News About Us

·       Social Starts named sixth most active seed investor in the US in 2017

·       Social Starts named third most active VC in NYC in 2017

·       Joyance Partners: A New Member of Our Fund Family

Funding News About Our Portfolio Companies

·       Hyr Raises $1.3M To Redefine How Hourly Shifts Are Filled

·       Vizbee Draws a Crowd: Turner, Tegna splash cash on startup that extends bridge between TV, mobile

·       Lambda School Raises $4M to Expand Income-Sharing Options for Coding Students

·       KC's Mycroft AI nets Mozilla partnership, $1.75M funding injection

·       Affinio Raises $9M To Push Analytics Into Brand Ad Budgets

News About Our Portfolio Companies’ Growth

·       Thunder hires Microsoft vet to expand Seattle office

·       Tokyo Otaku Mode Anime Coin To Launch This Summer

·       SocialRank’s new product helps marketers understand why tweets go viral

·       MyndVR Taps Littlstar to Launch Exclusive Virtual Reality Content Service for 55-Plus Adult Communities Nationwide

·       Opening Up Astronomer Open

·       TripleLift and AdRoll Are Partnering to Help Brands Drive Successful Performance Through Native Ads

·       Grovo's Award-winning Microlearning® Content Now Accessible in Cornerstone OnDemand and Other Leading Learning Management Systems

·       Canvs and Ampsy Team To Measure Emotion From Live Events

Recent Writing By Us

·       Where We Will Focus for 2018: DNVBs

·       Early Stage Slumps Come and Go - We Will Always Be Here

Moment-of-Inception Investments Q4 2017

·        Turing Advisory Group is a token sale advisory firm that recently came out of Techstars NYC.  CEO Bradley Miles previously spent time in venture and with Coindesk digging deep into blockchain and ICO research.  

·       Agridata is a crop estimation solution for the four trillion market of fruit trees and vines farming leveraging computer vision to produce highly accurate estimates of quantity, quality, and maturity of fruits, reducing both land costs and driving as much as 25%+ more revenue. Agridata’s vision is to become one of the most valuable data sets in agriculture, particularly in lending and insurance, an industry representing 10% of global GDP. CEO Cyrille Habis hails from the Stanford MS department of AI, embedded systems, and robotics and spent time at Google and Agilent in engineering and software development. 

·       Rosso & Flynn provides high-quality, responsibly-sourced fresh meat conveniently ordered online by customers in a market filled with commodity products.  CEO Manuel Rosso has over 15 years of experience at the intersection of food, CPG, and technology; his last food tech company, Food on the Table, sold to Scripps in 2014. 

·       TRANSFR VR is an eLearning platform tackling corporate training in VR.  CEO Bharanidharan Rajakumar previously founded an education startup that was an automated tutoring platform for mathematics, LearnBop, that he sold to K12 Inc. 

 

Advanced Seed Rounds Q4 2017

·        Werk: In Q4, Werk closed its $2.8 million Series Seed financing.  Werk is a marketplace for flexible work opportunities for women. 

·       Wellthy: In October, Wellthy closed its $2 million Series Seed financing.  Wellthy is a care management program and healthcare software platform for families to help manage complex health, chronic conditions, and age-related issues.  They are also working through employers as a platform to help employees manage their families care coordination. 

 

Series A and Beyond Q4 2017

·       Naadam: Naadam sources, manufactures and exclusively sells cashmere clothing online. These goods have all the quality of the best Italian cashmere (in fact, they are manufactured in Italy) but at 50% of standard retail prices. With this lower price base, Nadaam still delivers gross margins north of 60%. The company bootstrapped its initial growth and is now already profitable on $3M+ in 2017 revenue.  The company raised a Series A in Q4.

·       Wolf and Shepherd:  Founded by Justin Schneider, a former senior designer of high performance men’s athletic shoes for Adidas and New Balance, Wolf and Shepherd designs, manufactures and exclusively sells shoes that looks like dress shoes on the outside but have the fit, support and resilience of top-flight athletic shoes inside. To prove what he has, Justin sent a noted athlete friend to run a half marathon in his wingtips. The friend not only won, but set a record in the race. Sales have not slowed since. Gross margins here also stand above 60%.  The company is profitable now and has plenty of potential for expansion, not just by selling more shoes, but by using the deep analytics it owns on all aspects of the customer relationship to move into other kinds of related goods. We participated in the company’s Series A, which was its first significant raise.

·       Hush:  A remarkably strong entrant in digital sales of high end cosmetics. In anticipation of a large Series B raise in 2018, Hush decided to take on a small amount of additional capital from existing investors in Q4.  The company continues to exceed its aggressive revenue projections and is pioneering the sale of make-up via mobile. 

·       Original Stitch:  Original Stitch is a men’s business shirt e-commerce platform that can identify size measurements through AI on mobile.  Led by founder Jin Koh, we have been following this company for several years and invested out of SSLP 3 in 2016.  The company is generating significant revenue and intends to white label its measurement capture technology as an additional revenue stream in 2018. We joined a small raise in Q4 to help the company move toward its Series B in 2018.