Open for business: Meet 5 teams we recently backed
Let’s start by recognizing that we live in exceptional times. Our thoughts go to everyone who has suffered due to the ongoing pandemic, and to the many hard-working people who have been laid off from their jobs.
As an early-stage investor, our job is to find and support solutions to current and future problems. The next generation of digital companies will work as strong drivers in new job creation and economic growth, while other sectors may struggle. That is why we keep executing on the strategy we have always had — investing in, and supporting the best pre-seed and seed teams out there.
That said, we are proud to present to you our five latest investments:
1. Starmony
We are doing to music creation, what Spotify did to music distribution
The Starmony team has spent their entire career in the music industry. Jan Nordlund started off as a producer at Bass Nation already in the ’90s and produced a number of hits. He was also a founding team member at X5 music, which was sold to Warner Music in 2016. Another co-founder is Daniel Zangger Borch who’s been a music artist and songwriter that became a researcher and PhD in Music Performance, as well as song coach to several well-known artists (and recently to contestants in the Swedish version of Idol). Our General Partner, Jacob Key has spent 10 years at Warner Music before founding Luminar Ventures, and has always seen music creation as an area in need of innovation. There are millions of passionate people who dream of becoming music artists, but being talented unfortunately isn’t enough. Starmony has set out to tackle this problem.
We are excited to back the team together with some exceptional people including Andreas Liffgarden (former Global Head of Business Development at Spotify and founder of Soundtrack Your Brand) as well as Sophia Bendz (former Global Head of Marketing at Spotify, now Partner at Atomico).
2. Hack Your Closet
At Hackyourcloset.com, we maintain and take care of thousands of clothing items through our shared closet. From washing to repairs, our goal is to circulate each piece of clothing every month for at least 3 years!
The Fashion industry isn’t sustainable. Its environmental footprint represents 10% of all global carbon emissions every year, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined! And the global apparel market is growing every year.
Lisa Gautier, one of the founders of Hack Your Closet, had worked in the apparel industry for the past 10 years, her grandfather was a tailor and came from Vietnam to France where he started his own studio. Lisa never saw herself as someone working with “Fashion”, rather as an innovator within the industry, always focusing on finding sustainable solutions. So last year, she founded Hack Your Closet together with Mikaela Larsell Ayesa. The team’s mission is to challenge apparel ownership. They do it by introducing second-hand clothes into a huge shared closet, where members get curated, fitted clothes to their doorstep, which they might keep or send back for circulation every month. They utilize data to improve curation over time and the inventory mainly sits in their members’ homes, making operations scalable. Lisa and the team have set the bar high and plan to set up shared closets in multiple markets in the coming years.
3. NewGlue
We focus on building a platform that creates more job opportunities for designers while making entrepreneurs look like a million bucks.
Great branding and fantastic design will always be relevant. For small companies however, even getting to a decent level in terms of look-and-feel is difficult and costly. That’s something Cris, Lucas, and the team behind NewGlue want to fix. They have carefully selected designers who bring stuff such as logos, branded social content, design templates, merchandise, and more to their virtual creative agency. All of the above is integrated into a ‘Branding as a Service’ product where users get auto-generated content based on real designs, saving loads of money spent on expensive agencies while maintaining high quality.
4. Teemly
We envision a future where everyone gets the chance to work in a team they love, regardless of where they’re located
Remote work is trending for ten years spearheaded by companies such as Zapier, who also authored The Remote Work Report. During February and March 2020 companies like Zoom saw demand soar due to increased demand for work-from-home equipment. Although a somewhat overwhelming demand at the moment, we strongly believe much of the behavior is here to stay. There are clear arguments for less travel to internal meetings and more remote work moving forward, such as increased convenience, higher productivity, and less environmental impact.
Charlotte and Oleg, founders of Teemly, are committed to helping companies build truly connected, distributed teams, and they have already built a unique experience. Luminar uses the desktop version of Teemly every day as our own virtual office. We have set up a virtual coffee room, a few meeting rooms, a phone booth, and a meditation room. Team members may use the rooms as they wish and one can always check-in or ask a question to anyone using the push-to-talk feature. No more inefficient scheduling of internal calls, instead we mostly hang out in the ‘open workspace’ like we’re used to.
5. Debricked
We have built a SaaS tool that enables all software companies to automate management of open source risks. Be it security, copyright issues, licenses or code health
More than 96% of all software companies use open-source, which represents 60% of their codebase. This adds complexity both in terms of vulnerabilities but also copyright and license management.
Debricked has built a cloud-based tool (also on-premise if preferred) that scans and reveals vulnerabilities and monitors code health in open source code continuously. They gather large amounts of data from a wide range of sources, which is processed and automatically made actionable at the developer’s fingertips. Making open source code management as easy as pie.
When we met Daniel, Oscar, and Martin, the co-founders of Debricked, we were amazed by their passion for software development and building developer-centric products. Debricked’s technology stems from top-level research within open source security, and co-founder Martin Hell (Assoc. Prof. and PhD in Cryptology) is a published expert in the area. Although still early in their journey, they had already won customers such as Kry and Volvo because of a superior product with higher accuracy and value gains compared to the competition, showing that they can build solid cybersecurity products but also win customers’ trust.
