FAIRFAX, Va. & BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apr 4, 2019–Custom Ink, the leader in custom apparel for groups, companies, and communities, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement with an investor group led by Great Hill Partners, a leading growth-oriented private equity firm, to recapitalize the company for its next chapter of growth and innovation. Custom Ink’s current management team will continue to lead the company, with Co-founder Marc Katz remaining a major shareholder as well as Chairman & CEO. Custom Ink’s current shareholders, including Revolution Growth and SWaN & Legend Venture Partners, will exit their investments. Financial terms of the private transaction were not disclosed.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190404005121/en/

Founded in 2000, Custom Ink helps people create a sense of belonging and community within their schools, teams, businesses, charities, and other groups through digitally-powered solutions for the design, ordering, production, and delivery of customized apparel and other products. The company’s strong brand, robust platform, and caring and capable team have made it the leader in the custom apparel market with projected 2019 revenues exceeding $400 million. Custom Ink’s core values – The Golden Rule, Ownership and Innovation – and purpose-driven culture have earned it a perennial place on local and national “best places to work” lists and fueled industry-leading customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

“This is a really important milestone for Custom Ink,” said Katz. “It’s a testament to the great work of our team over the past 19 years, and it positions us well for the future. Our early investors were friends, family, and angels who saw the potential in Custom Ink, and more recent investors provided expertise and support to accelerate our growth. Now they are passing the baton to our new partners, who also embrace our values and vision. Great Hill in particular has an outstanding track-record of enhancing ecommerce and direct-to-customer companies that are similarly passionate about marketplace and workplace excellence. I think they’re an ideal partner to help us continue to build out our unique brand, offering, and platform.”

Great Hill Partners has deep experience investing in highly differentiated business models across the consumer, e-commerce, and retail sectors. The firm has a long history of backing native digital and omni-channel brands, such as Wayfair, Bombas, The RealReal, and The Shade Store.

“Custom Ink helped pioneer online customization and has created the industry’s leading end-to-end digitally-powered platform for customized apparel,” said Michael Kumin, a Managing Partner at Great Hill Partners. “This is a terrific brand with outstanding operations in a highly-fragmented category where we see huge growth potential for the company. We’re thrilled to back Marc and the team and are excited to help Custom Ink extend its market leadership, both organically and inorganically.”

Ted Leonsis, co-founder and partner at Revolution Growth, said, “When Revolution first invested in Custom Ink in 2013, we were impressed with how the company was using technology, combined with a passion for service, to revolutionize the custom apparel category and bring people together. We saw power in Custom Ink’s community-driven growth model, and this has proven to be a very successful investment. We’re proud of our role at Custom Ink and think Great Hill will be an excellent partner for the company’s next stage.”

Fred Schaufeld, SWaN co-founder and partner and longtime Custom Ink adviser, will remain an investor and board member in a personal capacity. Said Schaufeld, “Custom Ink is a wonderful story of creativity, determination, and striving to do the right thing. This was an excellent outcome for SWaN, and I couldn’t be more excited for Marc and the team. It’s a great company that will continue to do great things.”

The transaction is expected to close in May. Investing alongside Great Hill is HarbourVest Partners, a global private markets asset manager. GSO Capital Partners is providing committed debt financing as well as an equity investment in connection with the transaction. Guggenheim Securities LLC and DLA Piper advised Custom Ink on financial and legal matters, respectively.

About Custom Ink

Custom Ink is the leader in custom apparel and accessories for groups, events, and special occasions. The company helps group organizers bring their families, friends, teammates, and colleagues together with inspired designs they are proud to wear. Custom Ink makes the customization process fun and easy with innovative design tools, caring customer service, creative design inspiration and high-quality merchandise. It also offers Custom Ink Fundraising, a platform to raise money and awareness for charities and personal causes through the sale of custom t-shirts. Its influencer-led custom apparel platform, Represent, helps actors, athletes, musicians, thought leaders, and social media icons create and sell limited-run t-shirts and merchandise to their fans. Custom Ink is based in Fairfax, Virginia with other locations that include Charlottesville, Virginia; Reno, Nevada; Dallas, Texas; and Los Angeles, California.

About Great Hill Partners

Great Hill Partners is a private equity firm that has raised over $5 billion in commitments since inception to finance the expansion, recapitalization, or acquisition of growth companies in a wide range of sectors in business-to-consumer and business-to-business industries including eCommerce, software, financial and healthcare technology, digital media and internet infrastructure. For more information, visit www.greathillpartners.com.

About HarbourVest

HarbourVest is an independent, global private markets asset manager with more than 36 years of experience and more than $58 billion in assets under management. The Firm’s powerful global platform offers clients investment opportunities through primary fund investments, secondary investments, and direct co-investments in commingled funds or separately managed accounts. HarbourVest has more than 500 employees, including more than 100 investment professionals across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. This global team has committed more than $35 billion to newly-formed funds, completed over $19 billion in secondary purchases, and invested over $9 billion directly in operating companies. Partnering with HarbourVest, clients have access to customized solutions, longstanding relationships, actionable insights, and proven results.

View source version on businesswire.com:https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190404005121/en/

CONTACT: For Custom Ink:

Andrew Weinstein

Ridgeback Communications

202-667-4967

aweinstein@customink.com

For Great Hill Partners:

Charlyn Lusk

Stanton Public Relations

646-502-3549

clusk@stantonprm.com

KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA MASSACHUSETTS VIRGINIA

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FINANCE RETAIL FASHION

SOURCE: Great Hill Partners

Copyright Business Wire 2019.

PUB: 04/04/2019 07:00 AM/DISC: 04/04/2019 07:00 AM

By Jim Dallke -February 27, 2019

OCA Ventures, a 20-year-old Chicago-based venture capital firm, is heading west with the opening of an office in Silicon Valley.

OCA announced that it has hired Kevin McQuillan, a longtime venture investor and co-founder of Focus Ventures, to lead the firm’s West Coast operations. McQuillan, a five-time member of Forbes’ “Midas List,” a ranking of the top venture capital investors, previously led investments in startups such as Sensity (acquired by Verizon) and Paydiant (acquired by PayPal). More than 20 of McQuillan’s startup investments have gone public.

Focus Ventures, based in Palo Alto, has invested $850 million in technology companies across three funds since launching in 1996.

The addition of McQuillan and the opening of an office in the Valley have less to do with increasing OCA’s investments in West Coast startups, and more about adding value to the firm’s existing portfolio companies, OCA CEO Jim Dugan explained. Having a physical presence in Silicon Valley will help the firm strengthen its relationships with larger venture firms who can provide expansion capital to OCA’s portfolio companies as they grow.

“We’ve been doing business now in venture for 20 years. The heartbeat of the ecosystem is in the Valley,” Dugan said. “This expansion for us is a continuation of us being able to add value to our portfolio companies, particularly for those later-stage rounds.”

OCA, which is investing out of its fourth fund, invests in Seed, Series A and Series B rounds. Its notable exits include Cleversafe (acquired by IBM), Tenor (acquired by Google) and TradeKing (acquired by Ally Financial). It also scored a win last year after DocuSign’s IPO. OCA invested in Cartavi, a Chicago-area software startup, which was acquired by DocuSign in 2013.

Jonathan Shieber@jshieber

Four months ago, when two commercial DJI-made drones loaded with 1 kilogram each of plastic explosive detonated during a speech from Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro at a military event in Caracas, the world at large was introduced to the newest threat from our automated, dystopian present — cheap weaponized drone technology.

For Luke Fox, the founder and chief executive of WhiteFox Defense Technologies, it was simply the latest in a string of events proving the need for the kinds of services his company is developing. Something he calls “a highway patrol for the sky.”

From drug smuggling to reconnaissance and information gathering to terror attacks, unmanned aerial drones are no longer the provenance of state military and police actors, and are increasingly being used by criminal organizations to open new, aerial fronts in their operations.

“Drones are by far the biggest asymmetric threat that the U.S. faces,” says Fox. “Countries that don’t have a state-sponsored drone program are using them [and] it’s where you see people like ISIS are going.”

In the battle for Mosul in Iraq, ISIS flew more than 300 drone missions in one month, according to a talk given last year at CyCon by Peter Singer, a senior fellow and strategist at the New America Foundation. One-third of those were strike missions, representing the first time U.S. military faced an aerial attack since the Korean War.

The 24-year-old Fox began thinking seriously about the weaponization of commercial and consumer drone technology six years ago, when he founded WhiteFox Defense.

Creating the company was an extension of the way that Fox had been taught to think about the world as a child, he’s said. Fox grew up in an abusive foster home, raised by a mentally ill foster mother (who was, herself, a child protective service employee) who had adopted him and a number of mentally and physically challenged children.

“The reality I grew up in had my mind constantly looking for vulnerabilities. And instead of seeing these vulnerabilities as opportunities for crime I now had a whole color palette to choose from,” said Fox. “For example, when the world started going crazy over drones as recreational toys I saw that they could be used as weapons or for crime, and this insight into the criminal mind inspired a company that defends the country from drones.”

Fox was adopted from foster care by the librarian of his local Sacramento-area high school, tested out of college and went on to a community college before enrolling in California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo.

He began working with drones while in school and credits that introduction to the technology as the inspiration for starting WhiteFox.

“We previously started out in drone manufacturing, starting out in high-performance drones for specialty clients and research organizations. We needed affordable drones that were highly capable,” said Fox. “Making a highly capable drone that was very affordable attracted some very shady people. And, realizing that there was only so much we could control, it brought us to ask what is out there? At the time, the only thing to counter drone-related attacks was large missiles shooting down large Iranian drones.”

WhiteFox currently has three products either in development or on the market. Two have already been released to a select group of customers in different industries and the entire suite will be launched at the beginning of next year, according to Fox.

Without going into specific details of how the technology works, Fox said that WhiteFox Defense systems can detect, identify and mitigate unauthorized drones flying in a particular airspace.

“It’s not jamming or blocking drones or catching them out of the sky,” says Fox. Rather the idea is to provide situational awareness and identify the type of threat that an errant drone represents — whether the operator is, in Fox’s words, “clueless, careless or criminal.”

What Fox would say is that his company has developed a technology that’s based on identifying and differentiating between drones based on their unique radio frequency signatures. That product for identifying drones operating in a space is complemented by a second technology offering that allows WhiteFox to take control of the unauthorized drones in an airspace.

“One of the technologies that was started at Drones For Change [the company that would become WhiteFox] was a universal controller,” said Fox. “That technology really formed the basis. We asked what if this universal controller could become a master controller to take over any drone that was in your airspace? That solved the problem that got us out of drone manufacturing.”

WhiteFox isn’t alone in its attempts to create anti-drone technology. According to some industry statistics there are at least 70 companies working on drone defense technologies, with solutions ranging from deploying other drones to capture unauthorized UAVs to jamming technologies that will block a drone’s signal.

Earlier this year, Airspace Systems raised $20 million for its kinetic (drone versus drone) approach to drone defense, while Citadel Defense raised $12 million and Dedrone pulled in $15 million for their drone-jamming technologies.  And last year, SkySafe raised $11.5 million for a radio-jamming approach similar to WhiteFox, which forces unauthorized drones out of restricted airspace while permitting authorized drones to still fly.

“As​ ​the​ ​adoption​ ​of​ ​consumer​ ​drones increases,​ ​we​ ​believe​ ​it​ ​is​ ​vital​ ​for​ ​an​ ​ambitious​ ​and​ ​effective​ ​defense​ ​platform​ ​to​ ​emerge,” said Alex Rubacalva, a partner at Stage Venture Partners and an early investor in WhiteFox Defense. 

In all, drone-related startups have raised nearly $2 billion in the last eight years, according to data from Crunchbase, pulled at the beginning of 2018. Roughly $600 million of that investment total has come in 2017 and the early part of 2018 alone, the Crunchbase data indicated.

Technologies like SkySafe and WhiteFox are about more than just defending airspace from malicious actors.

“Counter-drone technology is not just about securing spaces from drones and preventing bad things from happening,” says Fox. “It’s about enabling drones to be used in the right way.”

The applications extend far beyond military uses. In fact, Fox’s technology is already being adopted by prisons around the U.S. and, indeed, anywhere airspace usage can be considered sensitive.

“Someone described as the largest delivery operations in the world is happening at prisons,” said Fox. “You have a lot of money behind buying a DJI at Best Buy and loading it up with heroin, with drugs, with weapons, with even Chinese food that was smuggled in. We found that there were drones smuggling in contraband every single day.”

WhiteFox recently conducted a survey with an undisclosed large public prison system in the United States to study just how pervasive a problem drone-smuggling was among its prison population. What the prison saw as one drone a week flying into restricted airspace became a realization that multiple drone flights per day were occurring in attempts to smuggle contraband onto prison grounds.

Operations extend far beyond police and military applications though, according to Fox.

During the California wildfires, rescue operations were halted thanks to unauthorized usage of drones by civilian operators who wanted to capture footage of the disaster. Their actions potentially risked the lives of not only rescue workers but of the citizens they were trying to save and the fire crews attempting to control the worst wildfire in the state’s history.

“This is one of the fascinating things about this industry as a whole,” says Fox. “It’s not that drones are bad and scary and we need to do something about them. If we’re going to embrace this technology as a society we need to be able to safely integrate it into society.”

From its initial deployments, WhiteFox was able to convince investors to funnel $12 million into the company to finance its expansion plans.

The extension of the company’s seed round included investors like JAM Capital, Stage Venture Partners, Okapi Venture Capital, Serra Ventures and OCA Ventures. 

“WhiteFox’s customers are armed with a highly robust and scalable-for-deployment technology​ ​platform​ ​that​ ​addresses​ ​the​ ​increased​ ​threat​ ​of​ ​hostile​ ​drones​ ​and enables​ ​greater​ ​control​ ​of​ ​their​ ​airspace,” said Jeff Bocan, a partner at OKapi Venture Capital, in a statement.​ “Crucially, WhiteFox’s technology also offers customers the ability to protect against reckless drone use, while enabling “friendly” drones to fly freely — all without any human intervention.”

WhiteFox Defense Technologies, Inc., a drone airspace defense and security company, had their flagship product, DroneFox, participate as selected equipment by the U.S. Government for the prestigious Black Dart counter-UAS and Red Teaming exercise last month. It was the first time WhiteFox had performed testing at Black Dart, the largest counter-drone testing exercise in the world. After only a brief training, military personnel were able to operate DroneFox to effortlessly detect, identify and mitigate drone threats that were sent by a contracted Red Team. WhiteFox participated alongside several Department of Defense organizations and civilian companies after passing the rigorous nine-month down-selection process. As UAS pose a unique and complex threat that requires multiple layers of defense to comprehensively protect, public and private entities were encouraged to work together.

Representatives of the U.S. Government saw how WhiteFox engaged with the entities and helped evolve security modeling along with techniques, tactics and procedures. Through the DroneFox user interface, operators were able to perform threat assessments of individual unknown or hostile drones and “whitelist” their own “friendly” drones. The military personnel operating DroneFox then relayed this information to remote personnel performing various ground operations at the exercise.

The Department of Defense has hosted the invitation-only exercise since 2004 to test the capabilities of Department of Defense and civilian companies as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have become easier to own and use. More than 70 countries now use UAS for government or military applications, according to the Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organization.

FBI director Christopher Wray recently told a U.S. Senate panel that the threat from commercial drones “is steadily escalating” even as Congress gives agencies new tools to address these threats. The comments came just days after President Trump signed into law legislation that gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice new powers to detect and mitigate drones that pose a threat to government and other sensitive assets.^[2]

Luke Fox, CEO of WhiteFox Defense Technologies, said: “Drones are becoming an integral part of military forces worldwide. They are being used for research and development, in combat missions, as target decoys and reconnaissance. They are also playing a key role in security, search and rescue missions, communications and munitions.

“The demonstrations at Black Dark showed how our technology can support the military in field operations, protect their sensitive assets, and become a pillar of defense against drone threats, enabling soldiers to focus on their missions.”

About WhiteFox Defense Technologies 
WhiteFox Defense Technologies, Inc. is a drone airspace security company headquartered in California. WhiteFox builds proprietary software and hardware that enables users and institutions to secure their airspace from drone threats. Pioneering the safe integration of drones into society, WhiteFox develops products that save lives, protect property, and safeguard privacy. WhiteFox’s mission is to keep the sky open for responsible pilots, advancing drone technology for the benefit of society. In a constantly changing industry, WhiteFox is pushing the boundaries of what security means. 

To learn more about WhiteFox or schedule a demo, email info@whitefoxdefense.com or visit www.whitefoxdefense.com.

About DroneFox

DroneFox is a SWaP-C optimized, portable solution which uses a novel method for tracking and taking temporary control of drones: a “master signal” which allows its operator to choose from a dynamic set of responses including land, return to launch, confiscate, and reroute.

Unlike jammers and other non-kinetic products, the DroneFox can select the exact signal it wants to manipulate, without interfering with any others signals—even other drones.

The core WhiteFox technology offers critical infrastructure and personnel the ability to protect against reckless drone use, while enabling “friendly” drones to fly freely and continue the work they’re doing to positively impact society.

About Black Dart 2018

Black Dart 2018 is an annual Department of Defense field demonstration of current and emergent counter-UAS technologies. The event is coordinated and overseen by the Joint Staff J8; Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organization. The training event brings industry personnel, observers from allied nations and military participants from across the Department of Defense.