Companies we work for

Stage 1 Ventures works hard for companies that we partner with - our funding model demands it. We wouldn’t want it any other way - when Partner, Portfolio companies and Limited Partner objectives are aligned, great things happen.

Read on to learn about our current market targets and portfolio companies, or visit our track record detailing companies we’ve had the honor of working with throughout the years.

What we’re looking for

Stage 1 Ventures focuses on the following industry sectors:

Mobile Industry

With over two billion mobile subscribers globally (1/3 of the worlds population) and 850+ million new handsets being deployed annually, the mobile phone has quickly become the third screen in our lives. We are particularly interested in capital efficient projects that have the ability to achieve hyper-growth, sometimes in partnership with tier-1 wireless carriers, other times standalone. These efforts focus on dramatically increase revenue per user and reduce customer churn via cutting edge content, applications, or infrastructure to deliver new data services. Key mobile sub-sectors for Stage 1 Ventures include:

• Search and advertising
• Consumer entertainment, including games, music, and video
• Content management and distribution
• Communication, including video sharing, SMS, MMS, and social networking
• Enterprise and consumer applications
• Productivity enhancement
• Infrastructure to support all of the above

Portfolio members include:

	Paydiant offers banks, retailers, and processors a white-label contactless mobile wallet, mobile payment and cash access platform that works with pre-existing debit, credit and prepaid payment instruments.
	Marxent offers market-leading expertise in the latest Mobile Augmented Reality technologies backed by over 50 years of combined marketing and software development experience.
	PhantomAlert empowers GPS and smartphone-equipped motorists with the infomation and tools to avoid traffic tickets.
	AdelaVoice blends the power of your voice with state-of-the-art recognition technologies to create a new, innovative and interactive relationship between you and your mobile device.
	Based on its patented technology, OnePIN provides secure, permission-based solutions to help people manage and maintain relationships across networks and devices.
	Skyhook Wireless provides a software-only positioning system that leverages a nationwide database of known Wi-Fi access points to calculate the precise location of any Wi-Fi enabled device.

Consumer/Business Cloud

Forget Web 2.0. SaaS is a start. While current Web communications are conducted via the exchange of pages, the new software model will use distributed executables. Think peer to peer with a purpose. Now, intelligence is at both ends - resulting in a personalized, high-IQ, interactive, valuable conversation.

Portfolio members include:

	xPeerient is a SaaS B2B Social Commerce platform that leverages members’ shared experiences to create a radically new enterprise IT procurement process.
	Veloxum provides a platform that makes applications and IT infrastructures self optimizing.
	Innerpass helps companies control their business critical files from anywhere and anytime.
	Carbonite was founded in 2005 in order to provide Internet-based Backup for Everyone™.
	Nimbit is a company that is changing the face of the music industry by providing state-of-the-art management solutions to the independent music industry.
	Myxer is the leader in ad-supported mobile content.
	Zapoint is re-defining the on-line recruitment world and how we use professional networking.
	Interactive Television solutions - currently in stealth mode.
	Magnify.net is a video publishing platform that makes it easy for end users to integrate user-generated video into your website or create a video channel from scratch.
	Carvoyant provides drivers a trusted health record for their car and creating the largest automotive service history dataset in the industry.
	Parelastic brings the flexibility of cloud architectures to all dimensions of your database layer. ParElastic operates on one simple principle; database architecture should be flexible, scalable and cost effective without sacrificing one workload for the optimization of another.
	Newburyport Brewing Company is dedicated to producing a wide range of high quality craft beer to local and regional markets in the Massachusetts area.
	PureCars is a leading automotive research company that answers the top concerns of used car shoppers.
	Deep offers an innovative general purpose database that brings unprecedented scale, simplicity and speed to data-driven decision making at large organizations.

Pay For Performance Marketing / Advertising

Back to the Future. Ten years ago, it was the internet that threw the telecom, media and marketing worlds into chaos. This time, it will be the mobile phone. Mobile media - be it sponsored ringtones, song downloads, promotional music videos - all require new marketing approaches to display, track and monetize the increasing demand.

Change is not limited to the mobile platform alone. Today, 20% of all media consumption is occurring on the web, yet only 4.5% of advertising dollars have migrated to the Internet thus far.  With $65B in traditional Madison Avenue advertising dollars finding their way into new media delivery mechanisms, one could certainly project that there will be a land grab going on in pay-for-performance marketing industry.

Portfolio members include:

	Maple Farm Media promotes "Digital Media for Main Street" by helping businesses target locally using digital media to find and grow their customer base.
	Wing Power Energy Inc is an early stage company that develops small vertical wind turbines - a market projected to grow 10 fold by 2015 in the US market alone.
	inStream Media provides innovative solutions to retailers and brands through targeted advertising and promotions at the point-of-sale in retail locations.
	OwnerIQ creates new opportunities for advertisers by providing self-support information for common consumer products.
	Myxer is the leader in ad-supported mobile content.

Security Portfolio

Ubiquitous Internet connectivity has a dark side. Hackers and thieves have broken into the computer defenses of countless companies, putting millions of Americans’ personal data at risk. Disclosure of such events have become mainstream, thanks in part to state legislation requiring public admission of privacy breaches.

End users are also targets - be it spyware, adware and phishing schemes, privacy is constantly under attack. Gartner predicts that the security market is currently an 8B industry, which will only get larger as vendors continue to expand protection from such attacks.

Portfolio members include:

	Delfigo Security offers a risk based, multi-factor, identity management solution that enables compliance with regulatory mandates at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.
	DropFire is a leading software development company dedicated to the interoperability of public safety data across agencies and networks.

Track Record

View our track record detailing companies we’ve had the honor of working with throughout the years.