Today we’re excited to announce that we led DemandStar’s $2m seed round. The Seattle-based company provides an online marketplace for business-to-government commerce – it connects local and national suppliers with government procurement officers. It should come as no surprise that government procurement is riddled with inefficiency. $1.5 trillion is spent…
Twenty years ago – in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom – expectations were high for B2B (product) marketplaces. The assumption was that online platforms would completely automate all supplier-customer transactions including retailing, wholesaling, and procurement. Yet today, the world of B2B marketplaces still lags far behind its B2C…
If you spend a lot of time in crypto (like we do here at V1), it can be easy to lose sight of how non-crypto investors and entrepreneurs think about the space. The huge ICO run-up in 2017 brought a lot of attention to the vertical. Since then, many have…
With many companies moving to work from home (WFH) over the past few weeks, our portfolio company Kobalt (which provides security as a service for small-and mid-sized companies) has been getting a lot of calls from organizations that have had suffered incidents related to remote work. This is not only…
It has been almost 10 years since Union Square Ventures launched the first Opportunity Fund, creating a strategy that has since been copied by many other VC’s. An opportunity fund is basically a separate pool of capital that allows a VC to continue to invest in its most promising portfolio…
