Anarghya Vardhana

Hot take on a lot of early-stage digital health companies out there: You're not a tech company. Most tech-enabled care companies I've seen over the past two years are only tech-enabled in the sense that they use telehealth as their delivery mechanism for care. There are exceptions to this, of course - companies who build computer vision and applied AI tools to better the doctor-patient experience, companies who build tooling around risk scoring and stratification to enable more personalized medicine, companies who build truly novel intakes to better route patients to the appropriate care, etc. These companies have real technology chops and, if they sell it right to the market, can get credit for this from investors. But if you're truly a telehealth provider, you need to realize now that the goal post has shifted dramatically from 2021 and you're going to be valued at maturity at something like 3x EBITDA. That's profit. Not revenue. Throw a revenue multiple out the window. That's not the world we live in if you're a virtual doctor's office. Think of how that impacts venture math. If you're raising a seed round at $15M post-money (or $12M pre-money), it means you'll have to generate something like $150-200M in annual EBITDA to be a fund returner for your seed investors. Maybe even more with dilution, since telehealth businesses are not traditionally capital efficient and will likely need to raise material additional capital to reach that scale. You need to be ridiculously profitable (probably on $800M-$1B in annual revenue since you're likely going to be a 40% gross margin business). Here's the good news: you can set yourself up well (and probably be a contrarian founder relative to your peers), by talking about EBITDA growth and how you can grow into a fund-returning outcome based on realistic mature market comps. This will stand out for the investors you're pitching, even at the early stage. This is how you can beat the malaise of the tech-enabled care market. Focus on the right metrics and the right type of growth. You don't have to have all the answers (no founder does), but you need to make sure the ship is headed in the right direction. A focus on profitability for "tech-enabled care" (*ahem* telehealth) businesses is a good first step.

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Over the years, we at GFR Fund have solidified our investment thesis, which is that we invest in "emerging digitally native communities." These communities can be built around games, social media, and any consumer applications. Now, founders have many easy-to-use tools to build user communities, such as Discord, X/twitter, Instagram, etc, and we believe the founders should start building communities even before they launch a product. The communities can help founders: - reach PMF faster - acquire users cheaper - retain and engage users longer - build better UX/UI, and - hire early employees Below, you can see how RTFKT and Omeda Studios built the community and then worked with them to create a product the users really wanted. We would love to talk to the founders who think the community is essential in building a product!

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I’m thrilled to be announcing that Notion Capital is leading the $15m Series A investment in Cogna today. In the industry, we like to think that software has been eating the world. But when you look at the data a better description would be more of a nibble. Depending on what source you look at the software industry represents between 5-8% of global GDP. Contrast that with the services industry that represents between 60-70% of GDP and worth around $25 trillion on a global basis. Most services have been out of reach for the software industry. They have either been too complex or too specialized for off the shelf software to access in any economically viable way. But that’s beginnning to change with GenAI leading to the emergence of ‘service as a software.’ Cogna is at the forefront of this opportunity - building precision software at scale and delivering huge productivity gains for traditional industries. We know Ben Peters & Lars Mennen well having backed their previous company Five AI that was acquired by Bosch in 2022. And we’re very excited to be backing them again together with Hoxton Ventures & Chalfen Ventures Read my full blog post on why we invested here. Radu Bozga Ben Peters Lars Mennen Bryan Gartner Mike Chalfen Hussein Kanji Kirsten Connell https://lnkd.in/eh8mhcJb

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Learn a bit more about our DNA and how we operate at Acurio Ventures from Kate Cornell

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Excited to join Blackout Tuesday # 18 at LocalGlobe this coming Tuesday centered around the theme: 'Increasing Venture-backed Black Founders: Journey from Seed to Series A and Beyond'. This event will focus on the challenges Black founders face when scaling startups and provide insights on navigating growth stages from Pre-seed to Series A. After a panel of founders sharing their experiences, the breakout session will dive into practical strategies for scaling. ✏ Register here: https://lnkd.in/eHZpMDN2 Launched in 2020, Blackout Tuesday aims to: 1. Increase Black representation in VCs 2. Boost venture funding for Black founders 3. Elevate Black employees in venture-backed companies 4. Support Black GPs 5. Increase Black or Black-aligned LP representation Balderton Capital Phoenix Court Blackout Tuesday

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Not all of the investments that Kindred Capital VC makes can be a 13 year sourcing process.... but... this is one of those very fortunate moments in which a relationship that started over a decade ago in the Bay Area where the brilliant A-H. Hleileh and I overlapped has now turned into an incredibly exciting opportunity for Kindred to lead his and Ron Holifield's first institutional round at Civic Marketplace. We believe: 1. Local government procurement is one of the most underserved areas in technology today, and has failed to keep pace with the private sector. They deserve better. 2. This is a huge opportunity, with US local governments spending alone amounting to over $1.5 trillion in annual spend, which is only going in one direction... 3. As the brilliant Kip Harkness shared with me in our diligence phase, "this industry moves at the speed of trust." And this is a unique founding team with A-H. Hleileh and Ron Holifield at the helm who bring together two critical ingredients: 1) decades of trust-building within this domain, and 2) a team who can build beautiful and scalable technology platforms. Onwards!! 🚀

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I'm excited to announce that Canapi Ventures has led OpenYield's seed round. OpenYield is redefining how bonds are traded and who gets to trade them. Despite being one of the largest global asset classes, fixed income has long lagged behind equities in terms of innovation. Outdated systems, fragmented liquidity, and barriers to access have made bond trading inefficient, opaque, and inaccessible to many, particularly retail investors.   OpenYield is changing that. By delivering an equity-like trading experience for bonds, the platform transforms the fixed income market into a space defined by transparency, efficiency, and access. With real-time pricing, seamless execution, and intuitive workflows, OpenYield is making bond trading easier and more effective for institutional players, market makers, and retail investors alike. This progress wouldn’t be possible without the exceptional leadership of Jonathan Birnbaum and Hilton Lipschitz, whose decades of experience in capital markets and fintech have earned them the right to build a category leader in this market. Also hard to believe that meeting Jonathan over 20 years ago led to this partnership today!   For Canapi’s network of financial institution LPs, OpenYield represents an exciting opportunity to enhance wealth platforms, attract new client assets, and deepen advisor relationships. As the competition for wealth clients intensifies, access to efficient fixed income trading will be a critical differentiator, delivering real value for customers and strengthening client loyalty. Thrilled to be partnering with Ben Savage and Ned Daoro at Clocktower Ventures. Shoutout to Harrison Kioko. More thoughts on our investment thesis here:

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For the past year (and then some), I’ve been working closely with my Partner Will Rayner to build and launch something that we’re super excited to now make public - Lookout Ventures: a new seed stage fund, backing infrastructure and B2B software startups outside of Silicon Valley. We’re building on almost a decade spent sourcing and leading deals at TDF Ventures. While there, we saw the majority of the VC industry chasing and bidding up the same set of SaaS deals - based in a few select ecosystems like the Bay Area - and demonstrating the same set of well established go to market benchmarks. We’re not here for those deals. What we are looking for: *Regions*: The days of needing to be in Silicon Valley to succeed are over. Startup culture has spread to many metropolitan areas from Raleigh-Durham to Washington DC to Houston to Chicago. Those cities have a combination of great universities, major corporate headquarters, and local accelerators and incubators, which are the key ingredients for startup creation. We’re particularly focused on the Southeast, Midwest and Texas. *Stage*: Founders are probably sick of big brand investors telling them that their traction is too early but they’d love to stay in touch for the next round. While Lookout won’t often invest pre-revenue, we do invest before product market fit. Whether it’s called a seed, seed prime, or early A, we want to work with founders as soon as they know they have a solution ready to scale. *Sectors*: We’re comfortable investing early because we’re staying focused on topic areas in which we’ve built our expertise and networks during our past decade of investments around infrastructure software and vertical SaaS. Within those areas, we have more specialized interests ranging from MSP (managed service provider) tooling to cybersecurity serving the small business to SaaS focused on field workers in various verticals. We’re actively writing checks and are excited to already be working with great teams from Arpio, hotglue, inforcer, and CloudCapsule. If you’re building or investing in these areas, drop me a line and let’s catch up.

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After the first deep dive discussion w/ founders I often hear a comment "I wish I had heard about this alternative [to all-in must-become-a-unicorn] way to build a startup earlier as I have wasted years in pursuing the wrong thing". Our mission is that no founder would ever need to say that again as it is such a waste. Us preaching the gospel 1:1 just doesn't scale, hence we use mass media to multiply our efforts - that's how Gorillacast came to be. The 1st episode is out, featuring yours truly. "How can you know what food you like unless you taste everything" said a chef. How can founders make informed choices about the best strategy for them to follow unless they know of all alternatives? This might not be of interest to you but pls spread the word so that the founders who should hear it can find it. I have a dream!

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It was an honour to unveil Molten Ventures’ short film, 2054, at the London Stock Exchange this morning as Molten Ventures’ new CEO.   This film, created using 14 separate generative AI applications, formed the core of the theme for this year’s CEO summit: “what if you succeed?”. A question which we should ask ourselves every day – and urge every entrepreneur and investor to do the same.   By diving thirty years ahead into a fictional future, we can get a glimpse of what may be possible if the capital, support, expertise and energy is injected into businesses and ideas at the right time. Something that we’ve been doing at Molten Ventures for many years.   We have already built a portfolio of Europe’s most forward-thinking companies who have developed technology that changes lives, now.   You can find out more about the story behind the film, including films made by our portfolio companies here: https://lnkd.in/ezNbeEPu

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RETHINKING RETIREMENT We've been investing in the Future of Work since we launched BBG Ventures, targeting underserved segments like deskless workers (Anthill, OX) and solopreneurs (Topline Pro). Over the summer we spent time digging into another deeply underserved segment of the workforce: Boomers. By the end of this decade, the entire generation will have hit retirement age and, for the first time, Americans 65+ will outnumber those under 18. This has huge implications for every aspect of society, and it mandates that we start thinking differently about retirement. The question for all of us is this: Can we re-focus healthy Americans 60+ on a new phase of productivity, a “third act” that enables them to keep learning, keep earning, keep socially-engaged and contributing to the nation’s economic growth? And what role can AI play in helping every senior identify their unique skill set and personal priorities — and connect them with the right opportunities? We have some thoughts on how to make this happen, and we'd love you to give it a read, add your feedback, forward it to a founder who's working in this arena (or who you think might be intrigued), and share it! AgeTech has been too focused on death and decay; it's time we embrace longevity and give older Americans a way to keep working -- on their terms. cc: Carol Magalhães Isaacs, CFA Nisha Dua, Claire Biernacki, Drew Silverman Fennessy

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My amazing cousin, Cleven Ticeson (https://lnkd.in/gWis4xX6) , a 14 time Emmy award winning producer for KCTS9 in Seattle, is a hero of mine. I grew up watching the educational shows like Bill Nye and the performing arts they would showcase. He was following the work I have been doing de-siloing the Black professional class working in venture scale entrepreneurship in the Pacific Northwest and composed a news reel covering Dreamward Group that moved me not only because he is my hyper-talented and dear cousin but because it voiced and gave me the perspective of the decades that what we’re building has been missing from the mass culture and my culture. Lewis Rudd once told me that the hardest target to hit is an invisible one and my dear cousin hit me right in the heart by speaking in his video about the unseen, but nonetheless felt, absence of inclusive capitalization of startups. Felt by the generation of Black people that watched the tech industry grow not only painting Black technologists and Black founders out of the heroic saga of tech, but Black funders as well. I am so glad that Dreamward Group is able to paint the target and make it visible through our work. Venture Capital, the financial backing of the tech industry, just like tech itself, had an evolution with foundational moments in the 70s on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley yet it’s mechanics, drama, and operation are largely unknown to the public that isn’t working in tech entrepreneurship. It’s trajectory and heights of accomplishment with Andreessen Horowitz and Madrona Ventures are parallel and analogous to Google and Amazon…But only the later two brands are household names to people outside of the industry. The world knows the story of Black people being excluded from Tech, It knows the story of Black people being excluded from executive leadership. It experienced the Obama administration and the depravity of the Trump backlash and had to ask itself why it had actively or passively participated in writing off Black professionals. Some of the world hears of Black founders getting less than 2% of invested capital, but even on hearing that, they don’t know the story of Black people being excluded from the role of deciding which startups get funded using a yet third party’s (often their own government’s) money…That is the story of Venture Capital today, and that’s what Dreamward is changing for the future.

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Congrats to Christopher Robson, Kurtis Broda and Kristen Cote at Wyvern on bringing on fantastic new investors Guy Filippelli, Dan Madden and Isaac Carp, CFA at Squadra Ventures. I'm a broken record at this point, but we're in the early innings of the Earth Observation market, and as we're seeing with Wyvern there is more demand for hyperspectral data than supply. As we will see in the coming years, there will be all kinds of problems that can be addressed by understanding our world beyond what our eyes can see. https://lnkd.in/gEzTjYks

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Prime Coalition has long taken a different tack to climate finance compared to its for-profit brethren. It makes the usual venture-style investments in startups through Azolla Ventures and also helps philanthropists direct their money to climate-related projects that it deems high impact. Trellis Climate follows the latter model with a focus on middle stages, where capital has grown scarce. #climatetech #climateVC #climatefinance

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Looking forward to discussing how changing demographics and culture norms are affecting investment opportunities in longevity, health and well-being at The Care Summit today Alongside Cake Ventures' Monique Woodard, Ziegler's Dan Hermann, Oak HC/FT's Billy Deitch and JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jennifer Edwards, we’ll dive into the trends shaping how we are investing in the space: - Last year marked one of the most significant social and economic moments in modern times: The number of older adults—those aged 50 and over- surpassed the number of children under the age of 15 for the first time. - In 2020 the 50 plus population contributed $45 trillion to global GDP, or 34% of the total. That equates to about 3x the revenue of the world’s 100 highest- earning companies in 2020. - The U.S. population grew by 24.5 million from 2010 to 2022, and Hispanics accounted for 53% of this increase – a greater share than any other racial or ethnic group. - Women around the world and across all ages drive 64% of consumer spending

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Kudos to aifleet on its $16.6M raise to fund growth in tech-enabled trucking. Its investors include Heron Rock Volvo Group Venture Capital, Obvious Ventures, Ibex Investors, Compound, Winthrop Square Capital and Cooley LLP. Aifleet is doing something different. Most other startups in this field are focused on pure technology. They have 204 drivers and power units. Will they be able to make it work with a combination of trucking and technology? https://lnkd.in/ePytPHx7

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Yesterday, our portfolio company, LineVision, announced the operationalization of LineVision's Dynamic Line Rating project with National Grid NY. This marks the single largest implementation of a #technology (#climatech) that can help operators determine in real time how much #power they can safely put through their lines leading to a more #efficient and more #reliable #grid - allowing #utilities to build a smarter grid; a grid that can welcome more #renewablepower sources faster! Congratulations to the people and teams at LineVision and National Grid! #decarbonization #gigacorn #electricity Kevin Kimsa Lilliana Paoletti Hudson Gilmer See the comments below for a link to the PR and launch video.

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WE DID IT! After 2 years of pushing through the biggest downturn in VC in decades, Matthew Stotts 🌐 and I made it to the finish line with Fund I! We couldn't have done this without One Small Planet (Will Peterffy and Jack Wielebinski 🙏), Regen Network and Regen Foundation (Austin Wade Smith Gregory Landua and Will Szal), and a dozen other family offices and angels who believed that we can build a nature-positive economy utilizing our eye for software and our history as founders from day 1 A shout out goes to all of our founders (only four announced today, but watch this space - there are multitudes!) who trusted us enough to give us a spot on their cap table for this 10-15 year journey. This is the best job in the world, and it's because we get to work with people like you who have weird ideas in the best possible way. Using Bitcoin as anchor base load to decarbonize residential housing in America's most expensive energy market? Make every complex supply chain legible to machines so we can find and eliminate deforestation in commodity supply chains? Build deeply liquid environmental asset markets to price ecosystem services, on a blockchain, that no one needs to know is a blockchain? I'm so excited to get to work on this stuff for the next 10-15 years minimum, and to see what we can accelerate with our tiny fund in the next 5-6 years as we approach 2030 Onward! https://lnkd.in/gy3B-DFe

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