Announcing Kindred Ventures II
A $100M fund for formation/pre-seed/seed stage startups
We’re thrilled to announce today that we’ve raised a new $100 million seed-stage venture fund. Our mission for this fund is to invest in brilliant and dedicated founders at the earliest stages of building their startup and, ultimately, our collective future.
This tumultuous chapter we live in today has jolted and pulled us into an accelerated and bumpy transformation across many areas of life. Trends and movements we thought might gain traction down the road have rapidly become inevitabilities. While we’ve always believed that growth — new markets and positive-sum progress — is the main driver of health for our global economy, we also feel more certain that democratic access and level playing fields are the dependencies to make it last.
At the core of this next phase of transformation, we want to meet mission-driven founders solving important problems by creating products enabled by innovative software. We are grateful and energized that our work is essentially to use a beginner’s mind to discover the interfaces, networks, markets, and infrastructure that will be conceived, designed, and built by dynamic and diverse entrepreneurs.
At Kindred, we use simple frameworks for the themes important to us, and think of them as questions more than answers:
How do we access, participate, and learn on a more level playing field in the economy?
Over a decade ago, we initially learned much about mobility and delivery through our early investments in Uber and Postmates. Many years later, we witnessed the challenges of evolving from a single marketplace into a global platform for multiple modalities and for the future of work on a global scale. We took notes on how new technologies like autonomous vehicles, local delivery robots, and short-distance electric aviation seemed only like prototyping fun at the start, but in the blink or two of an eye could start to become a reality on the road, sidewalk, and in the sky.
Our fascination with networks and movement led to our pursuit of the B2B mobility layer in our global economy. We found new entrepreneurs looking to use technology to empower people and businesses by creating virtual carrier fleets (CloudTrucks) and performance monitoring SaaS (Isometric Technologies) to improve the quality of our supply chains and logistics.
In the world of finance, the rules of the game are changing dramatically. People want more open and accessible ways of making payments, investing capital, and earning income and benefits. To these ends, we’ve been honored to be a supporter of the DeFi missions of Coinbase, dYdX, Namebase, Set Protocol, Radar, Mobilecoin, and Mina Protocol. We are in the early days of how this will all play out, but we are very optimistic about the direction, time, and impact it will have across all categories of finance. FinTech startups in our portfolio such as Bloom Credit, Catch, and Point have been working to solve the friction, inequity, and limitations that consumers face in their daily lives.
In all of these areas of marketplaces, mobility, work, decentralization, and FinTech, we are looking for builders who believe that these are giant multidisciplinary opportunities worth a lifetime of dedication.
What are the new models of creation, collaboration, communication, and computing?
IFYKYK, our culture is also the most vibrant ever-changing part of the economy. The founders we’ve backed have created new technologies to redefine media, fashion, and collectibles as more rentable, investable, and shareable. Zora, Seasons, Otis, Bitski, and HourOneAI each possess a laser-focus in their vision of the rapidly evolving relationship between creators and their fans/customers
Communication and expression are the active agents of change in culture and business. We have been lucky to be a backer of the talented product builders at audio-focused startups like Clubhouse and OpenPhone, along with a few other exciting stealth teams in social audio and video as yet unannounced.
Developers are the new class of creators, leveraging new methods of design and engineering. We believe that with the right developer tools and data infrastructure such as Northflank, Red Planet Labs, Anjuna, and Optic, the net effect on innovation will be tremendous.
When it comes to computing and our daily lives, we are simply overdue for a change to something better, beyond the smartphone. The illustrious team at Humane are deep in development to bring the world something truly incredible.
In what ways can we improve our well-being across the physical, mental, and social?
Digital health means both care and prevention, done more efficiently and accurately using technology. We helped form and fund Heartbeat Health, the virtual care service for cardiology. We’ve invested continuously in Color Health, as they expand into non-acute care management software across the country. We’ve also continued to invest and support another portfolio company, Tonal, who has quickly become the leader in at-home fitness, with its unique software-enabled strength training machine. We want to meet founders who want to work on bringing knowledge, services, and community for the improvement of our physical and mental health.
In the area of food, we’ve begun to explore functional foods and backed the team at Taika, who are creating a new type of CPG company focused on using the best of nutritional science, performance formulation, and delicious foods and beverages. In personal care, we’ve worked closely with a startup based in Singapore called Yours which has created a popular and digitally personalized skincare service for the South East Asian market.
Can we build sustainable systems for energy, materials, goods, and food?
Circular economies, plant-based foods, decarbonization, and electrification are all necessary ingredients of a low-carbon economy. To combat climate change effectively, we want to work with great entrepreneurs like those we’ve invested in previously at Linear Labs, a design and manufacturing team who have built the most power-efficient high-torque electric motor on the planet, Replenysh, a SaaS marketplace for a reusable materials supply chain, and Zymergen, a $2 billion dollar computational biology company creating better and more sustainable materials in our electronics, agriculture, and personal care goods.
We are grateful to our investors for their continued support of our work to support entrepreneurs building a better future. If you are a systems thinker or driven builder, and want to answer one of the questions above, please do reach out to us at hello@kindredventures.com. We would love to hear from you.
silicon valley is a state of mind and action,
Steve & Kanyi
