Project Cohort raises $1.8M

Project Cohort, a personal promotions platform, today announced that it has finalized a $1.8 million Series Seed investment. The oversubscribed round was led by Wildcat Venture Partners, with participation by Correlation Ventures, Thomvest Ventures and several angel investors. The company will use the funding to accelerate product development and invest in initial marketing efforts.

As a personal promotions platform, Project Cohort is creating a new category of consumer-oriented experience at the confluence of social and marketing. Now that social networking is ubiquitous, it’s crucial to empower people with the ability to extend their reach beyond those with whom they have already connected.

In just a few seconds, individuals, organizations, or business owners can use the Project Cohort app to communicate with any group of people they want to reach, such as a neighborhood, workplace, home town, or graduates from a particular school. These visually engaging and customizable messages appear across the web, apps, and social media as a welcome reprieve from traditional ads, all for just a few dollars.

“By democratizing sponsored messaging, Project Cohort empowers regular people to increase their influence and impact far beyond existing apps”, explained co-founder Mark Prior, adding “The average person has access to less than 1000 online people through their existing networks. We help them connect with the other 1.99 billion.”

“We are eager to empower non-professionals with potent marketing tools.” observed Wildcat’s Bill Ericson. “It’s time for sponsored messaging to be made broadly available so people can promote their own personal passions”.

“We are excited about the elegant convergence of advertising technology and social networking”, added Don Butler, Managing Director at Thomvest Ventures.

“If everyone is a brand in the new digital world”, offered Trevor Kienzle, Managing Director at Correlation Ventures, “then everyone can benefit from an easy-to-use and powerful marketing tool.”

Product development will be led by co-founder Raja Periasamy, an early technical pioneer in programmatic marketing. Industry veteran and Rocket Fuel (Nasdaq: FUEL) founder, Richard Frankel has signed up as an advisor and independent board director.

Project Cohort is currently available for alpha testing through the Apple App Store, allowing early evangelists to proactively spread the word about their favorite issues with audiences in their neighborhood and around the world. More information is available at http://www.yourcohort.com/.

About Wildcat Venture Partners

Wildcat Venture Partners is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies leveraging key technologies such as: artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR), highly scalable data infrastructure, machine learning (ML), and the internet of things (IoT). We are specifically interested in teams that are applying these technologies in the following markets: consumer, digital health, edtech, enterprise, fintech, marketing technology, and marketplaces. The Wildcat team brings decades of entrepreneurial experience, venture experience, and deep domain expertise to effectively navigate early-stage companies through the Traction Gap. For more information, visit wildcat.vc.

About Correlation Ventures

Correlation Ventures, a venture capital fund with more than $350M under management, leverages world-class analytics to offer entrepreneurs and other venture capitalists a dramatically better option when they are seeking additional co-investment capital to complete a financing round. The firm makes investment decisions in two weeks or less and offers reliability and transparency about reserves and its intentions to follow in future financings. Correlation Ventures invests across all industry segments, U.S. geographies and investment stages – from seed through late stage. Correlation Ventures has offices in the Bay Area, San Diego and NYC. For more information, visit http://www.correlationvc.com and http://twitter.com/correlationvc.

About Thomvest Ventures

Thomvest is a multi-stage venture capital firm with over $250 million under management. We focus on opportunities in Silicon Valley with early stage B2B startups in the fields of advertising technology, financial technology, and security. The capital we invest is our own, enabling us to be more creative, flexible and patient with entrepreneurs. We’ve funded over 50 companies over the last decade and more than two-thirds have either gone public, been acquired, or continue to grow as independent businesses. As a small team, we function like a lean startup and count on each team member to contribute beyond his/her defined responsibilities.

Read the original post here.