2020 in Review: 27 Financing Rounds; 14 New Investments in 79% BIPOC Founders & More 💪
Your quarterly update on all things Unshackled VC and beyond.
Image inspired by Pipe’s immigrant founder, Harry Hurst
Happy New Year! Welcome back friends to our Q4 update: our ceremonious goodbye to 2020 and a welcome to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. This year has been challenging: a devastating pandemic, deep and continued racial injustices, a social network at the epicenter of an election, and an assault on the Capitol. And yet, as we turn towards 2021, we have new hope. A chance to rebuild and to look forward to living in an America that cares about its people; including its immigrants. The grit and determination we’ve witnessed this year has been nothing short of incredible. We are proud to be part of this community and to continue to serve and support your companies this year and in the many years to come.
In 2020, we made 14 new investment commitments (excluding follow-ons) in one of our most diverse founder years yet. We welcomed an additional 7 Gen Z teams, 6 teams with a woman on the founding team, nearly all with BIPOC founders, and perhaps most beneficial in our ability to support immigrants on all visa types, our first investment in a DACA status founder. From launching our Roundtable 2.0 for future immigrant founders on a visa, to onboarding our incredible class of University Venture Fellows, to participating in campaigns such as: Next Act, to support immigrants affected by recent layoffs caused by the pandemic; it’s been a busy 2020 for the Unshackled team. Despite the challenges of the shift to virtual, Zoom has enabled us to reach more founders in all corners of the U.S., so much so, it has inspired us to launch our next initiative (currently in stealth mode 🤫) in line with supporting the wider immigrant community in the coming months. Watch this space!
This quarter we invested in Healthcare, Sales Enablement and AI, and to date our portfolio of immigrant founders has created ~530 new jobs.
2020 Portfolio Highlights
Lily AI, the company using deep learning for emotionally tailored recommendations, raised their $12.5M Series A in January. CB Insights named Lily AI one of the 100 most promising B2B retail tech companies in 2020 for their ability to help brands and retailers understand the individual customer’s emotional context through AI.
Oxio, the first white-label fully-customizable carrier-as-a-service platform for brands and enterprises, raised their $12M Series A, to accelerate the development of network and brand partnerships throughout Latin America and the United States in 2021.
Career Karma, raised their $10M Series A in December 2020 to connect students to career bootcamps. During the pandemic, founders Ruben, Artur and Timur also initiated their Reskill America campaign, which has since raised $300,000 equating to thousands of laptops to donate to people that want to enroll in job training programs and bridge the digital divide.
Plantible Foods, led by Tony and Maurits, raised a $4.6M Seed co-led by Vectr Ventures and Lerer Hippeau to develop a scalable and cost-competitive supply chain for its RuBisCO-based egg white replacement.
Dispo, founded by Daniel Liss and popular creator David Dobrik, announced their $4M Seed Round, led by Alexis Ohanian and Seven Seven Six Ventures, to accelerate growth of Dispo’s social platform and community. David Dobrik was our first DACA founder and we’re delighted to be able to support him through his US immigration journey.
DigitalBrain, building Superhuman for customer support, secured a $3.4M Seed led by Moxxie Ventures, alongside Caffeinated Capital, and others. 20-year-old immigrant founders, Kesava and Dima have grown from strength to strength this year, from graduating from YC’s Accelerator program, Kesava receiving his O1 visa, and raising their oversubscribed Seed in a matter of weeks.
Sote, the digital broker for logistics services across Africa, raised a $3M round led by MaC Ventures, to kick start aggressive growth in 2021. November was their best month of sales to date, booking over 100 containers representing over $100K in topline revenue.
Aavia, the hormone health brand, raised their $2.5M seed round led by Starting Line and Asset Management Ventures and launched their health app for anyone with a uterus to monitor their hormone health, all month long. Check out their new website and download the app to learn more!
GridRaster, a provider of cloud-based XR platforms that power augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AR/VR/MR) experiences on mobile devices for enterprises, announced it closed an additional $2.5M led by Blackhorn Ventures, with participation from other existing investors MaC Venture Capital and Exfinity Venture Partners.
Co-pilot, NLP and AI for sales enablement, secured a $2.5M seed round led by Amity Ventures. The team's mission is to make sales reps more effective during calls with real-time, voice-activated cues.
Lynk, had a monumental breakthrough in March 2020 successfully sending the world’s first ever text message from space to a mobile phone. They also raised additional financing to accelerate their vision to launch thousands of satellite “cell towers” into space.
New Investments
STEALTH: A healthcare company, founded by immigrant entrepreneurs developing a new cancer therapy treatment based on manipulating metabolism. We invested at Seed alongside top-tier co-investors.
STEALTH: A sales enablement tool, utilizing deep fake technology to optimize client response rate. We were the lead investor at Pre-seed.
Unshackled News
💪 Our General Partner, Nitin Pachisia spoke to Fortune magazine about the importance of an immigrant mindset during the pandemic to iterate and build fast:
“To be sure, an entrepreneur’s birthplace or country of origin is not actually what makes immigrant workers so valuable. “Are you special because you are an immigrant? No, it’s more about the ethos of being an immigrant,”
For us immigrants, there are creative ways of looking at a problem. When you come from another ecosystem, you question the why behind it. Then you take a variable and change it. That’s how big innovation happens.”
🚀 Last year our in-house immigration partner Michael Serotte of Serotte Law Firm led 2 Roundtable discussions for our attendees on how to start a company on a visa. It led to a great discussion and so we wanted to make this public for all in the community. If you want to know the dos and don’ts while on an H1B while wanting to start a company, tap here!
💫 In December our Principal, Maria Salamanca, appeared on the podcast “Women in Venture Capital'' talking about her journey into politics and investing, her views on diversity at the funding and portfolio level, and the women who inspire her. Listen here!
Exciting Opportunities
Sote - Product Manager (Remote)
Plutoshift - Backend Engineer (Palo Alto, CA)
Human - Senior Full-stack Engineer (Swift+Rails)
Pine Park Health - Head of Recruiting (Berkeley, CA)
Lily AI - Director of Product Marketing (Mountain View, CA)
Digital Brain - Product Engineer (Bay Area)
Plantible Foods - Team Builder (San Diego, CA)
Lynk - Chief Commercial Officer (Falls Church, VA)
Hi, 👋🏼 We’re Unshackled Ventures, the first and only early-stage venture capital fund for immigrant founders. Besides investing in immigrants, we sponsor their visas & green cards to enable them to spend 100% of their time building companies. Nothing is too early for us. Learn more about what we invest in through our post here.
Feel free to tweet us @unshackledvc or email us at hello@unshackledvc.com.