A Note from Manan & Nitin:
Earlier this month, Unshackled celebrated our nine year anniversary. Over the past 9 years, we’ve had the privilege to see more than 25K (18K in our database since 2018) immigrant founders and their ideas come through our investment process and have ultimately invested in 80 incredible immigrant led teams. Through those nine years, we have also grown internally as a team - bringing individuals with different perspectives and backgrounds into the decision making process. Today, both Unshackled’s portfolio and team are reflective of the industry we hope to see moving forward - diverse and immigrant led.
80 investments and 231 immigration filings later, it's incredible to think about the impact we are making, and we know we can do much more. Moving forward, we plan to deeply focus our efforts on helping more excluded and unrecognized immigrants enter the U.S. innovation economy and thrive. This means staying true to the three pillars that have driven us from day zero - providing: 1) The capital to start building, 2) Immigration support to enable founders to build freely within the US, and 3) Connections and access to US based talent, customers, and investors. You can read more about what we stand for and how we think about the future here.
Q1 Updates
Q1 Portfolio Highlights
Congratulations to Unshackled portfolio company, Landing for the launch of their app! Since the beginning, Landing has always been about building a place where visual inspiration, curation, and design come together on the internet. The Landing community celebrates every individual’s creative vision and expression. Whether you identify as a creator or curator, design ’just for fun’ or on behalf of a brand or your own small business, you have a place within Landing. Download today!
SyndicateDAO launched their new feature, Syndicate Remix! Clubs and Collectives can now easily activate powerful custom mint, burn, transfer, and (metadata) render mechanisms via contract calls directly through Syndicate's app. Syndicate Remix offers a user-friendly experience for directly interacting with Syndicate's protocol, allowing you to harness the powerful modularity of ERC-721M and ERC-20M without having to utilize third-party applications for contract interactions. In addition to Syndicate’s in-house modules, external developers can now access their custom-built modules directly through Syndicate's interface. For a full overview of our new Syndicate Remix tool, read their Guide here.
PolyGone, an interdisciplinary green tech company designing the first portable and affordable microplastic removal device, was awarded a $1.9M grant from NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration through the National Sea Grant Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) Marine Debris Challenge Competition! PolyGone will use this funding to optimize, manufacture, and deploy full-scale pilots of our artificial root filtration device, in both wastewater effluent streams and polluted tributaries across the Hudson River Watershed. Read more about this exciting award here.
It’s been an incredible start to 2023 for Masa Finance! Within Q1, the Masa team launched Masa Protocol mainnet across four L1s (Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Celo), launched an exceedingly successful partnership with Celo, delivering Celo Prosperity Passport to the Celo ecosystem, launched identity SBT, credit score SBT, verification SBT, secured 300K+ users, 900K+ SBT mints, 100K+ community members, and 200+ ambassadors. Read more about Masa’s incredible Q1 Community Update & what’s next for 2023 here.
Lily AI, was recognized as a 2023 top 100 Retail tech company by CB Insights! Lily AI is the first platform that bridges the gap between brand-speak and customer-speak to drive exponential growth for companies large and small. Lily AI seamlessly injects customer-centric product attributes into site search engines, recommendation systems, SEO/SEM capabilities and item setup processes to drive exponential lifts in traffic, conversion, revenue and brand loyalty. Today, Lily AI is trusted by some of the world's most esteemed retailers, including Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Gap, thredUP, Marks and Spencer, and many others.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity recently selected Cache Energy as an Energy Storage Innovations Prize winner! In addition to a cash prize, Cache Energy’s winning technology proposal will be featured in a report to Congress on the state of energy storage in the United States. Cache Energy is developing long duration energy storage technology that can scale up-to durations > 100 hours. The non-toxic, non-flammable storage material can be safely stored at room temperature and transported easily. Read the full announcement here.
Pod Foods, the leading grocery B2B marketplace platform, announced earlier this month that Mike Schall has joined its leadership team as president. Schall brings over four decades of senior management and leadership experience in branded food companies and retail grocery, spanning entrepreneurial initiatives to large national brands. He is joining Pod Foods to power revenue-generating initiatives and manage new business development opportunities. Read more about this exciting new addition to the Pod Foods leadership team here.
Congratulations to the TryCarbonara team for going live with Solana! TryCarbonara’s emissions tracker embeds software directly on Solana nodes to provide the most comprehensive and accurate measurement of the blockchain’s footprint to date — Enabling Solana to be the first major smart-contract blockchain to have its emissions measured in real time. This measurement dynamically changes based on the throughput of individual validators, when they’re online and offline and changes in the validator network over time. This data includes, for the first time:
Emissions measurement of RPC nodes via instrumentation of the underlying hardware
Emissions granularity at the server level incorporating geolocation of validator and RPC nodes
Marginal (or consequential) emissions based on the incremental emissions impact of new demand as it relates to the overall distribution of grid supply. This framework can be useful when gauging the environmental impact of changes and optimizations to energy consumption and accounts for the renewable energy mix of different sources of electricity.
Embodied emissions based on the manufacturing, transportation, and end-of-life management of the hardware infrastructure of the Solana Network.
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) which describes the overall efficiency of a data center.
Read more here!
Moxxie Ventures announced an incredible addition, Prateek Joshi to their investment team. Prateek has been a big part of Unshackled Ventures, as the first founder on an H-1B we ever sponsored, backed and supported. We are incredibly excited to continue to work with Prateek in this new journey as investors.
Ahead of the 2023 H-1B registration period, Formally, a legal tech company with a mission to increase access to justice, launched their H-1B lottery registrations for $1! Their platform leverages intelligent technology and accessible design to streamline and simplify complex legal processes. The Formally team also announced the integration of their generative ai feature, which will revolutionize the way legal support letters are generated. With the integration of GPT-3, Formally users can now generate high-quality, custom support letters in a matter of seconds. Saying goodbye to endless editing and formatting, and saying hello to a new era of efficient, innovative legal document generation. Learn more about how Formally continues to break down barriers, here!
Q1 New Investments
BlueUrbn helps commercial building owners measure the carbon footprint of their buildings and identify high-impact retrofits and energy-efficient technologies that drive cost savings and decarbonization. BlueUrbn ingests building data to provide the optimal path to net-zero at both the portfolio level and the individual building level. Co-Founders, Dhruv Suri & Suman Kumar, met during their time at Stanford as Knight Hennessy Scholars, are both social entrepreneurs, and have a deep passion for climate. We are honored to be joining them in their journey ahead!
Stealth tech company with founders focusing on ultrasound and genetic engineering to improve microbial fermentation.
Stealth financial tech company led by soon-to-be graduate at MIT.
Unshackled Updates
Welcome Elisabeth Tuttass, to the Unshackled team! As an immigrant with experience and a deep passion for the startup world, Elisabeth brings a unique perspective and unwavering dedication to helping founders succeed. She has been a cheerleader for founders for years, and her joy for supporting them shines through in everything she does. The team is overjoyed to have her on board and looks forward to working together to support immigrant entrepreneurs on their journey to building successful companies. Read more about Elisabeth here!
⚡️💭 Thinking about starting a company but have questions because of your immigration status? Unshackled's Founding Partner, Nitin Pachisia is offering 15 minute calls to those interested. ***Please note these are not pitching conversations - If you would like to pitch please submit your deck here: https://lnkd.in/dkan-rM
Hiring
A comprehensive list of job openings at Unshackled company’s can be founder here → https://unshackledvc.notion.site/Unshackled-Ventures-Portfolio-Jobs-403c15af6dfb4979b83f045a51a711e7
Q1 Hiring highlights
BlueUrbn - Founding Engineers & Product Designers
💚 Bolsiyo - Senior front and back end developers (LATAM)
Plantible Foods - Various Roles
🐶 Dig Labs - Full stack dev, Head of Engineering, & More
🔋Lumin.ai - Solutions Engineer, Founding Product Manager
👗 Lily AI - VP of Customer Success, & More
🛰️ Lynk - Various Roles
🔐Strac - Software Engineer, Head of Content & Demand Gen, & More
🏥Pine Park Health - Medical Director, & More
Maximus - Clinical Research Scientist, Customer Success Specialist
Aavia - Senior Backend Engineer