First Round is a seed-stage venture firm focused on building a vibrant community of technology entrepreneurs and companies, including Uber, Square, and Warby Parker. Through custom-built software, incredible in-person experiences, and a host of other unique services, First Round helps tiny companies get big while constantly reimagining the role of venture capital. It offers a growing number of services and products to help founders build companies from scratch. First Round has adopted the Diversity Term Sheet Rider.

First Round Capital

Before you build your team, before you write your first line of code, before you even take your first check—that’s when boldstart gets to work. We collaborate with technical founders well before company creation, lead pre-product rounds at inception, and rally our developer-first and SaaS network to help turn bold ideas into category-creating iconic companies. We’ve been in the trenches with Snyk, Blockdaemon, Kustomer, BigID, Superhuman (and so many more) from day one. The investment firm was founded in 2010 by Ed Sim and is headquartered in Miami, FL with Partners in Boston, Bay Area, and London.

boldstart ventures

Fueled is an full-service digital design, development, branding and strategy agency dedicated to entrepreneurs that offers an unparalleled suite of services for startups of all sizes.  Mobile Product Design - Fueled was founded with the single-minded vision of putting together an all-star team that could take a project from ideation through launch, with the agility and expertise of a top startup rather than the arthritic, fluff-ridden tendencies of a typical agency or dev shop.   iOS, Android, Web & Backend Development - Our software engineers are industry veterans. They leverage enterprise-class code quality with Agile and Lean methodologies to quickly and efficiently bring products to life. We emphasize scalability and extensibility so your product can grow with your users.   Growth & Marketing - Our analytics and conversion optimization experts can help you optimize your app's analytics suite, manage AB testing regimes, and manage digital marketing campaigns.   Fueled Ventures - Fueled clients go on to raise millions in funding and have been acquired in massive exits. That's why we offer select startup clients the opportunity to make their development budgets go much further through an investment from Fueled Ventures, our independent venture fund. But even better than an early infusion of cash is the fact that we vest all of our agency employees into our fund. Our team is your team.   Fueled Collective - The most valuable asset a startup can leverage is other startups. That's why we created the Fueled Collective, a one-of-a-kind coworking space that is home to more than 40 startups in addition to Fueled's New York staff. By surrounding ourselves with entrepreneurs from every industry imaginable, no business or technical challenge remains unconquered for long.

Fueled

BoxGroup is an early-stage investment fund that invests in technology companies. The fund aims to invest in the consumer, enterprise, fintech, healthcare, life science, and marketplaces industries at the earliest stage, as early as pre-seed round and as late as Series A. It supports companies based on a conviction in the team and seeks entrepreneurs working at the beginning of movements in existing markets or new markets yet to be created and with visions to create the next generation of category-defining businesses. Their typical investment ranges from $200,000 to $500,000. Adam Rothenberg and David Tisch founded BoxGroup in 2009 in New York, New York.

BoxGroup

Rubicon Venture Capital (Rubicon) is a Late Seed / Series A VC fund with a unique global community of value added investors to build lasting technology companies. Their investors are mainly successful entrepreneurs and executives located in key cities around the world. Rubicon invests in enterprise Saas, Fintech, hospitality tech, logistics, insuretech, PropTech, AI/ML and direct to consumer companies. Typically companies will have achieved at least $1m in ARR. We invest in Later Stage Seed and Series A & B venture capital financing rounds of high potential early stage disruptive technology companies.

Rubicon Venture Capital

Zelkova Ventures is a venture capital firm committed to helping entrepreneurs build companies. The firm primarily looks to invest in early stage companies, many times pre-revenue. In many instances they provide a company's first outside/institutional capital. They look to take an active role and partner with the  companies they invest in. Along with their capital, Zelkova brings expertise, insight and execution to all of their portfolio companies. Zelkova, although not exclusively, focuses on several key sectors -   Software Services, Internet Technologies, Environmental Technologies and Consumer Products.

Zelkova Ventures

S2 Capital is a micro venture capital fund that specializes in seed-stage investments. It was founded in 2014 by Samvit Ramadurgam and Sohail Prasad. S2 Capital is based in San Francisco, California.

S2 Capital

We Back Builders. Founded by @Jason  Team behind   This Week in Startups: https://www.youtube.com/c/ThisWeekIn  @twistartups    The LAUNCH Accelerator https://launchaccelerator.co/ @launchincubator    The Syndicate https://thesyndicate.com/ @thesyndicate415    Founder university: https://www.founder.university/ @founderuni    Remote Demo Day  https://remotedemoday.com/ @remotedemoday

LAUNCH

Tiny Capital is a venture capital firm seeking to invest in information technology sectors. The firm invests in private and public companies and has a base of permanent capital from a family office.

Tiny Capital

Precursor Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on pre-seed and seed investments in North America. The firm focuses on investments in B2B and B2C software applications and hardware. Precursor Ventures has adopted the Diversity Term Sheet Rider.

Precursor Ventures

Coughdrop Capital is an early-stage venture firm based in San Francisco and Los Angeles.Typically, we write checks into pre-seed or seed stage startups. Regardless of sector, industry, or stage, we like to fund smart founders with ambitious plans. We love warm intros, but don't require them.  Say hello!

Coughdrop Capital

Founders backing Founders. Swift Ventures is the fund that we wish existed when we were starting out -- a low-ego, sincerely helpful firm led by former founders who get it. With decades of company-building experience, Swift provides relevant and practical “garage-to-IPO” building and scaling expertise.We invest in AI and Automation companies with B2B business models.  Typically, we are looking for companies that have an early compelling product with positive revenue and retention signals.

Swift Ventures

Impact: 80+ startups. 31 exits. $150+ bn in value.

Chang Corporation

Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm specializing in investing in seed, start-ups, early, mid-stage, growth, and late-stage. It prefers to invest in the social media business and technology sector with a focus on software, back-end infrastructure, the infrastructure of the Internet, cloud computing, enterprise software and services, consumer, business Internet, mobile-Internet, consumer Internet, cloud computing, data storage, social network browsers data-storage, consumer electronics, networking functions, software related biology, biotech, and medicine companies at the intersection of computer science and life sciences with a focus on digital therapeutics, cloud technology in biology, and computational medicine.

Andreessen Horowitz

Hydrazine Capital is a venture capital firm started by Sam Altman and Ryan Cohen.

Hydrazine Capital

Knollwood Investment Advisory is focused on financing companies in the internet security sector.

Knollwood Investment Advisory

The House Fund is a pre-seed and early stage venture capital fund focused on the boldest Berkeley startups.  UC Berkeley has some of the most brilliant minds and daring businesses in the world, like Tesla, Apple, and Intel. It has never had a place to unite its entrepreneurs, until now. Started in 2016, with 50+ investments, $2B in follow-on funding, and 10 exits later, The House Fund has become a thriving ecosystem for the boldest Berkeley startups to grow.

The House Fund

We invest in great companies in the pre-seed and seed stages.

Yes VC

Karman Ventures (fka Moving Capital) is a venture capital firm backed by early employees of Uber and other decacorn startups.

Karman Ventures (fka Moving Capital)

Aurum Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in all asset classes across the capital structure in the public and private markets. The firm is committed to fostering the development of innovative startups, investing in groundbreaking ideas, and offering valuable support to entrepreneurs.

Aurum Partners

Founded in 2015, CSC Upshot Ventures is an early-stage venture fund focusing on providing seed capital to technology companies at scale. The firm seeks to invest in companies operating in the enterprise, artificial intelligence, healthcare, Fintech, and the marketplace. In close partnership with AngelList, CSC Upshot Ventures built a new model of venture investing based on the needs of founders, investors, and startup communities.

CSC Upshot

Tiger Global Management is an investment firm that deploys capital globally. Tiger Global seeks to earn superior risk-adjusted returns for its investors over the long term. The firm’s fundamentally oriented investments focus primarily on the global Internet, technology, telecom, media consumer, and industrial sectors. The private equity strategy has a ten-year investment horizon and targets growth-oriented private companies. The public equity efforts emphasize deep due diligence on individual companies and long-term secular themes.

Tiger Global Management

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.

The Chainsmokers is an electronic DJ and production company where indie artists release their remixes songs.

The Chainsmokers

Superhuman

Superhuman is a software platform that weaves social insights into a workflow. The platform supports Gmail shortcuts and more allowing its users to snooze a conversation at any time so they focus on what matters, and enjoy a more productive inbox.

<div><p>Superhuman is an AI-based email platform currently available to Gmail and iOS users. It offers a variety of features to reinvent the inbox, including AI-based tools to highlight the most important emails, follow-up reminders, and scheduled messages for a monthly subscription fee of USD 30. Superhuman reportedly reached 50,000 users in 2020 and had a waitlist of more than 450,000 as of August 2021.</p></div>

The tools that power remote work are define the next generation of enterprise software.

Remote Work Tools

<div>
  <p>
    Superhuman is an AI-based email platform currently available to Gmail and iOS users. It offers a variety of features to reinvent the inbox, including AI-based tools to highlight the most important emails, follow-up reminders, and scheduled messages for a monthly subscription fee of USD 30. Superhuman reportedly reached 50,000 users in 2020 and had a waitlist of more than 450,000 as of August 2021.
  </p>
  <p>
    Superhuman raised USD 75 million in a Series C funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) in August 2021. The round valued the company at USD 825 million and included the participation of Tiger Global Management and individual investors Drew Houston (CEO of Dropbox) and Jason Citron (CEO of Discord).&nbsp;
  </p>
  <p>
    As part of the investment, Ajay Vashee (General Partner, IVP) is expected to join Superhuman&rsquo;s board of directors. The fresh capital is expected to be funneled toward product development and launching the software to Outlook and Android users. It also plans to ramp up hiring across the team to reach a headcount of more than 200 by the end of 2022 (from 85 as of August 2021). Furthermore, integration with third-party tools such as Grammarly, Hubspot, and Salesforce is in the roadmap.
  </p>
</div>


<div>
  <p>
    Hive is a productivity platform for project management and collaboration. The platform provides automated workflows, project planning layouts, and action templates to assign and keep track of project tasks. Hive focuses on improving task execution with instant feedback cycles for editing and approvals. Additional features include note taking (Hive Note), instant messaging, online meetings, and file sharing.
  </p>
  <p>
    Hive offers a variety of ways for teams to organize their projects, including Gantt charts, Kanban boards, tables, and calendars, with updates made in one view automatically reflected in all others. The platform allows team members to create action cards with files, sub-actions, dependencies, and comments to stay on top of their objectives, and have access to a personal to-do list that compiles all assigned tasks from all projects. Managers can use Hive to assign approvals, share proofs, provide feedback, and collect project forms from clients and customers. Hive also uses AI and machine learning to provide insights on team productivity and identify potential risks, and to optimize resource allocation and client billing.
  </p>
  <p>
    <b>Key customers and partnerships</b>
  </p>
  <p>
    The company&rsquo;s customer base includes Uber, Marriot, Starbucks, The Economist, Compass, Omnicom, Harvard, New York University, and WeWork. Hive offers integrations over 1,000 SaaS platforms, including Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and Smartsheet, allowing users to import tasks from these platforms.
  </p>
  <p>
    <b>Funding and financials</b>
  </p>
  <p>
    Hive raised USD 10.6 million in&nbsp; raised USD 10 million in a funding round led by Rembrandt Venture Partners in August 2021. The funding round included Zoom as well as existing investors Tribeca Venture Partners and Angelpad. Hive is one of the first startups to receive an investment from Zoom&rsquo;s recently launched Zoom Apps Fund (a USD 100 million global venture fund). The fresh funds were allocated toward platform development.&nbsp;
  </p>
</div>


Hive

<div>
  <p>
    Grain’s software allows users to record and share online meeting content from tools such as Zoom in an effective manner. The content can be in the form of recorded videos or transcripts from the call. In addition, the shareable content can be clipped and tweaked to create summary videos of lectures, workplace meetings, etc. Grain operates a subscription-based model with a free-to-use version, a paid plan priced at USD 19 per user per month, and an enterprise plan with custom pricing. The company’s products focus on distributed teams, sales, product and user research, and hiring teams.
  </p>
  <p>
    In its latest funding round (
    <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9759">
      <u>April 2022</u>
    </a>
    ), Grain raised USD 16 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global Management. The funds were raised to expand operations and develop its ​​video meeting system of record for content, which allows employees to collaborate around insights, topics, relationships, or teams. 
  </p>
</div>


Grain

<div>
  <p>
    Air is a creative operations system that enables designers and marketers to create, store, search, collaborate, and review image and video content. Air&rsquo;s smart search function is equipped with image recognition, automated tagging, and search filters to reduce time spent on manual processes. Kanban-style project management tools that integrate with third-party tools like Asana and monday.com are also included in Air to manage visual content planning, production, and distribution workflows. Further, Air supports collaboration and the review process through version stacks and features like annotations, which can be&nbsp;timestamped and shared publicly. As of January 2022, Air offered a free version with a storage capacity of up to 5 GB for three members and paid subscription plans starting from USD 10 per month/per user.
  </p>
  <p>
    Shane Hegde and Tyler Strand, both Stanford graduates, founded Air in 2017. Hegde was the former chief digital officer at TV network Revolt Media (an American music cable television network). Strand&rsquo;s previous venture hostess.fm (a live-streaming company) was sold to LA-based events company SFX Entertainment in 2014.
  </p>
  <p>
    Although it was founded in 2017, Air launched in March 2020. In its first four months since launch, it reported weekly paid user growth of 10% and attracted 200 clients as of September 2020. As of January 2022, the company&rsquo;s revenue in the direct-to-consumer (DTC) and ecommerce markets had seen more than 500% YoY growth in the preceding 12 months. Air&rsquo;s free product is used to manage nearly 20 million creative assets, 25% of customers use the product daily, and customer revenue has doubled every six months, as of January 2022.
  </p>
  <p>
    In its most recent funding round in 
    <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8139">
      <u>January 2022</u>
    </a>
    , Air raised USD 10 million in an &ldquo;Operator Round&rdquo; led by Headline with participation from Tiger Global, Lere Hippeau, and 50+ strategic founders and marketing executives including Peter Rahal (Co-Founder, RXBAR), Kipp Bodnar (CMO, HubSpot), and Joe Thomas (CEO, Loom), valuing the company at USD 110 million. The company considers the Operator Round to be unique, as its backers included Air&rsquo;s existing customers, potential customers, and prominent product advisors. The fresh funds will be used to accelerate Air&rsquo;s go-to-market activities and growth.
  </p>
</div>


<div>
  <p>
    Acapela was co-founded by Roland Grenke, founder of Dubsmash, a video sharing social media app. Acapela facilitates online meetings without real-time interaction between participants; instead, members contribute to meetings over time. 
  </p>
  <p>
     Acapela provides voice and video messages integrated with popular productivity tools such as Asana, Google Workspace, Notion, and Atlassian. Additionally, meetings will generate tasks and meeting summaries automatically. The company identified distributed tech teams as its initial target segment and plans to shift focus toward small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and larger enterprises eventually.  The product is currently in invite-only beta.
  </p>
  <p>
    In October 2020, the company exited stealth mode with a USD 3 million seed funding round led by Visionaries Club. The round included Entrepreneur First and other notable individual investors, such as Christian Reber (founder of presentation software Pitch) and Taavet Hinrikus (founder of online money transfer service TransferWise). 
  </p>
</div>


Acapela

<div>
  <p>
    iObeya is a French company that has begun its global expansion starting with the United States. The company focuses on visualization tools for management, such as lean, agile, and manufacturing, often in the form of Gantt charts, whiteboards, and post-it notes. The platform currently has more than 300,000 users across 350+ clients, which are mainly large enterprises.
  </p>
</div>


iObeya

Solutions in this industry hub are predominantly offered under a B2B SaaS model

Some solutions in the virtual office and video conferencing segments are based on AR/VR

Facilitates hybrid workforces by offering tools for employees to collaborate regardless of location

Meeting transcription and note-taking apps, design, and project management tools use AI/ML for product development

Platforms that offer chat and email-based collaborative tools.

Superhuman

Remote Work Tools

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Recent Updates

Superhuman launches AI-powered instant replies to enhance email efficiency

Superhuman raises USD 75 million in a Series C funding round

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