Read more about how we’re thinking and where we’re investing here.
Recent Posts
Portfolio, Version One
We don’t need to tell anyone how much Covid has changed the workplace. The pandemic fast-tracked existing trends in remote work. And even as some companies have returned to the office, there’s little question that distributed work is here to stay. The advantages of distributed teams are compelling – for example, companies can hire talent […]
News
Spring is here, and we’re well into 2022! As always, there’s never a dull moment in the Version One family. Here are some of the many (public) highlights across the portfolio. Fundraising announcements Carbon marketplace start-up NCX raised a $50M Series B. With the funding, they’ll be launching in Canada and Mexico, enabling businesses to […]
News, Portfolio, Version One
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. […]
Portfolio
It’s hard to believe we’re already kicking off a new year. Before we headed into the holidays, we published our 2022 Year in Review, but now we’d like to do a deeper dive into all the Version One family activity that happened in the fourth quarter. It was a great way to end the year, […]
News
As we are approaching the end of another unprecedented year, it’s time to look back and share our top blog posts from the past 12 months. And if you haven’t seen it already, you can read our Year in Review post, where we reflect on the incredible pace of the start-up market in 2021. Our […]
News, Portfolio, Version One
2021 might be remembered as the year the world started to fully embrace the opportunity that the technology sector has to offer… Start-up funding hit an all-time high as did fundraising for new VC funds (coincidentally, we also raised two new funds for a total of $100m in fresh capital). Round sizes increased significantly across […]
Crypto / Blockchain
Every new technology platform creates a new paradigm for how information is discovered. The initial discovery layer of the Web 1.0 era was “browsing” (Yahoo), which resembled a better, more complete, and more accessible version of the yellow pages. As the web matured and scaled, two new and more web-native paradigms emerged: search and social. […]
Energy/Climate
We are excited to announce that we’ve led the $3.5M seed round of Moment Energy, with participation from our friends at Fika Ventures, Garage Capital and MCJ Collective. This is our third cleantech announcement in recent weeks, following announcements for EnergyBank, deep ocean long-term energy storage, and EnPowered, a payment platform to increase the rate […]
Energy/Climate, Portfolio, Version One
We’re excited to announce our investment in EnPowered, an on-bill payment platform designed to make it easier for businesses to invest in energy-efficiency projects. We co-led their $12M seed raise, along with our friends at Golden Ventures and Inovia. Great technologies exist to help businesses reduce their electricity usage, emissions, and energy bills. The problem? […]
Energy/Climate
As our planet is grappling with a climate crisis and dependence on fossil fuels, we are investing more and more in climate and energy. In less than two years, we’ve led the pre-seed/seed rounds of five companies: EnPowered, Patch, NCX, one yet to be publicized, and now EnergyBank. And we are excited to spread the […]
Crypto / Blockchain, Portfolio, Version One
Building a successful investment franchise over the past few decades required finding a distribution advantage as products have been mostly undifferentiated. The largest and most successful US franchises — Blackrock (founded 1988), Vanguard (founded 1975), and Fidelity (founded 1946) — are now managing close to $20 trillion in assets. While traditional finance offers few options […]
Portfolio
It’s hard to believe that we are heading into the home stretch of 2021. But before we do, let’s look back at the busy summer that the Version One family had! Fundraising and Exits Patch, an API platform for negative emissions, raised a $20M Series A led by Coatue Management with participation from existing investors […]
Version One
When I started Version One Ventures in 2012, every experienced VC shared the same rule of thumb: we had to return 3x net consistently to stay in business (i.e. 3x the invested capital net of fees over a period of about ten years for a net IRR in the low twenties). Ten years (almost) and […]
Portfolio
Today we’re excited to share the official launch of Replay, a browser that records all of the context that developers and engineers need to fix bugs faster. It has been years since I’ve written a line of code… but there are some pain points that I’ll never forget. Nothing that I programmed ever compiled perfectly […]
Crypto / Blockchain, Portfolio, Version One
Today we are very excited to announce our investment in the Ethereum developer platform Tenderly. We participated in Tenderly’s $3.3M Seed round earlier this year, as well as their recent $15.3M Series A round. The Series A is led by Accel, with participation from Point Nine Capital (who led their seed), Version One, and angel […]
Version One
A year and a half ago, we published the first edition of our Startup Handbook. It has been well received, with over 30K downloads to date. But any guide book is always a work in progress and we have received a lot of great feedback on how to make it more valuable. As such, we […]
Portfolio
It’s hard to believe that we’re already halfway through 2021! And what a busy first half it was. Here are just some of many activities and accomplishments in the V1 portfolio during the past quarter… Public listings Coinbase went live with its direct listing on Nasdaq, becoming one of the most valuable public listings of […]
Version One
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 […]
Crypto / Blockchain, Portfolio
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 […]
Version One
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: Carta We were introduced to Henry Ward from eShares through our friend Manu Kumar from K9 Ventures in 2013. We […]