Floodgate Fund is a venture capital firm that focuses on early stage investments in technology companies. It was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Floodgate

Spark Capital is an early stage venture capital firm. We invest in phenomenal products we love and the creative humans behind them. We do things a little differently and aren't afraid of risk. Spark-backed companies include Twitter, Discord, Anthropic, Cruise, Niantic, Oculus, Warby Parker, and tumblr. We know there are no playbooks or formulas for success and are here to help founders win their own way. We invest across all sectors and stages, and work out of San Francisco, Boston, and New York City.

Spark Capital

Bezos Expeditions manages Jeff Bezos' personal venture capital investments.

Bezos Expeditions

Union Square Ventures is a private equity and venture capital firm focused on early-stage, growth capital, late-stage, and startup financing. The USV portfolio companies create services that have the potential to fundamentally transform important markets.  It exclusively invests in the internet world, focusing on the applications layer of the web, internet services, and web services that create large networks as well as the mobile sector. Some of its invested companies are based in New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin, and places in between. It typically makes a starting investment in portfolio companies of $1 million. In certain Series Around cases, the firm may make a starting investment between $2.5 million to $3 million. It typically invests up to $20 million in any single company. Union Square Ventures was founded in 2003 and is based in New York, United States.

Union Square Ventures

Digital Garage provides ''new contexts'' through the Internet by implementing three core technologies: IT (Information Technology), MT (Marketing Technology), FT (Financial Technology). Their core competence is the ability to integrate these multi-disciplinary technologies together into a one-stop seamless solution.  As a ''context company'', Digital Garage combines events occurring in different business fields by using the three technologies IT, MT and FT, in order to complete a new ''context.''  The seeds of business nurtured by Digital Garage are flourishing under the three business segments. The ''Incubation Segment'' invests in prospective startups and develops media business, the ''Marketing Segment'' provides advertising/promotion solutions that reach each consumer and the ''Payment Segment'' offers payment solutions crucial for monetizing on the Internet. These business segments and the subsidiaries are on the verge of bearing fruit as their branches and leaves continue to grow. Digital Garage's management practice enables different corporate entities to operate independently, while acting and resonating in union at the same time.  Digital Garage will continue to place emphasis on the power of group collaboration. Please pay attention to Digital Garage as they make progress and pioneer the future of the Internet.

Digital Garage (TSE: 4819)

Lowercase Capital is a private equity and venture capital firm specializing in investments in seed/startups, mature, and acquisition of later-stage companies. The firm typically invests in wireless, media, commerce, infrastructure, energy, and transportation sectors. It also advises businesses and funds.  Lowercase Capital was founded in 2010 and is based in New York, New York.

Lowercase Capital

Quixotic Ventures is an active investor in early stage companies.

Quixotic Ventures

CRV has been an investor in technology companies for almost half a century. The firm has backed nearly 400 startups in its 47-year history, including foundational companies like Twitter, Zendesk, Amgen, Hubspot, Parametric Technologies, Yammer, EqualLogic, and Sonus Networks. Half of the companies CRV has backed have gone public or been acquired. The firm focuses on enterprise, consumer, and deep-insight bioengineering. CRV has offices in Palo Alto, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

IVP turns breakout companies into enduring market leaders. With a 40-year record of driving growth and 130+ IPOs, we’ve partnered with over 400 companies including Amplitude, Brex, Coinbase, Crowdstrike, Datadog, Discord, Klarna, Slack, Snap, and Twitter. As trusted allies, IVP helps founders and CEOs meet the challenge of leading a rapidly growing company. Its proven system bolsters functions including those that are sometimes overlooked and partners serve as trusted allies to companies seeking to realize their full potential.

Benchmark invests in and works alongside entrepreneurs building startups into transformational companies. They focus on early-stage venture investing in mobile, marketplaces, social, and infrastructure and enterprise software. Founded in 1995, the firm has offices in Woodside and San Francisco, California. The firm has been recognized for its commitment to open source and is noted for creating the first equal ownership and compensation structure for its partners. The five equal general partners who take board seats and a hands-on approach to every entrepreneur and company they back, with no junior investment staff. Current general partners are Chetan Puttagunta, Sarah Tavel, Victor Lazarte, Peter Fenton, and Eric Vishria. Benchmark has had 37 exits since beginning of 2011; 14 IPOs and 23 M&As representing a total market value of more than $60 billion. Benchmark’s current portfolio of early-stage venture investments includes private market leaders such as Uber, Snapchat, Tinder, Stitch Fix, Elastic and Cyanogen; recent IPOs and acquisitions such as Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, League of Legends, Jasper, OpenTable, New Relic, Hortonworks, Amplitude, Confluent, GrubHub, Zendesk and Zillow; and franchise companies from Juniper to eBay to Red Hat.

Benchmark

Insight Partners is a global software investor that partners with growth-stage technology and software companies. Insight has a deep focus in Fintech, Cybersecurity, AI/ML, DevOps, and Healthcare sectors. Across their people and their portfolio, they encourage a culture around a core belief growth equals opportunity. As of December 31, 2022, the firm has over $75B in regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested in more than 750 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio companies achieve an IPO.

Insight Partners

Morgan Stanley, from the number of their offices and employees to the experience of their management and the quality of their financial results, the facts about Morgan Stanley tell an impressive story.  Morgan Stanley and its people have helped redefine the meaning of financial services. The firm has continually broken new ground in advising its clients on strategic transactions, pioneering the global expansion of finance and capital markets, and providing new opportunities for individual and institutional investors.  Morgan Stanley maintained comprehensive corporate governance guidelines for years before corporate governance became headline news.

Morgan Stanley

T. Rowe Price is an investment management firm dedicated to funding technology startups. The firm serves individuals, financial intermediaries, and institutions and offers a full range of investment strategies across a broad spectrum: debt, equities, and private equities.

T. Rowe Price

Kleiner Perkins is a venture capital firm specializing in investing in early-stage, growth, and incubation companies. The firm continues that legacy, investing in founders with bold ideas that span industries and continents, partnering with them from inception to IPO and beyond to maximize the potential of their ideas. They also focus on early computer firms using their devices and programming and service companies. It also invests in the digital, life sciences, and healthcare industries.

Kleiner Perkins

Over the last decade, Millennium has been a pioneer, innovator, and leader in developing institutional-quality alternative liquidity programs for companies and shareholders in the venture capital ecosystem, partnering with the world’s leading technology companies to design investment structures that foster long-term growth from growth capital to debt financing and secondary liquidity.

Millennium Technology Value Partners

DST Global is an investment firm that funds late-stage ventures in the internet industry. Its investments include some of the world’s fastest-growing and most valuable companies. DST Global has offices in Menlo Park, New York, London, Beijing, and Hong Kong. The firm was founded in 2009 by Yuri Milner, Saurabh Gupta, John Lindfors, Rahul Mehta, and Tom Stafford.

DST Global

DFJ Growth invests in growth stage technology companies that are scaling rapidly and poised for market leadership.  Based in Silicon Valley, DFJ Growth is the later stage investing practice of [Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ)](http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/draper-fisher-jurvetson), a global venture capital firm. DFJ Growth partners with extraordinary entrepreneurs who set out to change the world by creating a new generation of iconic technology-driven businesses.

DFJ Growth

Slow Ventures is a community built on the collective experience and fueled by curiosity, Slow understands the entrepreneurial journey. Investing at the center of technology and on the edges of science, society, and culture, Slow gives founders the resources, connections, experiences, and empathy required to build strong, sustainable companies.

Slow Ventures

The Employee Stock Option Fund provides current and former employees of venture-backed companies with financial help needed to exercise options and cover associated taxes. It has a due diligence strategy and transaction protocol to evaluate and close transactions very quickly. The ESO Fund provides a new approach to exercising stock options that provides superior ROI potential through leverage and tax optimization. The fund also provides individuals who have already exercised private stock options with partial liquidity on the same terms that allows the owners to recover capital and eliminate downside risk while still retaining the potential upside from the stock.  ESO Fund was formed by Stephen Roberts, Jimmy Lackie, and Scott Chou in 2012.

Employee Stock Option Fund

X (formerly Twitter)

A foundational component to the next generation of digital entertainment.

Esports

<div>
 
 Skillz is a multiplayer mobile gaming platform that hosts tournaments for a variety of online games where users can compete for large cash prizes. Skillz was granted two patents in 2016 which cover two core growth drivers of its platform. Firstly, the platform&rsquo;s &lsquo;fair play algorithm&rsquo; determines the outcome for games (skill vs luck). This is important since there is a thin line between earning cash prizes for games based on skill and luck, the latter which is strictly regulated online in the USA. The second covers technology behind the platform&rsquo;s &lsquo;tournament management system&rsquo; (TMS), which allows developers to integrate their titles onto the Skillz platform.&nbsp;
 &nbsp;In June 2023, the company expanded its presence to Las Vegas by purchasing a 36,045-square-foot office building to serve as its new headquarters. 
 
 
 Skillz announced in June 2021 that it entered an agreement to acquire 100% of the mobile game marketing platform Aarki for around USD 150 million in cash and stock. Aarki&rsquo;s mobile marketing platform is driven by machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data. As a result of the acquisition, Skillz will expand its revenue stream, and more importantly,&nbsp; benefit from potential cost synergies through streamlined marketing spend. To diversify its revenue stream, Skillz 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/7548">
 launched a pilot program
 </a>
 in India in December 2021.&nbsp;
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 Skillz announced a multi-year partnership with the UFC, which is considered the world&rsquo;s leading mixed martial arts organization, 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9309">
 in March 2022
 </a>
 . The partnership gave Skillz and its developer community access to licensing rights to create UFC-branded esports mobile games, which will be co-marketed by Skillz and the UFC. The games are expected to be launched in 2023.
 
 
 Skillz entered into a strategic partnership with Exit Games, a developer of synchronous multiplayer gaming technology in August 2021. Founded in 2004, Exit Games is the developer of Photon, considered to be the world&rsquo;s leading real-time multiplayer game development technology provider. Skillz also announced a USD 50 million investment in return for a minority stake in Exit Games. Through the investment, Skillz gains exclusive access to Exit Games&rsquo; technology. The integration is expected to improve Skillz&rsquo;s chances of supporting multiplayer synchronous content on its platform. As a result, it enables publishers and developers to build racing, fighting, and first-person shooter games on the Skillz platform.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In December 2021, the company announced a private offering of USD 300 million of senior secured notes due 2026. The net proceeds from the offering will be used for general corporate purposes, which may include potential acquisitions and investments in products and technologies. This was followed by its IPO, in September 2020, on the NYSE at a USD 3.5 billion valuation, through a merger with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) named Fly Eagle Acquisition.&nbsp;
 
 
 In FY2022, Skillz&rsquo;s total revenue was down 29.8% YoY to USD 269.7 million. The revenue decline was primarily attributed to a 32.5% YoY decrease in gross market volume. The company revealed this was a result of &ldquo;planned pullbacks in advertising and incentives.&rdquo; Annual monthly active users fell to 2.1 million (down 27.6% YoY), however, annual average revenue per user remained flat at USD 11.0. Although operating expenses dropped in terms of absolute value, expenses as a percentage of revenue ballooned, especially sales and marketing expenses, which accounted for the majority of operating expenditures. The company recorded adjusted EBITDA losses in FY2022, which amounted to USD 122.4 million, respectively. 
 
</div>

Sports Tech

<div>
 
 PlaySight is connecting the next generation of athletes through immersive sports video and analytics technology. It is bringing advanced sports video and analytics technology to every court in the world, creating a global and connected community of athletes, coaches, and fans at all levels of sport. Its cloud-based Smart Court sports video and analytics platform integrates what happens on-court with an interactive and social online community. 
 
</div>

OpenNode offers the most accessible way for e-commerce businesses to process bitcoin payments. With an easy-to-use plug-in solution that includes payment infrastructure APIs for developers and the fastest payment processor capacity on the market, OpenNode enables new payment models and instantaneous settlements for businesses and consumers alike. By bridging the gap between blockchain and the rest of the world with a simple payments platform that is accessible to all, OpenNode is helping to create a borderless future where everyday transactions are paid for with bitcoin and fiat interchangeably.

Aleph is the largest global digital media partner. In over 70 markets worldwide, Aleph is trusted to connect the biggest players in digital media with the advertisers that rely on them. Aleph helps advertisers maximize the value of their investment through a complete service ecosystem - comprising innovative proprietary technology, digital expertise, and deeply embedded local market knowledge. Their teams help brands to master the leading digital platforms, bringing them closer to their customers. These services are delivered through their portfolio of digital media service brands: IMS; Httpool; WISE.BLUE; and Social Snack.

Alter is a platform SDK consisting of a real-time 3D avatar system and motion capture built from scratch for web3 interoperability and the open metaverse. Developers can pipe avatars into their apps, games, and websites. They offer computer vision, 3d technology, web3, machine learning, avatars, rendering engines, blockchain, and NFTs.

ShareChat is an Indian social media startup. It offers the content consumption and sharing platform only in Indian vernacular languages to cater to over 1.17 billion wireless network users of India. It is available in 15 Indian languages. The company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka.

Skillz is the mobile games platform on a mission to bring out the best in everyone through fun and fair competition. The Skillz platform helps developers create multi-million dollar franchises by enabling social competition in their games. Leveraging its patented technology, Skillz hosts billions of casual mobile gaming tournaments for millions of players worldwide. As the pioneer of skill-based competition for mobile gaming, Skillz has earned recognition with Parity.Org’s 2022 Best Companies for Women to Advance, Deloitte 2022 Tech Fast 500 and one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2023.

PlaySight is connecting the next generation of athletes through immersive sports video and analytics technology. They are bringing advanced sports video and analytics technology to every court in the world, creating a global and connected community of athletes, coaches, and fans. Technology has changed how sports are coached, played, and consumed at the elite levels, and they are focused on delivering the same cutting-edge experience to all levels of sport, all over the world. They are becoming the new standard in sports with our cloud-based Smart Court sports video and analytics platform, integrating what happens on-court with an interactive and social online community.

Actively promoting a unique, antidisciplinary culture, the MIT Media Lab goes beyond known boundaries and disciplines, encouraging the most unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate research areas. It creates disruptive technologies that happen at the edges, pioneering such areas as wearable computing, tangible interfaces, and affective computing.  Today, faculty members, research staff, and students at the Lab work in more than 25 research groups on more than 350 projects that range from digital approaches for treating neurological disorders, to a stackable, electric car for sustainable cities, to advanced imaging technologies that can “see around a corner.”  The Lab is committed to looking beyond the obvious to ask the questions not yet asked–questions whose answers could radically improve the way people live, learn, express themselves, work, and play.

OverDrive, Inc. provides technology infrastructure for distributing premium digital content in the United States, Singapore, Mexico, Canada, and Australia. The company delivers secure management, protection, and downloading services for publishers and enterprises, libraries, schools, retailers, and distributors. It provides download media with various titles, including eBooks, audio books, music, and video; and customizable reports. The companyâ€™s software products include Media Console, which allows downloading audio books, music, and videos; ReaderWorks, a suite of eBook authoring and conversion tools; BookWorks, a suite of tools for both commercial and noncommercial eBook production, as well as distribution.   OverDrive, Inc. was founded in 1986 and is based in Cleveland, Ohio.

X, formerly Twitter, is a global social networking platform that allows its users to send and read 280-character messages. It enables registered users to read and post their tweets through the web, short message service (SMS), and mobile applications.  As a global real-time communications platform, X has more than 400 million monthly visitors and 255 million monthly active users around the world. X’s active group of registered members includes World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations, and entertainment outlets. It is currently available in more than 35 languages.  X was launched in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. X is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with local offices in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Sunnyvale, and Washington.  X's international offices are located in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin, London, Madrid, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul, Tokyo, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Twitter

Twitter Ventures

Giving creators the power of content monetization and audience engagement.

Twitter

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