💫 2019 Ridge Rewind
🤩 Wow. Another year. Guess the old saying rings true: Time flies when you have a fund.
Of course, that also means it’s time for the 2019 edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ridge Ventures Rewind, a year-end rundown from your favorite early-stage VC firm. Whether you’re dodging your in-laws, tuning out your problematic Uncle Joe, or need some pleasurable holiday travel reading, we hope you enjoy the show. 🎅🏽🤶🏽
How was 2019 at Ridge? Mountainous: over $1 billion raised by our startups, a blockbuster IPO, and a monster addition to our team, among other wins. But we’re not here to toot our own didgeridoo, so we’ll let our portfolio companies do the talking.
Commencing launch in $3 million…$2 million…$1 million…
🧗♂ Howdy, Partner! Brendan Baker Joins the Ridge Expedition
OK, so maybe we’ll brag a little bit.
️Batting leadoff in this year’s Rewind is Brendan Baker, our newest Partner we announced via Business Insider in September. Brendan, a real-life mountain climber, knows all about scaling. As a former Director at Greylock Partners and employee number two at AngelList, he’s helped hundreds of startups raise tens of millions of dollars in funding. Brendan has already led our investments in Loop, an automated solution that cuts e-commerce return cycles by 50 percent, and another stealth startup.
Speaking of Business Insider, they LOVE our living plant wall. (Talk about high growth!)
🚄 Life in the Fastly Lane: an IPO to Remember
After roping in a $40 million Series F in 2018, Fastly went public in May and is currently valued at $1.7 billion. The Deloitte 500 listee’s edge cloud platform provides a fast, secure, and scalable user experience for companies like Yelp, Pinterest, and The New York Times.
Our own Alex Rosen led the charge on Fastly, our fourth unicorn in three years, while fellow Ridger Gil Penchina helped start the company.
📈 Discord is Far from Discordant
If you peeped last year’s Ridge Rewind, or have the slightest pulse on tech’s Unicorn-ucopia, you know Discord is not playing games. The go-to chat platform for gamers continues to build on the impressive stats they racked up at the end of 2018 — $200+ million in funding (!), $2.05 billion valuation (!!), and 150+ million users (!!!). 👏🕴
In a recent Fortune feature, Gil said this:
“If you look at charts of [Discord] versus Instagram versus Snapchat, the growth curves actually look pretty similar.”
Not bad company to be in.
✈️ UpLift is Going Places
Can’t afford to pay for a flight in one go? No need to be a soar loser, just book it with UpLift and pay for it in installments. This unparalleled solution propelled the company to a 747-sized $123 million round earlier this year — more than enough to convince United Airlines to get on board.
If vacationers prefer to brave the seas, they can now finance cruises through UpLift thanks to a partnership with Carnival Cruise Line. Sprinkle in the recent $250 million uptick to its credit line, and it’s clear UpLift is no flight risk.
🦸🏻♀️ Girls Just Wanna Have Funding
Fun(d) fact: over the past three years, female-founded companies have comprised more than one-third of Ridge’s investments.
Most recently, our resident hacker/DJ/grime aficionado Ben Metcalfe spearheaded our investment in Samasource. We’re continually inspired by founder/CEO Leila Janah’s mission to create jobs for East Africans who tag training data for the world’s biggest AI companies.
Our other leading ladies? Let’s just say their 2019 feats could fill a book of Proustian proportions. Here are some highlights:
- We have 55 million reasons why Heidi Zak’s ThirdLove is still (bra)wesome. 55,000,001 if you count Fortune’s spotlight on ThirdLove’s 85-percent-female workforce. Also, ICYMI 👇
- Minted founder/CEO Mariam Naficy made Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Powerful Women list.
- Jyve co-founder Cammy Bergren no doubt contributed to the company’s $35 million haul and more than $450 million in bookings.
- Online dating is dated; Amanda Bradford is fixing it. We’re swiping right on The League’s groundbreaking video speed dating feature.
🛒 Amazon Go…Away
Grabango is a grocery checkout-expediting superpower that we’re betting on to eradicate long lines and mindless National Enquirer skimming. Founder/CEO Will Glaser, former co-founder of Pandora, and his phenomenal team raised $12 million in February. Now Grabango is working with grocery chain Giant Eagle to outfit stores with checkout-free shopping.
Bolt and Braze are two other members of the Ridge Familia that are forever changing e-shopping life — and threatening Lord ‘Zon’s pole position. Realizing that online shoppers abandon their carts 70 percent of the time, Bolt has turbocharged online checkout and solved fraud detection to the tune of $68 million. Meanwhile, Braze cracked the Forbes Cloud 100 this year and used its cross-channel customer engagement platform to boost conversions for Urban Outfitters, 1–800-Flowers, and more.
🔮 The Foreseeable Future (of Work)
We’re jiving with Jyve’s Skills Economy. Jyve’s Consumer Packaged Gangsters (CPG) Brad Oberwager, Cammy Bergren, and James Kairos — previously of Bare Snacks, now owned by PepsiCo — have helped the company amass 6,000+ workers in 31 states and 4,000+ stores across 1,215+ cities nationwide.
And we can’t talk workplace revolution without mentioning our clipboard-breaking, file cabinet-stomping, paper-saving friends over at MaintainX. Thanks to MaintainX, embattled frontline workers — 80 percent of the world’s workforce — can save their paper for origami class and use seamless digital workflows to streamline training, quality assurance, record keeping, and other processes that have hamstrung companies for eons.
⚙ Let’s Get Technical, Technical
Ridge favorite Peter Yared has six exits to his name, so naturally, we backed his data-residency-as-a-service platform, InCountry, practically in our sleep. A whopping 74 percent of businesses operating in the EU are still GDPR-noncompliant, resulting in up to billions of dollars in fines. InCountry’s all-in-one solution ensures jurisdictional laws and customer data are always compliant, and it’s already live in more than 60 countries. 🌏🌍🌎
We’re expecting big things from Rafay as well, the containerization king saving Kubernetes from its own overcomplicated self. We led Rafay’s $8 million Series A because Kubernetes is a Kuber-nuisance, and automating it means fewer migraines for devops teams and more time to drive value for their companies. (FYI: Gartner predicts more than 75 percent of global organizations will be running containerized applications by 2022.) 🚀🌑🌟
🎄 It’s the Most Funderful Time of the Year 🕎
Well folks, that about does it for this year’s Ridge Rewind. We’re excited to close out the decade with a bang and bring our 2020 vision into focus. We wish all of you a happy holiday full of peppermint bark, Douglas fir needles, menorahs, or just some old-fashioned R&R.😴😴😴
And keep those lights up through the summer — you earned it.
To all a good night! 🌘
Alex, Pat, Gil, Brendan, Ben, Lorra, Nancy, Marta, Mark, and Baochi
🎁 P.S. Still doing holiday shopping? Check out the 2019 Ridge Gift Guide
