Urban Us + URBAN-X
Reflections on 5 great years — results, learnings, thanks, and what’s next for Urban Us.
Between 2017 and 2021, we ran the sourcing, selection, investment in, and coaching of startups at URBAN-X. As of the final days in December 2021, over 90% of the startups we backed had raised follow-on funding, up from 35% when we started.
We opted to conclude our work on URBAN-X so we could focus on our new platform, to be announced in the coming weeks. It’s a useful moment to reflect on what we built and thank our partners at MINI and BMW Group.
How it started
We first spoke with the team at BMW Group about URBAN-X in 2014. The alignment was perfect — we test drove the newly launched BMW i3, and the MINI team explained their vision to invest beyond the automobile, into areas like real estate and mobility services. At that time we’d just started to test our thesis at Urban Us, so we turned down the opportunity to run URBAN-X and took advisory roles.
In 2017, we finally accepted the offer to run URBAN-X. We were fortunate to inherit the EIR (experts in residence) program led by Johan and a thriving events and content approach organized by Miriam. We made some specific changes, including moving from a mentor-led to a partner-led program. We introduced our sourcing, scoring, and memo approach for selection. And we also tested a variety of recruiting approaches, like working with angel.co (their accelerator platform shut down two years ago).
Most importantly, we brought with us a super-active, diverse community of investors, customers, partners, and functional experts committed to startups, cities, and climate.
Results
We nearly tripled graduation rates for the program. As we mentioned above, as of December 2021, 90% of teams had raised funding rounds, up from 35% when we started. In our oldest cohort, 71% of teams have raised series A rounds. There are programs that publicly celebrate 50% graduation rates. As a point of reference — here are the stats for YC.
We supported and invested in 56 emerging companies that are fundamentally reshaping access to electric mobility, sustainable construction, carbon accounting, and infrastructure resilience management, among other important challenges in today’s world. We are proud to have built a community of stellar founders. Teams raised in excess of $335M, and reached enterprise value creation in excess of $1B within 4 years, with exits to companies like Octopus Energy and BP.
Fully Remote
A few months into the pandemic, A/D/O, our home for URBAN-X, was closed, permanently. In the summer of 2020, we were asking our founders to figure out how to shift to a remote world. We were already 80% remote, so we quickly adjusted to a 100% online program and began testing new formats, like deal books for investors, and ramped up introductions to our already active community.
By some estimates, we’ve experienced about a decade of growth in online commerce over just the last 18 months. It’s not just online shopping. It’s clear that investors are more than comfortable investing without meeting in person. And it seemed customers in all types of industries were also happy to buy without meeting in person. The value of place-based events like demo days, vanished in the face of a rapidly evolving online fundraising, e-commerce, B2B sales, and marketing landscape. Change has also come to how teams are organized. Across our portfolio, remote, is the most popular top location for jobs.
We see a unique opportunity to massively expand high-quality introductions. Opportunistic collisions in online and offline communities are fine, but we know we can be much more deliberate and effective in making high quality introductions between founders, investors, customers, and talent.
Where we’re headed
Since we began building URBAN-X, we’ve grown by 10x, from managing $10M in assets to well over $130M. And we are on track for at least 30x or around $300M by the end of 2022. In 2021 Urban Us was ranked the #1 early stage climate fund in North America and 99th percentile rank in climate tech on NFX Signal. Our first 3 unicorns are products of our work outside of URBAN-X, though there are a few URBAN-X alumni clearly on track to reach this milestone.
Alongside our venture funds, we’ve built our own asset finance platform providing a range of non-dilutive options to founders focused on climate and cities. We also helped incubate Perl Street so founders could finance next-generation distributed infrastructure. And we’ve expanded our support for startup business development in Asia by co-founding Urban Gateway.
At the start of 2021, we started work on something new, so we could forge new paths for those reimagining global systems. It’s a culmination of all we’ve learned about how to support early stage founders. Unfortunately, it also means we’re no longer able to run URBAN-X.
Thank you to MINI and BMW Group
We could not have arrived at this point without our 5-year partnership with BMW. Thank you to the MINI team [Georg, Eva, Sarah, Tara] and our teammates at URBAN-X [Johan, Miriam, Karol, Michael, Zihao, James, Dean, and Micah] and the many people at BMW Group who gave feedback or found ways to support teams as first customers or domain experts in areas from autonomous sensors and EV charging to industrial robotics and building energy management. Finally thanks to the team who founded URBAN-X [Peter, Esther, and Anand].
Thank you to all of the investors who joined in for practice pitches and the enormous number of customers, founders, and partners who took introductions to teams that literally had napkin sketches, dangerous rebar-wielding robots, or impossible-sounding claims that a space program would be built in Brooklyn.
And to all the startup founders — thank you for choosing to work with us. We’re excited to continue our journey together.
In the next few weeks we’ll have details about our new platform, designed for a remote-first world.
