1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kara Weber of Brilliant Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What do you like to invest in?

Kara Weber: We invest in companies transforming the future of commerce. Those companies need to be led by brilliant and diverse leadership teams. When we say transforming the future of commerce, we’re not only talking about brands and consumer products, although we have invested in several. We also invest in companies who are driving the future of commerce from behind the scenes.

A great example would be Happy Returns which is a company that offers services around the entire stack for commerce. Their customers include Everlane and Parachute and other well-known consumer brands who have happily handed off their responsibility for managing returns. They’re not a consumer-facing business, but they are driving commerce.

Sramana Mitra: It’s the e-commerce value chain basically.

Kara Weber: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: B2B and B2C.

Kara Weber: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Geography?

Kara Weber: We focus primarily in New York and Los Angeles. We’re split 50/50 between New York and LA. We’ve made two outlier investments. One in Seattle and one in the Bay Area.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a bit about your companies. Pick whichever ones you think are highlights and double-click down on them. Tell us what they do. Why did you choose to invest in them? At what stage did you get involved?

Kara Weber: Absolutely. I will drill down on a couple that I’m particularly proud of for specific reasons that highlight the relationships that we develop with entrepreneurs. One is a company called CameraIQ. They are a camera media platform. It’s a B2B platform for brands, marketers, agencies, and publishers who want to leverage AR for connecting more powerfully with their loyal customers or their followers.

They work with brands from many of the major professional sports league to Refinery29 and even Turner Broadcasting. They have leveraged CameraIQ to bring camera media and AR execution. The reason why I’m especially proud of that one is that I found the founder and her co-founders long before they had raised a penny. Alisson was this voice in the wilderness singing the praises and talking about the future of AR. People were spending less and less time in front of all these other screens in favor of the screen we all spend the most time staring at, which is our phone. The camera built into the phone is really the future of media. Nobody heard her. Nobody believed her.

Everyone thought she was crazy, but I, as a former marketer, really understood that if she was able to bring this new platform to life for marketers, they would go crazy about it. They’re always looking for new and most up-to-date ways to connect with their consumers. That was one that I feel incredibly proud of. Brilliant Ventures was the first institutional investor to commit to investing in CameraIQ. Their investor list is now a who’s who. Shasta Ventures led it. Home Brew is an investor.

Sramana Mitra: What do they do?

Kara Weber: It’s a B2B platform for marketers, brands, agencies, and publishers to leverage AR.

Sramana Mitra: Give me a use case.

Kara Weber: One of their earlier customers was a popular subscription box. They did a deal where they could launch the app with CameraIQ’s technology built into it. They can hold their camera over their subscription box bringing each item in the box to life with a full description, media, and links. They are able to connect their customers not only with the product in the box but also the brand behind that product via AR.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kara Weber of Brilliant Ventures
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