Announcing Fund IV and Opportunities Fund II
We’re thrilled to announce the closing of two new funds: Fund IV ($70M USD) and Opportunities Fund II ($30M USD). While these funds may be new, our values and goals remain the same. We still look for pre-seed and seed stage opportunities, as we believe these are the stages where we can add the most […]
Announcing our seed investment into Defined, a programable data platform for DeFi
We are very happy to announce our seed investment into Defined, a programmable data platform for decentralized finance (DeFi). We led the $2.5m round with participation from Mark Cuban, Balaji Srinivasan, Tiny Capital, Compound, Inflection, Portico Ventures, Capital 6, Rasool Rayani, and Kamunting Street Capital. We have been active investors in DeFi for almost three […]
The Version One Anti-Portfolio – the opportunities we missed…
Bessemer started the idea of the “anti-portfolio” – the companies that you passed on, but ended up doing very, very well. Here is the Version One anti-portfolio that we have built over the past decade: ApplyBoard We met CEO & co-Founder Martin Basiri in February 2016. Despite his passion for helping international students get into universities […]
Marketplace innovation driven by crypto
Marketplace innovation comes in waves and we can point to a handful of major trends over the past two decades: Right now, the most exciting area in marketplace innovation is blockchain-enabled marketplaces, especially with what is happening in decentralized finance. The Ethereum ecosystem has enabled the emergence of a tremendous number of protocols, platforms and […]
Opportunity is everywhere: we’re now investing worldwide
A little bit more than a year ago, we made our first investment in a COVID world…it was 100% virtual, all via Zoom from start to finish. What seemed highly unusual at the time became the new modus operandi for Version One and the VC industry as a whole. We ended up doing three more […]