Read more about how we’re thinking and where we’re investing here.

Happy New Year, everyone! While we’re excited to step into 2025, we want to take a moment and reflect on the incredible journey we've had at Version One over the past 12+ years. The experiences and lessons learned over this time have been pivotal in shaping our investment thesis and all that we do.

Today, we are very excited to announce we’ve co-led the $5M Series A+ round for Bolt.Earth, India’s largest EV charging network. We joined our friends at USV and Prime Venture Partners (both returning investors).

Yet another year has flown by. This past quarter was a busy one, which should come as little surprise as the whole V1 family has been working hard to close out the year and position themselves for a great 2025.

Every website needs a light refresh, if not a complete overhaul, every once in a while. And we’re no different. The last time we updated our website was back in 2018…a lot has changed since then!

At Version One, we typically focus on early-stage investments, though we occasionally make exceptions for standout opportunities—like Clio’s Series C and Coinbase’s Series D. These unique investments delivered exceptional returns for V1 and our investors.

As you’ve come to expect on our blog, here’s a quick rundown of the highlights from the past few months. Q3 has been one of the quieter quarters in terms of public announcements. That doesn’t mean everyone took the summer off but rather have been heads down building. Look for some exciting news soon!

We’re excited to announce our investment in Optimotive, having led the company’s $2m seed round with participation from Garage and NewLab. Optimotive is building a fleet of advanced autonomous robots for some of the toughest, extreme environments… picture the rocky, dusty, muddy and unpredictable conditions common in industries like construction, mining, and oil & gas.

If you’ve been reading our blog recently, you may have noticed that we updated our investment thesis and shared that deep tech is on our radar. We followed that post up with what deep tech means to us but since it is a broad category, we’ll be writing more on specific areas within deep tech over time.

A month ago, we published a post outlining our latest thesis update, “We back mission-driven founders who are early in new areas.” In it, we expanded on the types of founders and opportunities we’re looking for: “We’re interested in those rare opportunities where a founder is creating a brand new category. These opportunities are fringy and emerging (some might call them crazy, weird, whacky or wild). There’s nothing obvious or inevitable about it. They’re building something the market hasn’t yet imagined and doesn’t fit neatly into an existing market category. But if they’re right, then the fringe picks up momentum and ultimately becomes a wave.”

We’ve officially hit the halfway point of 2024, and all we can say is… wow, this year is flying by. The entire V1 family has been pushing, hustling and going all-out, so we’d like to recognize some of the milestones and accomplishments from this quarter. As we say in every recap, this represents the tip of the iceberg; there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that we can’t talk about publicly (yet).

As you may have read in our thesis update last week, we have been spending more and more time in the deep/hard tech space, making our first six investments since 2021. Today, we’re excited to share that we co-led the $9 million seed round of Bedrock Materials, a Chicago-based startup that manufactures the active materials for sodium-ion batteries. We co-led the round with our good friends at Trucks Venture Capital and Refactor Capital.

It’s hard to believe we are halfway through another year…and the past three months have certainly been a bit of a rollercoaster. The thing about mission-driven founders, though, is they continue to build even during market uncertainty. When you’ve got a clear point of focus, you keep moving forward despite the surrounding turbulence. As Version One turned 10 last month, we reflected about how lucky we are to work with incredible mission-driven founders – and challenging times like this bolster our gratitude.

Today, we’re excited to share that we led the $2M seed round of Antimatter, whose mission is to build the world’s most valuable peer-to-peer learning network, centered around memes. Spacecadet and Ordinary Holdings joined us as new investors in this round, alongside existing investors Haystack and Compound.

We’re a quarter into 2023 and when it comes to funding, the pullback from tech continues. However, just like winter provides the time and space to reflect and renew, a market downturn is the best time for heads down building without all the distractions of a super bull market. With that said, here’s a selection of updates and progress from the V1 family over the past months. And with the emergence of spring, there’s a lot of good news to set up a great year of building.

I just returned from a weeklong trip to India, having spent a few days each in Delhi and Bangalore to meet with local entrepreneurs and investors. Noah Smith recently wrote about why everyone should get excited about India’s prospects. I shared his optimism going into this trip and came back even more bullish about the potential of India’s tech ecosystem.

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome 2022! Although 2021 was a tough year in many regards, it was also an incredible one. Start-up funding hit an all-time high. We’re seeing more interest from people to follow their passion and become founders. And in many ways, it feels we’re entering a golden decade for technology.

We met CEO & co-Founder Martin Basiri in February 2016. Despite his passion for helping international students get into universities and colleges in North America, and having incredible traction early on, we passed because we weren’t comfortable with a high AOV / one-time “purchase”. As of September 2020, the company is valued at $1.4B and has helped 120,000 students identify and apply for 1,200 schools abroad.

Today our portfolio company Coinbase went public via a direct listing.

Despite the obvious challenges, we ended 2020 on a strong note and, so far, our portfolio family has been riding a huge momentum wave. 2021 is proving to be an incredible year across our portfolio – from big funding announcements to significant product developments. We’re so proud of what everyone has been able to accomplish and are looking forward to spring – and more widespread vaccine availability so that we can all be together again soon!

We’re excited to announce our investment in SuperRare, the leading marketplace for blockchain-based digital art known as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).