Wednesday, March 21, 2018 - Social Starts, a $60M+ venture capital partnership and one of the most active moment-of-investment investors in the US, has launched Joyance Partners, a new $20M venture capital fund focused on emerging technologies that can help individuals feel happier, healthier, calmer, more confident, less anxious or subject to pain. These emerging technological vectors of happiness deliver delightful moments, improving the day-to-day lives of people. With this focus, Joyance is the first venture fund centered on individual, personal experience, rather than today’s medical industrial complex. While Joyance Partners acknowledges the value in helping doctors and clinics, health plans and hospitals, the new fund sees far greater long-term human impact and value in the generation of technologies that will replace today’s syndrome-centric approach with something more personal, more preventative, more predictive and dramatically more powerful.
Joyance Partners will be directed by Managing Partner Mike Edelhart and Founding Partner William Lohse, who also oversee all of the Social Starts funds.
Joyance Partners will augment the current Social Starts team, bringing in new partners with PhDs in Bioinformatics and Physiology, and team members with backgrounds in bio, VR and lab sciences. Social Starts and Joyance plan to cooperate on early-stage investments regularly, with Joyance expanding the Social Starts moment-of-inception startup discovery methodology via access to more than 2,000 new company evaluations each year and deeper domain expertise in bioscience, neuroscience, food science and VR/AR.
Since its initiation in October 2017, Joyance has made 14 investments, including Agridata, Aromyx, Basecoin, Boundless Mind, Closed Loop, DepthKit, figur8, Gyant, Hexis, Neosensory, TRANSFR VR, Thyrve, Turing Group, and VINA.
The new fund will celebrate its official launch with the Celebrating Delightful Moments and the Tech Vectors of Happiness event on March 27, 2018 at District Hall in Boston. Managing Partner Mike Edelhart will lead a conversation with happiness expert Nataly Kogan, Harvard happiness researcher Sara Lazar, and Harvard professor David Edwards, an expert on the emotional potential of aroma, about the substantive impact new technology can have on individual well-being. Companies from the Joyance portfolio will showcase their work during the event, and Joyance team members will be on-hand to meet with interested entrepreneurs.
“Delightful moments are part of every human culture and every person’s experience. Now, a range of technologies holds promise to deliver delightful moments in radical new ways. This is one of the most powerful and evocative investment ideas I’ve had the joy of supporting. We think Joyance will find and back great entrepreneurs who will literally transform the way people live on Earth,” says Managing partner Mike Edelhart.
About Social Starts
Social Starts is a $60M+ venture capital partnership with a uniquely data-driven approach to investing in moment-of-inception and Series A financing rounds. They focus on companies that leverage social and mobile technologies to drive generational changes in consumer and business behavior.
Learn more about Social Starts at www.socialstarts.com.
About Joyance Partners
Joyance Partners is a $20M venture capital partnership that invests in companies with the capacity to deliver, or contribute to the delivery of, Delightful Moments. By investing in these technological vectors of happiness, Joyance is the first venture fund focused purely on individual, personal experience, rather than today’s medical industrial complex.
Learn more about Joyance Partners at www.joyancepartners.com.