2021 Year End Review Newsletter
Celebrating our community's growth in 2021!
Our 2021 Year End Review
Welcome to our Q4 Update and 2021 Year End Review! 2021 was a year of expansion. We’ve watched our team, portfolio, and general community reach new heights. In 2021, we made 12 new investment commitments and three follow-on investments. We welcomed an additional five teams with a woman on the founding team, five BIPOC founders, and one Gen Z team. We’ve leveled up our team with the promotion of Maria Salamanca to Partner and new Investment Analyst Alexis Maciel. We also onboarded another incredible class of future operators and investors in our newest class of University Venture Fellows. Our team has successfully submitted over 180 immigration filings to date. Last quarter we had the privilege of investing in companies focusing on legal tech, 3D food printing, autonomous driving, decentralized finance, and impact event planning. Our portfolio companies have contributed by employing over 1350 people (was ~1200 last quarter). With so many wins in 2021, we have such high hopes for 2022. As we hit the ground running this year, we wanted to share some tremendous Q4 highlights. Check out our stats below to see how much we’ve raised the bar 🚀.
If you or anyone in your circle are thinking of building a company, we hope you’ll consider us great partners in your journey. Remember, we like to invest at day 0, often before incorporation, pre-product, and pre-revenue.
Q4 Portfolio Highlights
Career Karma raised $40M for their Series B round! In their announcement, Career Karma reported having created over 25,000 matches per month, gained 3 million organic visitors, gathered thousands of users in their audio community, partnered with Fortune 1000 companies to present their “Career Karma as a Benefit” product, and has achieved 8-figure annualized revenue run rate. Behind these impressive results is an exceptional team and community that’s passionate about expanding higher education opportunities. We’re honored to be one of the early investors in this opportunity. Check out their announcement video here.
Pod Foods (grocery supply chain management) announced $13M in funding including a recent $10M Series A from the lead investor, Industrious Ventures, joined by M12, Moment Ventures, Barrel Ventures, Relish Works, X Factor Ventures, XRC Labs, K2 Global and Graphene Ventures, and us. After their $3M seed round, they expanded their operations and launched in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. In addition, they introduced a mobile app for easy inventory management and are building out data tools that'll match the right products to the right retailers and enable retailers to offer an endless aisle. COVID-19 and related supply chain challenges present presented a unique opportunity for Pod Foods, as they helped retailers keep their shelves stocked by partnering with emerging brands and creating brand awareness. Now with this milestone under their belt, they hope to expand to 10 cities in total and grow their team. Read more about this venture and the company's growth here.
Faeth Therapeutics (using metabolism to rethink cancer) announced their $20M seed from Khosla Ventures, Future Ventures, KdT Ventures, Cantos Ventures, and a few others as they emerge from building in stealth! Faeth Therapeutics focuses on developing ways to “starve” cancer-growing cells by using food. Essentially, Faeth is hoping to establish nutrition as the fifth pillar of cancer care. Faeth is now focusing on rolling out 3 successful trials aiming to test their knowledge and study their impact on pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, and in a few weeks, insulin-suppressing diets. Learn more about their hypothesis and the raise here!
Pine Park Health (senior living care) was one of our first investments. We’re proud to see them grow and raise $44M to refine primary care for seniors. Providers are constantly seeking solutions that can benefit the population in a cost-effective manner. The Pine Park Health team saw that this dilemma presents itself differently for those aiding seniors. CEO George Khasin, originally thought that remote monitoring alone would be a suitable solution to aid providers; however, after witnessing the numerous obstacles that facilities near him were facing, Khasin saw an opportunity to change the standard of care. Pine Park Health’s chief commercial officer, Dan O’Neill, shared that, “there are huge differences in serving the senior living environments — their operational needs, cadences, patterns, and practices.” Thus Pine Park Health pivoted its focus creating onsite pods of physicians, nurse practitioners, clinicians and enabling quicker responses to medical issues. Read more about Pine Park Health focus here!
Sote (supply chain in Africa) raised an additional $4M from Social Capital and Chamath Palihapitiya’s fund, totaling $8M for their seed. Sote acts as the is a digital broker for logistics services across Africa. CEO, Felix Orwa, shared Sote’s vision with Afrotech:
”If the African supply chain is composed of the flow of product, the flow of information, and the flow of cash, then Sote already controls the first two. With the launch of our Fintech solution, we will have control and a positive influence on all three. This creates a powerful flywheel effect with our customers as they find more holistic and convenient bundled services between logistics and capital solutions.”
Excited for Sote’s future in this space. Read more about their growth here!
CatalyzeX (AI code discovery platform) raised a $1.64M seed round! Co-founders Gaurav Ragtah and Himanshu Ragtah received funding from Kepler Ventures, On Deck, Basecamp Fund, Abstraction Capital, Unpopular Ventures, Darling Ventures, and industry angels to build a platform that removes the friction involved in researching ML models and techniques. With 30,000 weekly active users, they can accurately identify suitable models for developers and data scientists based on their use cases. Surprisingly, it’s just these two brothers building an incredible product with fantastic traction. Gaurav shares, “We’ve always made efforts to get to know people from various backgrounds of all kinds, but also when we talk about opportunities, [we plan to] actively tap into a recruiting pipeline to see if there are enough applicants from different backgrounds because fundamentally, I believe if we don’t find the best people across all backgrounds, we are unnecessarily disadvantaging ourselves,” (TechCrunch). Read more about this venture and the company's growth here.
2021 Year in Review - Financings and major announcements
Plantible Foods raises $21.5M Series A led by Astanor Ventures
Flowbo raises $3.4M seed round led by Global Founders Capital
Lily AI Announces Industry’s First Customer Intent Platform for Ecommerce
Lynk demos global satellite connection for ordinary phones and prepares for commercial launch
Our Forbes List Founders
Early in their building, our team recognized the infinite potential in Miri Buckland (co-founder of The Landing), Gaurav Ragtah (co-founder of CatalyzeX), and Aditya Vishwanath and Amrutha Vasan (co-founders of Inspirit Learning). Witnessing these founders join Forbes 30 under 30 list, only emphasizes our conviction around betting behind outstanding immigrant entrepreneurs. Check out the listing for Miri, Gaurav, Aditya, and Amrutha - Be on the lookout for more 😉
Q4 New Investments
WithOthers puts change on the blockchain, powered by music. Turning artists into activists and fans into movements offline in web3. The WithOthers impact-event generation platform gives musicians a show in a box—automating the entire production process so artists can focus on making change happen. Fans gather at shows and leave as supporters, taking meaningful ongoing action through the WithOthers platform to create positive social change, and earning unique proof-of-attendance tokens that get them, the artists they love, and the causes they care about paid. Forever.
Harvest Bioprinting is building faster 3D printers to transform the way we produce food and so much more. Traditional bioprinters are slow and limited to medical research. Their solution is to think bigger and design printers for industrial production. Capable of using a wide range of viscous liquids, their printers will reduce the time and cost to create the products. They will transform what 3D printers are capable of.
STEALTH: a legal tech company with a mission to increase access to justice. Their platform leverages intelligent technology and accessible design to streamline and simplify complex legal processes.
STEALTH: a company building a decentralized credit protocol that allows individuals and businesses to bridge the gap between their CeFi accounts and the DeFi apps they love.
STEALTH: a company building ATC (Air Traffic Control) for driverless vehicles. They are starting with long haul trucking as the MVP and will provide “Driver-As-A-Service” to fleet operators.
2021 Unshackled Updates
Welcome Alexis Maciel, to the Unshackled Ventures family! Alexis previously served as a Business Development Associate for Max Borges Agency (MBA), a consumer tech communications firm in Miami. Before joining MBA, Alexis traveled to Brazil as a recipient of the Department of States Critical Language Scholarship, working at Brazil’s top tech incubator while taking language and innovation courses at the University of South Santa Catarina. By leveraging her previous experience, she plans to help founders with press release plans, thought leadership, media friendlies, etc. We are so excited to have you join the family! Read more about our newest team member here.
Welcome to our newest class of Fellows! We are excited to have 18 members in this cohort where 35% identify as female, and over 70% identify as BIPOC. Read more about the newest class of future operators and investors in the venture ecosystem here.
Our partner, Maria Salamanca, made strides as LatinxVC president by partnering with Silicon Valley Bank to develop a new program supporting Latinx VC's mission to increase the number of Latinx represented in the VC community. In addition, LatinxVC will use the funds for staffing and growing their existing fellowship program, jobs platform, and mentoring programs. Learn more about LatinxVC here and check out this article that highlights their upcoming plans!
Hiring
☎️ Copilot - Software Engineer
💼 Formally
⚕️ Growthplug
🛰️ Lynk
🌱 Plantible Foods - Process Development Engineer
🏗️ Kwant
📸 Dispo - iOS Engineer
📱Oxio