Podcasting is exploding, and everyone knows it. But there’s just one problem: podcasters are dramatically under-monetizing the incredible amount of time spent listening. Amira Valliani is on a mission to enable podcasters to build businesses with Glow. Amira brought her extensive background in the podcast ecosystem to partner with PSL, who was experimenting with direct monetization in podcasting on the Acquired podcast. PSL worked with Amira to build the initial product, onboard early customers, and bring on her co-founder Brian Elieson, who has shipped some of the world’s most popular voice and media products at Microsoft and Amazon.
Allison Harr is making haircare simple through science with Gemma Labs. PSL had been working on the idea of a direct-to-consumer haircare business but had little expertise in the area. Allison came with years of consumer packaged goods experience, and a strong vision for how haircare could be an easy, friendly, and personalized subscription. Together with the design, engineering, and supply chain teams at PSL, Allison and her start-up crew are launching Gemma to the world.
Sentinel Healthcare is the first comprehensive remote management solution for hypertension. Led by Dr. Nirav Shah, former stroke director of Swedish Neuroscience Institute, Sentinel’s approach is unique. The company blends off-the-shelf hardware with proprietary software to create an impressive remote monitoring solution. Sentinel leverages its own medical staff to identify and assess potential concerns in patient data (e.g., blood pressure) and suggest actions for the patient in near real-time. We're deeply proud of the life-saving work that Nirav and the team are doing.
The era of ML-enabled software-as-a-service is upon us. In early 2017, PSL started looking around at different industries where there was tons of data and little modern software in use. Receivables Management turned out to be a perfect overlap. Scott Ferris, Ryan Kosai, and Trip Edwards teamed up with PSL to build Attunely, a sophisticated machine learning system that enables receivables management firms to make smarter decisions, improve outcomes for creditors, lower risk in the credit ecosystem, and expand credit access for borrowers.
Glenn Wisegarver knows the problem of financial account reconciliation far too well. As a career CFO, he has seen the pain and expense that comes from this process. Glenn came to PSL with an idea to make this dramatically faster and easier. PSL’s engineers, data scientists, and product designers brought this vision to life with Glenn. Using machine learning, Sigma IQ now radically transforms this experience, making an otherwise highly manual process magically automated.
Remarkably is a multifamily marketing data, analytics, and insights platform. Before Remarkably, the largest asset class in the world was being managed by sticky notes, spreadsheets, and emails. Co-founders Anna-Lea Dieringer and Erina Malarkey are industry veterans, and partnered with PSL to transform their deep domain expertise into a product and build a team to solve this problem at scale. With Remarkably, the nation’s top property owners, developers, and managers can drive market-beating performance and revenue.
Canotic is using its revolutionary AI technology to help enterprise companies unlock the monetary value of their unstructured data. Founded by Brad Cordova and Henry Setiawan, two machine learning researchers and engineers from MIT, Google Brain, Microsoft Research, and TrueMotion, the company is based in both Seattle and Berlin.
BigBox VR is on a mission is to combine platform-defining games, social communities, and competitive play to create a VR esport ecosystem. It was founded in by Chia Chin Lee and Gabe Brown, serious game industry veterans who led successful exits and launched top-grossing live service products at Valve, Disney, Sony, and Microsoft.
Bobby Figueroa is one of the world’s leading experts about how massive brands can effectively advertise and sell online. Having led global operations for Amazon’s fast-growing advertising platform, where over 50% of online product searches now start, he was perfectly-positioned to start the next great platform company for brands to reach their customers. When PSL met with Bobby about an internal project to develop a next-generation digital marketing company, he told us he was thinking about the same idea. He quickly dove in with the PSL team to develop product direction, bring on early customers, and raise a seed round from PSL’s investor network. He is joined by CTO and co-founder Vikram Oberoi, who was so excited about Gradient’s potential from his experience as VP of Engineering at the successful online grooming brand Harry’s, that he decided to spin out of PSL with the company.
It’s no secret that machine automation is leading to worker displacement. We wanted to play the other side of this automation trend: retraining and redeploying displaced workers into meaningful new jobs. We sought out Chris Hedrick, who was born to tackle the problem. Chris previously founded and led a successful training company and served as CEO of a university in Rwanda. PSL worked with Chris to validate the NextStep concept, design and build a product, and re-introduce Chris to co-founder Charissa Raynor, who had led the largest training program in the US. The company has ambitious plans to build the most inexpensive, high-quality platform to retrain and redeploy the millions who have been automated out of jobs into new healthcare positions.
Scott Schwan and Matt Wells have spent their careers building secure cloud infrastructure at Fortune 500 companies. They collaborated with PSL with a single goal: build a secure and easy-to-use platform to deploy cloud environments so that no company would ever need to do what they had been doing — building from scratch — ever again. Shujinko makes it easy to deploy cloud IT infrastructure that makes audits a breeze and are compliant out of the box.
Pete and Heather Christothoulou are on a mission to re-imagine media by helping Creators inspire their audiences with original, premium video experiences. By partnering with brands, Inspo produces shows with these creators to allow them to focus on what matters to them most -- their content and audience connection. We’re proud to be a part of the
Inspo journey.
Russell Wilson called PSL with a vision: a platform that enables elite athletes, artists, and celebrities to connect more meaningfully with their fans. Using PSL as a launch pad, he and CEO Jason Leekeenan of Hulu and Zulily fame, built upon the foundation of TraceMe and launched Tally, an events predication app that makes live events more fun for fans of all stripes. #gohawks
Esports is a global phenomenon that is still in its infancy as an industry. Led by Jon David, Taunt is building the social competition layer for fans to make watching games more fun and engaging. After two years of esports exploration, PSL built a deep understanding of the space to identify a truly transformative opportunity.
After helping to develop the next generation of physical retail at Amazon, Xiao Wang wanted to tackle an even bigger problem: the U.S. immigration system. Xiao worked with PSL to assemble a dream team to build, validate, and launch Boundless, which today empowers families to navigate the immigration process more confidently, rapidly, and affordably.
Dan Greenshields is no stranger to disrupting the financial services industry. He did it at Sharebuilder, and now, together with PSL, is going after the title insurance space. PSL had been developing a project in this area and reached out to Dan, knowing there was no better entrepreneur in the world to breathe change into a legacy industry.
Scott Moore knows the problem of bad ads as well as anyone. Having led publishing and large teams at Yahoo!, MSN, MSNBC, and Cheezburger, Scott experienced first-hand the very problem that Ad Lightning solves: eliminating bad ads and maximizing revenue.
Robert Schulte may just be the world's greatest expert on the pain of state sales tax. He is a former California State Auditor, and he sold his sales tax company, Taxcient, to Avalara. Robert came to PSL to solve the enormous problem of small business sales tax compliance. Working with PSL's developers, designers, and marketers to build version one of the product, Robert raised a significant venture round in just 3 months.
