, the leading enhanced digital receipts solution, offers retailers a post-sale opportunity to communicate with their customers. flexReceipt’s enriched receipts build customer loyalty and drive sales, while allowing retailers to monitor spending habits and shopping trends. The company’s patent-pending software allows retailers to add social media links, videos and customized offers to digital receipts. Go Beyond the Sale!
GNAX – GLOBAL NET ACCESS
Global Net Access (GNAX) operates two world-class data centers, AtlantaNAP and DallasNAP, offering mission-critical data center colocation and cloud services. GNAX provides superior technology solutions to a variety of organizations and industries worldwide.
Privately held with headquarters in Atlanta, GA, GNAX was founded in 1999 and has retained net income profitability since 2003.
Go Local
GoLocal24 is creating the next model for local digital news and information.
By providing high value local content, GoLocal24 is creating a highly efficient, scalable and highly monetizable mid-sized market model for next generation media.
In GoLocal24’s first market Providence, RI, GoLocalProv.com is the ‘go to” local Web experience that breaks the biggest local stories – sports, high school sports – GAME ON, weathers, news, politics, arts, entertainment – and it allows users to go as deep as they wish. Launched in 2010 the the site reaches over 800,000 unique monthly visitors with over 7.5 Million pages views. A second market, Worcester, MA (www.golocalworcester.com) was added in 2012. The company announced in January 2013 its expansion to Portland, OR. Read story here.
Leveraging branded, credible, and respected contributors, GoLocal creates the content, social experience and advertising opportunity that is unmatched. Information is delivered through multimedia, written, and video platforms and, thus GoLocal24 is creating the model for local-content media.
LocusPlay, Inc.
LocusPlay provides a mobile platform for lotteries in developing countries. Typically mobile infrastructure is the one system that has been robustly built out. Locus Play’s system can be utilized on any type phones even those that are not smartphones. Many national lotteries are still using paper. Terminal systems common in the U.S. are too expensive to install and maintain. LocusPlay puts lotteries on line and lottery revenues can be accurately reported.
MoFuse
MoFuse is the global leader in Mobile Content Management, making it affordable and easy for any business to build and manage a mobile website. MoFuse provides a web-based platform that optimizes sites for every smart phone and feature phone around the world.
MoFuse, short for Mobile Fusion, gives the SMB business owner an easy and affordable path to connect with their growing mobile audience. The MoFuse hosted mobile site solution offers many options for powering up mobile site including search, mobile commerce, click-to-call leads, mobile advertisements, and forms for mobile data capture. Mofuse keeps it easy with a simple monthly subscription fee to access to the MoFuse platform for building, editing, and receiving analytics on their mobile audience.
Host to thousands of mobile sites for businesses, advertisers, and nonprofits, MoFuse provides a cost effective solution for businesses to establish pathways to new revenue and customer relationships in the mobile channel. MoFuse customers include The State Department, Harper Collins, IBM, The Economist and thousands of SMB organizations around the world.
Placester
Placester is an Ad Network for the real estate industry. Our platform provides value to both advertisers and publishers by enabling the ordering, serving, and fulfillment of ads in the real estate vertical.
For advertisers, our platform serves as a hub to plan, purchase, and monitor advertising across multiple vertical-specific and traditional publishers offering increased ROI through access and analytics. For publishers our platform is a complete solution for order management and scheduling as well as ad serving. Our technology allows publishers to reduce operation costs while improving pricing through data and access.
Placester cares deeply about improving the real estate industry through the use of innovative technology. Our tools and software make advertising real estate simple, transparent and efficient.
Sharetown
Sharetown is a platform and a marketplace that allows simple, convenient, and social ways for individuals in local communities to connect and safely sell, rent, or share goods and services with family, friends, and neighbors.
Sharetown is revolutionizing the local face to face transaction by empowering individuals in local communities to leverage their underutilized assets and helping them make and save money. Traditional classified like platforms and marketplaces are not solving many of the current trust issues and social engagement problems and opportunities their users have today.
Sharetown solves these problems by providing a trusted and socially engaging experience, in essence becoming the evolution of the traditional classified model and enabling true peer to peer collaborative consumption.
Sharetown also provides opportunities for local media companies and other locally focused brands to partner, license the platform, and provide this experience to their end consumers while also providing a unique “non-advertising” revenue opportunity they are not touching today.
Two Bolt
Two Bolt provides digital marketing strategy and execution building strategic plans that get a client’s customers to respond and buy more. The results Mercury achieves are consistently above industry averages because:
- Work collaboratively with you to craft the right strategy and identify realistic goals
- Have a proven process that has been fine tuned over six decades
- Manage the execution of every project to ensure quality
- Use data in creative and innovative ways to generate better results
Two Bolt selects the right mix of tools and techniques to meet the needs of the project. We have no bias toward one method or another – each program is carefully designed to achieve results. Some of the tools and techniques we employ include:
- SMS
- Personalized URLs
- Social Media
- Surveys
Voltserver, Inc.
VoltServer has commercialized a radically new approach to electrical power distribution called Packet Energy Transfer (PET). Diverging from the way electricity has been managed and distributed since the days of Tesla and Edison, PET “digitizes” electrical energy into millions of discrete packets that contain both energy and data. In PET format, high voltage is actually safe to touch, and power can be transmitted more efficiently and safely on cables that previously only allowed low voltage, low power transmission. The company’s initial focus is the powering of small cell base stations as an enabling solution to the mobile data crunch. Future applications are diverse; and include the powering of data centers, buildings and electric transportation.
Exits
Our successes?
Here’s an overview of companies that we have helped launch into acquisitions by other companies.
ACCURADIO
AccuRadio is a multichannel Internet radio station specifically designed to showcase the potential of the exciting new medium of Internet radio! AccuRadio is also the first multichannel Internet radio station designed specifically for adults with sophisticated musical tastes.
AccuRadio currently reaches over 400,000 unique listeners per month (and up to 1,000,000 unique listeners per month during the Christmas season) with an audience of as many 14,000 simultaneous listeners on weekdays during business hours (Internet radio’s “prime time”).
DijiPop was sold to OwnerIQ in 2012. Read about it, here.
DiJiPOP optimizes and monetizes digital shopper marketing for retailers and brands. The company provides a merchandising marketplace solution that creates, targets, and sells digital shelf space in order to convert and monetize shoppers. Their approach is two-fold: One, a proprietary automation platform that manages, sells, and dynamically serves targeted and relevant product marketing for both retailer and brand. And, two, first-class ad representation that will establish and ensure success of paid digital shopper marketing programs.
Fundation, Inc.
Angel Street sold its interest in Fundation to the LeoGroup
Fundation provides on line small business loans. The company plans on transforming the small business lending market by utilizing technology and advanced data aggregation techniques to augment older lending models and eventually replace them. The borrowing experience involves credit decisions in minutes with competitive pricing and an application process designed to educate the applicant. Loans range from $50,000 – $250,000.
iWeb
iWeb was acquire by Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP). Complete details, here.
iWeb has been providing hosting infrastructure with is shared web hosting, dedicated servers, managed hosting and colocation services for over a decade.
Founded by Martin Leclair and Eric Chouinard in October 1996 and headquartered in Montreal since 1998, the company has enjoyed steady growth since its inception, currently employing more that 170 hosting specialists and operating four data centers in the Montreal, Canada area. Today iWeb is one of the largest web hosts and Internet hosting infrastructure providers in Canada.
Livio Radio
Livio was sold in 2013 to a division of Ford. Read more about it, here.
Livio Radio, a Detroit-based team of auto infotainment and digital audio veterans, has established relationships with key content providers, automotive companies and retail players and has a validated, scalable business model that addresses a large, global market. Specifically, with the car being the final frontier of the rapidly growing internet radio market, Livio Radio has developed a suite of hardware products & middleware/software solutions that enables full in-car audio experience via smartphone for nearly any car – new or old.
On The Spot Systems
On the Spot Systems was acquired in 2013 by Press Ganey. Full details of the transaction, here.
On The Spot Systems was founded in 2009 by Ken Kimmel and Geoff Palmer outside of Boston. Angel Street Capital made an early investment in On The Spot Systems, a company that develops mobile systems to enable businesses to gather customer insights, service feedback, and achieve field data collection needs wherever and whenever it is required.
On The Spot Systems’ platform, Survey On The Spot® enables service focused organizations to capture in-the-moment customer and employee feedback cost effectively. Utilizing iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and smartphone technology, our surveys provide on-site insights including photos and text commentary. The system also features service alerts, digital coupons and rewards, and automated data reporting via the web.
Business owners frequently receive inadequate customer feedback, and most feedback is received weeks after the customer was served. This means that traditional paper surveys provide very little use to managers, and also don’t help managers immediately improve customer service or fix problems that may be happening that day. With Survey On The Spot, managers learn how well they are serving customers and also receive instant alerts if a customer has had an unfavorable experience. Managers can also gain far more comprehensive on-site insights® from customers while they are on the spot, as well as increase opt-in subscribers to mailing lists to build a stronger relationship with customers.