Oxio Raises $12M Series A; Digital Brain Raises $3.4M Seed; New Investments; DACA & More
Your quarterly update on all things Unshackled VC and beyond.
Welcome back to our Q3 update. With October 1st aptly renamed March 215th by Twitter, we think it’s fair to say: what a year this quarter has been. At Unshackled, we clocked up 41 hours of Zoom pitch calls, announced our new hire, saw a few companies raise new rounds of financing, announced our first investment in a founder on DACA status, launched two programs and made 3 new investments.
This quarter we invested in Social, Augmented Reality and Computer Vision for Petcare, and to date our portfolio of immigrant founders has created ~430 new jobs.
Portfolio Highlights
Digital Brain secured a $3.4M Seed, led by Moxxie Ventures, alongside Caffeinated Capital, and others. The funding will be used to accelerate growth and onboarding larger enterprise companies in their sales pipeline. The founders, Kesava and Dima are 20-year old immigrant entrepreneurs who speak a combined 8 languages and Kesava is a 2x World Record holder in the Rubik’s cube.
OXIO raised their $12M Series A led by Monashees and Atlantico (top LatAm venture funds). The team also hired 5 top execs from Uber, Cabify, Estée Lauder and Altan to expand their management team.
Bluefield was recently the first in the world to detect a large methane release in Florida. The leak detection received coverage from Bloomberg and triggered a federal investigation into violations by the emitter.
Career Karma partnered with Workforce Southwest Washington (WSW) to train and place women, people of color and other traditionally underrepresented populations in tech jobs. WSW will provide funding for a two-year pilot that will include recruiting and placing 20 people per year into one of Career Karma’s training programs.
GraphLi has been aiding businesses investing heavily in supply chain digitization and automation in reaction to COVID-19. GraphLI's dynamic routing and optimization software is helping companies like ScottsMiracle-Gro better manage operations and forecast demand in order to reduce cost, while increasing customer satisfaction.
KwantAI grew 100% from Q2 2020, with 4 Fortune 100 companies using Kwant for safety and productivity.
On Deck continues to grow rapidly, with a string of new programs and announcements including On Deck Writers, Angels, and Podcasters. The team also announced On Deck Labs, to invite world-leading subject-matter experts and community builders to come and build the learning communities of the future.
DIG labs, a companion animal life sciences and tech company, is actively building their health app: a 10-second wellness check and health tracking app for your dog. Sign up to join the waitlist and be one of the first to try!
Acciyo has a new product: Below the Fold, a semi-weekly newsletter spotlighting important stories *not* making the headlines. Subscribe here!
Pilleve added 3 new clinical advisors to its board, ranging from pharmaceutical executives to renowned anesthesiologists, to help boost its clinical sales and outreach.
CatalyzeX’s chrome extension just broke into top 500 in Chrome web store for the 'search tools' category.
New Investments
DIG Labs is building the future of pet tech that provides pet owners with a 10-second wellness check, including nutrition recommendations, parasite detection, and microbiome insights, so they can make better informed decisions. Currently, stool scans can take vet offices days to weeks to process, and the original appointment tends to be days after a health incident occurs. With DIG Labs, owners can receive information about their dog’s health and action items while out on their daily walk. We invested in DIG Labs’ pre-seed round alongside The Venture Collective.
Founders Tara Zedayko and Jessica Chu have over 16 years combined healthcare experience at Johnson & Johnson, and co-founded DIG Labs in 2019 to close the gap between human and pet healthcare. Tara (CEO) has a B.S. from Cornell and an MBA from NYU Stern. Her expertise lies in biophysical methods, brand management, and corporate development. Jess (COO) has a B.A from Boston College and an MBA from NYU Stern. She has worked in M&A at PwC, Brand Management at J&J and Coty, and is an active member of the dog rescue community, and has personally fostered nearly 50 dogs to-date.
Beamm is building an AR video creation app, that allows users to create Hollywood-style CGI and VFX content with technical ease. Creating VFX today is a manual process that takes time, skill and money, however Beamm can give creators that superpower in an easy-to-use mobile app, without compromising on quality. We led Beamm’s pre-seed investment round.
Founders Charlie Beuthin and Divesh Naidoo have extensive experience in the entertainment industry and the VR/AR industry respectively. Charlie has 10 award-winning years in the entertainment business, first as a product and marketing manager at Warner Music UK and Universal Music UK, then heading up the music and talent teams at MTV Africa. Divesh is responsible for many of Africa’s spatial computing firsts. He spent 6 years as a founder and CEO of a successful VR/AR software development company, and before that spent 6 years working in the VFX industry for multinational clients including MTV, KFC, Mercedes Benz and the BBC.
Dispo founded by popular influencer David Dobrik, is creating a social media platform that promotes capturing real-life authentic moments via a disposable camera app. Dispo users have to wait till 9am the next morning for the photo “to fully develop” and encourages its 2.6M Gen Z user base to live in the moment, rather than extensively editing and filtering the photos like on Instagram or Snap. We invested alongside Alexis Ohanian of Seven Seven Six fund.
David Dobrik is a digital star and TV personality known for making viral content on YouTube with over 70 million followers across his platforms. Named "Gen Z's Jimmy Fallon" by the Wall Street Journal, Dobrik exhibits his characteristic charm and undeniable relatability in everything he does. David is a DACA recipient and we are excited to support him as our first DACA founder on his immigration journey. Daniel Liss (CEO) graduated from Harvard and served as a policy analyst on Mayor Bloomberg’s policy team, he then completed an analyst program at Deutsche Bank before attending Stanford Graduate School of Business. During business school he interned at Oscar Health, Fab Fit Fun, and launched Bama Covered, the nation’s only grassroots, non-partisan healthcare education movement of 600 students across Alabama. He then joined Sofia Vergara’s team at Latin World Entertainment and spent four years building out Vergara’s brand.
Events
Lily AI’s Co-Founder & CEO Purva Gupta and thredUP Co-Founder & CTO Chris Homer discuss how retailers can use product data and emotional context to hyper-personalize the digital customer experience. Sign up here!
TalentTalk DIGITAL presents Startup Hiring 101: Built for Founders. Mark your calendars and tune-in on Thursday, October 22nd at 11:00am PT. The conversation will be led by Sarah Holmes, Associate at Unshackled Ventures, with unique founder perspectives from Aditya Vishwanath (Founder of Inspirit VR) and Steve Bartel (CEO & Co-Founder of Gem).
Fund News
👩💻 This quarter we announced Faye Maidment as an Analyst on the Unshackled investment team. With a background in marketing, Faye has already been working with our growing portfolio for the past 10 months, and will continue to support the rest of the investment team on sourcing, diligence, portfolio support and fund marketing. Faye has a passion for emerging technologies (VR/AR) and virtual influencers. Read more about her story here!
🚀 Our General Partner, Nitin Pachisia joined the The INDUStry Show podcast to share the story of Unshackled, what we look for in our founders and how investors can add value at the earliest stages of business building:
“Where we can add value...is providing that friends and family support for entrepreneurs who we’re investing in. Especially, for the first time founders.”
“To be in that trust circle… A win as a VC in all situations is when a founder can come to you in their toughest times. When they can come and cry with you, you’ve earned a seat. We’re very fortunate that we get to be there and be the wartime VC with our portfolio founders and fight their fights alongside them.”
🥳 This quarter we also launched two of our in-house programs, the Unshackled Roundtable and University Fellowship. We’ll be announcing our class of 2020/21 fellows soon, an incredible group of 22 movers and shakers at their respective colleges who will be working alongside the Unshackled team this year! Our Roundtable program is also in full swing, with interviews happening this week for potential founders looking to make the leap into entrepreneurship.
Hiring
Digital Brain - Founding Engineer (Remote)
Lily AI - Account Executive (Remote)
Plantible Foods - Research Associate - Plant Science, Process Engineer (San Diego)
Aavia - Head of Product, Head of Brand and Community, Medical Officer, Product Designer (NYC, Remote)
Inspirit VR - Full-Stack Developer, AWS Engineer (Bay Area) Junior Unity Developer, Senior Unity Developer, AWS Engineer (Remote)
PngMe - Lead Backend Engineer, Blockchain Developer, Data Engineer (Bay Area)
OnDeck - Education and Content Intern, Founder Fellowship: Build Partner (Experience Lead), Writer Fellowship: Writing Partner, No-Code Operations (Remote)
Dispo - Lead Mobile Engineer (Los Angeles)
Maximus - Product Designer,Full Stack Engineer, Head of Marketing, Social Media Manager, Head of Operations (Santa Monica)
Human - Senior Backend Engineer (Remote)
Growthplug - Demand Generation Marketing Specialist, Talent Acquisition Operations Specialist, Sales Manager, Account Executive, Business Development Representative, Customer Success Representative (Beaverton, OR / San Jose, CA)
Pilleve - Customer Success, Full Stack Engineer (Washington DC)
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.