Happy Canada Day to our friends and colleagues north of the border, and Happy Fourth of July to those of you south of the border. We hope everyone is having a great start to summer.

 Here’s a quick recap of the key activities and announcements from this past quarter. 

 Welcome to the V1 family!

 We welcomed Dolly (same-day retail delivery service) to our portfolio, after participating in a $7.5m Series A round, alongside Unlock Ventures Partners and Maveron. Dolly is focused on delivering big and bulky items. Their fastest growing use case is furniture and other large item deliveries from big brand retailers like Lowes, Costco, and Big Lots!. 

We announced our investment in Kobalt, a security as a service company. Kobalt is an exciting investment for us – it’s out first security investment (after looking for the right opportunity for some time). It’s also the first company we’ve helped incubate!

We also invested in Guesser whose mission is to make prediction markets more accessible to mainstream users. They’ve created a super simple interface to interact with Augur, in the same way that Coinbase created the easiest and most beautiful experience to buy and sell crypto currencies.

And last but not least, we announced our investment in Celo, an open-sourced crypto-powered global payment platform. Their mission is to create conditions of prosperity for all, providing financial applications (like cash transfer programs, P2P lending, collaborative small-scale insurance, digital assets and wallets) to the large populations on this globe who are unbanked or underbanked.

Other funding announcements and exits!

Outreach raised a $114m Series E round at a $1.1b valuation – the first Version One unicorn! We couldn’t be more proud of this team. You can read some thoughts from CEO Manny Medina on post-unicorn life, creating culture and more.  

Blockstack announced that it intends to raise $50 million in a token sale that would leverage the SEC’s Regulation A+ crowdfunding exemption.

And, Twenty20 is joining the Envato ecosystem.  

Product launches and partnerships

Ada, a market leader in automated customer experience, launched Ada Glass. This provides a seamless customer handoff from Ada’s AI-powered chatbot to live chat platform partners including Zendesk, SalesForce, and Nuance.

Shippo announced their UPS Ready Program and Fedex Compatible partnerships.

Abstract released their SDK, so that you can start building your dream integrations.

Manifold launched their “Marketplace as a Service,” making it incredibly easy for developers to add apps to any platform.

Lolli launched its Firefox extension (to add to the Chrome extension).

Coinbase expanded its cryptocurrency Visa Debit Cards across Europe and also welcomed 11 countries in Latin America and Asia. Coinbase also now supports 30+ assets on custody.

Blockstack released their Blockstack whitepaper 2.0, which builds on two years of R&D work, peer-reviewed research, and presents a more detailed specification of their technology. 

Dapper Labs (who brought us CryptoKitties) released Cheeze Wizards…the world’s first blockchain battle royale with cheese. In Cheeze Wizards, players summon Wizards to fight in magical duels and compete to become the Big Cheeze.

And finally, we loved these books and sent them to our founders… it you find yourself with some extra time this summer, we recommend reading them!

• Trillion Dollar Coach, from Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle   
• Turning the Flywheel, Jim Collins’ monograph to accompany his classic business book, Good to Great

Happy Summer to everyone!