Top VC Seed Deals (September 2017)
I’m super fascinated with early stage startups and I spend a lot of time researching/doing due diligence on many of them at Arab Angel Fund. With this blog, I want to document what companies I’m really vibing with each month so, over time, I can see if my intuition on these companies were right. Make sure to follow for more VC, startup, and entrepreneur stuff.
Petal
FinTech is huge and companies that can make financial products that appeal to younger generations will see gains. Petal’s flagship product is the first credit card that was purposefully designed to help the estimated 65m Americans that have no or misrepresented credit.
Not only is the team creating a product that is much needed in the market, but they’re pretty stacked and fully capable of bringing a product like this to market — hailing from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, American Express, Amazon, and McKinsey.
The investors in their $3.6m Seed round are also highly touted. Major financial backers include Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Afore Capital, Rosecliff Ventures, Guild Capital, Great Oaks VC, Story Ventures and Silicon Badia. In addition, 4 cofounders of 4 different unicorn companies are also investing as angels in this company (SoFi, Funding Circle, Flatiron Health, and Clover Health).
Guilded
The eSports industry is booming, and were just starting to see the beginning of this digital revolution. Guilded aims to be the home for your gaming guild, however, I think the most interesting aspect of Guilded’s software is their Insights tool. This tool connects to the API of Overwatch (more games to come) and draws data of each individual player. Insights then utilizes machine learning to analyze things like kill/death ratio in a specific role, accuracy, and more to identify the players in the guild that would have the best chemistry in a team together. A tool like this is crucial for teams that want to take it seriously and get into a competitive arena.
Founder Eli Brown is definitely the guy to create a disruptive company in this space as he is a former software engineer for Microsoft, focusing on its Xbox platform, and was in the same position at Instagram and Facebook before founding Guilded.
Guilded was a member of the prestigious Y Combinator (Summer 17 batch) and have raised a seed round with some of the highest performing VCs in the game —SV Angel, Initialized Capital, Susa Ventures, ZhenFund, FundersClub, Fuel Capital, Sterling.VC, and Liquid2 Ventures.
Snappr
Uber for X has been sort of a joke in the startup community because it seems like every startup wants to be Uber for X where X is something that no one truly needs on-demand. Professional photography on the other hand is something that could benefit greatly from an on-demand model. As part of Y Combinator (Winter 17 batch), Snappr aims to make professional photography affordable by creating an on-demand marketplace for photographers. A 30 minute shoot will run you $59 and a two-hour shoot will be only $149.
The team appears to have some smart heads on it as the CEO was a former McKinsey Strategy Consultant and the Head of Operations and Marketing has had over a decade of experience in photography & videography, including founding the agency Tah Dah Productions.
Snappr raised a $2m Seed round from Airtree Ventures (biggest VC in Austrailia), Justin Waldron (cofounder of Zynga), and Lars Rasmussen (cofounder of Google Maps).
Mira
With the recent releases of augmented reality SDKs from Apple (ARKit) and Google (ARCore), augmented reality is here to stay and startups that can capitalize on this will see immense growth. Mira AR is creating a headset that allows users to slide in their iPhone and see its display reflected in their line of sight. The headset will be sold at $99 which puts it in the mid-tier AR market alongside Gear VR and Google Daydream.
The team behind Mira is strong — Cofounder and CEO Ben Taft has successfully exited a company to FNT Media and Cofounder and COO Matt Stern spent time at Sony Pictures Entertainment as a Virtual Reality Innovator/Associate.
The company raised a $2.5m Seed round from beast VCs such as Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Founders Fund Angel. Other notable investors include MacroVentures (cofounded by 6th mayor of DC Adrian Fenty) and Troy Capital Partners (cofounded by cofounder of Myspace Josh Berman).
Ambient.ai
Determining what is in videos at-scale is a difficult thing for developers to do because current AI solutions cannot provide information on what the scene actually is — only it’s individual parts. Ambient.ai’s technology processes video and can then provide captions for its contents, ranging from broad context about what’s taking place in a slice of footage (for example, saying “this is a music festival”) while also captioning specific actions, like saying “there is a woman walking”.
“We think it’s the first functional equivalent to the human visual system,” Ambient.ai cofounder and CEO Shikhar Shrestha said in an interview. “Because we don’t detect chairs, and detect coffee cups, and detect people, then try to piece that together. We actually understand the scene more holistically, and we use the time dimension.”
The company’s cofounder and CTO Vikesh Khanna is an expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning and has previously worked at dropbox to build their large-scale analytics system.
Ambient.ai raised a Seed round from Y Combinator (Summer 17 batch), SV Angel, Stanford, Inevitable Ventures, Western Technology Ventures, and more.
