Seeds to Track November 4th, 2019

Brendan Wales
Nov 4 · 5 min read

A weekly newsletter, highlighting the top 5 seed companies that have announced or raised a seed round within the past week. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter here.

Happy Monday.

A few general venture capital highlights from last week:

Vindex.gg raised a $60M Series A (!) to bring better software infrastructure to the esports market. Vindex CEO Mike Sepso was the founder of Major League Gaming which was acquired by Activision Blizzard in 2015.

Scratchpay raises $65M ($50M in debt + $15M in equity) to help people pay for vet bills. Existing investors in SWS Capital, TTV Capital, and Struck Capital.

Here are my top 5 seed investments from the past two weeks:


Sana

EVA Growth Index:

Product:
Benefit packages for employers with full medical, dental, vision and other perks without the traditional headaches or hidden fees

Investors:
Giga Funds, Trust Ventures, Mark VC

Total Raised:
$6M

Business Model:
SaaS revenue plus margin from operating a health insurance plan

Comparables:
Traditional Insurance providers, Alan

X-Factors:
1. Fullstack benefits provider to simplify admin for businesses
2. Affordable plans for mass-adoption

Thoughts:
Employers pay too much for their benefits and Sana is out to lower the cost via innovative insurance plans built for the small business. The founders know a thing or two about this market, having both been early employees a JustWorks, a high flying Trinet competitor.


Oliver

EVA Growth Index:
No external data sources showing growth

Product:
On-demand direct to consumer furniture via a monthly subscription

Investors:
Mayfield Fund, Abstract Ventures, Michael Ovitz, Julia Hartz, Kevin Hartz, Eric Wu, April Underwood

Total Raised:
$6.8M

Business Model:
Monthly subscription fee plus margin on final sales

Comparables:
Live Feather

X-Factors:
1. Curation as a service, bundled into rooms with a click of a button
2. Macro tailwinds focusing on millennials who are looking for convenience and affordable design

Thoughts:
I could include one version or another of this type of model every week, but I like Oliver’s approach around providing an entire room. The design at the end of the day is the hardest part. The furniture is straightforward. They will need to figure out a clever hack to get distribution (buying ads on FB and Insta won’t be enough), but I like the approach.


Improvado

EVA Growth Index:

Product:
180 integrations to empower your marketing team to use their favorite tools to map data, build and visualize custom reports

Investors:
Bullpen Capital, Nimble Ventures, Auren Hoffman, 500 Startups, Omar Towakol

Total Raised:
$8M

Business Model:
SaaS subscription

Comparables:
Segment, Stitch Data

X-Factors:
1. Letting non-savvy marketers pull data out of the tools they use
2. Marketing-stacks are becoming increasingly fragmented

Thoughts:
Moving data from one tool to another is a nightmare. Segment solves this problem well. Improvado is focusing on helping folks move their customer data into their preferred data visualization tool. There is a bit of overlap with Segment, a portfolio company of ours, but generally speaking, this is a massive problem for anyone collecting large amounts of customer data.


ManiMe

EVA Growth Index:

Product:
3D printed ready to wear manicures fitted to the consumer's fingers based on five simple photos taken by the consumer of their hand

Investors:
Techstars, NFX, Maha Ibrahim

Total Raised:
$3M

Business Model:
Personalized direct to consumer e-commerce

Comparables:
No one significant

X-Factors:
1) A network of nail designers who use ManiMe to share their designs with the world

Thoughts:
Recurring revenue. Innovative product. Inherently viral (people will see the nails and ask their friends about them). No sophisticated competitors online.


Searchable

EVA Growth Index:
No external data sources showing growth

Product:
Internal search engine that helps individuals find knowledge that exists and might be hidden within an enterprise

Investors:
Defy VC, Brian Halligan, Jonathan Kraft, Paul English

Total Raised:
$2M

Business Model:
SaaS subscription

Comparables:
Various knowledge base and internal wiki solutions

X-Factors:
1. With more folks using google docs and other cloud services, it is now more possible than ever to search across a large % of a business’ documents

Thoughts:
This is one of the largest unsolved problems in the enterprise. There are privacy concerns, but there are ways to solve that. If fast and accurate, this has the potential to be a fast grower.


Have you recently raised a Seed round? Do you think your start-up could be interesting for e.ventures? Provide us your information here and potentially be included next week.

See last weeks Seeds to Track >> here

What is the EVA Growth Index?
The EVA Growth index is a composite of third-party data sources around a company’s website traffic. The vertical green lines in the charts represent a point in time where the company raised outside capital
.

Brendan Wales

Written by

Partner at e.ventures. Investing in seed to growth stage consumer internet and SaaS businesses.

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