AAF Seed Radar #17: Northwood Space, Vectara, Pierre, Antares Industries & Terminal
We track early stage investments of 250+ funds at AAF as part of our offensive strategy to have our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the overall startup ecosystem. The list below is a handful of those seed investments that we invested in, or underlying portfolio companies within our emerging manager strategy. All information is publicly available and none of this is financial advice. :)
Northwood Space
Summary: Northwood Space is building a data highway between earth and space by building a cell tower network for satellites to unlock the full potential of the $94B satellite communications market. Increasingly data-intensive space applications are now constrained by a bottleneck in throughput capacity on the ground. Many key aspects of ground architecture haven’t changed much since the 1960’s. The industry standard is bespoke manufacturing processes, lengthy construction and fine-tuning, only to deliver a system with limited capacity and frequent failures. Northwood is expanding access to space by rethinking shared infrastructure for satellite backhaul.
Speaking to CNBC on her vision for a data highway up to satellites, Mendler explained that though “space is getting easier along so many different dimensions,” the actual process of sending and receiving data to and from specific satellites remains difficult. She said users can “have difficulty finding an access point for contacting your satellite.” This certainly tracks with the explosion of satellites in orbit, including hundreds of tiny cubesats — like, for example, some of the 90 payloads that SpaceX launched aboard its Transporter 9 rocket launch in November last year.
Team: Northwood was founded by Bridgit Mendler & Griffin Cleverly. Bridgit Mendler is a multifaceted individual known for her work in acting, music, and advocacy. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the MIT Media Lab, focusing on technologies supporting inclusive governance and citizen engagement. Prior to her academic pursuits, Mendler was a platinum songwriter, recording artist, and television actress, notably starring in Disney Channel’s “Wizards of Waverly Place” and NBC’s “Undateable.” Griffin is a veteran engineer having worked with MITRE, Lockheed Martin, MIT & Space Vector Corporation as a Mechanical Engineer the last decade.
Funding: The company closed a $6.3M Seed round led by Founders Fund & Andreessen Horowitz. BoxGroup, Also Capital, Banter Capital & Long Journey Ventures also invested in the round.
Vectara.ai
Summary: Vectara is an end-to-end platform to embed powerful generative AI features with extraordinary results.
At a high level, Vectara lets users ask questions about their company’s data and returns a summary with citations to the source data set. The platform ingests new documents in real time, providing “client-configurable” data retention, which enables organizations to discard the original documents and text after they’ve been indexed so that no residual data from the company remains in Vectara’s search index. Vectara’s founder, Amr Awadallah says that brands like Conversica, Apex Chat, Metus and Oncotelic Therapeutics have been applying it to use cases like legal discovery, ecommerce search, news monitoring and financial analysis.
Team: Founder & CEO, Amr Awadallah previously served as VP of Product Intelligence at Yahoo! from 2000–2009, following which he co-founded Cloudera which went public in 2017 and was subsequently taken private by KKR for $5B.
“We’re opening up this application of AI for the millions of apps and websites out there that rely on search for core navigation,” he continued. “This technology enables teams to better use time that’s being wasted, capture money that’s being left on the table and begin unlocking further insights that become available once search intent is understood.”
Funding: The company raised $28.5M in seed funding led by Race Capital with participation from Page One Ventures & Point72 Ventures.
Pierre
Summary: Pierre is a modern engineering platform for product teams. Pierre enables engineers, designers and business team members to discuss new features before they’re merged. Move from design doc to branch with just a push. Set context and review code, ideas, and live previews with anyone. Tailor your workflow with CI widgets. All in one place, all together.
Team: Jacob Thornton (CEO) is the Co-creator of Bootstrap, a front-end software development framework with 160K+ GitHub stars. Ian Owbey (CTO) was the first intern at Twitter, dropping out of college at 19 to TL the Twitter platform team. Jacob and Ian co-founded a mobile app called Bumpers in 2016, which was eventually acquired by Coinbase. For the next 5 years, they led the Product Platform team at Coinbase and were the company-wide web and mobile DRIs.
We’re building a new way to review code, and we’re starting with pull requests. As engineers with more than 15 years of experience, we’ve seen firsthand how cumbersome a pull request review is using Github — often, pull requests lack necessary context, take too long to approve, and cannot be viewed by non-engineers for feedback. Github’s comment features make it difficult to manage a conversation over time, and discussion is lost when engineers switch to Slack or Hangouts.
Funding: The company raised an undisclosed round post YC demo day from Wayfinder Ventures.
Antares Industries
Summary: Antares is building mission critical energy solutions starting with portable micro nuclear reactors for the DOD. At Antares, their long-term mission is to make clean energy abundant, from Earth to the Asteroid Belt. They are fueled by the belief that energy abundance and military strength are the keys to unlocking growth in the American standard of living. This vision drives them to build transportable microreactors for the modern warfighter. By developing inherently safe, rapidly deployable nuclear microreactors that can be operated terrestrially or in space, Antares aims to solve the energy constraints of contested logistics and untether military capabilities from fossil fuel supply chains.
Team: Co-founder & President Julia DeWahl was the former Business Development lead of the Starlink Business Operations Team at SpaceX where she led the business from 0 to 650,000 across 25 countries. Before SpaceX, Julie was Senior Director of Operations at Opendoor or 5 years She is an angel investor in Northwood Space, Hadrian, Bedrock, Primer and more. Co-Founder & CEO, Jordan Bramble was previously Founder & CTO of Local Kitchens.
Funding: The company raised over $8M in seed funding from top-tier investors, including Caffeinated Capital, Susa Ventures & Banter Capital.
Terminal
Summary: Terminal is building Plaid for Telematics — a universal API for vehicle telematics data. Federal mandates require Electronic Logging Devices to be integrated into all trucks to track hours-of-service and records of duty status. Today, there are dozens of different ELD device companies, many of which have poor or non existent third party APIs. Customers who require telematics data include insurance companies, fuel card vendors, invoice factorers, fleet management systems, digital freight brokers, load boards, transportation management systems, and more.
Team: The company was Co-founded last year by CEO Raghav Midha and CTO Connor Giles, who previously held product and engineering leadership roles at New York-based neobank NorthOne, were inspired by Plaid’s application programming interface (API) securely linking data across financial networks.
“For those two and a half years, we worked a lot with various middleware solutions and we realized how core some of that infrastructure we built would be in unlocking all the efficient tools that we had,” Giles told FreightWaves. “We felt that logistics had so many opportunities to experience this same unlocking.”
“At that point, we were open to solving all sorts of different problems, but what really connected for us was so many different people were running into the challenge of integrations,” said Midha. “Anybody trying to build any system, automation or platform within logistics and trucking was spending up to 50% or more of their time just on different integration types.”
Funding: Terminal closed a $3.1M ($4.2 million CAD) seed round in December after being one of seven Canadian-affiliated companies participating in Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 cohort. Investors include Wayfinder Ventures, Golden Ventures & Y Combinator.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Stay tuned for our next Seed Radar.
To stay up to date with all things AAF, check out our website!
