Inai, Thoughtful Automation, Rose, SundaeSwap, Loft — 27th September, 2021
We see about 5,000 startups each week, and I want to give you a glimpse into how we at Headline think about trending tech companies and tracking new investment opportunities. In this post, I’m highlighting top tech companies that have announced or raised a seed round within the past week.
Inai
EVA Growth Index:
Product:
Single payment integration that lets online vendors set up with a plethora of payment providers (Stripe, Braintree, Visa, PayPal, etc.)
Lead Investors:
9Unicorns Accelerator Fund, Paua Ventures
Total Raised:
$4M
Comparables:
PayOp
My Thoughts:
Beyond giving end-customers flexibility around their payment method, I like the ability for Inai to potentially push the payment method that is most cost-effective for a business and/or its end customers in real-time.
Thoughtful Automation
EVA Growth Index:
No external sources showing growth
Product:
Cloud-based workflow automation platform for complex processes, like vendor onboarding or invoice processing
Lead Investors:
Drive Capital
Total Raised:
$6M
Comparables:
Zapier, Leapwork
My Thoughts:
The robotic process automation space is in such early days still and already holds a handful of unicorns. I believe there will be a dozen more with unique approaches and I like Thoughtful Automation’s approach of owning repetitive human labor-intensive processes that exist across most organizations.
Rose
EVA Growth Index:
No external sources showing growth
Product:
Click and point data ingestion, cleaning, and analysis platform
Lead Investors:
Undisclosed
Total Raised:
$6M
Comparables:
Obviously AI
My Thoughts:
Just getting data sets into an analytics program is often half the battle and it looks like Rose has built a seamless solution to automate this to a large extent. Their third-party data marketplace also can act as a fantastic long-term moat. Love the name too.
SundaeSwap
EVA Growth Index:
Product:
Decentralize liquidity trading protocol for the Cardano ecosystem
Lead Investors:
cFund, Alameda Research
Total Raised:
$1M
Comparables:
Uniswap
My Thoughts:
I am by no means a crypto expert but Cardano’s market cap has grown from sub $1B to over $70B over the last year and looking at Sundaeswap’s web traffic there is definitely something in the making here.
Loft
EVA Growth Index:
Product:
Kubernetes management platform that lets individual engineers within an organization spin up environments at their own will
Lead Investors:
Fusion Fund
Total Raised:
$5M
Comparables:
Devspace
My Thoughts:
Even seven years after its initial launch, there are still far too many DevOps resources required to work with Kubernetes within an organization at scale. That being said, container orchestration is going nowhere, so enabling developers within an organization to work with the Kubernetes more freely while still giving DevOps clarity around where is what looks to be a massive opportunity in my eyes.
Hi, I am Nicolas von Blottnitz, an Associate at Headline’s SF office focusing on Consumer, Fintech, and SaaS businesses. Since joining in 2018, I have led our investments in Tabnine, Polygon, Flockjay, Solid, and Grin.
What is the EVA Growth Index?
The EVA Growth index is a composite of third-party data sources around a company’s website traffic. The vertical green lines in the charts represent a point in time where the company raised outside capital.
