Shuman Ghosemajumder, Reken’s cofounder and CEO, also sat within that small group of AdSense product managers, and as a result we’ve know him for just about 21 years. When he and Rich Griffiths let us know they were starting a new company together it was an easy “Yes”. Not surprisingly, we weren’t the only former colleagues to sign on and perhaps a little bit of that Google magic will bless this startup as well.
Reken sits at the intersection of what the team learned at Shape Security (where Shuman was CTO and Rich was VP Product) and their investigations into how generative AI was creating new threats that individuals and companies would need to address.
While the company is still being quiet about their product, they are hiring, so if the overview intrigues you, let them know.
]]>When we met Demi Guo, Pika’s CEO and Cofounder, we were struck both by her technical accomplishments and her interest in building a community, not just software. Sign us up - for the product and for the investment, which Pika announced this week as the latest addition to what now totals $55 million in cumulative funding.
Earlier we mentioned Anchor, and it was their CEO Mike Mignano, who now as a Partner with Lightspeed, led this round (and introduced us to Demi). It’s a joy to work alongside him again!
If you are interested in joining Pika (the product), sign up here.
If you are interested in joining Pika (the company), they are of course hiring.
]]>Now having been adopted by more than 75 customers across three continents, the Ride Report team will be continuing its growth as part of INRIX, the leading intelligent mobility software platform. We know they’ll continue to do mission-driven high impact work!
]]>
Sitka has become a trusted partner to a variety of customers, including some of the most prestigious and innovative hospital systems. It allows doctors to get specialist consults virtually and from outside of their institutions, meaning patients can have access needed expertise while care providers have more flexibility in staffing. Sitka just combined forces with AristaMD to continue scaling to a future where software can help bridge cost and quality gaps in care, no matter where you reside. And that’s good for everyone.
If you think that Zoom is the perfect tool for any type of virtual experience among teams then stop reading now.
Ok, if you made it this far let us tell you about Gatheround, a modern software product that helps teams, companies and organizations conduct high quality meetings that matter - such as All Hands, Employee Onboardings, and anything that requires talented, creative humans to interact.
Trusted and loved by customers such as Gusto, Salesforce, Lyft and Cisco, Gatheround just announced its $8 million Series A to continue development and deployment of its unique, opinionated and effective platform. We’re excited to continue our support in this round after leading the seed earlier.
As CEO Lisa Conn writes, “We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of what distributed teams can do with the right tools. Remote and hybrid teams are already more engaged and more equitable. Gatheround is the final piece of the puzzle: a meeting platform that reflects the social dynamics that give in-person interactions their collaborative magic. Not only are engaging meetings a good business practice, they’re also essential to shared team culture and norms. Teams and companies equipped with those strong, healthy social ties are unstoppable.”
If breaking out of the tiled gray video wall for your work sounds appealing, try Gatheround. Oh and also, they’re hiring.
]]>Now a decade later, Shield produces smart autonomous devices and aircraft which are deployed by our country, and other nations, in combat zones, on critical life saving missions, and for disrupting large scale criminal activity. Shield is even currently in Gaza. The company's platform has saved lives, intercepted illegal goods, and performed a host of other flight missions that will quietly stay out of headlines. Shield's board decks produce gasps, tears, and applause. And it’s still just the beginning.
Shield announced a raise of $200 million additional dollars to further the development of this industry-leading software, at an increased valuation over its previous round. There is no ceiling on where Shield can go from here, and we’re proud to be early investors and ongoing supporters.
If a responsible startup at the intersection of compelling technology and global-relevance interests you, they’re hiring.
]]>The Ello team is multidisciplinary, combining technologists with educators, to build a powerful and responsible approach to AI learning. Giving children confidence and capability in their reading is an important component of lifelong capacity building and helping anyone reach their fullest potential. Our interest in this goal transcends Homebrew, as Hunter’s first job was working in a children’s bookstore and Satya was a long-time Board member of KIPP.
Ello uses an AI-powered coach alongside books to meet your child where they are - in abilities and interests - and then bring them along to grow skills and enthusiasm for reading. And this is just the beginning of what Ello has planned.
If working at a well-funded, high quality, ethical AI consumer startup appeals to you, Ello is hiring.
]]>WHO: Alex Sambvani and Gabe Duncan met when they were implementing personalized voice AI as members of the data science team at Spotify. That experience taught them that the power of voice AI could be applied to help businesses of all types, but that the technical hurdles would be too challenging for many of them. They conceived of Slang to bring this transformative technology to small businesses via a simple, fast and highly performant voice AI platform.
WHAT: Slang has built an AI-powered, 24/7 phone concierge that intelligently answers customer calls for small businesses, starting with restaurants. Slang enables customers to implement voice AI with a simple, no-code solution that is up and running in 30 minutes and offers powerful data intelligence that helps drive customer engagement and revenue. Quickly and easily, Slang automatically handles tasks like booking appointments, making reservations, placing food orders, and more, resulting in higher conversion and happier customers.
HOW: Available voice solutions deliver a terrible customer experience (phone directories anyone?), cost exorbitant amounts of money, take months to implement and rarely integrate into other systems that small businesses rely upon (like reservation systems for restaurants). Having staff answer calls distracts them from their core job responsibilities and creates an inconsistent customer experience. Slang stitches together a number of technologies, including natural language processing, text to speech, dialogue management and reservation system APIs, to taking an often troublesome customer touchpoint (answering customer phone calls) for location-based businesses and turning it into a scalable, affordable and actionable revenue channel.
WHY: Small businesses are facing an unprecedented staffing shortage and all-time-high wages — this means it's no longer affordable to answer the phone, resulting in missed calls and lost business. Slang helps SMBs capture more opportunities over the phone and elevate the
customer experience. Over time, Slang will become the conversational AI layer for business — an entirely new channel for businesses to transact, market, and serve their customers.
If being on the cutting edge of technology and helping small businesses thrive sounds exciting to you, join the team at Slang. They are hiring for positions in New York and remotely.
]]>When we met the Albert team and learned about their experience building a modern collaboration, data, and productivity stack for the chemical and material science industry it was clear this felt like a Homebrew opportunity. Committed mission-driven entrepreneurs in a vertical that the average startup may never have considered. So when the founders invited us into their seed financing alongside their lead (and our frequent co-investor) Index Ventures, we lept at the opportunity, backing them with our personal capital and bringing along some notable individuals with us.
It’s been a joy working with this strong team and if you’d like to build with them too, Albert is hiring.
]]>Manifest allows organizations to generate, collect, and operationalize software bill of materials (SBOMs) to achieve insight into the hidden risks of their software, respond faster to vulnerabilities, and procure more secure products. The company recently announced Department of Homeland Security and Air Force contracts, among a number of other commercial customers. Alongside these new relationships is a $6 million seed round, which we were thrilled to participate in (thanks to our friend and coinvestor Ross Fubini for the introduction).
As the Manifest team writes,
Software supply chain vulnerabilities are escalating rapidly. Software supply chain attacks have grown 300% since 2020, and an astonishing 62% of enterprises say they were hit with software supply chain attacks in 2021. Cybersecurity is often referred to as the “horizontal vertical,” touching every industry and every enterprise. The problem of understanding what’s in the software we build and buy is something that has been overlooked for too long, and in recent years, headline-making and business-disrupting cybersecurity vulnerabilities such as Log4shell, Solarwinds, and Apache Struts have brought it front and center.
If Manifest’s mission sounds exciting to you, they are hiring!
]]>But when the round completed, it occupied one specific new spot in our own history: the first follow-on round in a Homebrew♾️company, where instead of investing money on behalf of others, we’re using our own capital. But the core of what we do isn’t new at all. Still putting in the work, still looking for venture outcomes, still operating as a team alongside founders. And knowing that we have to earn any ongoing opportunities to follow-on in future funding events. So when the Adonis founders extended the offer to us, in an oversubscribed situation, we were thrilled and eager to deepen our participation.
If Adonis’ mission sounds exciting to you they are most definitely hiring.
]]>Hallow, the leading Catholic prayer app, just announced its $50 million Series C to further drive growth and product enhancements. As the team writes in its own blog post about the round, the last year has been extraordinary for the company:
This Lent, Hallow was the first faith-based app to ever crack the top 10 apps in the App Store overall coming in at #3 – beating Netflix, Spotify, Instagram, Amazon, Tiktok, YouTube and so many more of the largest apps in the world. It took us almost two years from launching Hallow to get to 1 million prayers prayed in total on the app. This Lent we had over a million prayers prayed each day. We just crossed 225 million prayers prayed in total and, as of last week, now over 10 million downloads.
With a successful subscription model the Hallow story isn’t one of just usage but also of revenue, since a sustainable structure is required for them to continue delivering a quality product to their community (Hallow is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation so business and values are always aligned).
If Hallow’s mission appeals to you, they are of course, hiring.
]]>At Periscope Data, Tom and Harry built an industry-leading platform for complex data analysis that allowed cloud data teams to experiment with machine learning and other advanced processes to unlock new value from data. When they decided to return to their data science startup roots with Modelbit, it was a chance to deepen our connection with them beyond misplaced mail by becoming investors in their seed round. The Modelbit team is deep in data science, machine learning and cloud infrastructure. Supporting them as they build in this space was a no-brainer.
So if you’re a data scientist seeking a faster ML deployment platform, check out Modelbit.
]]>As they describe, “Treat's AI integrates with your eCommerce stack to analyze your ad creative, customer behavior, and demographic data to generate super-personalized photos that will attract your best customers.” The output is stunning and effective. So it’s no surprise that they’ve raised an $8.5 million seed round to power growth. Homebrew is a supporting investor and looking forward to seeing visual marketing move from one size fits all to the right image for the right customer.
If you’re a brand and would like early access, sign-up via Treat’s website.
]]>“Engineers currently have tools to get low-level data, but indexing & processing that data still takes weeks of development time. Writing your own indexing stack requires extra engineering effort to develop and maintain. Meanwhile, existing solutions have issues with slow performance, data lag, and downtime.”
That’s why teams from projects such as Decentraland, Aragon, Treasure, Lyra, and Syndicate are all using Satsuma.
If Satsuma’s mission sounds exciting to you, they’re hiring engineers.
]]>No longer. Several years back, the team at Assembly realized that the majority of companies don’t want 15 different vendors, they want one extensible product that can grow with their needs. A single interface and a single source of truth for the ‘front office’ HR needs across the company. Assembly delivers out of the box modules for your most pressing needs and a no code builder that powers customization and creation of many more culture suite products.
Assembly and its customers weren’t the only people to recognize the significance of this opportunity, investors did too. And so Assembly recently announced the raise of a $10 million Series A to continue growing its team and technology.
If you’re looking to consolidate multiple SaaS HR tools into a single platform (and single bill!), take a look at Assembly. And if working on culture tools that make every company work better together seems exciting, Assembly is hiring.
]]>The Finch team is a methodical and deliberate group of builders, unafraid to challenge and update their beliefs as they navigate the tremendous opportunity in front of them. And this growth isn’t just top-line acceleration (revenue has grown 12x since their Series A), but is accompanied by maturity in where they invest, leading to several months of cash flow positive results along the way. Even if a startup on an impressive trajectory decides to forgo profitability in the near term, knowing how to achieve it and the levers it can pull is a secret weapon during up and down markets.
So if you are evaluating how to pull disparate payroll, benefits, and other employee data into an application or single view, now is a good time to learn about Finch. And if you’re looking at new gigs, consider this well-funded midstage startup with years of professional growth ahead - they’re hiring.
]]>The team at Stelo Labs has built protection for every type of transaction: Defi and Swaps, NFT marketplace, signatures, malicious contracts. Doesn’t matter, they’re on top of it. They offer a Chrome extension, an API, and a SDK to help you integrate safety all across the user experience.
The talent of the Stelo team, vision for a safer web3, and progress to date hasn’t just attracted users and customers, but also investors. And Stelo is now announcing a $6 million seed round to further its efforts. If what Stelo is working on sounds intriguing, it’s also hiring engineers in NYC/remote.
Jetpack has raised $10 million to date, led by Google Ventures and Coatue. Today it announced financing, and also made its platform available in beta. While there’s much work ahead, we’re thrilled to be supporting investors in Daniel and the team.
]]>Crowdbotics sometimes gets described as an ‘ERP for Software Development,’ allowing enterprises to spin up production-ready hosted applications that aren’t just demos or sandboxes but can scale to the broadest range of internal and external use cases. For example, the U.S. Air Force has flight analysis and training tools powered by Crowdbotics. Literally mission critical software.
If Crowdbotics sounds interesting to you, they’re hiring.
]]>Customers of TrueBiz use its platform to speed their onboarding of new business customers, quickly and accurately validating data and identity. The result is a better customer experience, reduced fraud, and increased revenues. Nice combination, right?
Coming out of Y Combinator, TrueBiz raised a $2.4 million seed and we’re excited to be supporting investors.
]]>WHO: Puneet Gupta and Lior Mechlovich experienced the pain of building usage-based billing firsthand while at Amazon Web Services. Their teams were responsible for some of the original metered, usage-based cloud services at AWS. While there, they saw the need for both accurate measurement of consumption and flexible billing and invoicing. With this deep expertise and hands-on experience, the team decided to launch Amberflo and make it possible for any company to employ usage-based metering and billing.
WHAT: Amberflo manages end-to-end metering, pricing, invoicing, and billing infrastructure for software and cloud services companies. By implementing Amberflo, companies are able to optimize their product-led growth (PLG) conversion, decrease customer acquisition costs and increase net revenue retention. Customers also benefit by paying software fees that are tied directly to value.
HOW: Amberflo built a robust, accurate real-time usage metering platform that is decoupled from a scalable, flexible billing and invoicing service. In the words of one customer, “the idea of separating metering from pricing and billing is a stroke of genius.” It’s this insight that has enabled Amberflo to already power usage-based billing for companies such as LaunchDarkly and Firebolt.
WHY: The shift towards usage-based pricing is gaining more and more momentum. Product-led growth is changing how users are adopting software. Building the metering and billing infrastructure needed to support these trends is complex, expensive and time-consuming. Amberflo offers a comprehensive solution out of the box, making it possible for every company to take advantage of usage-based opportunities in billing and beyond.
Try Amberflo for free and check out their open positions!
]]>This might sound like science fiction, but it has very real potential to be science nonfiction within the next few years. As Living Carbon CEO Maddie Hall writes in the company blog,
“If we continue to double the number of trees we plant every year from 2023 to 2030, we can sequester 604 million tonnes of CO2 – the equivalent to removing 1.66% of 2021 global emissions. This would require less than 5% of reforestable land in the US.”
Congratulations to the Living Carbon team! If this work sound intriguing to you, they’re, of course, hiring!
]]>When we met the Fuzzbuzz team coming out of YC they had a mission-orientation around the value of quality software. Not just in our everyday desktop SaaS applications, but in medical devices, autonomous cars, and anywhere a bug or security flaw could cause real harm. As part of Rippling, the Fuzzbuzz team will join an already impressive engineering organization to strengthen and extend platform infrastructure.
]]>Enter Pager.xyz. Unlocking the internet of screenshots by making the objects, music, apps, places in your screenshots into clickable links. Wired covered their launch, noting this might lead to a much more open web vs being silo’ed by an app or OS sharing stylesheet. We agree and think ultimately it’s about the sharing, discovery layer Pager can power beyond the ‘simple’ utility of adding links. Google Ventures also agrees, and they led the $5.2m seed round, joining us and other pre-seed backers.
If what Pager is working on sounds interesting to you, they’re HIRING.
]]>Introducing Useful Sensors, which Homebrew has backed alongside our friends at Amplify, Fika and other notable investors. Cofounder Pete Warden is well known for a variety of contributions to open source, Google’s TensorFlow and other notable projects. Reconnecting with him, and meeting his cofounder Manjunath Kudlur, reinforced our own beliefs that *someone* was going to revisit the largely unfulfilled potential of this market and break it open in a huge way. Now we have some skin in the game that it’ll be this team.
You’ll hear more about what they’re doing over time, but already there’s a $10 Personal Sensor available at sparkfun for your experiments.
]]>The Adonis cofounders know each other quite well - Akash and Aman are brothers - and most recently were the cofounder and first employee, respectively, of a growth-stage startup helping employees make the most of their benefits packages. This experience, and a long time interest in the problems facing health care practitioners, are the foundation for Adonis. They share more about their point of view with Forbes in an article announcing the funding,
“It wasn’t until that process [that] Aman and I became intimately familiar with all the challenges that doctors go through when trying to get reimbursed by medical insurance companies,” 30 Under 30 alum Akash, now 26, told Forbes. “Speaking with dozens of practice leaders across the country, we learned that time and time again every single practice was having the same challenge.”
This first funding round gives Adonis $5.6 million to start attacking this problem, and Homebrew eagerly participated alongside our friends at Bling Capital, Coalition Operators, and other notable investors.
If this sounds like a problem you’d like to spend the next few years working on, Adonis is hiring.
]]>Built by a team of technologists and operators who are motivated not only by the market opportunity but by the mission as well, Arthur has quickly become one of the preferred technical partners to companies in the financial, health, manufacturing, and retail industries. This momentum carried the company to a recently announced Series B financing of $42 million, funding the ongoing development and scaling of their platform.
If working on these types of problems at a well-run and well-funded startup appeals to you, they’re hiring.
]]>We’re supporting investors in Block Party and thrilled they recently announced a $4.8 million seed round to grow their team and continue their work. Tracy is a fearless, committed leader and if working on a problem like this interests you, they’re certainly hiring.
]]>WHO: Alex Levin and Rebecca Greene were in the trenches together at Handy, where they helped to build the phone sales team and associated technology. They saw firsthand the limitations of existing technology when trying to get customers to engage in phone and text conversations. That experience and the resulting insights led them to start Regal.
WHAT: Regal helps to automate outbound phone and text communications so that customers are reached with the right messages at the highest time of purchase intent. The company offers a dashboard with call and text messaging tools, information about where customers are in the sales pipeline, and a “journey builder” that enables customers to trigger calls and texts to “high-intent” buyers at specific moments.
HOW: Regal determines intent based on data like customer website usage, customer relationship management data and other general behavioral info. It also learns what messages are best for specific moments in the customer journey, helping sellers close more business. Regal also changes the caller ID on cell phones from an unknown number to the name of the brand so that customers know who’s calling.
WHY: No one loves receiving calls or texts from unknown numbers. And businesses waste significant time and resources trying to reach customers who don’t respond. Regal changes the experience for both businesses and their customers. By enabling richer, timely conversations to happen between businesses and customers, Regal is solving a massive problem that exists whenever a high cost or high consideration purchase is being made.
Regal is hiring across every function so check out their current job openings!
]]>If taking on the biggest challenges in payments sounds exciting to you, Finix is hiring!
]]>If working with creative technologists building a culture, not just a company, sounds appealing, Hidden Door is hiring.
]]>If you’re shopping for amazing, elegant, high quality and fair priced goods for your home, home office or backyard yurt, check them out.
]]>Congrats to Embed CEO Michael Giles and the entire team. We know you’ll make a big impact as part of FTX!
]]>In Nava we continue to support our thesis of software-driven startups bringing SMB/SMEs the capabilities previously reserved for the Fortune 500. In this case, high quality benefits, because employees who know they have an employer provided safety net are happier, healthier and more satisfied team members.
But we also entered Nava’s round for another reason: to work with CEO Brandon Weber. We were fortunate to originally get introduced to Brandon in early 2013 when he was starting a proptech company, and we were starting Homebrew. We did our best to convince Brandon to let us lead his seed round but he went with a more established larger fund that had deep experience in his vertical. It was one of those experiences where we knew he made the best decision he could for his company but we both wished there would have been a way to make our pieces fit together. And now we have, just nine years later!
If Nava sounds right for your business, check them out. And if you’re looking to work at a well-led, well-funded, mission-driven company, they’re hiring.
]]>At Homebrew we’ve been proud to support the Ethena team in every financing round and continued to do so in this one. We believe they are just getting started, and of course, they’re hiring.
]]>We were fortunate to have different reactions to Shield’s mission and vision. And since that time have participated in every funding round the company has raised, including meaningfully in this $90 million Series E.
The only thing more impressive than what they’ve done since we first met the team is what they have on their roadmap. If that notion intrigues you, they’re hiring.
]]>They’ve raised a new $15 million Series A in order to grow, grow, grow. In their own words, “we’ve been excited about building a future in which the employment sector is both connected and programmable.”
If you’re a developer just head over to Finch right now and try it out. And if the problems they’re solving sound interesting to you, well, of course they’re hiring too.
]]>And now he has even more support to do so, having recently announced a $12.5 million seed round. With this funding they’ll be growing their team, so if interested, maybe you should join them.
]]>In their own words:
Since Git was first released in 2007, code review, source control, and developer tooling have come a long way. The technologies, workflows, and tools pioneered by the largest tech-forward companies provide a glimpse of what code review can be: an efficient, engaging platform that supports engineers at every step of the development cycle—from the moment a task is assigned until the pull request has been merged to the trunk branch. We believe that by building a modern code review experience for fast-moving eng teams, we can help them ship faster and create amazing products.
If you’re obsessed with high quality software and building tools that engineers love, Graphite is hiring.
And if you’re not on the waitlist yet to try out Graphite for yourself, sign up now!
]]>Fortunately a startup can solve this problem! Subcity.
WHO: Alex, Gil, and Chris united around a common goal: to help American businesses take full advantage of the government incentives put in place to help them grow. We met Subcity’s CEO Alex via mutual friends, some of whom had invested in his previous startup, Next Big Sound, which had exited to Pandora in 2015.
WHAT: We love capitalism! Unfortunately late stage capitalism has also become increasingly complex and regulated, often creating circumstances where businesses outside of the Fortune 500 struggle to understand the financial incentives put in place by federal, state and local governments to help them succeed. Subcity is facilitating access to tax incentives, government grants and other benefits that these businesses are owed. Starting with manufacturers.
HOW: Cofounder Gil’s previous business had been focused on executing Subcity’s mission on a local scale. He saw how powerful these incentives were for small businesses and was incredibly successful negotiating $150m+ in payments for his clients. But he also knew that this was a tiny fraction of the pool that companies across the country were eligible to receive. Clearly, software could more easily automate the matching process of companies to their prospective claims. And that’s where Chris’s experience from building scaled systems at little places like YouTube and Apple comes in.
WHY: A belief that American companies, with the capital and cash flow government intended to provide, can add jobs, grow new business lines and increase competitiveness, here and globally.
We led Subcity’s $3m seed round, and very much enjoy working with this mission-driven team. If the intersection of fintech + small business interests you, the company is hiring for remote positions across the US.
]]>If you want to work for a team that uses advanced technology to help humans, not replace them, Loris is hiring.
]]>data.world has been just as thoughtful in its company-building, setting itself up as a Public Benefit Corporation to make sure it can be a good steward of the trust customers put in the team and business. If this combination of mission and values interests you, they’re hiring.
]]>Hivemapper is using dashcams and its own crypto token to create a decentralized and cost-effective approach to the next generation of map building. Its progress and vision are impressive enough to raise an $18 million Series A round, which the company announced today. Homebrew is a longtime supporting investor of the Hivemapper team and if you want to join (the org chart), they’re hiring.
]]>Nautilus Labs has been working tirelessly to bring the most modern and sophisticated route planning tools to the industry. And it recently announced a $34 million Series B on the back of industry demand for its product.
90% of the world’s goods pass through ocean freight at some point in their existence. If working in a global industry like this, using software to improve efficiency and fight climate change, excites you, Nautilus is hiring.
]]>They recently shared a bit more about what Hidden Door is working on via this Venture Beat article. If a generative social space that feels like Roblox meets RPGs, but with all the power of interactive storytelling, sounds cool to you, then you might want to join them.
]]>But venture capital is a weird business when it comes to timescales. You’re simultaneously helping startups solve the challenges of that day, that week, that quarter, while also being asked to make decisions about your own investment strategy that will play out over a fund’s lifecycle of 10+ years! When we sat down together in 2021 to plan for Homebrew’s future, the most obvious choice was raising a larger fund with even more capital to invest since that’s the way the industry has moved. But we never started Homebrew to be capital accumulators and have never optimized for assets under management as a business model.
The part of Homebrew we’ve always been clearest about is our operating model: we’re steadfast service providers for exceptional founders and companies. We anticipated that raising too large a fund would introduce conditions that actually work against our goals and values, as opposed to supporting them. If we took stewardship of hundreds of millions more of our LPs’ capital for Homebrew’s fourth fund, we believed we could be successful, but we weren’t 100% sure we could be happy. So we went back to the founding question we asked when starting Homebrew and tried to get clarity on what strategy would best enable us to do the purest, highest impact work for founders. All of that led us down a path that made us equally giddy and nervous. Which meant it was *definitely* the right thing to do.
Instead of staying the course and raising an even larger, traditional venture fund, we’re zigging while the market zags: Homebrew IV(ever) is an evergreen investment vehicle composed, for now, of only our own capital. Going forward, when we commit to a company it gets our sweat, our reputation, and literally, our dollars, behind it.
While the decision to try going evergreen with our own capital was internally-motivated, we believe it’s also well-suited to the evolution in startup financing models. When we launched Homebrew, there was a gap in the venture capital market: not many funds were combining a strict concentration on seed with a focused strategy (portfolio, experience, gravitas) as a lead in those rounds, digging in for the next several years in support of the founders. We packaged capital and counsel together in a manner that was mutually beneficial. And it worked out quite well.
Now fast-forward to 2022. We remain convinced that founders still value capital and counsel. But it’s also true that increasingly, capital and counsel are available, and often demanded, independently of each other. Counsel is sought independent of the size of the check written by an investor, and the best cap tables are diverse collections of operators, strategic capital and institutional dollars. Whereas historically capital was the cost of having the “right” or “authority” to provide counsel, in today’s startup world, it’s clear that the two are often unconnected. Heck, some firms have been built on the notion of a check and no other interaction with the checkwriter!
But that’s not the relationship with founders that Homebrew promises. From our earliest days, we’ve only supported companies where we can put sweat and reputation to work, alongside capital. Of course it’s always in service of, and at the behest of, the founders, and it’s part of what we think differentiates Homebrew.
Our legacy strategy focused almost exclusively on doing this in the context of being the seed ‘investor of record,’ which meant we were working with a small number of founders, beginning at a very specific stage, and then only if the way they wanted to fund their company fit our single product SKU. This was absolutely a sensible and successful strategy for Homebrew I-III, and might continue to be such if we wanted to build Homebrew into a larger institution that scales beyond the two of us. But we don’t.
Instead, now we’re effectively adding new product SKUs, beginning our relationships with founders, still as early as possible, but also more customizable to a company’s stage and needs in a mutually beneficial way. Not limited by check size, ownership targets, fundraising stage, or really anything else. Just a mutual desire to work together to increase the probability, velocity or scale of success of your startup. Whether it’s the first check you raise paired with our ability to then coalesce a seed round around our participation, or the last allocation in a later round that’s closing (or has already closed!), we just want to wire the money and get working on your behalf.
With this new evergreen vehicle in place, we embark on the next phase of Homebrew. So much of Homebrew’s first decade was about asking others to take a bet on us, especially the amazing collection of institutions who committed to us as Limited Partners. They’re all truly our partners, and we’re not only in business because of them, we’re better investors for having worked with them. We know that we’ll be collaborating with that group for many years to come and we thank all of them for their ongoing support into our second decade working closely with brilliant founders building world-changing companies.
Forever,
Hunter and Satya
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