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 all times in the U.S. It is also the first IPO in the Version One family and hence, a special milestone for us as a fund. You can read our reflections, and why we think the best is yet to come, here.

Three unicorns

Ada, Outreach and Shippo all raised hefty rounds this quarter and reached the one-billion-unicorn valuation mark!

• Chat-bot provider Ada raised $130M, led by Spark Capital, at a $1.2B valuation. 
• Shippo raised a $50M round led by Bessemer Venture Partners at a $1B valuation. 
• Outreach raised $200M, co-led by new investors, Premji Invest and Steadfast Capital Ventures, at a $4.4B valuation – up from a $1.33B less than a year ago.  

New capital

SilviaTerra changed its name to NCX, after its Natural Capital Exchange carbon market, and raised a $20M Series A led by Marc Benioff, who also joined as a board member. 

Encrypted learning platform Cape Privacy raised a $20M Series A, led by Evolution Equity. 

Deutsche Telekom made a significant purchase of Celo’s native asset, CELO. You can read about it here.

New companies

Pickle Robot, a robotics startup focused on loading/unloading the back of the truck, raised $5.75M in seed funding. You can read why we’re so excited about the Pickle team and their vision. 

We led a $2.5M seed round in Defined, a programmable data platform for DeFi. We have been active investors in DeFi for almost three years now and you can read about why we’re thrilled to add Defined to our portfolio. 

Filebase, S3 compatible object storage powered by blockchain, raised a $2M seed round led by Multicoin. We are very bullish about decentralized storage and here’s why we love Filebase. 

Acquisitions

Financial wellness startup Trim was acquired by OneMain Financial. 

Product Announcements and Partnerships

• Jam now lets you change website copy without dev help!
• Top Hat is partnering with Desire2Learn to give educators even more flexible tools to help their learners to succeed. 
• Lolli launched its iOS app.
• Shippo is now partnering with Stripe Identity to prevent losses from account takeovers, theft or fake signups. 
• Uniswap became the first DEX to pass $0.3T in trading! And Uniswap v3 has been deployed to the Ethereum mainnet. 
• Ada continues to add integrations to deliver a smoother customer experience. Their latest integrations include platforms like Intercom and Oracle. 
• Coinbase released the newest version of their wallet.
• Booster expanded their service for mobile energy delivery to include on-demand electric vehicle charging. 
• Stacks launched a $4M accelerator to fund teams building apps on Bitcoin.  

Fund news

In case you missed it, we/V1 announced our two new funds: Fund IV ($70M) and Opportunities Fund II ($30M). We are looking forward to backing more mission-driven founders. To learn more, here’s some of the coverage: our own post, TechCrunch, The Globe and Mail, and GeekWire.

As always, you can stay updated on V1 news on Twitter:.

Wishing you a Happy Canada Day and Fourth of July, as well as the best summer as the world slowly re-opens. Be safe and take care.