Q2 2020 Quarterly Update

Happy Canada Day & Happy (early) Fourth of July!

Here we are, halfway through 2020 and what an unprecedented year it has been. As we focus on staying safe and healing, we continue to look forward, keeping our heads down to build great companies. 

At the end of every quarter, we publish a quick recap. And while these past three months have been far from typical, there was a lot of activity across our portfolio. Here are some of the highlights: 

New Investments 

We announced three new investments this quarter:

We led DemandStar’s $2 million seed round. The Seattle-based company provides an online marketplace for business-to-government commerce, connecting local and national suppliers with government procurement officers. You can read more about why we’re excited in our announcement post. This was our first investment in the “time of Covid-19” with everything done virtually via video calls, Dropbox folders, DocuSign forms, and other remote tools – more on our experience here in GeekWire.

We participated in Opyn’s $2.16 million seed round. Opyn lets you protect your DeFi deposits and hedge ETH risk by purchasing put and call options on the price of different cryptocurrencies (starting with ETH). Because Opyn’s platform is open and generalizable, we believe it can become one of those core primitives or “money legos” for DeFi. You can read more about our thoughts here.

Cape Privacy emerged from stealth and announced a $5 million seed round, which we co-led with Boldstart Ventures. It helps enterprise companies maximize the value of their data by providing an easy-to-use collaboration layer on top of advanced privacy and security technology, helping enterprises increase the breadth of data included in machine learning models. Cape Privacy enables organizations to model and share privacy-enhanced data, while maintaining trust. 

Funding Announcements 

Outreach raised a $50 million in a Series F round, valuing the company at $1.33 billion. The funding will be used for product development and to continue their geographic expansion (more in Europe and eventually Asia).

Shippo announced that it has closed a $30 million Series C after posting 100% growth in 2019. 

Lolli closed an oversubscribed $3 million Seed II round and continues to add partners weekly. 

Product Launches, Accolades and Other News

Blockstack and Algorand are building a multi-chain smart contract language called Clarity.  

Coinbase launched Rosetta, an open-source specification and set of tools that makes integrating with blockchains simpler, faster, and more reliable. You can read more here.

Dapper Labs (the makers of CryptoKitties)  launched a beta version of the NBA TopShot app, a new blockchain-based collectible collaboration with the NBA

Scanwell continues to work on bringing a Covid-19 antibody test to market. They’re working with the state of North Carolina and Raleigh-based Wake Forest Baptist Health to distribute 1,000 of its at-home antibody test kits to a random sampling of citizens to track the virus and immunity over time.

Shippo published its annual benchmarks report with industry averages for e-commerce. 

Top Hat acquired Canadian Textbook business, Nelson Education, to compete with publishers on digital courseware. 

And, Trim was named as one of Business Insider’s top five budgeting apps.  

You can stay up to date with us and the V1 family by following via Twitter and subscribing to our blog.

Have a great summer! 

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