A few weeks ago I shared my reflections on my first year as a GP. Along with all the well wishes (thank you!!), many asked what Version One is investing in these days. Our portfolio companies aren’t as quick to publicize fundraising rounds like they used to and as such, we’re not making as many public announcements about our activity.
So, as a follow up, I thought I’d share some high level stats on our investing activity since we kicked off Fund III nearly a year ago in October 2018.
- 8 investments
- Only 1 investment in SF Bay Area
- 5 consumer companies (is consumer back?! :))
- 2 hardware startups having a heavy software layer (using AR and AI)
- 2 crypto/blockchain applications
- 3 marketplaces
- 3 pre-seed rounds
- 4 teams with female co-founders (of which, 2 are CEOs)
These trends align with a tweet that Boris wrote last week and here are the main takeaways of our investing thesis and strategy…
We are geographically agnostic, though focused on North America with main “hubs” in SF, Toronto, NYC, and Seattle.
We invest in early stage: we now lead pre-seed rounds (typically with a $500k check) in addition to leading or participating in seed rounds (with a check of up to a $1m).
Yes, we still invest in marketplaces as this is one subset of network effects (our investment thesis).
And finally, we are not afraid in investing in hard things (i.e. robotics/hardware, healthcare/bio) or nascent markets (i.e. crypto/blockchain, AR)!
