Maria Salamanca Promoted to Partner; 3 New Investments; Inspirit Raises their Seed Round & More
Your quarterly update on all things Unshackled VC and beyond.
Welcome back friends to our Q1 2021 update! With many U.S. states opening up vaccinations to all adults and with summer just around the corner we’re hopeful that we’ll return to our new normal relatively soon. Testament to that, and after over a year of being entirely remote, Unshackled has started to return to the office and scheduling meetings with founders (following social distancing policies) who are local – nature is healing!
This quarter we announced three internal promotions, made three new investments and saw some of our incredible University fellows go on to placements at top funds. Despite the pandemic, in early 2021 our community presence and power is as strong as ever. If you or anyone in your network are thinking about starting a company in 2021, get in touch – opportunity is calling!
This quarter we invested in Creator Tools, Music, Design and Computer Vision for Beauty, and to date our portfolio of immigrant founders has created ~640 jobs.
Portfolio Highlights
Inspirit (next generation of STEM education) announced their $3M Seed led by Sierra Ventures with participation from AME Cloud Ventures. The raise will be used to test out their business model and monetization plans, as well as hire new technical team members.
The Landing (social design platform) announced their $2.5M Seed led by Cowboy Ventures. Other investors include Dara Treseder, the CMO of Peloton; Manish Chandra and Tracy Sun, the founders of Poshmark; Designer Fund; and Progression Fund. The funding will go towards creative tooling capabilities, which allows users to build and design spaces within its platform.
Pngme (unified financial data platform for Africa) announced their $3M Seed. The investment, led by Radical Ventures, Raptor Group, Lateral Capital and EchoVC, closed in Q3 2020. The investment is being used to grow its Lagos and Nairobi teams, expand engineering and data science, and scaling its product for banks, fintechs, and credit bureaus.
Tailored Industry (on-demand, distributed manufacturing) grew revenues 105%, soft-launched their software platform, and started a pilot of their on-demand service with Calvin Klein. In Q2, the company will publicly launch their SaaS offering and add an industry veteran to their team, Emily Gauger, to lead sales. Achieving these milestones is another step towards their ultimate vision of building a distributed network of micro-factories, all powered by their proprietary on-demand manufacturing software.
GridRaster (powering immersive mixed reality on mobile) is selected for SBIR Phase I to work with AIr Force Agency for Modelling and Simulations to provide “A Unified and Shared XR software infrastructure to facilitate ultra-realistic simulations and training for USAF Pilots and Maintainers”.
DigitalBrain (Superhuman for customer support) just closed their first large enterprise pilot and are currently growing their team. They are hiring across the board!
CatalyzeX (catalyzing moonshots with machine intelligence) is now serving over 500K code buttons per day, 15M code buttons per month. The CatalyzeX browser extension automatically adds <code> buttons next to papers everywhere as developers and researchers browse the web — which instantly get you the code in one click to experiment and build faster.
Aavia (female hormonal health) has a new, more durable smart case launching this summer! You can pre-order yours today at www.aavia.io and get the current version of the case for free in the meantime!
Kwant’s (data driven construction platform) customers have expanded to multiple sites, growing at 30% Q/Q with the company crossing $1M in ARR in Jan 2021.
New Investments
Hairtelligence is an online, automated, AI-powered solution for measuring, cutting, dying, and styling custom hair products for black hair. With the utilization of computer vision as a tool to accurately measure and translate desired looks, Hairtelligence will have the ability to not only reduce maintenance costs and time but set a new industry standard that achieves high-quality results with the most transparency.
With their technical expertise, experience in big tech and operations and understanding of the black community, founders Ifueko Igbinedion, Isoken Igbinedion and Marlyse Reeves are in a unique position to change the hair customization experience forever. We’re very excited to be backing such an impressive team and cannot wait to see their progress.
Strive is redefining radio by paying ride-share drivers to selectively advertise Spotify artists, helping artists reach new audiences and drivers access new revenue streams. For the undiscovered artist, analytics and custom insights are available to determine where their music is receiving the most engagement, and the corresponding tracks most popular with riders. For drivers, after simply displaying the QR code inside their vehicle and connecting Strive to Spotify, they can instantly diversify their revenue streams.
Founders Jaden Banson and Yash Bolisetty met during Apple's WWDC Scholarship program and after ideating on the music discovery problem, performing customer discovery and testing via an MVP, they saw Strive as a viable adtech solution that not only satisfies a real need, but also the potential to achieve dramatic venture scale. Both founders are rising stars, with Jaden being one of Shopify's youngest employees and Yash's previous experience as Co-Founder of Ambrosia AI.
The Landing is bringing shoppable social to their design platform that allows users to create and shop from moodboards; think shoppable Canva meets Pinterest. Focusing first on the creator tooling capabilities, the team will next build the social layer and explore ways for creators to monetize their boards and capitalize on the burgeoning creator economy.
Founders Miri Buckland and Ellie Buckingham met at business school and since the pandemic have been iterating on what tools and spaces people might need to design their homes – without the need for hiring out services. The Landing was born! With their recent $2.5M Seed raise, they have been able to launch their first version of The Landing platform which is already attracting an even broader than expected set of use cases for the tool beyond the home vertical, including birthday cards and fashion boards! We’re excited to see how they continue to iterate.
Fund News
🎉 Maria Salamanca promoted to Partner. Here’s a snippet from our announcement blog:
If you have ever had the opportunity to work with Maria, you immediately know she is one of the promising stars in all of venture, at any stage. It’s uncanny to have someone so accomplished, diverse and versatile at such a young age. And today, we are proud to say, she’s our Partner! It’s probably not right to be possessive of another, but in this case, it just feels great. Great because we are better because of her, our team is better because of her and most importantly Unshackled & our founders are better because of her. This is what it’s about to build a generational fund - to have long term relationships with your teammates and watch them grow right in front of you.
Read Unshackled’s full announcement here.
🎉 E’mani Davis promoted to Analyst and closed her first deal!
Being a Black woman, so early in my finance career, and having the opportunity to be an active member in a deal where the product and the team was a reflection of me, was something I imagined would happen much later in my career. The powerful small Unshackled VC team challenged me to walk with that agency and power as an analyst and reinforced a lesson I’ve learned from Arlan Hamilton: To fight insecurity with information.
Read E’mani’s reflection blog in full here.
🎉 Faye Maidment promoted to Associate and wants to invest in interactive media, gaming and new social media.
Sourcing, diligence and funding is all very well and good, but let’s be honest, there is more to investing than posting sweet nothings on Twitter. Enter: post-investment, pre-investment’s older and wiser sister. The stage where hard work begins and the ego is left to sulk at the door. Working truly in the weeds and offering support when needed has been a humbling experience. In my first year at Unshackled I’ve witnessed umpteen product launches, supported several downstream raises and interviewed key first hires. The takeaway? A founder’s job is the hardest one here and we mustn’t ever forget it.
Read Faye’s reflection blog in full here.
Hiring
Graphli – Head of Sales
Human – Head of Marketing
Hairtelligence – Front End Web Developer with Mobile Experience
DigitalBrain – Founding Engineer
The Landing – Head of Engineering
Dispo – Backend Engineer
Aavia – Software Engineer
Lily – Machine Learning, Staff Applied Scientist
Inspirit – Multiple roles across Content, Design, Engineering and 3D
PodFoods – Multiple roles across Sales and Business Development
Pine Park Health – Multiple roles across Clinical Care, Operations, Partnerships and Growth and Product
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.