21 Labs Acquired, Our Investment in the Creator FinTech Space, Dispo Raises a Series A, and More!
Your quarterly update on all things Unshackled VC and beyond.
Our Thoughts
Our team was disappointed with the latest DACA federal court ruling. As a fund that works with immigrant entrepreneurs from all walks of life, we know the toll an uncertain future can take. We hope Congress can find a permanent solution for the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants on DACA. If you or anyone you know is a DACA recipient, we recommend this resource by Emerson Collective.
Q2 Updates
Hey, fam 👋 - Welcome to our Q2 2021 update! Although we started with the “masked off” announcement and we’re now inching back to old “new normal”, we hope you all are embracing that good summer energy. We are super excited to share the new transitions, investments, and additions that last quarter brought us.
We announced the expansion of our team and are seeking a new Head of Community, made three new investments, and have slowly transitioned to in-person meetings. During a season of so much uncertainty, our community persevered and planted seeds that now are bearing good fruit.
If you or anyone in your circle are thinking of building a company, we hope you’ll consider us great partners in your journey.
Last quarter we were lucky to invest in brain-computer interface, creator economy, and the fintech space.
Currently, as reported, our portfolio companies employed over 1,000 people (up from 650 last quarter!). Check out our stats below to see how much we’ve raised the bar 🚀
Portfolio Highlights
Congratulations to 21 Labs on your exit and joining forces with Perforce! Perforce acquired AI-based mobile testing provider 21 Labs to elevate Perforce’s efforts in delivering quality software to their customers faster. This strategic milestone allows the Perforce team to strengthen its end-to-end portfolio of intelligent test automation solutions.
We couldn't be more thankful to the founders, Shani Shoham and Royi Haddad, two Israeli immigrants, for all their hard work, commitment, and friendship. We had a wonderful celebration at Foley’s winery and can’t wait to see what they do next. Unshackled originally invested in the pre-seed round in 2019 and this marks our first exit!
Read more about this here!
Dispo (photo-sharing app) crossed 100M photos and announced its Series A, with participation from 776, Endeavor, Thirty-Five Ventures (Kevin Durant), F9 Strategies (Andre Iguodala), and celebrity advisors including Annie Leibovitz, Cara Delevingne, Sofia Vergara, and Raven B Varona. Read more about this incredible team here.
DIG Labs (pet health software) released the DIG Labs digestive health check, the first and only visual-based dog health scanner that uses stool photos to assess internal health. Powered by patent-pending computer vision technology and supported by a team of dog experts, the DIG Labs digestive health check is the debut solution from DIG Labs. Try it here!
Gridraster (A Cloud-Native XR Platform) has been awarded SBIR Phase II by the US Air Force for aircraft repair and maintenance. With multiple large enterprise opportunities, GridRaster is now strategically poised to scale and is currently raising capital to grow the team to support its growth. GridRaster has been recognized by Gartner as “Cool Vendor '' in Frontline Workers Technology in 2021.
Inspirit (next-generation STEM education) won the 2021 SXSW EDU Online Launch competition, presented by the Walton Family Foundation. Inspirit launched a free Discord community for high school students interested in STEM competitions, events, and connecting with peers from around the globe. With the support of their network of Ivy League students, high school students can receive essay reviews and college application advice to better prepare them for the next step. Students can sign up for the opportunity here. Lastly, the team just launched its content creator program. Now anyone can become an instructor on their interactive 3D learning platform and earn money by doing what they do best: sharing their knowledge.
The Landing (social design platform) had a quarter marked by product iteration post-launch, intense user research on their new cohort of genZ users helped push their creative tooling, and the hiring of a rockstar Head of Engineering. Now they are heading into Q3 with eyes focused on continuing to build for creators, with the goal of harnessing the power of *mood board creativity* that has pushed the limits of early use case assumptions.
OXIO (connectivity-as-a-service platform) launched a new telecom service with the retail chain Circle K in Mexico, leveraging 25,000 of their retail employees across 1,300 stores to promote the service to their customers. The next goal is to reach a minimum of 500,000 subscribers within 18 months.
Pilleve (pill management software) shipped out the second generation (Gen 2.2) of its smart pill bottle to its customers! The device will be more reliable in terms of dispensing and has added functionalities and sensors to make the patient experience better.
New Investments
Flowbo is a marketplace that connects investors to content creators generating predictable revenue. Flowbo enables creators to raise money and for investors to share in their future earnings and assets. Imagine investing in a celebrity before they became big and share a part of their revenues today.
Daniel Kang (CEO) and Norman Yu's (CTO) background is impressive and strong. Both founders have deep knowledge and expertise in the finance and tech industry. Daniel, a former Softbank Vision Fund investor, is committed to providing access to capital for everyone and studied finance at McGill and policy at Oxford. Norman Yu has a huge interest in exploring the cutting edge of technology and studied mathematics at Princeton University and computer science at Stanford University.
Allocate is a platform that offers venture fund products for wealth advisors, family offices, and qualified individual investors based on their investment objectives, any pre, and post-investment transactions, and reporting activities. They enable investors of all types to discover, assess, and access the highest quality fund to manage.
Samir Kaji and Hana Yang met as Kauffman Fellows, who shared impressive backgrounds in financial services. Upon meeting, Yang was working in the nonprofit world and noticed the friction between the nonprofit and venture capital worlds. Then Yang joined Kaji at First Republic Bank to work together and continue the conversation. Those conservations have led to them launching Allocate and closing $5M in seed funding from partners including Urban Innovation Fund, Tusk Venture Partners, Basis Set Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, Fika Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Anthemis Group, and us.
Check out more about this investment and team here!
STEALTH: a team of neuroscientists, ML engineers, and tech entrepreneurs building a sleek brain wearable to adapt computing to the human mind.
Company Updates
Back home in San Francisco! Our team has returned back to in-person operations for the first time since the pandemic. The team has evolved tremendously, along with pandemic mandates. But now for the first time, we were all able to gather and work together in person. We’ll continue to remain aligned with CDC guidelines and hope that as COVID cases begin to decrease we can see you all soon! (pc: Dispo app 📸)
Our partner, Maria, is not done raising the bar! Maria was highlighted and acknowledge in Fast Company’s second annual Queer 50 list. The list features women and nonbinary leaders across many industries—including tech, finance, venture capital, media, and entertainment.
Diversity shouldn’t be seen as an effort to make room for a couple of exceptional people. Instead, the goal is to saturate the industry with exceptional diverse talent to the point it becomes the norm, not the exception. With the industry showing fewer than 1% of investors are reportedly Latinx women, Maria shares that her network and community are folks that identify similarly to her.
“My closest friends in venture are, for the most part, folks of color; the majority are women,” - Maria Salamanca
In addition, Maria works to normalize is how the industry welcomes and supports immigrant entrepreneurs in the venture ecosystem.
“We’re working toward a more positive narrative about immigrants as job creators, not job takers,” - Maria Salamanca
Check out the rest of the post here!
Our partner, Manan, continues to shed light on how the pandemic influenced immigrant entrepreneurs and where we can all be a resource. He shared his thoughts with NBC and Crunchbase, on how Unshackled Ventures bridges the gap and continues to be a platform that encourages and supports immigrant founders throughout their journey.
"There was a population of entrepreneurs who were being overlooked...If you're going to talk about enabling immigrants, you also have to talk about enabling their immigration journey” - Manan Mehta
Despite the challenges that were faced, we’ve all witnessed the tremendous resilience of the immigrant community.
“I think there’s a lot of encouragement now and I’m seeing more and more founders and entrepreneurs returning back to school”- Manan Mehta
Check out the entire Crunchbase post here and the NBC post here!
Hiring
Want to jump on a 🚀rocketship 🚀 but not ready to join Richard, Elon, and Jeff in 🛰space?!? Unshackled portfolio companies are hiring with roles ranging from internships for high school students to founding engineers. Below are just a few of the 🔥exciting teams that are looking for top talent, and you can check out more here! Are you an Engineer, PM, or Designer and open to joining a pre-seed company? Sarah wants to learn more about you!
🧠 Digital Brain -- Product Engineer
A full-stack engineer: ideally you've worked with React, Typescript, and Postgres.
Product-minded folk who truly want to create delightful experiences.
Someone who wants to help shape the culture of the company and customer interactions.
💊 Aavia -- Head of Mobile Engineering
You have experience in building, testing, debugging, and delivering iOS apps in a professional environment
You are a product minded engineer with empathy for the customer experience
You have prior experience developing and publishing native iOS applications using Swift and SwiftUI
Manage all inbound applications for various roles (Operations, HR, Clinical & Technical).
2+ years of recruiting experience
Facilitate candidate process to ensure an efficient and thoughtful candidate experience.
🕶 Inspirit -- Graphic Designer
You understand how to design for a Gen Z audience
Knowledge of Figma, Sketch, Illustrator, inVision, AdobeXD, or other tools used for visual and interaction designs.
You are passionate about working in the immersive STEM education industry
👗 Lily -- Head of Engineering
5+ years experience managing Engineering Managers
Experience building and scaling real-time distributed systems and infrastructure
Extensive experience recruiting, mentoring, and retaining great individual contributors and managers
🌱 Plantible -- Operations Associate
Good operational skills, preferable handling of (farm) equipment and machine operating skills and greenhouse work experience is a must
Experience through employment in operational environment preferred, optionally recent college graduate with an Agriculture Degree
Knowledge and experience in hydroponics/aquaponics is a strong plus. Willing to train the right individual with an agricultural background
📸 Dispo -- Backend Engineer
An engineer with product sensibility. We are a small team and product input comes from everyone.
Proficient with Python / Django and AWS (or comparable cloud platforms).
You care deeply about performance and are comfortable analyzing DB queries, performing load tests, or whatever it takes to improve key metrics.
🍎 Pod Foods - HR Manager
Need 5 years of HR management and start-up experience, including growth to 100 employees
You work quickly, are comfortable in a fast-paced environment, and are excited to learn with the desire and ability to lead.
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.