Voices, Fringe, Hydrolix, Sendit, Trubify — March 1st, 2021
We see about 5,000 startups each week, and I want to give you a glimpse into how we at e.ventures 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.
To start, some top news out of the venture and tech landscape from last week:
Leading NFT-enabled fantasy football platform Sorare (soccer for the American readers), raises $48M Series A led by Benchmark. The company has now taken on $55M in venture capital, with our e.ventures leading their Seed round in July last year.
Klarna raises $650M in a private equity round led by Silver Lake, boosting its valuation to over $30B. The Swedish company has taken on over $3B in outside capital to date with Walerud Ventures leading their Seed round back in February 2005.
DigitalOcean, the cloud hosting platform for developers files for $100M IPO. The company disclosed that it closed December 2020 with $318M in revenue with customers from 185 countries. They raised $455M in outside capital to date with IA Ventures leading their Seed round in July 2013.
Now to my top seed investments to track from the past week:
Voices
EVA Growth Index:
No external sources showing growth
Product:
Social platform for real-time long-form conversation
Lead Investors:
Group of angels including Peter Thiel and Justin Mateen (co-founder of Tinder)
Total Raised:
$2M
Comparables:
Clubhouse
My Thoughts:
The voice space is super hot right now as it enables consumers to interact with content anywhere, anytime. While Twitter and Clubhouse have become break-out players in the space, it is still very early and only time will tell what the right approach will be. There is still very little information about Voices’ product, but with super angles like Thiel and Mateen, this will be one to watch.
Fringe
EVA Growth Index:
Product:
Lifestyle benefits platform that enables employers to provide their employees with benefits they actually want (Talkspace, Uber, Shipt, Audible)
Lead Investors:
Sovereign Capital
Total Raised:
$4M
Comparables:
Zenefits, Espresa
My Thoughts:
The little things are often what matter most to us humans. Naturally, giving your employees access to benefits they really care about could drive cost-effective employee retention.
Hydrolix
EVA Growth Index:
No external sources showing growth
Product:
Elastic cloud database platform that reduces the cost to ingest, query, and store data by streaming it in bite-sized and uflly indexed packages
Lead Investors:
Wing Venture Capital
Total Raised:
$10M
Comparables:
LucidLink
My Thoughts:
The rate of data we are collecting is out-scaling the rate we are able to download and process it. Hydrolix’s index-enabled platform packages data into bite-sized pieces to make it faster to interact with. This is similar to how Netflix streams their videos, which enables you to seamlessly skip back and forth their huge HD-video files.
Sendit
EVA Growth Index:
No external sources showing growth
Product:
Green and affordable same-day delivery for local retailers
Investors:
Better Ventures
Total Raised:
Undisclosed
Comparables:
DPD, Xeroe, PedalMe
My Thoughts:
I imagine most people reading this relate to the guilt of getting packages shipped to their front door. Sendit provides a low-CO2 alternative for which I believe plenty of consumers would be willing to pay a premium.
Trubify
EVA Growth Index:
Product:
Live music streaming platform that gives emerging artists the highest payouts and direct access to their listeners
Investors:
Cove Fund
Total Raised:
$4M
Comparables:
Spotify meets Substack
My Thoughts:
In this digital world, somehow Soundcloud is still the leading solution for musicians to get recognition without a record label. I, therefore, see a massive opportunity for a platform like Trubify to enable creators to monetize without the major labels.
Hi, I am Nicolas von Blottnitz, an Associate at e.ventures’ SF office focusing on Consumer, Fintech, and SaaS business. Since joining the firm in 2018, I have led our investments in Codota, Polygon, Flockjay, Wise, 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.
