Announcing our investment in Opyn, a decentralized options marketplace
We are very excited to announce our investment in Opyn, a decentralized options marketplace. If you invest in ETH (or just follow it), you’re used to prices going up and down. Opyn lets you protect your DeFi deposits and hedge ETH risk. The platform allows you to purchase put and call options on the price […]
Announcing our investment in DemandStar, a marketplace for government procurement
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 in the local government procurement […]
The API-as-a-marketplace
As we’ve been spending time on B2B marketplaces and dev tools/platforms, we’ve come to realize that there’s an interesting sub-category that combines elements of both: the API-as-a-marketplace. What is an API-as-a-marketplace? Just like a traditional marketplace, an API-as-a-marketplace has two sides: suppliers and buyers. But, the interface is different. In a traditional marketplace, discovery and […]
B2B Marketplaces Revisited
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 counterpart. Alibaba is an exception. […]
Is this the crypto inflection point we’ve been waiting for?
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 stopped following the progress or […]