BR Ventures Leads Investment Round in Jodange

Student-run venture fund expands its portfolio into sentiment analysis

ITHACA, N.Y., April 28 /PRNewswire/ — BR Ventures (BRV), an MBA student-run, early stage venture fund of the Johnson School at Cornell University, today announced that it has invested in Jodange, an emerging, visionary technology leader in sentiment and opinion analysis. The completion of the Series A round will aid Jodange as it continues to capture market share with its best-in-class technology.

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Based on Cornell technology developed by Claire Cardie, professor in the University’s Department of Computer Science and Director of the Information Science Program, Jodange solutions represent the forefront of research in the field of natural language understanding and intelligent text processing. In an environment where influential content originates from an exploding number of online information sources, Jodange enables decision makers to better understand who and what is influencing their customers, competitors, and marketplace. Such depth and breadth of technological innovation enables Jodange to offer a wider variety of services with greater accuracy than other sentiment analysis tools on the market.

“This round of financing, led by BR Ventures, is an endorsement of the potential that exists for delivering sentiment analytics that goes beyond the basic high level positive or negative labeling that so many companies provide today,” said Larry Levy, CEO and Co-Founder of Jodange. “Jodange is well-positioned to fundamentally change and grow the sentiment analysis market. BR Ventures will help us do that through funding, support, and additional partnerships.”

Through business applications that sort through wikis, blogs, corporate sites, and online media outlets, Jodange provides the analysis that allows users to identify and isolate individuals’ opinions and sentiments about key topics over time. The technology helps users decipher who is worth listening to and how best to correlate their opinions to business outcomes over time.

“BR Ventures is very impressed by Jodange’s technology leadership and customer acceptance in sentiment analytics, and firmly believe that they are well positioned even at this early stage, to grow aggressively in this space,” said Roy Ashok, investment manager at BR Ventures, who led the deal. “We are excited to play a crucial role in supporting their growth going forward.”

The Series A financing round will enable Jodange to further its technology leadership and build its nascent sales and marketing strategy.

About BR Ventures

BR Ventures (BRV) is an MBA student-run, evergreen, early stage venture fund of the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. With over seven portfolio companies spanning high-tech, healthcare, biotech and sustainable technologies, BRV’s investments represent the cutting edge research at Cornell University. BRV is committed to promoting entrepreneurship at Cornell and in the local community. It has several partnerships with prominent angel VC groups in upstate New York and with bigger firms in the Northeastern region of the United States. More information is available at www.johnson.cornell.edu/brv.

About Jodange

Jodange automatically extracts opinions from any online content in order to understand sentiment. Jodange was born when serial entrepreneur, Larry Levy, met academic, Claire Cardie, professor of Computational Linguistics at Cornell University, NY. Leveraging Cornell’s significant investment in sentiment analytics, Jodange has developed a technology to extract and rank opinions. The result is the creation of the world’s first Opinion Utility. For more information, please visit www.jodange.com or call 914-595-1380.

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    BR Ventures Contacts:
    Anna Bruno, Chief Marketing Officer, BR Ventures
    alb21@cornell.edu

    Jodange Contacts
    Larry Levy
    +1-914-595-1381
    Larry.levy@jodange.com

    Other Contacts:
    Deirdre Snyder, Public Relations Officer, Johnson School
    dgs37@cornell.edu
    +1-607-255-3494

SOURCE The Johnson School at Cornell University