Afore Mentioned — April Newsletter
Afore Capital’s April newsletter featuring the inaugural Pre-Seed Summit, portfolio profiles, news, and more
The Inaugural Pre-Seed Summit
In April Afore Capital hosted the inaugural venture conference focused solely on pre-seed and early stage investing. The Pre-Seed Summit brought together over 150 founders, investors and LPs in venture for a half day packed with deep insights, exciting conversation, and time for attendees to mix and mingle at The Battery in downtown SF.
The morning kicked off with Marco Zappacosta, Co-Founder & CEO of Thumbtack. Marco discussed the sky high expectations put on startups and the need to give companies more time to grow and develop. Like many successful unicorns, Thumbtack started with a pre-seed sized round ($500K in their case), built a long lasting culture of scrappiness, and only raised big rounds of funding once they had product-market fit and were ready to scale.
Later the crowd welcomed panels of VC and LP investors to share their perspectives. Read more about the Pre-Seed Summit here.
Portfolio in Focus
FaunaDB is the only Mission-Critical NoSQL Database, guaranteeing data correctness without operational complexity. Scalable, secure, transactional, global, multi-cloud, multi-tenant, temporal, and highly available, FaunaDB is designed to support digital enterprises in the 21st century and beyond. Verticals like financial services, ecommerce, gaming, and SaaS have deployed FaunaDB to support identity management, distributed ledgers, shared services, mobile APIs, and other use cases. Founded in 2012 by the team that scaled Twitter, Fauna is based in San Francisco and Boston, and funded by Point72 Ventures, CRV, Data Collective, and Quest Venture Partners, with strategic investment from GV (formerly Google Ventures, a division of Alphabet), Capital One Growth Ventures, and LINE Corporation.
Capital One Growth Ventures recently announced FaunaDB’s $25M Series A.
Cushion is a consumer-centric technology company focused on safeguarding people’s money. Their custom tech does work on behalf of the consumer to help them not only rectify financial mistakes, but also prevent them from happening again in the future.
To start, Cushion is going after the $200 Billion that consumers pay U.S. banks in fees and credit card interest each year. Their bot, called Fee Fighter, automatically disputes those charges on behalf of Cushion’s users. When it is successful, Cushion retains (at most) a 25% cut of the found money. That way users never pay for the service out of pocket.
Cushion’s long term goal is to democratize access to financial help and automate 70% of basic finance management — helping consumers avoid costly fees, save money, and live financially healthier lives.
Learn more at Cushion.ai.
In Other News…
Petal partners with WebBank to launch card for ‘credit invisibles.’ Read more in American Banker.
Learn more about Visor as they aim to coach and train up video game players to become superstar gamers. TechCrunch featured the company in their roundup for YC’s demo day one.
Read about Thumbtack Co-Founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta at Afore’s PreSeed Summit. 10 years in and at a $1.3B valuation, Marco understands the value of the long game. He said, “The time frame to get stuff done is much longer than these narratives we create around businesses.” Read more in Pitchbook.
Overtime taps Marc Kohn, Formerly at Barstool Sports and Bleacher Report, as Chief Content Officer. Check out the story in Variety.
Afore’s Gaurav Jain and Anamitra Banerji talk about the emerging Pre-Seed niche with Pitchbook. Jain said, “Seed funds used to be pre-product-market fit, now seed funds want to wait for a product-market fit. They want to see enough meat on the bone, and then that’s when they want to invest.” Read on here.
Stay tuned for more events, follow us on Twitter @AforeVC, and subscribe to our newsletter here.
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