🎆 Ridge Ventures 2018 Rewind

Published in

RidgeVC

6 min readDec 19, 2018

❄️ VCeason’s Greetings!

Maybe you’re bundled up in your Snuggie, sipping eggnog and brandy. Or perhaps you’re scrolling through emails on your morning commute and asking yourself if Die Hard is indeed a Christmas movie. In any event, we’re glad you’re here to read about some startups that are getting mo’ money to solve mo’ problems.

It’s been a big year for Ridge Ventures, starting with the $135M raised for Ridge IV. But it was our portfolio companies that really stole the show. In this special winter Ridge Rewind, we recap their epic year from multiple exits to raising nearly $1 billion in funding. Scroll-worthy highlights include: ThirdLove CEO and co-founder Heidi Zak has a not-so-secret message for Victoria’s Secret, Minted’s Mariam Naficy brings cheer to holiday card procrastinators while raising $208 million….and much more!

🚀 Exits

💰 Citrix acquires Sapho for $200 million

Sapho, which we seed-funded back in 2014, was recently acquired by Citrix for $200 million to help large organizations ease employees into modern work practices without losing their legacy software.

Ridge Ventures and Sapho co-founder and CTO Peter Yared go back like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Yared, former CIO of CBS Interactive and member of Ridge’s CXO Network, leveraged our relationships with 70+ Fortune 500 brainiacs to elicit feedback on Sapho’s product and market fit. In 2017 alone our CXO network produced 40% of Sapho’s bookings — we like making life easier for companies who are making life easier!

💰 ZoomInfo Acquires Datanyze

Datanyze, very, very nyze. The leading technographics provider is shacking up with ZoomInfo to help sales and marketing professionals connect with the right people at the right time.

Before founding Datanyze, CEO Ilya Semin immigrated to the US with $600 and landed a lucrative $7.25/hour job at a pool management company. It didn’t take long for Semin’s AI-powered insights platform to save drowning execs from the tedium of prospecting for leads.

Semin knows how to stack his Pringles: he bootstrapped Datanyze on the way to 25% monthly growth, hired 30 people, and clocked more than $10 million in revenue with only $1.8 million raised. 600+ companies around the world rely on Datanyze, a Gartner Cool Vendor and G2 Crowd High Performer.

🗞 Speaking of Data Companies…

💸 Data is the New Oil? The New Electricity? Or just a variation on an old theme? Read Alex Rosen’s TechCrunch article on The Attributes that Define the Increasingly Critical Data-As-A Service Industry. Data is valuable but if it “don’t make dollars it don’t make sense.”

💵 Dollar Dollar Bill Y’All

Ridge Ventures is making it rain (torrentially). Our portfolio companies raised nearly $1 billion this year — that’s a lot of La Croix.

Some more info on the bigger hauls:

🌿 Our friends at Minted raised $208 million George Washingtons ($300M total to date) to help scale their robust marketplace of independent artists and fuel new business strategies, such as opening up brick-and-mortar stores. Minted’s roster of talented designers––spanning 50 states and 96 countries––make your wedding invitations, websites, and holiday cards easy like Sunday morning.

🦄 The Discord team, despite their namesake, are quite a harmonious bunch at the moment. The free chat platform for gamers has joined the unicorn legion, notching $200 million at a $2.05 billion valuation while tripling its user base to 150M+ users. Those are big numbers in all the right places.

📱 Braze (formerly Appboy) has a new name but is changing the mobile marketing game just the same. The growth marketing automation platform announced an $80 million round, the opening of a new HQ in Singapore, the tripling of its revenue, and the doubling of its valuation to $850 million. Braze boosts mobile conversions for companies like Microsoft, HBO, Domino’s, Gap, and more by providing insights that help ads feel human and less like an obnoxious mall kiosk worker selling knock-off cologne.

☘ Trifacta, the Easy-Bake Oven of data prep, landed a trifecta by tripling its customer base. Trifacta’s $48 million round from Google and others will expand its AI-based data wrangling tools to even more enterprise businesses.

💻 Fastly cha-ching’d $40 million, as it continues to make edge computing edgier for today’s biggest brands. The company also tripled its users (we love tripling!).

👠It’s Ladies Night

More than 30% of Ridge’s recent investments have female co-founders. Here’s the latest from some of our wonder women.

👄 ThirdLove CEO Heidi Zak Put Victoria’s Secret to Bed

Victoria’s Secret threw shade at ThirdLove, and CEO and co-founder Heidi Zak had the perfect response. Oh, how the Angels have fallen.

💯 Heidi Zak and Minted CEO Mariam Naficy Make the Inc. Female Founders 100

Both Heidi Zak and Mariam Naficy were honorees of inc. magazine’s annual list of top female entrepreneurs “rattling industries far and wide.” Bravo to these changemakers who are improving the world and making money in the process.

👑 Accolades For YouEarnedIt Founder Autumn Manning

Austin’s premier business outlet crowned Autumn Manning a “culture warrior” and lauded her mentorship. Congrats to our culture queen for the high praise and well-deserved Stevie award!

🌉 And to All a Good Night

We’re excited to close the books on 2018 and ring in the new year with plenty of VCheer. From all of us at Ridge Ventures, have a merry end to Q4 and dream big with those resolutions.

Oh, and for those holiday card slackers out there: sign, seal, and deliver yourself from agony by using a beautiful Minted design like the one below. All it takes is a few clicks and a tongue to lick the flap!