Foundry

Our Investment in mpathic

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:28:13 +0000

AI is increasingly the first thing people talk to in their hardest moments. A teenager spiraling at 2 am. A patient parsing a frightening diagnosis. A person in crisis reaching out to the only thing available 24/7. These interactions are happening right now at a massive scale, and the AI on the other end is ill-equipped to safely meet its users’ needs.

This is not a hypothetical risk. As foundation models become the default interface for mental health support, medical triage, and youth engagement, the gap between what AI can say and what it should say is widening fast. The companies building these models know it. They’re actively seeking partners who can bring clinical rigor to a problem that engineering alone cannot solve.

Our Investment in FlexPoint

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:45:08 +0000

We’ve been talking about digital transformation for decades, but it’s taken on new meaning in recent years, especially for SMBs. Several key factors are at play: the surge of vertical SaaS and “AI for X” applications, rising online fraud, and the emergence of a digitally native generation of business leaders and customers. We’ve reached an inflection point where digital transformation has shifted from a buzzword to an existential necessity.

Managed Service Providers (“MSPs”) are the unsung heroes of this moment. SMBs globally are increasingly working with MSPs to keep up with the accelerated pace of digital adoption. These firms have evolved well beyond “IT guys” into trusted, strategic partners that provide mission-critical services while acting as the outsourced CIO for their clients.

Our Investment in Ferrum Health

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:18:00 +0000

Our healthcare system stands at a critical juncture. Skyrocketing costs, widespread physician burnout, and overwhelming administrative complexities lead to limited access to quality care and, ultimately, compromised patient outcomes. Health systems are acutely aware of these issues and urgently seeking a better way forward. The promise of technology, particularly AI, offers the potential for transformation toward a more efficient and effective healthcare system.

If data is the fuel of AI, our healthcare system is sitting on an untapped oil field of epic proportions. Healthcare produces 30% of the world’s data volume: more than 2 zettabytes (that’s 2 trillion gigabytes!) annually. By 2025, healthcare data volume is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 36%.

A Note to Colorado Entrepreneurs

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:30:09 +0000

Earlier this year, we announced that our current fund, Foundry 2022, will be the final Foundry fund. We are excited to complete the initial work of building the Foundry 2022 portfolio over the next 18 months. As stewards of capital to our LPs and engaged partners to our portfolio companies, we are all in on every investment we make and committed to the decade plus of post-investment work ahead.

Our Investment in Gigpro

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:01:53 +0000

From intimate dinners at local bistros to conferences, celebrations, and vacations at luxury hotels to Taylor Swift arena shows, the hospitality industry is at the core of our social fabric. It’s where memories are made, relationships are nurtured, and communities are built.

Frontline workers are the backbone of the hospitality industry and make these beloved experiences possible. Hospitality businesses like restaurants, hotels, and venues need a reliable and adaptable workforce to maintain high service standards amidst constantly fluctuating needs. Service jobs are hard work and require the right mix of competence, communication skills, and grit. Shifts are long and can be physically and mentally taxing. These factors make staffing both crucial and challenging.

The Final Foundry Fund

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 07:48:25 +0000

Foundry 2022 will be our final Foundry fund.

While VC firms rarely make decisions like this, it’s precisely what we planned to do when we started Foundry in 2006. From our founding, we intentionally decided not to build a legacy or generational firm —one meant to live beyond the tenure of the founding partners. Instead, we intended to focus on the work of investing, re-evaluating each potential new fund as our fundraising cadence required. For nearly 20 years now, that cadence has been to raise a new fund every three to four years. Each time, we make a deliberate decision to raise a subsequent fund. But not this time.

Our Investment in Vendasta

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 08:47:33 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Vendasta’s CAD 20m financing. In connection with the financing, the company will convert a CAD 52.5m debenture to equity and subsequently have no outstanding debt. Vendasta is led by co-founder and CEO Brendan King, a multi-time entrepreneur who started the company 15 years ago.

Vendasta is a scaled B2B SaaS company that sells marketing, sales, and other software solutions to SMB customers (SaaS SMB) via a well-developed reseller channel. The SMB market is a particularly challenging one to sell to, and the venture-backed landscape is littered with companies that have tried to sell point solutions, specialized products, or proprietary solutions directly to SMB customers and have yet to scale successfully. Vendasta’s reseller channel is a key differentiating factor that has allowed it to unlock the SaaS SMB market successfully.

Our Investment in Springbank

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 12:32:24 +0000

This week our friends at Springbank announced their debut fund with $35 million in capital commitments, and we are thrilled to partner with them. Courtney, Elana, and Jen were introduced to us by our partners at Union Square Ventures as they began putting together their new fund. We couldn’t be happier to share the news of their initial fund.

Springbank is an early-stage venture fund building the infrastructure to support women and working families. The companies they are backing are building the tools, products, and services that define the future of inclusive work, the new care economy, and the next wave of financial progress. They started Springbank with a singular belief that the needs of women and working families were under-estimated, under-innovated, and under-invested. Areas like flexible and remote work, care infrastructure, women’s health, and the financial health and productivity of households have historically been viewed as “women’s issues” and therefore nice – but not need – to have. Their perspective is that these are in fact “everyone issues” that greatly impact our society, labor markets, and economy at large. Since starting Springbank in 2019 they have partnered with incredible founders actively building for a more equal future, including: Carefull, Copper Banking, Daivergent, Dandi, Great Wrap, Guaranteed, Little Otter, PlantBaby, Season Health, Summer Health, Wellthy.

Announcing Foundry 2022

Tue, 09 May 2023 07:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have raised a new fund to continue our network-driven investing. Foundry 2022 is a $500 million fund that invests in early-stage technology companies and early-stage venture funds. We began investing the fund in 2022 and are excited to continue partnering with founders, GPs, and LPs.

We transitioned to our network-driven strategy in 2016 with the first Foundry Next fund. Since then, we’ve had the privilege of building our partner fund portfolio, which includes a fantastic set of established and emerging early-stage investors.

Our Investment in MacroFab

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 11:20:41 +0000

We’re excited to announce our investment in MacroFab’s Series C financing alongside Edison Partners and BMW Ventures. MacroFab was introduced to us by our partner firm, Techstars, who participated in its seed round in 2015 and we’ve been following the company’s impressive progress ever since. MacroFab is a cloud-enabled electronics manufacturing platform built to automate and optimize the manufacturing process. The company’s platform has a modern, easy to use interface to take information directly from the customer to the manufacturing floor, enabling clients to reduce the up-front cost and complexity of getting manufacturing jobs running. This is especially relevant in today’s market as companies are looking for manufacturing solutions in the face of supply chain issues. Founded in Houston, Texas in 2013 by current Chief Product Officer, Chris Church, and Lead Electrical Designer, Parker Dillmann, MacroFab simplifies manufacturing with a software-driven approach to building electronics at scale.

Introducing Meredith Lawrence

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 08:24:31 +0000

I am delighted to be introducing myself as the newest member of the Foundry team. As an Investor, I will be assisting the investment team in nurturing the Foundry network of CEOs, partner funds, and investors, identifying and evaluating investment opportunities, and helping with anything else that needs to get done behind the scenes.

My first exposure to the startup world is when my dad started his own business after decades as a large-company employee. He saw a problem in the market, knew he could do things differently, make his service better than competitors, and the rest, as they say, is history. He bootstrapped the business and realized tremendous growth through hard work, long days, and unparalleled determination. Having a front-row seat to his entrepreneurial journey changed me, without me honestly realizing it at the time. I never thought of him as a founder until later in life when I could truly appreciate what that meant, but I am grateful that his entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic are rooted in my DNA.

Introducing Megan Barbour

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 07:14:27 +0000

I am thrilled to join Foundry as the Head of Network. It is truly exciting to be part of the Foundry mission and to support our Founders/ CEOs and partner funds. This role comes at an interesting junction in my career. First, I am passionate about the startup ecosystem stemming from multiple roles in startups. Second, my preferred focus is building programs/ products that solve customer problems. And finally, I have benefited from being part of the Foundry family and the Network. The stars have aligned with this role! With that, I want to take a moment to say hello and introduce myself.

Our investment in Coherent

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 12:46:24 +0000

While the promise of the cryptocurrency market and its goal of decentralization is hotly debated, blockchain technology continues to attract thousands of talented developers and founders. They see a disruptive technology that provides a new way of building companies and connecting society. Some estimate that there are over 20k active blockchain developers, growing 100% year-over-year, and over 83m unique crypto wallets. But it’s still early days, and there’s a significant need for infrastructure to support this massive technological shift.

Our Investment in RealWear

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 19:40:31 +0000

Industrial workplaces are complex and dynamic environments dispersed over large geographic footprints. The efficiency, safety, and effectiveness of frontline workers often depend on timely communication with colleagues in other geographies, along with access to information contained in various formats on different systems throughout an enterprise. While the ubiquity of mobile devices solves some of these problems, they require users to hold them and use their hands to manipulate them. This activity is challenging, if not impossible, in many workplace situations, such as repairing industrial equipment.

Our Investment in Regard

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 10:44:03 +0000

“The technology is magical.”

When we hear a statement like this from one of our partner funds, we pay attention. This one came from David Waxman of TenOneTen Ventures several years ago during a portfolio review. He was referring to a portfolio company called Regard (formerly known as HealthTensor), which is building an artificial intelligence co-pilot for physicians to help diagnose medical conditions.

If you’ve seen a doctor recently, they’ve likely had a laptop in tow. Physicians are spending substantial time on documentation, which takes away from the time they can spend with patients. While healthcare technology has significant benefits, it often makes a physician’s job harder, not easier. Most physicians did not endure extensive schooling and training to spend more time on documentation than with patients. With nearly 50% of physicians reporting burnout in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and 20% of the clinical workforce leaving the field from 2020 to 2021, this is a critical time for our healthcare system.

Network Driven Investing

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 08:01:00 +0000

We are strong believers that the pace of innovation over the next 20 years will dwarf that of the last 20. Technology is no longer an isolated sector. It touches all aspects of our economy, speeding change and creating opportunities at every turn. The power to introduce new products used to be reserved for large corporations and the occasional startup. Now, that power sits at kitchen tables, in garages and in the minds of dreamers everywhere. Good ideas, capital to finance them, and the competition to nurture visionary founders are expanding in amazing and surprising ways from coast to coast and throughout the world.

The Evolution of Foundry

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 14:22:11 +0000

When we started Foundry in 2007, our aim was to connect talent with capital, especially in the places and among the people the rest of the technology industry had not yet discovered. We knew that running a nationally focused, early-stage venture fund from Boulder was a trail we had to clear and navigate on our own. But we felt that venture capital had become somewhat stale – almost stagnant – in how funds (and partners) operated. Perhaps it was time for a different approach, new ideas, and new thinking about how to operate a venture fund. We also thought we could have a lot of fun together doing it.

Introducing Mandy Howard

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 18:17:55 +0000

In February I joined Foundry as an Investor to identify and evaluate investment opportunities in our Partner Fund portfolios and continue to grow Foundry’s network of entrepreneurs and investors. I wanted to introduce myself and share what led me here. Curiosity, resourcefulness, and patience.

The pandemic brought on a lot of reflection for me like many others. On July 7, 2020, I began writing about why I wanted to invest. For a few years leading up to this point, I often wondered if my startup experience and eventually my product management experience could be helpful to founders and their teams. I decided I wanted to leverage my unique path and perspective to increase accessibility and be a resource. The more digging I did, I began to learn of other operators who had transitioned into VC. And hearing Lo Toney share his belief that product management was the best path to VC was a confidence boost as well.

Our Investment in 8base

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 15:36:00 +0000

Standing up and managing full stack software development teams is hard and can be expensive. Founders are faced with a near endless set of decisions when building their technology platforms. 8base is making it easier and faster to write and deploy code with its suite of low-code tools for building data models, custom logic, APIs, connections to external systems, cloud-based hosting, security, authentication, and frontend applications. Many no-code and low-code solutions are great for prototyping but don’t scale for enterprise needs. 8base offers all the benefits of low-code with the tremendous benefit of supporting scaled enterprise solutions too.

Investments

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 12:04:35 +0000

The following is a list of investments made in vehicles managed by Foundry. Excluded from this list are investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for Foundry to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets. Past results of Foundry’s investments, pooled investment vehicles, or investment strategies are not necessarily indicative of future results. There can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results.

Our Investment in FloatMe

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 14:41:00 +0000

Most Americans live without an adequate financial safety net. According to a 2021 Bankrate survey, 25% have no emergency savings at all, and it’s estimated that as much as 69% of the population has less than $1,000 in savings. There are many reasons for this. Stagnant wages, increased cost of living, student loan debt, and exploding healthcare costs are all contributing factors. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the situation. Many people with unexpected bills end up turning to credit cards or high interest, short-term loans to solve their immediate financial problems. FloatMe provides an alternative.

Our Investment in Castiron

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 14:40:00 +0000

We are passionate supporters of entrepreneurship in all its forms, and we know that we are but one option for founders looking to build their companies. In Moody’s YouTube channel, Venture Kills, and Seth’s book, The New Builders, they talk in depth about this and the huge promise that small business owners hold for the future of the American economy. So when High Alpha Studio company, Castiron, launched in October of this year, we couldn’t wait to get involved.

Our Investment in Bolster

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 14:37:00 +0000

Bolster’s leadership team, entirely remote in 2021

At Foundry, we’re building what we describe as a “network-first” strategy. The vast majority of our new investments come from a network of over 40 early-stage VC funds in which we are LPs. Through these investments, we are indirect investors in several thousand companies. We co-founded Techstars, which, as a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs accelerate their businesses, has over 2,000 active portfolio companies and is making over 500 new investments each year around the world. A decade ago, I coined the term “startup community” and wrote the original book about the topic, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, based on the premise that building startup communities in every city in the world are an essential part of the global democratizing of entrepreneurship. Today, we have invested in Bolster, another company built fundamentally around a network premise in entrepreneurship.

Our Investment in Sofar

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:36:00 +0000

At Foundry, we care deeply about the planet. As hikers, runners, cyclists, skiers, sailors, and anglers, we love to play in the mountains and the oceans. We depend on the outdoors for not just recreation, but for the replenishment that time in nature can provide.

Our engagement in the outdoors and our involvement and support of environmental organizations has led us to closely follow a new wave of for-profit technology companies working to solve major climate challenges. We’ve monitored many of these companies as our network of partner funds began investing in climate- related entities. We’ve now invested in two companies directly, teaming with our partner funds as they identify some of the most compelling opportunities. Our latest, Sofar Ocean, is a great example of our network model at work.

Our Investment in LOOP

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0000

“I love my car insurance company.” Said no one, ever. Today’s car insurance market is broken. Underwriting practices are irrelevant and discriminatory. Customer service and claims-processing are slow. Brands are outdated (and cheesy). The behemoths of the $256 billion auto insurance industry are overlooking major demographic and cultural shifts. Enter, LOOP.

LOOP Co-founders John Henry (left) and Carey Anne Nadeau

LOOP is car insurance you’ll love, built for the 21st century. Powered by truly differentiated technology, LOOP is going after the opportunity to serve a massive, yet overlooked and undervalued population. Instead of underwriting policies based on demographic information like credit score, occupation, and education, LOOP’s approach is actually tied to driving. Leveraging real-time data and AI, LOOP measures driver performance, along with weather, traffic, and collision data, to price policies for customers. This results in more competitive rates for underserved populations like millennials, renters, and immigrants.

Hello from Foundry’s newest Investor

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 06:59:39 +0000

A few weeks ago I joined the investment team at Foundry, and I wanted introduce myself and share more about why I joined this phenomenal team.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in two fairly different worlds. My dad was an immigrant from India, while my mom spent her childhood bouncing between Indianapolis and Spain. Growing up in different cultures and religions taught me to constantly ask why – why did we pray to both Jesus and the goddess Lakshmi? Why did one side of my family eat with a fork and knife and the other half with their hands? Why did one side of my family go to private school and college and the other didn’t?

Matchstick Ventures has a new fund!

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:22:27 +0000

Today, our friends at Matchstick Ventures announced their newest fund, Fund III, and we are thrilled to partner with them again. Ryan Broshar and Natty Zola are long-time friends and collaborators with us (you can read about that here), and we couldn’t be happier to share news about their continuing success. They are serial entrepreneurs and Techstars alumni, and we’ve invested alongside them in a number of companies including Stackhawk, Ordermark, and Spekit.

With this new fund, Matchstick will continue its focus on software-oriented companies based in the Rockies and North regions of the United States at the pre-seed and seed stage. In addition to providing funding, they will roll out a new initiative called Matchstick Strikers, a network of experts to help companies create community, scale efficiently, attract great talent, build diverse and sustainable workplace cultures, and raise additional capital.

Our Investment in Dibbs

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 11:31:41 +0000

People like stuff. Objects hold deep meaning for us, and they provide us with a vehicle for connecting with others and building community. Manifestations of this that quickly come to mind are classic car clubs and vintage guitar forums on the internet. Many objects that capture people’s imaginations have seen their value buoyed by the communities that surround them, so much so that many enthusiasts are no longer able to afford to participate by purchasing them. This is definitely true of sports cards, a nearly $14 billion dollar market worldwide. A 1909 T206 Honus Wagner card sold for over $3 million in 2016, and a Tom Brady rookie card sold for $1.3 million last spring. High price tags, even for the most avid (and wealthy) sport fans. Enter Dibbs.

Our Investment in Mandolin

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 11:47:24 +0000

We are pleased to announce our recent Series A investment in Mandolin, made alongside our partner fund High Alpha Capital, and co-led by 645 Ventures, with Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures joining the round as well. Mandolin, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, is revolutionizing the way that musicians connect with their fans by creating unforgettable experiences in a digital format.

Prior to COVID-19, live concert performances were a $2 trillion market, and that revenue evaporated overnight as the pandemic shut down live music. Artists, promoters, and venues scrambled to find new ways of reaching their audiences, and Mandolin’s Livestreaming platform enabled artists to continue to bring live performances to their fan bases virtually during the height of the pandemic.

Our Investment in Deduce

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 11:11:22 +0000

Deduce CEO, Ari Jacoby

We are pleased to announce our recent Series A investment in Deduce, made alongside our partner fund, True Ventures. Deduce is a fraud prevention tool that helps its customers prevent user account takeover and new registration fraud. Most fraud prevention products rely on data solely from an individual customer’s web site. This approach is fine for massive enterprises with sprawling web presences, but there isn’t enough data in most small- and mid- size companies’ web sites to be meaningful. Deduce’s unique Identity Network uses data sensors on over 150,000 web sites serving hundreds of millions of daily users to create a massive, real-time authenticated user network, discerning real users from dangerous actors attempting to take over user accounts.

Our Investment in Recount Media

Tue, 04 May 2021 15:15:57 +0000

We are pleased to announce our recent investment in Recount Media’s Series B financing. We led the round with our partner funds, Union Square Ventures and True Ventures, also participating. Founded in 2019 by journalist John Heilemann and media veteran John Battelle, Recount Media is a leading media platform that produces high-quality content across a suite of digital, social, audio, and experiential products at the intersection of politics, business, and culture.

Recount is disrupting the way that news is produced and distributed. They combine the power of a podcast network with streaming content, short form pieces for social media, and a traditional newsletter to meet users where they are with targeted news that they can trust. Their goal is to redefine the business of news and journalism with an understanding of the impact that it has on our society. Although the company was only formed two years ago, their flagship title, The Recount, is already outperforming many legacy digital news brands in terms of engagement and views.

Foundry Network Gives Board Rooms a Boost with Bolster

Mon, 03 May 2021 11:49:01 +0000

It’s no surprise that early-stage boards aren’t as diverse as they could be, but we were surprised to see that today, only ⅓ of companies have independent directors. Today, 85% of directors on Foundry direct portfolio company boards are White, and 57% of our companies currently have open board seats. As such, there is a real opportunity to build a more diverse pipeline of independent director candidates for our founders and CEOs.

Our Investment in Starting Line VC

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 10:19:19 +0000

We are pleased to share Foundry Group’s investment in Starting Line. Founded in 2018 by Ezra Galston, and headquartered in Chicago, Starting Line leads seed-stage rounds for consumer startups building products and services for the 99% economy – companies that leverage technology to be cheaper and better, open up access, and, ultimately, expand markets.

We’ve been a fan of Ezra’s for years, dating back to before he left Chicago Ventures. Seth was a formal advisor to his first fund and will continue in that capacity – working closely with Ezra and this expanding (and fantastic) team at Starting Line. This has given us a unique perspective on the fund as we’ve watched them grow from an experiment to a uniquely positioned, early-stage venture fund. We’re particularly proud of what the team is building and the niche they’re carving out for themselves in Chicago.

Our Investment in Spekit

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 14:53:47 +0000

Spekit Co-founders Zari Zahra and Melanie Fellay

We are pleased to announce our investment in Spekit’s Series A financing alongside our partner funds, Bonfire Ventures and Matchstick Ventures, as well as Renegade Partners, Operator Collective, and others. Spekit is a digital adoption and enablement platform for in-app employee training. Founded in Denver, Colorado, in 2018 by Melanie Fellay and Zari Zahra, Spekit streamlines employee training and onboarding by delivering contextualized and personalized in-app learning experiences to its users.

Introducing Foundry’s Head of Network: Rena Ramirez

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 10:51:40 +0000

(Photo Credit: Praise Santos/@comeplum.)

We are thrilled to share the news that Foundry Group has hired its new Head of Network: Rena Ramirez.

When we first posted the job description, we were extremely upfront about the fact that it was “hard to put into words exactly what we’re looking for because the right person for this role could come from many different professional backgrounds.” It was also hard because the role itself is so broad – touching so many different aspects of our work at Foundry. Many very qualified candidates accepted the challenge (and it was a challenge – we put together a gauntlet for candidate interviews so we could get to know these amazing candidates and their skill sets in-depth). Rena stood out as exceptional in many different areas. Her drive, passion for the work, experience, and unique background encompassing both marketing, network, and PR, made her the right choice.

Our Investment in Hustle Fund

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 12:15:56 +0000

We’re pleased to announce our recent investment in Hustle Fund II. Based in San Francisco and Singapore, Hustle Fund is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture fund that invests in and supports software-enabled businesses across North America and Southeast Asia. The fund is managed by co-founders Elizabeth Yin, Eric Bahn, and Shiyan Koh.

Hustle Fund focuses on pre-seed companies with founders who exhibit hustle, which the team defines as “great execution meets high velocity.” They execute a unique investment model: an initial $25k check, followed by a period of collaboration to assess hustle on both sides, followed by a larger investment in select companies with teams that demonstrate significant hustle and market potential. To support their strategy and portfolio of founders, Hustle Fund launched Redwood School, which teaches advanced customer acquisition, sales, and growth skills.

Our Investment in Avid Ventures

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 10:25:10 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Avid Ventures Fund I, the debut fund of emerging manager Addie Lerner. Based in New York, Avid backs exceptional founders at the Series A and B stages building transformative technology companies. Avid takes a hands-on approach to help founders evolve early-stage companies into proven growth businesses with their highly collaborative investment strategy. Avid has already made five investments in companies accelerating the credit, identity verification, co-working, healthcare brokerage, and mortgage industries.

Our Investment in Gig Wage

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 09:51:42 +0000

Craig J. Lewis (photo credit: Jae Oates)

We are pleased to announce our investment in Gig Wage’s Series A financing. We invested alongside Green Dot (NYSE: GDOT), Continental Investors, our friends at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, and our partner fund, Techstars Ventures. Based in Dallas, TX, and founded by Craig J. Lewis, Gig Wage is building financial infrastructure to support the companies and workers that make up the world’s growing gig economy.

Our Investment in Landing

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 07:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Landing’s recent Series B financing. We led the round, with prior investors Greycroft and Maveron also participating. Landing is transforming apartment living from one of the most complex and inefficient experiences in modern housing into a seamless delight. Founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Smith, the company provides its members access to a nationwide network of furnished apartments with flexible lease terms currently available in 75 U.S. cities.

Crucible Acquisition Corporation Announces Pricing of Upsized $225 Million Initial Public Offering

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 09:00:53 +0000

January 05, 2021 10:27 AM Eastern Standard Time

BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Crucible Acquisition Corporation (the “Company”) announced today that it priced its initial public offering of 22,500,000 units at $10.00 per unit. The units will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange (the “NYSE”) and trade under the ticker symbol “CRU.U” beginning January 5, 2021. Each unit consists of one share of Class A common stock and one-third of one redeemable warrant. Each whole warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one share of Class A common stock at a price of $11.50 per share. Only whole warrants are exercisable. Once the securities comprising the units begin separate trading, the shares of Class A common stock and redeemable warrants are expected to be listed on the NYSE under the symbols “CRU” and “CRU WS,” respectively.

Our Investment in Parallel Domain

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:39:09 +0000

We are pleased to announce our recent investment in Parallel Domain alongside our friends and partners at Calibrate Ventures and Costanoa Ventures. We are excited to invest in another breakout company from our Partner Fund portfolio.

From self-driving cars to delivery drones, autonomous systems have the opportunity to significantly improve the quality of life for billions of people. Training and testing these machines to perceive the surrounding world, however, is neither scalable nor reliable. The current approach suffers a critical bottleneck: collecting, labeling, and curating data.

Foundry Network Holiday Gift Guide 2020 Edition

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:14:59 +0000

Are you looking for unique and cool holiday gifts? Maybe stay-at-home orders have you looking to treat yourself to something new and fun?

Our 2020 Holiday Gift Guide highlights Foundry’s direct investments, as well as our partner funds’ portfolio companies, and it has something for everyone on your list. We categorized all of our offerings to help you zero in on what you need easily.

Looking for some party wear or work from home clothing? We’ve got you covered.

Our Investment in ColdQuanta

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 09:29:46 +0000

We are excited to announce our Series A investment in ColdQuanta, alongside Maverick Ventures, Global Frontier Investments, and LCP Quantum Partners. ColdQuanta, based in our own backyard here in Boulder, Colorado, is the market leader in commercializing quantum atomics. Their Quantum Core™ technology is based on ultra-cold atoms: lasers cool atoms to nearly absolute zero, and manipulate and control them with a high level of precision. This core technology has broad applications in quantum computing and beyond.

Foundry Is Hiring: Head of Network

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 06:48:05 +0000

We’re looking for a leader to create a more robust, dynamic, and connected network program at Foundry Group. The Foundry Network, as we’ve been calling it, encompasses founders, CEOs, executives, general partners of our underlying venture capital fund investments, limited partners (our investors as well as other investors in the funds we have investments in), and other members of our ecosystem. We regularly bring together members of this community to connect, share, and learn from each other.

Foundry’s Newest Partner: Jaclyn Hester

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 09:23:38 +0000

We are thrilled to share the news that Foundry Group has a new partner. She’s someone many of you who are close to the firm already know: Jaclyn Hester.

We think of partners in the very literal sense of the word – someone whom we trust and work with in partnership; someone whose judgement and wisdom we rely upon; someone who embodies the values and the work ethic that we try to exemplify at Foundry. In the life of a venture firm – especially a small one like Foundry – new partners are few and far between. It’s an important decision and one that we don’t take lightly. For Jaclyn, who joined us in 2016, it’s deserved and well earned.

Our Investment in Elevate Security

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 08:52:30 +0000

We are pleased to announce our recent investment in Elevate Security. We invested alongside our partner fund, Costanoa Ventures, and our friends at Defy. Based in Berkeley, California, Elevate is a human risk management platform for the enterprise. It empowers CISOs and their teams to leverage powerful, data-driven insights to influence employees to make better security decisions across the enterprise.

As many of us have unfortunately experienced, the biggest security risk in a company is employees. Over 90% of security breaches are caused by human error such as compromised credentials in a phishing attack, accidentally uploading sensitive information, or using weak passwords. These actions increase risk to the enterprise and are often termed as human risk. Elevate is building the first ever human risk management platform for enterprise, enabling customers to measure, influence, and reduce human risk to strengthen their company’s defense against the next cyberattack.

Our Investment in Bonfire Ventures II

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 07:49:19 +0000

We are pleased to share Foundry Group’s investment in Bonfire Ventures’ newest fund.

Founded in 2017 by Jim Andelman and Mark Mullen, Bonfire is a seed-stage fund that focuses on B2B software companies. Their team places a premium on supporting founders as well as the broader B2B software ecosystem in Southern California.

Jim has been a venture capitalist for nearly two decades. Prior to launching Bonfire, he was co-founder and managing director at Rincon Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm based in southern California. Before Bonfire, Mark was a solo general partner at Double M Partners. Prior to founding Double M, he was an investment banker with RBC Capital Markets, where he focused on M&A and private equity. They were joined by Brett Queener in 2018, who spent 20 years in executive roles at Siebel, Salesforce, and SmartRecruiters, and has been an active angel investor in software startups to enable high risk merchant processing payments. We’ve been lucky to support Bonfire from their earliest days and are happy to see the firm continue building on their initial success with this second fund.

Our Investment in Optimize Health

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 07:43:02 +0000

SVP. Optimize Health delivers remote patient monitoring (RPM) programs to independent medical practices, accountable care organizations (ACO’s), and hospital systems that improve patient outcomes while enabling doctors to do more with less, with systems using natural medicine such as cbd, some using systems like the delta-8 thc carts.

Jeff LeBrun and Chuks Onwuneme founded Optimize Health in 2015 as Pillsy, a similar RPM platform designed to increase compliance with medication regimens of every kind, including the ones from the Mensjournal.com

Foundry at Denver Startup Week 2020

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 08:18:00 +0000

Like all events these days, Denver Startup Week is going virtual and Foundry is excited to participate this year in a variety of ways.

For our 4th year in a row, we are proud to co-host the Pledge 1% Colorado Nonprofit Pitch Contest celebrating Impact + Innovation in our community on September 16 at 3pm MT. This event was created to shine the Startup Week spotlight on Nonprofits in the front range and to get them plugged in and connected to the Boulder/Denver Startup Community. The event has facilitated $100k+ in grants to nonprofits over the past three years and generated awareness in the startup community about the great work they are doing. Thanks to the Knight Foundation and Anchor Point Foundation for supporting this event from year one!

Foundry Group Network and Community

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 09:53:31 +0000

Building a strong network and community has been core to the ethos of Foundry Group since its inception in 2007. Our partner Brad literally wrote the book on Startup Communities in 2012 and has a sequel, The Startup Community Way, coming out next month.

Our portfolio community (now 75+ active companies and 32 Partner Funds) has grown organically over the past decade with engagement largely driven by the partners at Foundry.

Over the past few years, we have been investing more time and resources into building and growing our Foundry family and community. We’ve made incremental improvements here and there, tried some things that have worked well, things that have failed, and others in between. We’ve landed on the pillars below that we are focused on going forward:

Black Lives Matter

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 12:18:28 +0000

At Foundry Group, we condemn racism. The systemic racism and oppression that has been deeply seated in the fabric of our society for centuries must end. Black lives matter and we are appalled by racially-driven violence, police brutality, and murder.

As a firm, we acknowledge that we have a poor track record of racial diversity, both within our organization and in our investments.

We commit to contributing to positive change now: to educate ourselves and listen so that we may become strong allies and advocates; to invest in Black entrepreneurs and investors and help recruit Black employees to our portfolio; to work with and support Black entrepreneurial leaders and organizations.

Our Investment in Meru Health

Wed, 13 May 2020 08:47:44 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Meru Health. We led the Series A financing alongside our partner fund, Freestyle, who led the company’s previous financing. We were joined by Bold Capital Partners and Slack Fund, and existing investor, Y Combinator, among others. Based in Helsinki, Finland, and San Mateo, California, Meru offers a complete and clinically proven treatment program for depression, anxiety, and burnout with long-lasting outcomes.

We’re excited to welcome Meru to the Foundry family, not only as a portfolio company but also as a resource. In addition to investing, we are providing the Meru program for free to Foundry’s portfolio company CEOs, similar to what Freestyle did for their portfolio CEOs in January.

Our Investment In Code Climate

Mon, 11 May 2020 11:15:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Code Climate. We led the Series B financing alongside our partner fund, USV, who led the company’s previous financing. We were joined by existing investors NextView Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and Trinity Ventures. Code Climate provides software engineering organizations with data-driven insights to improve their processes, teams, and code. Founded in 2011 and based in New York City, their products are trusted by over 1,000 companies ranging from startups to enterprises.

Our Investment in Fritz AI

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 10:50:43 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Fritz AI, the machine learning platform for iOS and Android developers. Foundry led a $5M financing alongside our partner fund, Uncork Capital, who co-led the previous round. We were joined by NextGen Venture Partners, Inner Loop Capital, and existing investors Eniac Ventures and Hack VC.

Based in Boston, Fritz AI is an all-in-one solution for edge intelligence. They simplify mobile machine intelligence and enable developers to deploy sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence models in their mobile apps. Making AI/ML easy to use on the edge, Fritz AI helps companies accelerate time-to-market, reduce engineering complexity, add robustness to the AI/ML iteration processes, and ease AI/ML recruiting burdens.

Our Investment in Moxxie Ventures

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 07:27:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce Foundry Group’s investment in Moxxie Ventures’ debut fund. Based in the Bay Area, Moxxie is an early-stage venture capital fund managed by Katie Stanton. Moxxie targets pre-seed and seed-stage companies founded by exceptional operators with big ideas and endless determination to make life and work better. Moxxie will leverage Katie’s incredible network as well as her experience building products, brands, and teams to help companies at the earliest stages.

Gifts from the Foundry Group Network

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 16:34:59 +0000

Still looking for awesome holiday gifts? Maybe you just want to treat yourself to something for the new year? Look no further, our Foundry Group 2019 Gift Guide has something for everyone on your list.

Inspired by our friends at Techstars and their Gift Guide, we thought it would be fun to highlight some of our direct investments and partner funds’ portfolio companies this holiday season. We think everything listed below is awesome, so we’ve tried to keep the hyperbole out of the descriptions so you can quickly scan for anything you are interested in.

Our Investment in Kindred Ventures

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 10:44:23 +0000

We are pleased to share Foundry Group’s investment in Kindred Ventures’ new fund, which they just announced this morning. Based in the Bay Area, Kindred is an “earliest-stage” venture capital fund managed by partners Kanyi Maqubela and Steve Jang. They take a hands-on approach and work closely with founders at the earliest stages—from formation to seed, especially adding value in the areas of product development and talent. Kindred’s investment strategy is sector agnostic, but is largely driven by several themes: marketplaces, SaaS, decentralized networks, consumer services, and frontier technologies.

Our Investment in WHOOP

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 11:05:07 +0000

We are pleased to announce that WHOOP, the human performance company, has closed a $55M Series D round led by Foundry Group with participation from Two Sigma Ventures, Accomplice, Thursday Ventures, Promus Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, and strategic individuals. The capital – a combination of debt and equity – will be used by the company to further scale its customer base as well as to invest in the next generation of Whoop products.

Our Investment in Matchstick Ventures

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 13:59:14 +0000

We are pleased to announce Foundry Group’s investment in Matchstick Ventures. Matchstick is a seed stage venture fund managed by Ryan Broshar and Natty Zola. Ryan and Natty are based in the Twin Cities and Boulder, with a focus on startups in the North and the Rockies regions. This is Matchstick’s second fund and the first with Natty on board as a partner.

While Natty officially joined Matchstick in 2018, he and Ryan have worked together for many years through their roles as Managing Directors at Techstars—Ryan as MD of the Techstars Retail Accelerator w/ Target in Minneapolis and Natty as MD of Techstars Boulder. They share not only a deep friendship, but several co-investments, an ethos around helping founders, and the Techstars #GiveFirst mentality. They also share founder DNA, both having started companies themselves. We first met Natty in his founder days when he took his company, Everlater, through one of the first Techstars classes in Boulder in 2009.

Our Investment in Uncork

Mon, 19 Aug 2019 16:33:47 +0000

We are pleased to share Foundry Group’s investment in Uncork Capital’s newest funds, which they just announced this morning. Based in the Bay Area, Uncork is a seed-stage VC fund managed by partners Jeff Clavier, Stephanie Palmeri, and Andy McLoughlin. While this is Foundry’s second institutional commitment to Uncork (Foundry also invested in their 2016 funds and the FG partners invested personally in their earlier funds), we’ve been partners and friends for many years.

Our Investment in SingleFile

Tue, 13 Aug 2019 07:55:53 +0000

We are pleased to announce Foundry Group’s investment in SingleFile. Based in Seattle, WA, SingleFile simplifies and automates state and local compliance activities for companies and their service providers. The company’s first offering is an enterprise product for law firms to manage registered agent services, including formation, state qualification, and related filings with government agencies.

There are over 30 million companies in the U.S. and 1.1 million of them do business in three or more states. Each quarter, over 75,000 new companies are formed. They all have one thing in common: a registered agent and a compliance headache. Any given company, especially those that do business in several states, might have over 100 filings to deal with each year, all with different government agencies. Today, this is an extremely manual, time-consuming, and confusing process. And there can be serious consequences for getting it wrong. Law firms like the one at www.sambrotman.com often take on the burden of managing this compliance and the registered agent relationships, but would much prefer to have paralegals and junior attorneys spending time on substantive tasks for their clients. Many can’t or won’t bill clients for this work.

Our Investment in Backbone

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 07:43:09 +0000

We are pleased to announce Foundry Group’s investment in Backbone. Based in Boulder, CO, Backbone is a next generation workflow solution that helps consumer goods companies manage the complex design and product development process from anywhere, on any device.

Built for the direct-to-consumer (DTC) economy, Backbone addresses the need for efficient and modernized product development. Prior to Backbone, product development teams had two options: manually manage the process using a bunch of separate apps not built for product development or use a clunky, out-dated, legacy incumbent. These options often led to problems like human error, redesigns, sending incorrect data to manufacturers, inventory miscalculations, missed deadlines, and ultimately loss of revenue. With the rise of eCommerce and DTC brands, consumer goods companies needed a better way to get products to market, faster. Understanding that speed to market is defining competitive supply chains, Backbone is building next generation product development tools to suit today’s fast-paced brands.

Our Investment in Ordermark

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 09:00:47 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Ordermark. Foundry Group Next 2018 led the $18M Series B financing the company is announcing today.

The restaurant industry is in the midst of significant disruption. 59% of restaurant orders from millennials are for takeout or delivery, and 60% of all US consumers order takeout or delivery once a week. Since 2014, online ordering and delivery have grown 300% faster than dine-in traffic, and over 200 online ordering services have been created to capitalize on this tremendous opportunity. Restaurateurs want to meet their customers where they are, but the complexity of collating, queueing, and fulfilling orders from numerous platforms bogs down kitchens and service staff, impeding their ability to maintain timeliness and a high quality product. Ordermark was created to address this problem.

Our Investment in Quiq

Thu, 25 Jul 2019 06:00:49 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Quiq. Foundry Group Next 2018 led the $12.5M Series B equity financing the company is announcing today. Quiq is revolutionizing customer communications for the enterprise from its offices in Bozeman, Montana. They plan to use the funding to continue building their engagement platform, adding bots and AI, integrating a messaging-based shopping cart, and executing on the next phase of their go-to-market plan.

Quiq was founded in 2015 by a group of RightNow Technologies alumni. RightNow, acquired by Oracle in 2012 for $1.6 billion, was a leader in customer experience, so the team has deep knowledge of their market space and longstanding relationships in the enterprise world. Mike Myer, CEO of Quiq, was RightNow’s CTO. We were introduced to the company by Will Price at Next Frontier Capital.

Our Investment in Mixhalo

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 17:27:24 +0000

We are pleased to announce Foundry Group’s investment in Mixhalo. We led the $10.7m Series A equity financing the company is announcing today. Based in San Francisco, Mixhalo provides a direct-from-the soundboard, totally immersive in-ear monitor experience to audiences at a venue via a smartphone app. This is the audio that professional musicians experience from the stage.

Their audio tech platform provides “audio augmented reality”: venue-curated, high-quality, low-latency audio feeds direct to the audience. Aside from live music / concert applications, Mixhalo can transform an audience’s experience at sporting events, festivals, trade shows, conferences, museums, and more. Imagine choosing among multiple play-by-play commentaries at a live sporting event, listening in on a presentation from the next room at conference, tuning in to the band at a faraway stage at a music festival, or having a multilingual real-time translator feed at a lecture. Mixhalo has applications anywhere amplified audio exists to reach an audience, and even extends beyond that use case to applications where a PA system might be disruptive or otherwise not feasible or appropriate.

Dropbox Acquires HelloSign

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 12:25:11 +0000

On Monday, Dropbox announced they are acquiring HelloSign.

Foundry Group invested in HelloSign in May 2017, and it has been a great experience working with the company as they built out their modern API-driven approach to e-signatures and document workflows. Now they’ll have access to Dropbox’s 500 million users to expand their reach even more quickly.

The transaction was announced Monday morning and is expected to close in Q1.

More details below from HelloSign and Dropbox’s blogs, and elsewhere in the tech press:

Our Investment in Knock

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 08:29:52 +0000

We are pleased to announce Foundry Group’s investment in Knock, part of a $400M total debt and equity financing the company is announcing today. Based in New York and San Francisco, Knock is the first online home trade-in platform – a radical new approach to home buying and selling that greatly simplifies and streamlines real estate transactions.

Knock was started by founding team members of Trulia.com – Sean Black and Jamie Glenn – who together bring decades of real estate technology experience to the business. The Knock process is akin to trading in a car – the company uses data science to price homes accurately, technology to sell them efficiently, and a dedicated team of licensed local experts to guide consumers seamlessly through the process. Knock currently operates in Atlanta, GA, Charlotte, NC, Raleigh-Durham, NC, and Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, and expects to expand into several new markets in 2019 and beyond.

Our Investment in Tidelift

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 07:13:29 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group has co-led a Series B investment in Tidelift.

Based in Boston, MA, Tidelift is making open source work better—for everyone. Through the Tidelift Subscription, the company provides a single source for proactively maintained open source components and professional assurances around those components, powered by the open source creators who know them best.

As we shared when we announced our participation in the Series A financing, Tidelift is a unique B2B spin on the marketplace model, addressing the critical needs of both those who make open source components and those who use them.

Foundry Group Holiday Gift Guide 2018

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 10:30:56 +0000

Hо-hо-hоld on bеfоrе you сlісk оn a lіnk dеlіvеrеd tо you in аn еmаіl. Cаn’t wаіt to buy thаt Chіа Pеt fоr 80 реrсеnt оff? Beware сlісkіng on links you rесеіvе frоm unfamiliar websites. It соuld be a “рhіѕhіng” ѕсhеmе, whеrе ѕhорреrѕ whо click thrоugh аrе led tо a false ѕіtе dеvеlореd tо ѕtеаl thеіr data. If the deal is too good tо раѕѕ up, еntеr thе wеbѕіtе nаmе bу hаnd іntо your browser.

Our Investment in Calibrate Ventures

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 10:23:02 +0000

We are glad to see our friends, Jason and Kevin, announce the closing of Calibrate Ventures initial fund with over $75 million in commitments. They are a first time fund, but experienced investors with a long history as partners. Funds like Calibrate and GPs like Jason and Kevin are the easy first-timers to back.

Jason and Kevin have been working together for the past decade at Shea Ventures. They honed their investing skills together, learning their relative strengths and instilling their shared values as partners. It’s not often that you find a first-time fund where the two partners have been together for this long and have a shared history of great investments including five companies with billion-dollar-plus exits (Chegg, Dollar Shave Club, Ring, ServiceMax, and SolarCity.)

Our Investment in the Costanoa Opportunity Fund

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 12:05:23 +0000

Costanoa Ventures announced today the closing of its newest investment vehicle, a $75 million fund that will invest in the “early growth” rounds of the most promising companies emerging from Costanoa’s three early-stage fund portfolios. We are delighted to add Costanoa to our growing family of Partner Funds.

The notion of “adding Costanoa to our family” has a slightly odd ring to it since Greg has been like family for many years. Our relationship is long, deep, and multi-faceted. We met Greg for the first time in 2000 when he was a partner at Sutter Hill Ventures and led a catalyzing round in Return Path, which resulted in the merger of a company Fred Wilson had funded at Flatiron Partners with a company Brad had funded at Mobius Venture Capital. The resulting company, Return Path, still exists today and, eighteen years later, Greg, Brad, and Fred are still board members. A few years later, Greg co-invested (again, at Greg’s previous firm) in the round Brad led in FeedBurner, joining that board. FeedBurner’s board ultimately included Greg, Brad, Fred, and Matt Blumberg (Return Path’s CEO) along with Dick Costolo, the founder and CEO. Over the years, we have invested in roughly half a dozen companies with Greg.

Our Investment in True Ventures VI

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 08:00:47 +0000

We were delighted to see our friends at True Ventures announce their newest set of funds. Foundry Group and True Ventures have a long-standing relationship as friends, peers, and co-investors. It’s fun to note that both Foundry and True were founded in the same vintage of emerging managers, although they got started a couple of years before us. Our firms were founded with overlapping values and ambition to support entrepreneurs differently than many VC firms created before 2003.

Our Investment in Molekule

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 07:15:22 +0000

We are pleased to announce Foundry Group’s Series B investment in Molekule. Based in San Francisco, CA, Molekule has developed an air purification solution which captures airborne bacteria, allergens, mold, chemicals, and viruses, and breaks them down into elements that aren’t harmful. Molekule’s first product, which is shipping now, can bring relief to millions of people suffering from respiratory issues like asthma and allergies as well as help people who just want to live a healthier lifestyle. It was founded in 2014 by Dr. Yogi Goswami, Dilip Goswami, and Jaya Rao.

#TimeOffToVote

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 07:16:42 +0000

As all of you know Nov 6th is election day. At Foundry we’ve decided to make sure that our employees have the time they need to vote that day by participating in #TimeOffToVote – a nationwide effort to encourage employers to make accommodations for their employees to participate in the election. We hope you’ll consider whether participating in this effort makes sense for your company as well.

Announcing Foundry Group Next 2018

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 09:38:49 +0000

We are happy to announce the closing of our seventh fund, Foundry Group Next 2018. The $750 million fund combines all of our prior fund strategies – our early stage, early growth, and partner fund investments – into a single fund.

For historical reference, our early-stage funds (FG 2007, FG 2010, FG 2013, and FG 2016) are all $225 million in size. Our first early growth fund raised in 2013, Foundry Group Select, is also $225m in size. In 2016, when we raised Foundry Group Next, we approximately doubled the size of that fund to $500 million since 30% of it was going to be invested in partner funds and 70% in early growth. So, at the beginning of 2016, we effectively raised $725 million (FG 2016 and Foundry Group Next). Foundry Group Next 2018 is simply the combination of those two funds rounded up slightly.

Our Investment in High Alpha

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 07:17:53 +0000

Our friends at High Alpha just announced their new High Alpha Studio and High Alpha Capital fund. We are proud to be partnered with them across both efforts.

When we make an investment, whether into a company or into a fund, we always start with the people. First and foremost, we have to believe that the people we are backing are good humans, and that, taken together, they form a team that is greater than the sum of the parts. We want to invest in teams that have a positive impact on their companies, portfolios, and broader communities. Next, we need to see a compelling strategy that maps well to the strengths of the team. There are a number of different winning approaches in venture, but not all teams are equally well-suited to execute a given strategy. Specifically, we don’t think that there are many teams that are well-suited to succeed executing a studio concept. It takes a particular set of skills, experiences, and personalities to pull it off. With a team like High Alpha, the studio model is incredibly powerful and allows a small firm to become a huge talent multiplier.

Our Investment in Wave Capital

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 10:03:35 +0000

We welcome Wave Capital to our Partner Fund portfolio. Based in San Francisco, Wave was launched last year by Sara Adler, Riley Newman, and David Rosenthal. Wave specializes in companies creating marketplaces and invests in companies at their earliest stages, as they build their teams, find product market fit, and work towards their Series A.

Leveraging their Bay Area roots and deep Silicon Valley networks, the Wave team is targeting top talent spinning out of major tech companies like Airbnb, where Riley built and led the Data Science team and Sara launched the Corporate Development program. They will also target marketplace startups in Seattle, where David spent over six years investing in early stage companies at Madrona Venture Group.

Xometry Acquires MakeTime

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 16:18:57 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that Foundry Group portfolio company MakeTime has been acquired by Xometry. This acquisition brings together the country’s two top manufacturing network businesses and creates the largest on-demand manufacturing platform in the United States. As part of the transaction, Foundry Group Next led a $25 million round of financing for the newly combined company. Almaz Capital, BMW’s iVentures, GE Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Maryland Venture Fund also participated in the round.

How can LPs conduct diligence on accusations of sexual harassment?: Start by asking the question.

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 10:05:02 +0000

Over the past year, there have been a number of sexual harassment scandals in tech, especially involving venture capitalists. The power dynamic in our industry has enabled bad actors to harass founders seeking capital and junior employees trying to work their way up in a very competitive and historically male-dominated industry.

Some in the industry feel that Limited Partners (“LPs”) — the institutions, wealthy families, and wealthy individuals that fund VCs — are in a strong position to create change because they are the first source of capital in the investment chain. If bad-actor VCs are unable to raise capital, it diminishes their ability to leverage the power of that capital to harass others. As a result, LPs could be part of the solution by choosing not to fund VCs who commit sexual harassment.

Our Investment in Section.io

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 10:00:48 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group has made a Series A investment in Section.io. Based in Boulder, CO and Sydney, Australia, Section.io is building a modular, API-driven reverse-proxy layer to provide web engineers with greater flexibility, transparency, and control over advanced edge compute for delivery of their web applications.

Section.io was founded in Sydney, Australia by Daniel Bartholomew and Stewart McGrath, who became frustrated with the rigid “black box” approach of legacy Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and the misalignment of those CDNs with modern DevOps principles. Stewart and Daniel recognized CDNs were not able to adapt to quickly enough to keep pace with modern software development practices.

Our Investment in Arthur Ventures

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 11:12:56 +0000

As we build out our Partner Fund portfolio, we look for opportunities to strengthen existing relationships in our ecosystem. We’ve known the Arthur Ventures team for several years and were thrilled to welcome them to the Foundry Group family earlier this year.

Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Arthur Ventures invests in fast-growing, scalable, enterprise software companies outside of Silicon Valley. They’re often the first institutional investor for portfolio companies, writing a substantial initial check at Seed or Series A.

Foundry Group – Best for the World for Workers

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 10:54:24 +0000

Today, Foundry Group was recognized for creating the most positive impact for our workers based on an independent, comprehensive assessment administered by the nonprofit B Lab. Honorees are featured on B the Change, the digital Medium publication produced by B Lab, at bthechange.com/bestfortheworld.

Foundry Group announced its’ certification as a B Corp over two years ago – B Corps are for-profit companies certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency measured by the B Impact Assessment (BIA). We joined a growing community of more than 2,400+ Certified B Corps from 50+ countries and over 130+ industries working together toward one unifying goal: to redefine success in business

Victory for VictorOps and Splunk!

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 10:16:22 +0000

Today, Splunk announced they are acquiring VictorOps. We invested in VictorOps’ Seed round back in 2012 and it has been our privilege to work with co-founders Todd Vernon, Bryce Ambraziunas, Dan Jones, and the rest of the excellent VictorOps team over the past five years.

We’ve invested in Todd as a co-founder/CTO/CEO three times now: back in the late 90s where he was the CTO of Raindance Communications, as the CEO/founder of Sovrn (formerly Lijit), and as the CEO/founder of VictorOps. Obviously, we are big fans of Todd and his tenacity and persistence in building companies over the years.

Our Investment in Tidelift

Tue, 22 May 2018 07:53:42 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group has made a Series A investment in Tidelift. Tidelift gives software development teams dependable—professionally maintained, secured, and licensed—open source software from a single source, while introducing a new way for open source creators to get paid for doing the work they love.

Tidelift was founded by Donald Fischer, Havoc Pennington, Jeremy Katz, and Luis Villa, who have more than 70 combined years of experience working and investing in open source at organizations like Red Hat, Google, Mozilla, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Our Investment in Golden Ventures

Wed, 02 May 2018 08:03:31 +0000

Today, Golden Ventures is announcing the closing of their third fund, a CAD$72M vehicle. We are excited to have them join our group of Partner Funds and welcome our northern neighbors to the family.

While the vast majority of our investments are in the United States, we’ve had long connections to the Canada startup community, with a particular connection to Toronto and Waterloo. Many of our companies have engineering offices in the area, going back to our investment in Zynga in 2007. Blackberry (then RIM) acquired Gist, another early Foundry Group investment. Techstars currently has two programs in Toronto. Brad’s co-author of Startup Opportunities is a professor at Ryerson College. And, we aren’t limited to Toronto, as we currently have an investment in Data Nerds based in Kelowna, BC.

Our investment in PSL Ventures

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 12:57:29 +0000

Today, Pioneer Square Labs announced the launch of PSL Ventures, a Seattle-based venture capital fund that invests in early-stage technology companies. The $80 million venture fund will invest in companies all over the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The fund will also participate in financings in spinouts of PSL’s affiliated startup studio. We are excited to back the team and have them as one of our Partner Funds.

The Foundry Group Manifesto on Board Meetings

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 08:01:35 +0000

(Boulder): Today, Foundry Group, a venture capital firm focused on making early-stage technology investments, participating in select growth rounds, and identifying and supporting the next generation of venture fund managers, released a video manifesto on board meetings.

After years of painstaking research, the firm discovered that nearly 13,729 hours of time are wasted per day by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and board members attending meetings that, while well intentioned, usually contain multiple inefficiencies that are needlessly present.

Introducing Our New Partner – Jamey Sperans

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 17:18:56 +0000

We are excited to announce that Jamey Sperans is joining Foundry Group as a partner.

When we started Foundry Group in 2006, we were very clear that we were not going to build a legacy venture capital firm; one meant to outlive its founders. There would be no generational planning, no transitions to younger partners, and no senior partner hold-outs who would hang onto economics well after they had stopped working. Simply put, when we are done investing, we will drop the mic and shut off the lights.

Time’s Up – Sexual Harassment Legal Defense Fund

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 21:30:45 +0000

Recently, we were contacted by a female entrepreneur who is a long-time friend. She had experienced sexual harassment by a well-known VC but was terrified of going public about it. While she was struggling with all of the issues one would expect around this, she was also worried about being sued. She felt like she had the emotional resources to cope, but she didn’t feel that she had the financial resources to withstand a lawsuit.

BREAK THE INTERNET TO SAVE NET NEUTRALITY

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 06:43:05 +0000

We have just hours. The FCC is about to vote to end net neutrality—breaking the fundamental principle of the open Internet—and only an avalanche of calls to Congress can stop it. So we decided to help “Break the Internet” on our sites. You can also support on Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube or in whatever wild creative way you can to get your audience to contact Congress. That’s how we win. Are you in?

More info here.

Our Investment in Data Nerds

Thu, 07 Dec 2017 18:55:24 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Data Nerds. With offices in Kelowna, B.C. and Denver, Colorado, Data Nerds is building a platform that allows businesses and consumers to quickly and easily obtain valuable property information that is otherwise extremely hard to get.

The U.S. real estate market is worth at least $29.6 trillion and the annual transaction value is upwards of $491 billion. This adds up to over 125 million homes in the US and over 3,200 individual counties that hold valuable data about each of these properties (all of whom make property information available differently). The amount of data created in the last 20 years surrounding these homes is massive, yet underutilized.

Our Investment in Pi Charging

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 17:04:23 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016 has made its initial Series A investment in Pi Charging, Inc. Pi delivers wireless power to multiple devices safely and at high power (up to 10W) from any angle without requiring a charging mat. They achieve this magic using their proprietary breakthrough: the world’s first magnetic field-shaping algorithm.

Pi was founded by Lixin Shi and John McDonald, who met at MIT. Their vision was to change the state-of-the-art in wireless charging, not with charging pads, microwaves, lasers, or ultrasound, but with a long-range magnetic charging transmitter. These transmitters will work with the Qi wireless standard, so your new iPhone 8, iPhone X, and many other current and future devices are compatible, and won’t require a special case.

Our Investment in K9 Ventures

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 13:27:46 +0000

We recently invested in K9 Ventures’ third fund, a $42M “pre-seed” fund with a strong focus on emerging technologies (more on the pre-seed naming convention in a minute). Manu Kumar, who runs the firm, did a nice job of talking about his fund and its strategy here. We are excited to formally partner with Manu and count K9 among our Partner Funds, as we’ve known and followed Manu for many years. My partner was a personal early investor in his initial 2009 fund, and I got to know Manu through UTIMCO’s exposure to K9 Fund II in 2012. We’ve been impressed watching Manu build K9 and were excited to see him launch The Kennel space.

Our Investment in Resolute Ventures

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 12:22:45 +0000

We shared some of the backstory on our investment in Founder Collective and want to continue the conversation about our fund investing by highlighting Resolute Ventures. We are largely driven by people and relationships. It’s important that we build a real, personal connection with our partners and that we want to be in business with them for the next decade. That is most certainly the case with our investment in Raanan and Mike at Resolute.

Partner Funds

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 17:31:28 +0000

This last week marked a year since we publicly announced Foundry Group Next. The timing also happens to mark the second anniversary of our starting to work together on the portfolio. I wake up every morning thankful for the group of people that we get to work with every day. One of the secrets to Foundry Group and the broader Foundry family is that we’ve been lucky to surround ourselves with quality people across our portfolio companies and our partner funds.

Our Investment in Pilot

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 15:23:47 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group Next, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Pilot Fiber, Inc. (“Pilot”) as part of a $17M financing. Pilot, based in New York, NY is building a new model internet service provider by offering reliable fiber-optic internet with transparent pricing, no annual contracts, and speeds over 1,000Mbps.

Despite providing a critical piece of infrastructure for companies of all types, business ISPs have been slow to evolve and adapt to modern business practices. Companies looking for service have traditionally faced a lack of transparency, bundled packages, inconsistent connectivity, and inferior customer service. Pilot takes away these pain points, replacing them with an internet service experience that works with business customers, not against them.

Our Investment in Boundless

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 15:45:57 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Boundless as part of a $3.5 million financing. Based in Seattle, Boundless helps families navigate the legal immigration system with confidence.

Boundless was spun-out from Pioneer Square Labs in April. Boundless was co-founded by CEO Xiao Wang, a Chinese immigrant who previously held strategic roles at Amazon and the New York City Department of Education; President Doug Rand, a serial entrepreneur and former Assistant Director for Entrepreneurship in the Obama White House; and CTO Serdar Sutay, a Turkish immigrant who led engineering teams at Microsoft and Chef.

Our Investment in The Pro’s Closet

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:46:09 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in The Pro’s Closet (“TPC”) as part of a $9M financing. TPC, based in Boulder, CO, is the world’s largest seller of pre-owned bicycles and bicycle parts.

The cycling market is large and expanding rapidly. But as bicycles become more sophisticated and expensive, a gap has opened up in the market for used bicycles. TPC’s platform solves the pain points that sellers and buyers of used bikes experience. For sellers TPC offers the quickest and easiest way to turn their used bike into cash – often to be used to purchase a new (or newer) bike. TPC also works with bicycle shops and manufacturers helping to reduce the sticker shock of new bikes by offering a trade in program for a customer’s old bike. TPC also works with bike manufacturers to help them manage and resell their demo inventories.

Our Investment In Taunt

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 17:29:04 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Taunt as part of a $1.75 million financing. Based in Seattle, Taunt is a social competition platform for eSports fans. Fans communicate and compete to show off their game knowledge, earning bragging rights in the community. The really cool part: it’s all in real-time, so you can see stats and call events as they’re unfolding live.

Our Investment In Impact Health

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 16:18:52 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Impact Health as part of a $13M financing. Impact Health is based in Los Angeles, CA and is building an online platform designed to take the confusion out of buying and using health insurance in the individual market.

The Impact Health platform serves as both an advisor and an advocate to consumers in the individual health care markets and fits in our distribution theme. Their platform walks consumers through a simple set of questions to help them make informed and tailored decisions about buying a health plan. They also act as a “healthcare concierge” to consumers who are struggling to understand the coverage their existing plan provides. The complexity of these markets combined with the detailed and ever changing nuances of the plans offered make both choosing a plan and understanding what coverage applies extremely difficult.

Our Investment in Misty Robotics

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 14:11:52 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Misty Robotics as part of its spinout from Sphero followed by an $11.5 million financing. Based in Boulder, CO, Misty Robotics, Inc. is building a robot for everyone with the goal of providing autonomous robots for every home and office. These robots will be seen and treated as our friends, our teammates, and a part of our families, interacting with humans in entertaining and friendly ways that have only been seen before in science fiction.

Our Zero Tolerance Policy On Sexual Harassment

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 19:50:19 +0000

Last week, yet another instance of sexual harassment and mistreatment of women in our industry became public via an article published by The Information concerning sexual harassment allegations against venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital. As the news unfolded, we felt profound sadness for the women involved and disgust for the behavior they were subjected to.

A number of leaders in the VC community immediately responded thoughtfully, and articles like Reid Hoffman’s The Human Rights of Women Entrepreneurs appeared. Women we have immense respect for, such as Joanne Wilson, wrote powerful articles like The Gig Is Up. Twitter lit up with commentary which we hope will continue for a while, instead of just being a short news cycle.

Our Investment in HelloSign

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 13:45:20 +0000

We are excited to announce that Foundry Group Next has completed its Series B financing in HelloSign. HelloSign is based in San Francisco and makes the excellent HelloSign App and API, HelloFax, and the recently launched HelloWorks, which allows developers to convert documents and forms into intelligent workflows within their applications.

HelloSign’s API-driven platform approach to its product suite means the company fits squarely in our Glue and Protocol themes. Today, eSignatures and the additional data capture surrounding them are a vital part of many high-value (and high-stakes) workflows: for example, Instacart uses HelloWorks to streamline the on-boarding process for thousands of shoppers.

Introducing Our New Partner – Chris Moody

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 18:00:41 +0000

We are excited to announce that Chris Moody is joining Foundry Group as a partner.

Our Investment in Founder Collective

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 16:32:50 +0000

We recently shared our thinking on fund investing with our post, “What does a Foundry Group Next fund investment look like?” We noted that we are largely driven by people and ecosystem. We want to continue laying out our thinking by talking about each of our fund investments. We’ll start with our most recent fund investment, Founder Collective, and walk backwards to catch up on what was a very active first year of investing for Foundry Group Next.

Our Investment in Looking Glass

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 13:54:01 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Looking Glass as part of a $10 million financing. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Looking Glass has created the world’s first personal 3D volumetric display.

While the idea of a 3D volumetric display was envisioned over 100 years ago and Louis Lumière invented stereoscopic (3D) films in 1935, the physical instantiation of such a product has been elusive. Extensive research at MIT in the early 1990s, which included John Underkoffler (now CEO of Oblong) made progress but stalled in the mid-1990s.

Our Investment in Chowbotics

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 14:57:24 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Chowbotics. Based in Silicon Valley, Chowbotics has developed robots that make food in restaurants and cafeterias.

At Foundry, we are always on the look-out for interesting Human Computer Interaction (HCI) companies. This investment theme has led to our investments in companies such as Glowforge, Formlabs, Makerbot, Fitbit, Occipital and Sphero. These companies have each grown quickly and defined their markets. We believe that Chowbotics will do the same in the emerging robotic food preparation category.

What Does a Foundry Group Next Fund Investment Look Like?

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 11:36:09 +0000

We recently shared an outline of what we’re looking for in a Foundry Group Next (“FG Next”) direct investment. Our FG Next strategy not only allows us to continue making direct investments in high-potential startups that fit within our themes, but also to scale up our ability to support venture firms and funds whose vision and values align with ours. Through this activity, we hope to spread the Foundry Group values and DNA further into the overall venture and startup ecosystem.

Our Investment in Dwolla

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 06:00:54 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Dwolla as part of a $6.85 million financing. Based in Des Moines, Iowa, Dwolla provides an API platform for white label ACH bank transfers, enabling a robust connection to the banking infrastructure for software applications.

In 2012, Dwolla raised a financing led by Union Square Ventures to change how payments worked. They initially focused on a consumer to consumer service, scaled the team up significantly, raised several rounds of capital, and built a lot of software to support the infrastructure that was required for their consumer service.

Our Investment In Sensu

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 20:39:04 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have made our initial investment in Sensu, Inc. Sensu is a modern and cohesive monitoring platform for the enterprise – it can monitor servers, services, application health, or business KPIs, enabling dev and ops teams to keep a vital, real-time view on the health of their infrastructure.

Sensu was originally created to replace an aging Nagios installation that couldn’t keep up with the rapidly evolving demands of a dynamic public-cloud infrastructure, and has been widely adopted due to its backward compatibility with plugins written for legacy monitoring tools Nagios, Icinga, Zabbix, and more. As software continues to devour the world, modern monitoring tools are vital to prevent costly downtime.

What Does a Foundry Group Next Investment Look Like?

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:40:17 +0000

We always stop and consider whether a public posting makes sense whenever we repeatedly send something via email. This post comes from one of those moments. As we do more growth investments outside of our existing portfolio from Foundry Group Next (FGN), we are responding frequently with “thanks, but that doesn’t fit our strategy and what we are looking for.” So, in an effort to have something easy to point to publicly, we wanted to share an outline of what we’re looking for in an FGN investment.

Our Investment in Borrowed & Blue

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:26:40 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Borrowed & Blue, Inc. With offices in Charlottesville, Virginia and Boulder, Colorado, Borrowed & Blue is a wedding vendor marketplace that helps couples research and book their wedding vendors.

Every year, 2.2 million couples get married in the United States. The average couple spends $24,000 on day-of wedding vendors, across many transactions, making weddings a $53 billion industry annually. Yet the market remains notoriously inefficient, and a handful of players, led by The Knot (NYSE: XOXO) have dominated the wedding landscape for many years with pay-to-play vendor listing directories. Other wedding sites and services have focused less on helping couples discover vendors, and more on tangential benefits, such as sharing wedding photos, organizing guest lists and seating charts, or creating wedding websites.

We hear you on Pogoplug

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 17:51:45 +0000

To frustrated Pogoplug users, we offer our sincere empathy. We were caught off guard just like you. We are making every effort we can to help those users who have been impacted. We hope to have an update soon.

Our Newest Fund – Foundry Group Next

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 11:56:47 +0000

We are happy to announce the closing of our sixth fund, Foundry Group Next. The $500 million fund is a continuation of our Foundry Group Select Fund approach but expands on our previous Select Fund strategy with the addition of two important components.

Foundry Group Select allowed us to make growth investments in the most successful companies from our early stage funds. Supporting these existing portfolio companies with meaningful capital in their scale-up phase provides flexibility to our companies and allows us to remain syndication agnostic in our investing.

Our Investment In Formlabs

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 10:00:31 +0000

We recently led a $35 million financing at Formlabs. In case you were wondering, lasers are super cool.

In 2010, when we invested in MakerBot, the maker movement was just beginning. While 3D printing technology had been around for 30 years, there were no desktop 3D printers. The concept of using an additive process for 3D printing, where you built up a 3D object from continuous extrusion of a material such as ABS or PLA (plastics) was well understood. But this technology had not been brought to the desktop at a $2,000 price point. MakerBot did that and created an entirely new market segment within the 3D printing industry.

New Registration Status at Foundry Group

Mon, 23 May 2016 12:34:49 +0000

We have some entertaining news to share with you today. We have recently registered with the SEC and are now considered Registered Investment Advisors. Did we do this so that we can have cooler business cards? No. Did we do this because our back office was lacking in purpose? Heck no.

We had to, per the SEC rules. And the reason you ask? Well, we can’t tell you that or we could possibly break some other SEC rules. So for now, just accept that your friendly neighborhood venture capital firm is now subject to a lot of new and stimulating paperwork.

Helping Spare People From Gluten (and other Allergens)

Fri, 20 May 2016 13:52:18 +0000

Our investment in Fitbit was our first effort to invest in the notion of human instrumentation. As the quantified self became a broad meme around 2010, we decided that over the next 20 years there would be an increasing integration of technology into the human body to help measure, test, and regulate our health and overall organic functions.

We’ve looked at many companies that are doing things in this area, but almost all trigger the need for either FDA approval or engagement in some sort of regulatory or invasive process. While the body hacking movement is fascinating, the side effect of implanting physical devices in one’s body creates issues that we aren’t ready to contend with.

Foundry Group is now a Certified B Corp!

Thu, 19 May 2016 06:30:49 +0000

Foundry Group has always focused on community. From our work across all manner of community organizations, to bringing key industry conferences to our home town of Boulder, to supporting entrepreneurs, we’ve always looked for ways to engage productively in the markets we work in.

We’re firm believers in doing more than just talking. We are founders and major supporters of Pledge 1% and The Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and have watched them grow into nationally – now internationally – acclaimed organizations.

Making Music with ROLI

Wed, 04 May 2016 13:47:30 +0000

Today we are excited to announce that Foundry has lead a $27 million financing round in ROLI. Based in London, ROLI makes connected hardware and software products that transform music-making with a platform that bridges the gap between acoustic and electronic instruments and allows anyone to make music.

ROLI’s Seaboard is a new kind of musical instrument, an evolution of the familiar electronic keyboard that lets players shape sound through five dimensions of touch on a soft and smooth touch and pressure responsive surface. This brings unprecedented expressivity to the instrument, enabling incredibly realistic expressions of acoustic instruments while bringing new possibilities to fully synthetic sounds as well.

Status of Our FG Angels Experiment

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 15:00:49 +0000

After two years of a dedicated experiment, we’ve decided to stop making new investments via our FG Angels Syndicate. We’ve learned a lot, achieved some of our goals, but ultimately have decided that the effort required to maintain our investment pace on AngelList is too great for us, at least for now.

A long history and explanation of what we’ve learned is posted at Ending Our FG Angels Experiment.

By running the experiment, we’ve better understood the leverage points at the angel / seed level that AngelList and Syndicates create, which for some investors, and many entrepreneurs, is very powerful. We’d like to believe that we’ve contributed to the evolution and dynamic of angel / seed investing through this effort. And, our friends at AngelList have been amazing to work with. We hope they feel we’ve been helpful to them on their mission.

Foundry Group Next

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 19:25:42 +0000

We are excited to announce that Lindel Eakman is joining Foundry Group to lead a new initiative we are creating called Foundry Group Next.

Over the years at Foundry Group we’ve built an extensive network of companies. While we’ve invested in some of these directly, this actually represents the smallest set of companies that we are involved with. We have also invested indirectly in many others through our investment in Techstars. Yet another, and much larger set of companies, come from our investments in other venture funds.

Keeping You Safe With Revolar

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:22:14 +0000

Today we’re excited to announce that Foundry has lead a $3 million financing round in Revolar. Quite simply, Revolar transforms the way people keep themselves and those they love safe by providing a simple way to notify friends, family or a monitoring service that they feel threatened or are in trouble.

Revolar is a discrete, wearable device that uses Bluetooth Smart™ to signal an alert to your loved ones via a text or email message. You can wear Revolar under clothing or on a keychain, clipped to a purse, etc. If you ever need help, simply press Revolar and an alert message with your live location information is sent to your friends and family.

Our Investment in Havenly

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 17:02:43 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Havenly, Inc. Based in Denver, CO, Havenly is creating a marketplace matching interior designers with clients.

Nearly $60B in annual home furnishing sales are not influenced by an interior designer. The vast majority of people either try to furnish their homes by themselves (which takes a ton of time, conviction and knowledge) or try to rely on “free” in-store design services (which are stuck to a single brand and have misaligned incentives due to commission structures).

Our Investment in TrackR Helps You Find All of Your Things

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 21:03:55 +0000

We are pleased to announce we led an $8.7 million investment in TrackR. Based in Santa Barbara, CA, TrackR has a series of products to help you locate all the physical things you own.

As mobile phones and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) become ubiquitous, each of us is now carrying around a GPS-enabled supercomputer in our pocket. While many more physical products are becoming connected with the Internet, the vast majority of things we own don’t have an Internet connection. As a result, they are effectively “off the grid.”

We’ve Joined the Circus!

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 21:54:55 +0000

Two Bit Circus, that is. Today, we are excited to announce that we’ve co-led a $6.5m Series A investment in Two Bit Circus with our friends at Techstars Ventures.

Our Human Computer Interaction theme continues to evolve and provide fertile ground for investments. One of our core beliefs about HCI is that as computing continues to progress and becomes increasingly common, it will saturate our world in such a way that it will “vanish into ubiquity” and result in people interacting with computing in situations where they may not even be consciously aware that they are doing so.

Our Investment In Pioneer Square Labs

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 13:37:45 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have completed our initial investment in Pioneer Square Labs (PSL). Based in Seattle, PSL is a startup studio, an 8-person team of founders, developers, and designers who rapidly test and validate new startup ideas before recruiting an executive team to build out an actual spin-off company.

The co-founders are Greg Gottesman, Geoff Entress, Mike Galgon, and Ben Gilbert. Greg is a co-founder of Madrona and long-time VC. Geoff worked with Greg at Madrona for a decade and is one of the most prolific and successful angel investors in the Pacific Northwest. Mike was the co-founder of aQuantive which was acquired by Microsoft for $6.2 billion. Ben was a co-founder of Madrona Labs with Greg.

Foundry Group urges Boulder to VOTE NO on 300 and 301

Fri, 16 Oct 2015 13:35:39 +0000

This year’s local election in Boulder is a critical one. The city that we love risks shutting its doors. While the business community in Boulder has contributed immeasurably to the vibrancy, charitable contribution base, economic development, and success of our community, there is a faction in Boulder that feels that our city should stop moving forward and instead should live in the past. This faction believes in a less inclusive Boulder and aims to achieve this goal by literally shutting the doors to our city.

Our Investment in AvidXchange

Sun, 20 Sep 2015 16:00:21 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have completed an investment in AvidXchange. Based in Charlotte, NC. AvidXchange (Avid) is a leading mid-market B2B payments provider with a complete invoice workflow management solution, enabling its customers to seamlessly handle invoice ingestion and payments to their respective suppliers.

Avid was founded in 2000 and is run by Mike Praeger, a long time friend of Brad’s from when they both lived in Boston in the 1990s. Mike had several entrepreneurial successes before starting Avid and has grown it in the past 15 years to a substantial company on a modest amount of invested capital.

Our Investment in Chewse

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 21:44:12 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have completed our initial investment in Chewse, Inc. Based in San Francisco, CA, Chewse has created a platform that makes it easy for businesses to order and manage meals for their employees.

The U.S. market for corporate food delivery is over $30 billion a year. It’s not a new market, but it’s one that is rife with frustrations. The market is fragmented, with the three largest restaurant chains that supply the corporate market being Subway, Panera and Chipotle with market shares of 3%, 0.8% and 0.05%, respectively. There are over 11,000 caterers in the U.S. with the top 50 largest controlling less than 15% of the market.

Our Newest Fund – Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P.

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 11:12:54 +0000

We are very happy to announce today the closing of our fifth fund, Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. The fund is the same size as our last one: $225,000,000 in limited partner commitments. We are pleased to be working with a great group of investors.

We will continue to do exactly what we have always done: invest in seed and early-stage investment opportunities in the software and IT space that are located across the United States. We’ll also continue to pursue a strategy of Thematic Investing that has served us well over our investing careers.

Our Investment in Glowforge

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 04:44:50 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have led a $9 million round in Glowforge, a Seattle-based desktop 3D Laser Printer company.

In 2010, when we invested in Makerbot, the maker movement was just beginning. While 3D printing technology had been around for 30 years, there were no desktop 3D printers. The concept of using an additive process for 3D printing, where you built up a 3D object from continuous extrusion of a material such as ABS or PLA (plastics) was well understood. But this technology had not been brought to the desktop at a $2,500 price point. Makerbot did that and has created an entirely new market segment within the 3D printing industry.

Our investment in Simbulus

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 20:10:30 +0000

We’ve recently invested in Simbulus the makers of Woot Math. Located in Boulder, CO, the company is building a software application that we believe will revolutionize the way that kids learn math.

We’ve long believed that current education methodologies are archaic. The process of education seems to be one of the last markets that have resisted technological advancement. From time to time, we’ve considered whether or not we wanted to pursue an education investment theme, although to date, we have not made that decision.

Our First Year on AngelList – FG Angels Update

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 18:40:17 +0000

A little over a year ago – and very shortly after AngelList announced their “syndicates” functionality – we decided rather than postulate about how AngelList Syndicates may or may not change, transform, or challenge the venture capital industry, we’d jump in with both feet. When we formed FG Angels we were the first institutional venture firm to launch a syndicate. We committed $2.5M to the effort with the intent of “making 50 investments between now and the end of 2014 in companies that list on AngelList…[investing] $50,000 of our own money in each company and the balance from our syndicate.”

Our Investment in Mattermark

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 19:46:15 +0000

Last week we led a $6.5 million investment in Mattermark. Based in San Francisco, Mattermark’s mission is to organize the world’s business information to answer questions about the companies you want to do business with.

While there have been numerous efforts over the last 20 years to organize detailed private company data on the Internet, the end result is still lame. Classical search approaches like Google are a mess – you can get bits and pieces of the data, but it’s impossible to get what you want in one place. When you use public company data as a metaphor, it’s not surprising that Bloomberg still exists in the world of Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, and a continued list of non-comprehensive, relatively neglected data sets and presentation layers.

Our Investment in Spare5

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 14:19:13 +0000

We are pleased to announce we have invested in Spare5. The company is building a software platform that allows experts to monetize their spare time via mobile device.

As our newest theme “Marketplace” evolves, we think about underserved markets that should be working together, but through lack of technology are not. We have a special interest in markets that involve some sort of remnant asset that needs monetization and that is spoiled and / or lost if not used.

Our Investment In Ello

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:19:00 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve co-led (along with Techstars’ Bullet Time Ventures and with participation from FreshTracks Capital) a Series A financing for Ello, a new and disruptive social network. Based in Burlington, Vermont and founded and run by our long time friend Paul Budnitz, Ello is basing their business on a fundamentally different premise than other social networks – specifically eschewing building a business that is reliant on third-party advertising or the selling of user data.

Our Investment in about.me

Tue, 10 Jun 2014 15:48:03 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we’ve co-led the $11m Series B funding of about.me. Based in San Francisco, about.me is a platform for representing personal identity online allowing users to create and maintain a curated page for self-expression. For examples, take a look at Brad Feld, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson.

We have long been obsessed with the notion of online identity and self-expression. One of our early Foundry Group investments, Gist tackled part of this problem, but was acquired relatively earlier in its life by RIM. More recently, our investment in FullContact addresses the idea of a definitive contact record for everyone on the planet, generated automatically from publicly available data.

FG Angels Update After 13 Investments

Fri, 30 May 2014 12:39:12 +0000

As of today we have made 13 investments via FG Angels – 11 have been announced and two will be closed within a week.

On 10/1/13, we announced that we were going to create a syndicate on AngelList and start doing seed investments that way. Our plan was to make 50 seed investments by the end of 2014, using the angel strategy that Brad has been using for his own angel investing since 1994.

Our Investment in Nix Hydra

Thu, 29 May 2014 13:40:56 +0000

Today we’re pleased to announce our Series A investment in Nix Hydra. Nix Hydra is a software entertainment company dedicated to creating fun, interactive products for young women on new and emerging technology platforms.

The studio’s debut game, Egg Baby, is a virtual pet egg that hatches into a variety of gift-giving creatures depending on how players treats the egg. The game quickly became a phenomenon in the U.S. after it launched in 2013, touting almost 9 million downloads with no marketing spend. The company has plans for a number of other titles and will use the financing to expand their underlying gaming platform, extend the Egg Baby franchise, and create new games and titles.

Our Investment in Distil Networks

Wed, 28 May 2014 15:07:08 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we’ve co-led Distil Networks’ Series A financing, along with Techstars’ Bullet Time Ventures. Based in Arlington, VA, Distil Networks provides advanced bot detection and mitigation capabilities to its customers on public and private clouds.

The term “bot” refers to an automated software program that runs over the internet and accesses and interacts with websites. The most common example of a bot is a web crawler (also known as a spider), employed by search engines to index the web and enable online discovery. By and large, web crawlers are welcomed by website owners, as discoverability and searchability are crucial to their business.

Our Investment in Rachio

Thu, 03 Apr 2014 23:11:25 +0000

We’re happy to announce our latest FG Angels investment in Rachio.

Rachio has created a device called “Iro” which is a smart irrigation controller that is powered by intelligent cloud-based software and is controlled via an intuitive, lightning-fast iPhone and Android app or web-dashboard. Iro is incredibly easy to install and set up, replacing only the existing control box, and modernizes the entire irrigation system. With the push of a button in the app, Iro connects to the internet via WiFi.

Our Investment In Mozaik

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 12:40:33 +0000

Sometimes we come across a company that we know is going to change the world. They’ve got something magic in the tank that’s simply inevitable. It’s like they’re travelling back in time and building something that that in the future will be considered obvious. That’s Mozaik.

Brad will join the board with this Series B financing and we couldn’t be more excited to work alongside Mara and James as they reshape the financial ecosystem. Mozaik fits squarely into our Glue theme as they are building technology that scrapes and vets the entire digital world of finance and stitches the pieces back together in a more rational way. Just as Twitter has reshaped social movements, Mozaik will transform our ongoing battle against corruption and fraud. Who knows, maybe one day it can automatically produce financial reports so that we don’t need to use accountants or auditors anymore.

FG Angels Invests in Uvize

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 14:00:18 +0000

We’re excited to announce our latest FG Angels investment: Uvize.

Uvize provides schools with an innovative software platform that their helps military veterans succeed in college. They partner with universities to deliver an online extension to their veterans center. The community site is a essentially a network that connects students with the right veteran classmate, mentor, or advisor when they need it.

Uvize also delivers incoming veterans academic orientation and preparation classes in an amazing online environment. Building skills and community before school starts increases the success rate of veterans. Uvize is founded by military veterans and a college educator.

FG Angels Invests in RABBL

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:19:16 +0000

We’re excited to announce our latest FG Angels investment. We continue to review a large number of opportunities, and our FG Angels Syndicate recently closed a $339,631 seed investment in RABBL.

RABBL is a social booking platform, which enables bands and fans to market and pre-sell tickets to potential shows, and, once critical mass is achieved, broker an agreement with a venue to host the show.

On the front end of the product — the “social” part — fans and artists use RABBL to prove demand for potential shows. This lets artists find opening acts, helps artists get into festivals and new venues, and lets a fan invite and convince an artist to come play the fan’s town by proving demand.

We’ve just invested in Drync – FG Angels

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 04:10:25 +0000

We are excited to announce our fourth FG Angels investment in Drync – who have raised $434K from our FG Angels syndicate.

Drync builds a smartphone application that bridge the gap between experiencing wine and being able to catalogue and purchase it. The company likes to call this “impulse commerce for wine.” With their application, one can scan any wine bottle, immediately have the wine identified and priced for instant purchase or review. Currently Drync has a database of over two million wines.

FG Press and Our First Book – Uncommon Stock

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 00:09:55 +0000

Last week we formally launched a new publishing company, FG Press.

Our first book – Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0 by Eliot Peper was released yesterday. It’s in a new genre we are helping pioneer called “startup fiction.” We believe that life often imitates fiction (or is it the other way around) and one can learn as much from a great novel as they can from a dry, boring business book.

At Foundry Group, we’ve been writing for a long time. Brad and Seth started blogging in 2004. Jason and Ryan started a few years after that. In 2010 Brad started writing books. His first book, Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup, was written with David Cohen, CEO of Techstars. Our second book, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist was written by Brad and Jason.

ARTtwo50 – Our Third FG Angels Investment

Fri, 21 Feb 2014 18:12:54 +0000

We are excited to announce our third FG Angels investment in ARTtwo50 – who have raised $285K from our FG Angels syndicate.

If you’ve been to our offices, you know we are fans (and collectors) of original art. But, the art world is very top-down, rigid, and has remained relatively unchanged for decades. The ARTtwo50 team of designers, hackers, and Stanford d.school and business school grads has created a wholly different approach that they believe will change the way we buy and sell art.

Our Investment in Bounce.io

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 18:58:37 +0000

We are excited to announce that we’ve led Bounce.io’s Series A financing. Based in Louisville, CO, Bounce.io is an email infrastructure company that provides services to domain registrars, ISPs, and mail services providers to better manage and monetize bounced email traffic.

We love the email market, as evidenced by our investments over the years in companies such as Message Media, Return Path, Postini, and SendGrid, and from time to time, given our involvement in the email domain, we come across companies that have “discovered” interesting unaddressed “white spaces” in the market. Bounce.io is one of those companies.

Our Investment in TeamSnap

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 16:05:59 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we’ve completed our initial investment in TeamSnap. Located in Boulder, CO, TeamSnap is building a software platform that helps people manage groups that they belong to such as sports and hobby groups.

With our portfolio company investments related to our Marketplace and Distribution themes, we’ve been consistently interested in solving problems of friction in markets that are willing to pay for both access and efficiency. Companies such as Sympoz, PivotDesk, and Rover are examples that address systemic friction in procuring the goods and services their particular markets want.

Prompt.ly – Our Second FG Angels Investment

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 20:27:12 +0000

We’re excited to announce our investment in Prompt.ly, our second FG Angels investment. Today, Prompt.ly announced they have closed a $1.5M financing, with $325,000 coming from our FG Angels syndicate.

Prompt.ly provides a mobile-first SaaS platform to empower the “invisible economy” of service providers across the world – think psychologists, massage therapists, personal trainers, housecleaners, tutors, gardeners, etc. It is estimated that these service providers account for over $1 trillion of economic activity annually in the US alone. You can watch Prompt.ly’s introductory video to learn more.

OnTheGo Platform – Our First FG Angels Investment

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 14:25:39 +0000

We are excited to announce our first FG Angels investment in OnTheGo Platforms. Today, OnTheGo announced they have closed a $700,000 financing with $330,000 coming from our FG Angels syndicate.

We are fascinated with Google Glass and the potential for more tightly integrated human computer interaction as a result of technologies like Google Glass. We met the CEO, Ryan Fink, and his partners from OnTheGo six months ago, gave them some feedback, and made some introductions for them.

Our (Data)Heroes…

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 17:27:17 +0000

Today, our portfolio company DataHero announced their product is exiting beta into GA release, and that they raised a new round of funding led by Foundry Group. Even better, they announced integration with their portfolio company cousin SendGrid, allowing easy analysis of send and open rates, and easy drag-and-drop cohort analysis of SendGrid’s data. DataHero also announced additional integrations with dataset provider Quandl and customer service app Desk.com.

We’ve been incredibly impressed with the progress the team has made since we led their initial seed round in 2012 and believe strongly in their vision of making sophisticated data visualizations accessible to anyone. While historically most business intelligence software has focused on accessing data residing in enterprise SQL databases, we see the future being radically different: mission-critical enterprise data increasingly resides in disparate vertical SaaS applications and cloud storage systems, and best-in-class BI tools will make it easy to access and analyze these important data sources in just a few clicks.

Our Investment in littleBits

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 12:23:59 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we’ve co-led the $11m Series B funding of littleBits. Based in New York, littleBits mission is to democratize electronics so that society can be creative with electronics in the way it is with software.

We love robots and electronics. The maker movement is in full swing. 3D printing doesn’t seem foreign or cutting edge any more. Consumer electronics companies – like Fitbit – are accelerating at an unprecedented rate. The Internet of Things is no longer a strange phrase.

Foundry Group Announces Its Newest Fund – Foundry Group Select

Fri, 25 Oct 2013 15:56:27 +0000

Today, we are excited to announce the closing of our fourth fund, Foundry Group Select. While it is exactly the same size ($225 million) as our previous funds, it has a different focus.

The Foundry Group Select Fund will invest solely in our Foundry Group and previous funds’ portfolio companies that have achieved significant success.

With Foundry Group Select, we’ll be able to invest up to $25 million in these companies’ late stage growth rounds. Up until this point, we’ve been limited in the amount we can invest in these rounds due to our early-stage strategy, while we also use the best financial services, which anyone can find in this online review of survey junkie and help people and business as well.

Foundry Group Announces Major Shift In Investment Strategy

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 14:27:43 +0000

(Boulder): Today, Foundry Group, a venture capital firm that invests in U.S.-based seed and early stage technology companies announced, via video, a major change to their investing program. Previously, the firm has focused on cutting edge technologies within their well-known investment themes. Effective immediately, however, the firm will focus on more proven technologies that present less technology risk.

“We really believe that the golden age of technology occurred 30 to 40 years ago and we intend on identifying and investing in the best entrepreneurs in these older, key technologies,” said Seth Levine, Managing Director.

Our Investment in MapBox

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 13:17:10 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we’ve led the $10m Series A funding of MapBox. Based in Washington, DC and San Francisco, CA, MapBox provides a highly customizable mapping platform based on open data sources for web and mobile application developers. We became aware of MapBox this past summer via two vectors: Zack Rosen, CEO of our portfolio company Pantheon, introduced us to Eric Gundersen, CEO of MapBox, and our portfolio company Gnip worked with MapBox and data artist Eric Fischer (now part of the MapBox team!) to do some amazing visualizations using geotagged tweets. When a company and entrepreneur is recommended to us via multiple trusted sources, we pay attention. While the digital mapping and satellite imagery industry has long been dominated by large companies, governments, and a proprietary data mindset, the open-source and open-data movements have made inroads into the mapping world. Most notable is the OpenStreetMap project, started in 2004, which now has over one million contributors worldwide building an ever-growing and extremely rich dataset. MapBox embraces open-data and open-source and provides a rich set of tools that enable publishers and web and mobile developers to quickly and easily add fast, beautiful, and highly customizable maps to their sites and apps. As a quick example: here’s a map of Foundry Group global headquarters using our logo, font, and color palette:

FG Angel FAQ

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 02:19:56 +0000

We’ve been floored by the amount of interest the community has shown in our AngelList syndicate, FG Angel. Alongside that interest has come a lot of questions which have been helpful to us as we work through the details of creating our AngelList Syndicate and making our first FG Angel investment.

To provide clarity where we can, we’ve put together this FAQ that responds to many of the questions we’ve received. As you read through this FAQ, keep in mind that it is specific to our FG Angel initiative. If you have questions about syndicates in general, AngelList has put together their own FAQ.

AngelList – Do Or Do Not, There is No Try

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 12:06:37 +0000

Yesterday, at our weekly Monday (sushi, sometimes tacos) lunch, we talked about AngelList. Over the weekend we each read blogs about how AngelList was going to transform venture capital, including The Great Venture Capital Rotation, AngelList Syndicates Will Also Pit Angel Against Angel, Leading vs. Following, Is @AngelList Syndicates Really Such a Big Deal?, and Some Thoughts On The Big AngelList Deal. Notwithstanding the theorizing, prognostications, and brilliant prose, we think that the verdict is still out on the longer term effects of AngelList to the venture capital industry.

Cloudability is Looking for a VP of Engineering

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:28:25 +0000

Cloudability is a Portland/Bay Area based startup that is changing the way companies measure, monitor and analyze their cloud based infrastructure. With a growing team that works closely together, we move fast and enjoy what we do. Over 7,000 companies across the globe use our platform today. Come join the fun and build something big with us.

JOB DESCRIPTION
As part of Cloudability’s Executive Team, the Vice President of Engineering oversees our growing team of software engineers. This is a hands-on role, where you will be using your experience as a software engineering manager in a rapidly growing environment to lead the engineering function, mentor staff and expand the team. In addition, you will use your experience solving significant and complex technical problems to serve as the strategic technical leader for Cloudability, partnering closely with the rest of our executive team as we continue to build great products our customers will love.

Our Investment in 3D Robotics

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 15:03:07 +0000

We’ve long felt that machines are taking over the world. Given the rapid cost decreases in sensory components (brought upon, inpart, by the proliferation of smart phones and other mobile devices), it’s easier and cheaper than ever to construct hardware that can interact with the outside world in a fully or partially autonomous way.

Over the past few years, we’ve kept close attention to one particular market of interest: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We believe that the applications are nearly endless, but many have been cautious due to market and regulatory concerns. Early companies produced toys that had some basic ability to do minimal autonomous activities. They were also expensive. Even today, most of them do nothing more than fly around a camera and help a pilot not to crash. Although even then the results aren’t always pretty as evidenced by this wedding photographer drone running into the head of the groom.

Our Investment in LeadPages

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 12:28:29 +0000

We’re excited to announce today our investment in LeadPages. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota (our first MN investment!), LeadPages is the easiest way to create and split-test landing pages, launch pages, sales pages, webinar registration pages, and other conversion pages.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the web for generating customer leads. With hundreds of thousands of businesses competing for the attention of consumers across the web, the importance of web marketing continues to increase. There are numerous ways that companies drive traffic to their websites, and a large industry has evolved around the best marketing practices to drive that traffic through better content and marketing strategies and effective use of ad spending on things such as Google AdWords. However much less attention has been paid to the pages where those ads drive customers, and what they’re asked to do once they land on those pages.

Foundry Group Contributes $100,000 To EFCO For Boulder Flood Relief

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 12:48:24 +0000

When we started Foundry Group in 2007, part of our strategy was to build a national venture capital firm based in Boulder, Colorado. Brad and Seth already lived here; Ryan and Jason made the move from San Francisco to Boulder. Since then we’ve all called Boulder home.

While only about 30% of our investments are in Colorado, we love this place. Living here bring us both personal and professional joy every day. We believe Boulder is one of the best places on the planet to live and to build startup companies.

Our Investment in Kato

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 15:32:11 +0000

We recently led an investment in Kato. We are excited to be an investor in another great company that has gone through the TechStars Boulder program. Brad will be joining the board.

Kato has a straightforward goal – solve the world’s enterprise messaging problem. In the last decade, there has been a proliferation of efforts to address real-time communications in the enterprise. The current state of play is a total mess, especially when you try to go across organizations. The default remains our trusty friend email, which ends up being a soul-crushing way to try to deal with real-time communications.

Awe.sm: Platform and Application Evolution

Tue, 16 Jul 2013 21:08:16 +0000

Today, Foundry Group portfolio company awe.sm announced a new social analytics product targeted at brands and agencies which leverages theirpowerful social ROI measurement platform.

As we discussed when we invested in awe.sm, the company fits comfortably into our Glue and Protocol themes, and the company caught our eye because several of our portfolio companies, including Topspin Media and StockTwits, were creating value from its technology platform. Companies with developer-facing products are compelling to us, as evidenced by our investments in companies like SendGrid, Urban Airship, MongoLab, and Chute.

Our Investment in Modria

Mon, 08 Jul 2013 16:44:35 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we’ve completed an investment in Modria. Located in San Jose, CA, Modria is building an online dispute resolution and mediation platform.

With the explosion of online activities, people are transacting at a rate never before seen. This obviously includes ecommerce, but also includes mundane things like paying bills online, reviewing property assessments, filing insurance claims, and other things that used to be non-digital activities. It is inevitable that all of these new transactions will generate an enormous amount of disputes that need to be resolved.

Our Investment in Chute

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:39:55 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group is the lead investor in a $7m Series A financing in Chute Corporation. Chute provides “instant media infrastructure” to web and mobile app developers at companies such as CNN, The House of Blues, the NBA, Conde Nast, and many more.

Chute fits squarely into our Glue theme. We continue to be enthusiastic about companies that provide on-demand application infrastructure for mobile and web developers. Multiple companies in our Protocol and Glue themes fit this description, including SendGrid, MongoLab, Urban Airship, and Pantheon.

Our New Look

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:00:16 +0000

We hope you’ve noticed that foundrygroup.com has a new look and feel. Designed by our friends at Slice of Lime, we felt that it was time to give a bit of a refresh to the Foundry site, which was feeling rather stale and outdated. We’ve tried to streamline things, make information more readily available and to highlight our investments more on our homepage.

With this site redesign we also took the opportunity to take some new group and individual shots of the Foundry team. Some have been posted here, others we’ll roll out in a later update.

Joining The Board of Harmonix

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 02:07:47 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Brad will be joining the board of Harmonix. The company, best known for developing three massive game franchises – Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Central – is hard at work on a new generation of games that transform the way humans and computers interact.

Given our deep focus on human-computer interaction, it was easy for us to decide to get involved with Harmonix. We’ve learned an enormous amount about the intersection of human-computer interaction and video games over the past five years through our investments in Zynga, Sifteo, and Orbotix. We’ve continued to stretch the envelope of human-computer interaction with investments in Oblong, Occipital, and Organic Motion. We’ve seen, and experienced, first hand the power of using different HCI paradigms to capture human emotion and interaction in different contexts.

Our Investment in Rover.com

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 07:46:01 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have led a $7m Series B financing in Rover.com, the leader in digital dog boarding that connects dog owners with approved, reviewed, and insured sitters. In addition to making our dogs Brooks, Bear, Einstein, and Mosley happy, we are excited to be funding another great Seattle-based company as well as a company to emerge from a Startup Weekend (where Brad is a board member.)

Rover.com fits in our new marketplace theme. In this theme, we are searching for situations that have an inherent suppressed supply as well as a demand – the market needs to work for both participants. We’re particularly intrigued with markets where the goods or services in question exist already, where full demand has been difficult to obtain on an individual basis. Finally, we are concerned with time – we want assets that expire if not used. We think of this type of market as “remnant asset monetization.”

Our Investment in VictorOps

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:54:35 +0000

We are pleased to announce we have led the seed round financing of VictorOps, a company based in Boulder, CO founded by serial entrepreneurs Todd Vernon, Bryce Ambraziunas, and Dan Jones. Todd, Bryce, and Dan have worked together closely over the years as co-founders and early executives at both Raindance Communications and Lijit Networks.

This is the third time we have backed a company Todd has founded. Todd was previously co-founder/CTO at Raindance Communications, which we backed at Mobius Venture Capital and went public in 2000. Todd went on to be co-founder/CEO at Lijit Networks, which Foundry Group invested in in 2008 and was acquired in 2011 by Federated Media.

Our Investment in Betabrand

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:40:27 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group is the lead investor in a $6.5m Series B investment in Betabrand Corporation. Located in San Francisco, CA, Betabrand is an online clothing company that creates unique clothing that appeals to an individual’s sense of personal style, exclusivity, and creation. By creating limited edition “inventions” Betabrand takes the ability to manufacture small batches of clothes while allowing their users to participate in the creation process.

A New Investment Theme? You Tell Us.

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 08:19:23 +0000

At Foundry Group, we spend a lot of time thinking about our Thematic Investing Approach. We both rethink our current strategies within existing themes and also talk about what big picture and transformative trends are occurring that may lead to new themes.

Previously, we’ve unearthed themes after we’ve made several initial investments in an area and have spent enough time that we’ve been satisfied that we’ve found an area of opportunity that we can invest in over a ten to twenty year life span. Prime examples of this were our February 2011 unveiling of our Distribution theme and our April 2011 post about our Adhesive theme, which itself emerged out of our Glue theme.

Our investment in isocket

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:03:33 +0000

Today isocket announced an $8M Series A financing led by Foundry Group. isocket is pioneering the concept of “programmatic direct buying” of online advertising – connecting buyers and sellers of premium display inventory together on the isocket platform to streamline and make more efficient the process of buying and selling premium display. By making the traditionally very manual direct ad sales process easier, isocket has created the largest marketplace for direct ad buys. This means more high value demand coming straight to publishers doors, and more premium reach for advertisers with less overhead and more synergy with their RTB campaigns.

Our Investment in Mobiplug Networks

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 08:41:48 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we’ve led a $2.7m Series A financing of Mobiplug Networks, a graduate of this summer’s Boulder TechStars program. Mobiplug is developing an affordable all-in-one home monitoring and control solution that starts with a gateway device that sits on a home network and speaks a variety of the most common wireless protocols like ZigBee, Z-Wave, Insteon and more.

Once installed, homeowners will be able to monitor and control lights, locks, thermostats, sensors and other devices in the home via smartphone and tablet applications that will make using these technologies simple and delightful. A great benefit to the consumer will be the comfort, convenience, and peace of mind they receive at an affordable price. At the same time, Mobiplug is opening up their API so that developers can innovate on their platform as well, which will enable all sorts of cool functionality by allowing web services with open APIs to interact and access the gateway to create truly automated actions with the connected devices, via simple API calls.

Raising Our Third Fund – Foundry Venture Capital 2012, L.P.

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 08:19:38 +0000

We are very happy to announce today the closing of our third fund, Foundry Venture Capital 2012, L.P. The fund is the same size as our last one: $225,000,000 in limited partner commitments. We are pleased to be working with a great group of investors.

Our Investment In Modular Robotics

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 07:00:50 +0000

We recently led a $3m financing in Modular Robotics, a Boulder-based company that is building a programmable robot construction platform. They’ve already released their first product – Cubelets – which is available for purchase now.

As kids, we played with Legos, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, and Erector Sets. Over the years there have been efforts to integrate this primal desire to “build things” with robots, combining the physical (e.g., Legos) with the digital (software). One of the first attempts at creating a robot construction platform has evolved into Lego Mindstorms. The idea for Mindstorms came out of the MIT Media Lab and was commercialized in conjunction with Lego and is now a substantial product line for Lego. The First Robotics Competition spawned a number of kits over the years, including those from VEX, another company in this category. Many other companies have created kits around robotics, ranging from the simple to the extremely complex.

Our Investment In FullContact

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 13:25:10 +0000

Last night FullContact announced that we have led their $7m financing. We are psyched to be an investor in another great company that has gone through the TechStars Boulder program. Brad will be joining the board.

FullContact has a straightforward goal – solve the world’s contact information problem. Right now there is no “single version of truth” for an individual contact and as more and more systems use and proliferate fragments of contact records, things are just getting worse. The problem is not merely collecting and presenting contact information, but cleaning up the data, enriching it, de-duplicating it, validating it, and making it easily accessible in any context.

Our Investment in Cloudability

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 09:55:44 +0000

Yes, we’ve been busy with financings lately, but we’ve been very fortunate to meet a lot of great entrepreneurs. And today we are excited to talk about Cloudability. Cloudability, located in Portland, OR, is creating a software platform that collects, analyzes and models cloud computing costs and usage.

We’ve long been believers in cloud computing, both as investors and users. Forbes estimates that by 2013, 80% of companies will be using cloud-computing resources in their businesses. Today the market spends $68 billion on cloud resources and that number is expected to triple by 2015. These adoption numbers are being driven by the deployment of SaaS (Software as a Service) models of software deployment, but also more recently BaaS (Backend) and IaaS (Infrastructure).

Our Investment In Jirafe

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:22:30 +0000

It’s a big day for funding announcements here at Foundry. This morning we announced that we led a $5M financing into Pantheon to help them extend their leadership in hosted Drupal (see that post here). Fast forward a few hours and we’re also today announcing our investment in ecommerce analytics and marketing platform, Jirafe.The Jirafe platform helps retailers make better use of their marketing budgets, drive better inventory and merchandizing decisions, and gain better insights into their online sales funnel. That’s a longer way of saying that Jirafe helps online retailers make more money, something that we believe every ecommerce vendor is looking to do!

Our Investment In Pantheon

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:24:33 +0000

Today we are pleased to announce that we’ve led a $5M Series A investment in Pantheon, a cloud service for developing, deploying and scaling enterprise websites built upon the Drupal open-source content management platform. Check out the company’s blog post and also Venture Beat and PE Hub, who have covered today’s funding announcement.

Pantheon fits into our Glue investment theme and represents a growing category of cloud-based application infrastructure providers in our portfolio including Awe.sm, Gnip, SendGrid, ObjectLabs, Standing Cloud and Urban Airship.

Singly App Challenge

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:45:00 +0000

Recently, our portfolio company Singly held a hackathon called the Singly App Challenge to mark the official launch of the Singly platform. The event was a great success: there was a strong turnout, some amazing apps were built in just 48 hours, and the winning team walked away with a $10,000 prize. Singly plans to host more of these in the future, so stay tuned!

Foundry Group Beer!

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 11:54:39 +0000

Today we are releasing our first batch of Foundry Group beer: the Liquidation Preference Spring Equinox Ale. As many of you know, we are serious beer nerds at Foundry Group – if you need further proof, check out Ryan’s photolog of the beers he’s enjoyed over the years. Way back in the stone ages of the early 90s, Ryan even used to brew his own beer.

We decided that a cool perk for our LPs, portfolio company founders and CEOs and would be to create a batch of Foundry Group beer and send these members of the Foundry Group family a 22oz bomber of beer.

Our Investment in Datahero

Thu, 31 May 2012 09:29:24 +0000

Today Datahero announced that Foundry Group has led the company’s seed round, and we are joined by a great set of co-investors including Neu Venture Capital, former Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg and analytics experts and LinkedIn alums Mike Greenfield and Jonathan Goldman.

Datahero was founded with the goal of bringing powerful data analytics and visualization to everyone, allowing anyone to understand the data that matter to them. The founders are Big Data veteran Chris Neumann and user experience expert Jeff Zabel. Chris was the first hire at Aster Data, a Big Data company from before the term was coined. Jeff Zabel spent many years at BMW’s Palo Alto offices and was a driving force behind the company’s iPhone/Android phone integration projects and the award-winning Google Maps send-to-my-car feature.

Our investment in Mocavo

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:37:17 +0000

Today Mocavo announced that Foundry has led a Series A investment in the business. Since launching in March of 2011, Mocavo has worked to create a genealogy search platform that provides users with the best tools available to find information on their ancestors. And while the genealogy is a large (and growing) market, the companies that have focused on this space have generally concentrated on building proprietary data assets that they have made available to subscribers to their services, rather than focusing on the tools by which genealogists access those data.

Our Investment In SEOMoz

Mon, 14 May 2012 20:50:59 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have made an investment in SEOMoz. Based in Seattle, SEOMoz is the leading provider of software for search engine optimization (SEO) and hosts the web’s most vibrant SEO community.

SEOMoz has a set of basic rules they refer to as the TAGFEE code (transparency, authenticity, generous, fun, empathetic, and exception). TAGFEE is on display in SEOMoz CEO Rand Fishkin’s awesomely detailed post about the financing titled Moz’s $18 Million Venture Financing: Our Story, Metrics and Future.

Our Investment in Singly

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:39:49 +0000

We are pleased to announce our initial investment in Singly, Inc. The company, located in San Francisco’s Mission District, is creating a software platform and service for personal data.

Through investments in our Glue theme, we’ve seen companies like Gnip and Next Big Sound build valuable businesses by making it easy for developers to obtain and interact with big sets of public data from web applications.

And the volume of private/people data (and information related to people) is exploding: tweets, photos, videos, click-streams, social interactions, check-ins, data from real-world sensors like heart monitors, email, Fitbit-like devices, health records, financial records, transaction histories, location information and much more. This growing, fragmented world is rich with possibilities and nascent in its organization and infrastructure.

Hiring between portfolio companies

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:16:53 +0000

The question of how we handle companies within the portfolio company hiring from each other has come up a number of times recently and we thought it would be a good idea to hit the subject head on, publicly. With over 40 companies in the Foundry portfolio, and with many of these companies concentrated in specific geographies (in particular Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle and New York) there are often times when an employee from one company in which Foundry has an investment applies for a job or is approached by another company in which Foundry has an investment.

Our Investment in Awe.sm

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:15:23 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have made our initial investment in Awe.sm. The company provides a powerful analytics platform for social media to developers, marketers, agencies and publishers. We first met Awe.sm’s co-founder and CEO Jonathan Strauss at the Glue Conference in 2009 and have been following the evolution of Awe.sm with interest since then. As Awe.sm’s user adoption increased and their platform vision evolved and came into sharper focus (see today’s launch of the new awe.sm for developers platform), we decided it was time for Foundry Group to invest in Awe.sm.

Our Investment In Yesware

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:31:07 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have made our initial investment in Yesware. Based in Boston, Yesware is a seed stage company that is developing services that connect salespeople, their email and CRM. We believe that mapping this basic relationship – between the application in which salespeople, executives, and the people who support them spend the majority of their time and the app which is used to perform key business functions – is a critical step in driving organizational efficiency and further spreading both the ubiquity and power of CRM.

Lijit Acquired by Federated Media Publishing

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:39:07 +0000

Today we’re happy to announce that Federated Media Publishing has acquired Foundry Group portfolio company Lijit Networks. The deal is a great outcome for the company and its investors. As part of the transaction, Foundry Group Partner Seth Levine will join the Federated Media board of directors and Todd Vernon (Lijit’s CEO and founder) and Walter Knapp (Lijit’s COO) will take on senior operating roles at the combined business (both will report directly to Federated’s CEO Deanna Brown).

Foundry Group Premiers Documentary Film About Secret Lives of Venture Capitalists

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 07:40:11 +0000

Today, Foundry Group, a venture capital firm investing in seed and early stage US-based technology companies, premiered a documentary film illustrating through complex metaphors and stunning montages the secret lives of venture capitalists which has been rarely seen or understood, until now. Set amidst a backdrop of a highly competitive investment environment, the film follows four venture capitalists as they explore the intense relationships between themselves and the entrepreneurs in which they invest. While these relationships are critical to the long-term health of the start-up ecosystem, the VCs chose to communicate only through song and interpretative dance.

Our Investment in Sympoz

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:19:56 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have completed our initial investment in Sympoz,. Sympoz, located in Denver, CO, creates enthusiast communities at the intersection of education, publishing, social and commerce, which inspire and educate enthusiasts while enabling experts to grow and monetize their followings.

Our distribution theme, including our investments in Zynga and Cheezburger, has shown us that delivering engaging content on a vast distribution network can make for a compelling company. One of the secrets of these companies’ success is spending relatively small amounts on content, over many different verticals and subject matters, and not relying on a “hits driven” content business.

Our Investment In MakerBot

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:16:08 +0000

We are excited to announce that we’ve led a $10 million financing in MakerBot Industries, a Brooklyn, NY-based company that has developed the first low cost commercial 3D printer.

While 3D printing technology has been around for a while, to date it has been limited to high-end industrial printers costing between $10,000 and $500,000. While the applications of 3D printing are very broad and extremely compelling, the cost and complexity of the products and process has limited the application of 3D printing.

Occipital’s 360 Panorama Is Free. For Now.

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:52:57 +0000

For a limited time, Occipital’s Panorama 360 is free. If you don’t know why this is such an awesome app, watch the short video demonstration below.

We closed our investment in Occipital last week. The Occipital gang is going to create a bunch of amazing stuff and now’s your chance to get on board with a one minute iPhone download. And, if you are reading this after the free offer expires, it’s still worth getting for the couple of bucks they are charging.

Our Investment in Occipital

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 09:11:49 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2010, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Occipital Inc., (“Occipital”). Occipital, located in Boulder CO and San Francisco, CA is creating world-class computer vision products for mobile platforms.

As part of our Human Computer Interaction investment theme, we’ve become firm believers that computer vision technology is fundamentally changing many of the ways that people interact with computers. With our prior investments in Oblong and Organic Motion, we’ve seen the impact of this kind of technology and a future of applications built around computers being able to “see” what is going on in the real world.

NVCA Members Support Creation of Private Company Accounting Board

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:15:01 +0000

This week, NVCA sent a letter signed by more than 70 of its member firms to the chairman and president of the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) supporting the recommendations of its Blue Ribbon Panel on Private Company Financial Reporting (BRP). Two of the significant recommendations are 1) the development of more relevant and useful private company accounting standards and 2) the creation of a separate board to develop and maintain them. Currently, private company and public company accounting principles and standards are under the purview of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).

Our Investment in Authentic8

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 11:57:36 +0000

In 2001 I led Mobius Venture Capital’s investment in a company that was defying then-conventional wisdom in its approach to email security. Postini offered an anti-spam/anti-virus email security solution hosted in the cloud, as opposed to via on-premise software or an appliance. This was back before SaaS was even a generally recognized acronym; but what Postini was doing seemed intuitively obvious and their approach was then in the early stage of being validated by customers.

Jobs At Foundry Group Portfolio Companies

Tue, 24 May 2011 20:31:12 +0000

Many of our portfolio companies are hiring. As a result, we’ve put up a new Foundry Group Jobs page on our website. You can sort by Company, Location, or Category. There is also a Foundry Group Jobs twitter feed that you can follow – whenever a new job is posted it’ll hit the feed.

Our friends at Union Square Ventures helped us set this up. They worked with Indeed, one of their portfolio companies, on the USV Jobs page which we liked a lot. Special thanks goes to Gary Chou who is the GM of the USV Network.

Our Investment in MongoLab

Wed, 18 May 2011 10:05:42 +0000

Today we are pleased to announce that we’ve led a $3M Series A financing in MongoLab, a San Francisco-based DBaaS (that’s database as a service) provider of MongoDB in the cloud. We are joined by a great syndicate of investors that includes Baseline Ventures, GRP Partners, Freestyle Capital and Bullet Time Ventures

MongoLab fits squarely into our Glue investment theme and represents a growing category of cloud-based application infrastructure providers in our portfolio that includes Gnip, SendGrid, SimpleGeo, Standing Cloud and Urban Airship.

Foundry Group’s AdTech Investing: Adhesive

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:39:22 +0000

We’ve written extensively about our thematic investment approach and a handful of our active themes, most recently our Distribution theme which we’ve been working on for several years but had yet to formalize and discuss publicly.

Over the past few quarters, we’ve been thinking more about the online advertising investments that we’ve made over the last three years, which include AdMeld, Lijit, Trada, Medialets, Mandelbrot Project, Triggit and Integrate. While this is about 20% of our active portfolio, we’ve never considered AdTech a theme. Instead, we have included these companies in our Glue theme since each company is an intermediary technology – although in each case applied to AdTech.

Our Investment in Openspace

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:26:53 +0000

We are excited to welcome Openspace to our family. We made a seed investment back in October 2010 and the company asked us to hold off announcing anything until they had a few things ironed out.

Openspace is a one-stop marketplace for buying apps, music, books and movies for smart phones, tablets and desktops. They are approaching building an app store from an open community perspective, via the Developers Cooperative, which we thought aligned well with our newest theme Distribution. The App Store market is maturing quickly and it’s been exciting helping founders Robert Reich and Randy Watler chart the evolving landscape.

Foundry Group Invests in Attachments.me

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:07:19 +0000

Tired of not finding what you are looking for when you search your email system? If you know the person who sent the message you are looking for, you might have some luck. But if you are looking for information contained within an attachment, link, or if you’ve forgotten who the sender was, you are most likely in trouble.

But maybe not. We are pleased to announce our investment in Attachments.me, which is building a natural-language based platform to extract information from attachments and links contained within a user’s email store. The company has created an email enhancement tool to enable easy access to the treasure trove of valuable data currently trapped within email systems. Attachments.me indexes a user’s email account and presents an attachments-centric view of it, creating document thumbnails, providing search within attachments, and, above all, makes a user’s email experience better and more productive.

Theme: Distribution

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 10:33:51 +0000

As we’ve written about in the past, we use what we call a thematic approach to what we invest in. Our current themes are Human Computer Interaction, Glue, Digital Life, and Protocol. We’ve been hinting about two new themes that we’ve been investing in for a while – one that’s a derivative from our Glue theme (which we’ll discuss in a separate post) and the Distribution theme.

In general, we avoid investing in vertical markets. The one exception is a set of companies that are in our Distribution theme and include Zynga, Topspin, StockTwits, and Cheezburger. Each of these companies is aimed at a specific vertical market and has the following set of common characteristics:

Gist Is Acquired By RIM

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 13:10:57 +0000

RIM has announced that it has acquired Gist. We are super proud of the Gist team for all they have accomplished since we invested in them in May 2009.

Boulder – Our Small City of Innovation

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 10:54:25 +0000

Recently, we were fortunate to have the kind folks from MSNBC come visit us to see why Boulder is such a special place for entrepreneurship and innovation.

We Took A Bite Out Of Cheezburger

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:20:13 +0000

Today Cheezburger Holdings announced that we have led a $30 million financing.

We were originally introduced to Cheezburger’s founder and CEO Ben Huh about 18 months ago by our mutual friend Micah Baldwin at the LA TwiistUp event. We apparently shared a fondness for clever misspellings and hit it off immediately.

At the beginning on 2010, with our friend Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group, we approached Ben and started talking about investing in Cheezburger. The timing wasn’t right for Ben and his investors for a variety of reasons but we stayed in touch.

Simplifying Performance Marketing – Invests in Integrate

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 16:18:45 +0000

At the very end of last year we announced an investment in Integrate – a performance advertising platform company. Seth posted about it on his blog at the time and we meant to repost it here at FoundryGroup.com as well. Here it is:

Performance marketing has been both a very lucrative side of internet advertising but also a bit of the wild west, where rules are made to be stretched or broken (with alarming regularity). And while the simplicity of pay for performance has been attractive to many advertisers, diligence has been required to monitor the quality of the traffic and leads generated by performance marketers. In particular, control of creative assets and their appropriate use has been a concern for many advertisers that is why many businesses opt to hire a SEO agency to bring traffic to their websites. In addition, existing performance marketing platforms have been limited solely to online assets.

2010 Year In Review

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:03:25 +0000

As we reflect back on 2010 it is fun to remember the new companies we invested in during the year. We ended up making investments in 11 new companies this year – eight in our 2007 fund and three in our new fund which we announced in October.

When we look back and see when the investments were made, our timing is very lumpy. We’ve always been this way – we don’t have a particular pacing, tempo, partner allocation, or thematic allocation goal – we just all work on everything together and invest when we get really excited about something.

Gluecon and Alcatel-Lucent team – changing the game at Gluecon 2011

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:45:27 +0000

Our goal for Gluecon has always been to make it *the* gathering place for developers working on the connective technologies that hold the web and IT infrastructure together – from web services to SOA to APIs and cloud computing. Eric Norlin – our partner in Gluecon, Defrag and now Blur – has helped bring together technology leaders for an in depth (and proudly geeky) conversation around the changing landscape of these technologies and the applications they support.

Foundry Group Invests in Urban Airship

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 05:51:56 +0000

We recently led the $5.4 million Series B funding round of Urban Airship. Besides our normal excitement of finding another great company to partner with, we are especially pleased to announce this as our first investment in our second fund.

Launched in June 2009, Urban Airship has found early success providing mobile developers with tools to optimize their applications, including easy-to-implement products for mobile messaging and content delivery and authorization. To date, Urban Airship has delivered more than 1 billion mobile messages across the Apple iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms. Many of the top brands in entertainment, media, publishing and gaming depend on Urban Airship to ensure their mobile marketing initiatives are profitable and scalable.

Fox Business Reports on California Companies Headed to Boulder

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 12:06:11 +0000

Today, Fox Business reporter Adam Shapiro spent some time in Boulder talking to folks about what is special about creating a company here.

He began the day at the Boulder Open Coffee Club, an informal twice-monthly gathering for those to talk tech, startups, geek and anything else of interest. Stay tuned for our personal blogs to see what we individually had to say on the subject.

Atoms Are the New Bits

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:56:25 +0000

During our careers, we’ve invested in a number of companies that sell consumer-electronics devices. In the past several years, we’ve invested in companies like Sling Media, Pogoplug, Smith & Tinker, Pie Digital, Sifteo, and most recently, FitBit and Orbotix.

In recent years it has become dramatically less expensive to design, build, and bring a consumer electronics device to market. The emergence of low-cost and low-power processors, DSPs and SOCs (systems-on-a-chip), the declining cost of all forms of memory, and Asian-based outsourced manufacturing (primarily in Taiwan, China and increasingly, Indonesia) has made investments in companies offering a consumer-electronics device a much more compelling opportunity from a VC perspective.

Foundry Group Version 2.0

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 10:36:22 +0000

We are very happy to announce today the closing of our second fund, Foundry Venture Capital 2010, L.P. The fund is the same size as our last one: $225,000,000 in limited partner commitments. We are pleased to be working with a great group of investors.

Foundry Group Invests in Orbotix

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 05:52:19 +0000

We recently led an investment in Orbotix, a Boulder, Colorado company that graduated from the TechStars Boulder 2010 program, Orbotix is creating a new game platform that combines common physical objects, smart phones, and a software marketplace. Their first product will “reinvent the ball” through the creation of a robotic ball controlled by a smart phone.

As we’ve explored the theme of human computer interaction, we’ve observed the incredible opportunity to integrate ordinary toys with computers. The ball is one such object as it is an extremely versatile and popular toy. However, up to this point, attempts to do clever electronic things with balls have been limited to simple things like incorporating motion-sensing blinking LEDs into the ball.

Foundry Group Invests in Fitbit

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 05:12:06 +0000

We recently led a $9 million investment in Fitbit. Based in San Francisco, Fitbit is creating pioneering consumer products in the field of human instrumentation. Its first product is a $99 device containing a 3D motion sensor that accurately tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, and sleep. The Fitbit tracker is smaller than a belt buckle and is easily worn on your waist, in your pocket or on undergarments. It includes a wireless base station which, when connected to your PC, uploads your data to the Fitbit web site where a user can track progress and compare results from other users. From the company’s website, users can track their activities, compare them to friends or the general population of Fitbit users and track other activity-related information (including diet).

Sifteo Needs a Head of Marketing

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:43:23 +0000

Sifteo, one of our portfolio companies located in San Francisco, is seeking a Marketing Lead to help deliver a new interactive play and learning system to consumers. They are looking for someone who can develop and execute a focused messaging and outreach plan, who can build and deliver a quantitative marketing program, who can build the right channel relationships, and who is excited about jumping into a start up environment. You’ll be working with the co-founders and the product team, and you will be responsible for the full marketing program for the product on a start-up budget.

Foundry Invests in Triggit

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:51:31 +0000

Today we are pleased to announce our investment in Demand Side Platform (DSP) Triggit and welcome Zach and Susan Coelius, Ryan Tecco and the rest of the Triggit team to the Foundry family.

Triggit has developed technology that helps advertisers and agencies buy media across various real-time bidding exchanges. Seth has a longer post up on his blog describing some of the changes in the online ad ecosystem – and specifically the rapid rise of exchange-based buying and selling – that lead us to this investment. Along with Foundry portfolio companies AdMeld and Lijit, we see Triggit standing at the center of this fundamental shift in online advertising and in Triggit’s case bringing unique technology to brands and agencies transacting on the real-time exchanges that will help advertisers more effectively target specific online audiences.

Foundry Group Invests in BigDoor

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:11:02 +0000

We recently closed a $4m investment in BigDoor Media. Based in Seattle, BigDoor provides a platform for non-game publishers to integrate game mechanics, such as points, badges, levels, leaderboards, virtual currency and virtual goods, into their web and mobile applications.

The web has become increasingly social. While many simple social features, such as sharing, liking, and favoriting content are appearing on publisher’s sites, users are increasingly engaging with each other in other ways as evidenced by the dramatic success of social games. As a result, many non-game publishers are now exploring ways to incorporate “game mechanics” into their web and mobile applications.

Foundry Group Invests in SimpleGeo

Tue, 18 May 2010 10:18:01 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group has invested in SimpleGeo. SimpleGeo, based in Boulder, CO, provides a hosted geospatial platform for web and mobile application developers, enabling third party app developers to build sophisticated location-based functionality into their applications on web-based and mobile platforms, including Android devices and the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

With the widespread availability of GPS-enabled smartphones, the market for location-based applications and services is going mainstream. Once the province of luxury automobiles and expensive single-purpose devices, hand-held turn-by-turn navigation applications have become commodity items that are either free or very low cost. Beyond basic map-based navigation apps, entirely new categories of applications have emerged based on the widespread availability of location-aware mobile devices. These include location-based advertising platforms, social/gaming “check in” tools like Foursquare and Gowalla, augmented reality applications like Layar and more.

The Origin of Oblong

Wed, 12 May 2010 13:34:59 +0000

Oblong founder John Underkoffler was recently profiled where he spoke about the origins of the company.

When we speak about the history of Oblong, we tend to start with the movie Minority Report, where John was Steven Spielberg’s science advisor. If you haven’t seen the movie in a while, check it out. It is one of the only movies that we’ve seen that holds up in its vision of the future even 8 years later.

Foundry Group Invests in Sifteo

Mon, 10 May 2010 09:47:50 +0000

We are excited to announce that Foundry Group has invested in Sifteo, Inc.

Sifteo is a game-platform development company that has developed “Siftables” the world’s first table-top gaming platform. Siftables are sets of cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities that act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them by piling, grouping and sorting to interact with digital information and media.

As cool as this sounds, it’s not nearly as cool as the company’s TED talk and demo below.

Foundry Group Invests in SendGrid

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:01:35 +0000

Today SendGrid announced that it has raised a $5m financing led by Foundry Group. Seed round investors Highway 12 Ventures, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, David McClure (via FF Angel) and David Cohen’s Bullet Time Ventures also participated in the round. Postini founder Scott Petry and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg also participated in the financing.

SendGrid offers a powerful and flexible cloud-based transactional email platform that enables companies and application developers to easily send and receive emails to and from their users, while enhancing their email delivery rates and providing rich analytics. The SendGrid platform easily scales to handle millions of users, providing access to world-class email infrastructure services, freeing developers from the hassles of managing the complexities of email servers and technologies.

Foundry Group Moves to Twitter Platform for Deal Evaluation

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:36:09 +0000

While we are fans of investing in companies in the email ecosystem with our thematic investing approach, we have come to the realization that email is not the most efficient form of communication for evaluating potential investment opportunities.

We are blessed to have a large number of entrepreneurs who are interested in us as potential partners and the volume of email we receive can sometimes overwhelm us, so we began the investigation for a more streamlined approach. We hired consultants from McKinsey & Company last summer and after 9 months of working with us to learn how we operate, it was obvious that Twitter was the right choice.

Introducing: Trada

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 06:52:26 +0000

Today is the public launch of Trada – a company we’ve been working with for the last 18 months to develop a platform that we believe will revolutionize search marketing. The fundamental premise is pretty straightforward: search campaigns are better managed by experts. The Trada platform brings together a “crowd” of search marketing experts to work on search campaigns of Trada advertisers across multiple search engines (currently Google, Yahoo and Bing). These experts propose ad copy, manage ad groups and keywords and deliver clicks (and conversions) to Trada advertisers for an advertiser determined price. Because the company leverages a group of experts, campaigns in the Trada system have more keywords (6,200 on average), a larger number of people working them (the system average is 24 optimizers per campaign) and as a result better success (the company’s customers see reductions in cost per conversion in some cases of over 25% even while increasing their search spending).

Organic Motion is Looking for Engineers

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:25:05 +0000

One of our portfolio companies, Organic Motion is hiring. They are a really exciting company right in the middle of our Human Computer Interaction Theme. In the company’s own words:

“Organic Motion is a global leader in the development of breakthrough markerless motion capture and analysis technologies. Our software products utilize state-of-the-art computer vision techniques and high performance graphics hardware to deliver an industry first set of production, entertainment, and research tools for use in a variety of industries.

Memeo Connect for Google Apps

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:04:41 +0000

Today, Foundry Group portfolio company Memeo announced the newest product in their suite of applications: Memeo Connect for Google Apps, which leverages new functionality announced by Google: the ability to upload all file types to Google Docs’ cloud-based storage. In addition to providing the ability to upload arbitrary file types to Google Docs, the Official Google Enterprise Blog also announced that Google Apps Premier Edition users will soon be able to use the Google Documents List Data API to upload files to Google Docs in batch, or to purchase applications offered by third parties to enable users to migrate and sync their files to Google Docs.

Foundry Invests in StockTwits

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 07:35:34 +0000

Today StockTwits announced (release here) that it had raised a $3m Series B financing led by Foundry Group and returning investor True Ventures. For us, StockTwits represents a unique opportunity to leverage the increasingly active conversation taking place on (and off) the Twitter platform around stocks and markets. We’ve witnessed in other investments the power of 3rd party networks to drive the scale and reach of new businesses and we believe StockTwits represents a huge opportunity to harness the Twitter community’s ongoing conversation around stocks and investing.

The Latest with Organic Motion

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:50:26 +0000

As we previously reported, we’ve recently invested in a computer vision company called Organic Motion. This is another one of our Human Computer Interaction investments. To give you an idea of one of the markets they are targeting, check out the these marketing materials designed for the defense industry. In it, you can see some specific use cases that the company can deliver today. (Be patient, it’s a 5mb file, so it takes a bit to view).

Oblong in the News

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:38:00 +0000

Our company Oblong was recently the subject of the new Bloomberg Series, Innovators. If you want to see 30 minutes of great TV about innovation and entrepreneurship focused around our portfolio company, it’s a great watch. They are in episode “Turning Point.” We are really excited about our partnership with Oblong and all that they’ve accomplished, so we are proud that others are recognizing their successes.

(As a technical note, we find that in Windows, IE works better than Firefox to view it).

Foundry Group Goes to the Supreme Court

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:35:42 +0000

Brad and I were lucky enough to see the Bilski argument at the Supreme Court. We were both beyond impressed and each wrote about our experience. Jason’s recap is here. You can find Brad’s summary here.

We are hopeful that as a result of this case, business method patents will be forever dead and gone. Given the tenor and body language of the court, we would be surprised if it turned out any other way. Perhaps most interesting was the courts’ investigation into software patents, even though that was technically not the issue at hand. We, individually at the Foundry Group, are not fans of the current ecosystem surrounding software patents and would be happy to see the court take action on this front too.

Our Investment in Organic Motion

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:37:09 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Organic Motion, Inc. The company is based in New York City and is a leading innovator of computer vision and advanced motion capture systems. Organic Motion’s core computer vision technology dramatically increases a computer’s ability to see and understand the motion of humans and other living organisms. The company offers groundbreaking turnkey and customized motion capture systems that utilize its patent-pending breakthrough computer vision technology.

Foundry Group Digital Life Summit

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:29:40 +0000

Last week we hosted what we called the “Foundry Group Digital Life Summit” here in Boulder, Colorado. While we are no strangers to helping host conferences such as Defrag and Glue, this was a much more intimate event that we arranged ourselves.

The genesis of the idea was to get our three portfolio companies in our Digital Life Theme together – namely Cloud Engines, Memeo, and Pie Digital – for a day or two of knowledge transfer and collaboration. After mulling the idea around, we decided to extend the gathering beyond our own portfolio and invite executives and board members of venture-backed and public companies that play in the broader Digital Life universe.

Our Investment in Next Big Sound

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:12:30 +0000

We are very happy to announce our investment in Next Big Sound, Inc. (“NBS”). NBS is an online music analytics and insights company located in Boulder, Colorado. They measure the growth and popularity of bands across major web properties and sell actionable insights around those data to band managers and other industry professionals. NBS has developed a scalable architecture that can quickly add new sources of information and aims to be the definitive source of quantifiable fan data surrounding the music ecosystem.

See you at Defrag!

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:23:27 +0000

Several years ago, along with conference veteran Eric Norlin, we started* Defrag – a conference designed to bring together a group of technologists to talk about the challenges around increasing fragmentation of data online and the tools and technologies that are being developed to make sense out of this data mess. We strongly believe that rather than sitting on the sideline watching and listening to the conversation taking place within the markets we care about that we should be actively facilitating and participating in that discussion (Defrag sits at the intersection of our Implicit Web and Protocol themes). In October we’ll be holding our third edition of Defrag and we’re extremely excited about how the conference is coming together*.

Smith & Tinker Financing

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:15:16 +0000

In the spring of 2008, we announced our initial investment in Seattle-based Smith & Tinker, a company founded by veterans of the toy, internet and gaming industries. At that time, the company was heads-down in development mode and wasn’t quite ready to talk about the product they were developing, so our initial blog post was somewhat short on details about what the company was up to. Beyond repeating Smith & Tinker’s mission, “reinventing play for the connected generation”, we said little.

The new Foundry Group website

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:36:32 +0000

We’ve been flattered with the feedback on our new Foundry Group website design. We had a lot of fun putting it together and are really happy with how it turned out. Websites for venture firms can be a challenge and in our case we wanted to create a site that was informative, serious but not stuffy and corporate. It was also important to us that it reflected our personalities.

Theme: Protocol

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:09:42 +0000

During a run several weeks ago, I was pondering the arc of several of our investment themes. When we made our investment in Gist, we talked about it being at the intersection of our Email and Implicit Web themes. It turns out to also include our RSS theme (which previously included investments in FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati.)

I’d just finished reading A Semantic Web Primer and was thinking about the various semantic web protocols that were the basis for our Implicit Web theme such as RDF, OWL, and XML. At some point I realized that the bucket of Internet and web-related protocols that we have been investing in since the mid-1990’s included SMTP, RSS, XML, and of course HTTP.

Email – The Original Social Graph

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:12:48 +0000

Reposted from Feld Thoughts.

I’ve been an Internet email user since early 1984 when I got my first Project Athena account as an undergraduate at MIT. Notwithstanding all the “email is dead” messages over the years, I continue to use email as my primary online communication mechanism. There are an enormous number of things that frustrate me about email, most notably the lack of fundamental innovation in email clients and servers. That said, as a messaging tool – it still dominates for me.

Pogoplug: Make your hard drive a cloud drive

Wed, 13 May 2009 08:04:39 +0000

Last Fall, we met the fine folks at Cloud Engines, the company behind the pogoplug, a wonderfully easy-to-use gadget that turns any USB storage device into a web and smart-phone accessible file system, giving users easy control over who they allow to access their files. In short, the pogoplug allows you to take the hard drive attached to your computer (or hanging off your router in the basement of your house) and make it accessible to the world at large – allowing it to become a full-fledged part of the cloud. The beauty of the pogoplug lies in the simplicity of its premise (to give users control over making their content extensible beyond their walled network) combined with the elegant way that Cloud Engines has designed the pogoplug to be both powerful in its function but extremely easy to set up and use.

Foundry Group’s investment in Medialets

Tue, 12 May 2009 06:08:53 +0000

At Foundry Group we’ve made investments in a handful of companies that participate in the online advertising ecosystem. But as we talk about how we think about these investments here on our blog and in other forums, we describe our efforts in this area not as “advertising” but as “glue.” Our interest lies in the intersection of advertising and our glue theme. Specifically we view advertising through the lens of connective technologies – those that help advertisers connect with users and remove friction from the overall system (both AdMeld and Lijit are examples of companies in the Foundry portfolio that fit into this line of thinking).

Our Investment in Gist

Tue, 05 May 2009 07:33:21 +0000

Today, Gist has announced that Foundry Group has led its $6.5m Series A financing. We are delighted to be investors in a company that we think has a shot at solving “the inbox problem” that we’ve been thinking about and living with for a long time.

If you follow our themes, you know that Email and the Implicit Web are two of our favorites. Email is a long running theme of ours dating back to 1996 when we invested in Email Publishing (the company that we believe was the first known email service provider.) Over the years we’ve invested in a number of successful email related companies, including Postini, Critical Path, and Return Path.

Jason is appointed to the NVCA Board

Fri, 01 May 2009 07:57:00 +0000

The annual meeting of the National Venture Capital Association just wrapped up in Boston yesterday. As you can imagine in these economic times there was plenty for the group (which is the industry association representing the approximately 450 venture capital firms in the United States) to discuss. If you’re interested, Jason has a post on his blog talking about the main news from the meeting – the NVCA’s view on how to fix the current crisis for venture backed companies in the capital markets.

Join us at Glue

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:15:14 +0000

At Foundry we organize our thinking about investing into what we call “themes”. The themes we pursue are horizontal in nature and are driven by underlying technology protocols and standards or emerging market trends and customer needs. Examples of the investment themes we are currently pursuing include Human Computer Interaction, Implicit Web, Email, Glue, and Digital Life.

As part of this approach we look to meaningfully participate in the ongoing conversation taking place within these thematic areas. To that end we’ve teamed up with Eric Norlin to work on a few conferences that bring together thought leaders from across the technology industry. Our first attempt at this is Defrag – a conference now in its third year that is focused on how technology has evolved to help people and organizations better organize, interpret and consume disparate information (thus the name “Defrag”). While the conference wasn’t theme specific, the conversation has tended to tie closely to our Implicit Web and Email themes.

Shoot to Thrill

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:48:45 +0000

Last summer, we invested in a company called EmSense, which has developed a technology to measure an audience’s emotional and cognitive response to a media experience. EmSense does this by capturing real-time biometric data from a large group of test subjects by measuring brainwaves (via dry EEG sensors), heart activity, breathing, blinking, temperature and motion. Our investment in EmSense falls squarely into our Human Computer Interaction (HCI) theme.

As we detailed in our original blog post about this investment, EmSense has a broad array of customers in the advertising, consumer products, retail and video game segments, each of which is using EmSense’s tools to refine and improve the quality and effectiveness of their media, be it a video, radio or print advertisement, product package or video game title.

What We Learned at CES

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:04:30 +0000

Foundry Group attended the latest incarnation of CES this past week and thought we’d give some of our thoughts on the show. In no particular order, here is “What We Learned at CES.”

Don’t buy a television for the next 6 months. This is certainly counter to what retailers and producers would want us to say, especially given the current state of the economy, but all the major brands are introducing exciting technologies in the first half of 2009. The TVs are thinner (some less than 1mm!), brighter (LED backlighting rocks), faster (240mhz refresh rate) and offer superior contrast ratios (1,000,000 to 1 and even higher). Next to the best of today’s generation of panels, there is no comparison. Having been to CES a few years in a row, this year seemed to demonstrate the biggest improvements on imaging. If you don’t buy a TV in this generation, hold on a couple of years until OLED TVs are commonplace and then sit a back and look at the best displays we’ve ever seen. For now, we’ll geek out on LED backlit generation two screens.
Everyone is trying to make things easier on consumers. It only took 20 years or so, but consumer device manufactures, both large and small are finally focusing on the consumer experience. Maybe this is the effect of Apple’s entrance into the consumer device ecosystem, but this year, in particular, showed many instances of deep thinking about usability. What was of particular interest to us were some of the startups that attended the show and instead of presenting groundbreaking technology, rather have executed on current technologies to bring the consumer a needed digital solution with the ease of use never seen before at an unexpectedly low price.
3D on TV. Full HD TVs and projectors that have incredible 3D-images (glasses needed) are now consumer available. Clearly the amount of content available will drive how popular these devices become, but the technology is really impressive to experience. We played a VW racing game in 3D and would have been happy to sit there all afternoon, or at least until the inevitable headaches set in. There was also a prototype of a 3D TV that didn’t require the viewer to wear glasses. It was pretty rough, but cool at the same time. We have our doubts that the entire universe of content will ever go 3D, given how different the production tools and processes are for live-action movies and television. However, for media like video games and CG animated content which are largely “3D native” already, there should be less of a hurdle to create appropriate 3D content, and probably better justification from a user-experience perspective as well.
SanDisk has a power marketing department. SanDisk had their usual large presence and this year the big announcement was a 2GB Rockband-branded SD card. All for the low price of 13 bucks. Yes, you can buy a regular SD card for about 4 bucks, but why not pay an extra $9 for a cool sticker? Well done, SanDisk. Also, similarly, one can now purchase a cool looking Godfather-branded USB thumb drive, (not from SanDisk) but it does contain some Godfather content, at least. Speaking of content, SanDisk also brought out a new MP3 player for lazy people called the slotRadio. The MP3 player comes with 1000 preloaded songs based on standardized genre playlists chosen by the company, not the user. Over time, a user can order new cards to put into the MP3 player’s slot, each card having a different genre of music pre installed. The only controls on the device are play and skip (i.e. no “back”). Call this the MP3 player for people who really don’t like music.
It was virtually empty at the show. Okay, that is a gross overstatement, but the hotel rooms were half the price of last year and it was definitely easier to navigate on the convention floor. The folks at CES claimed there was only an 8% drop in attendance, but it felt like a lot more. Our bet is that folks who registered beforehand didn’t buy plane tickets and hotel rooms and didn’t show up. CES probably included these folks in their numbers. After all, they have booths to sell based on attendance. Some reports have the attendance at 22% down.
Nobu is still excellent. Enough said. Guy Savoy was also scrumptious.
Human Computer Interaction. We were excited to see the continual refinement and presence of next generation human computer interactions. Frequent readers to our blog will note that we are huge fans of HCI. We wouldn’t say there was anything earth shattering, but it was nice to see multi-touch and other similar technologies progress.
Connectivity matters. Connecting more devices to more content in more places was a big theme. On the wireless front, there was a wealth of smart phones, LG’s new Dick Tracy-esque watch cell phone, lots of in-car connectivity (satellite TV, in-dash computers with mobile Internet, etc.), and a push to deliver more relevant content (traffic, weather, sports, etc.) via traditional GPS devices. And while the idea of accessing the Internet on a TV seems a bit passé (WebTV pioneered the idea about 14 years too early), 2009 just might go down in history as the year that this idea truly came to fruition. TV manufacturers seem to have embraced the idea—we think having this built into TVs is a big step forward when it comes to the average consumer—and the wealth of newly available content like NetFlix streaming movies and Yahoo’s widgets should make for a more compelling experience than WebTV’s original email-on-your-TV proposition.

Our Investment in Brightleaf

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:12:12 +0000

We are pleased to announce our investment in Brightleaf. Brightleaf, located in Westwood, MA, is a legal process automation company dedicated to providing business and legal solutions to in-house legal departments and law firms. Brightleaf has developed a software platform that automates much of the creation process for the legal profession’s most commonly used documents. For law firms, automating this process allows for both faster and more consistent document creation – saving them time and money while increasing quality. For in-house legal groups, the company’s platform allows for unprecedented control and standardization of business documents which allows companies to more quickly meet their customers’ needs. The company brings together a deep understanding of how enterprises create, move, store, retrieve and derive information from their legal documents.

Topspin’s on the Road

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:22:07 +0000

We invested in Topspin Media last summer, and they’ve been busy cranking out multiple releases of their Artist Manager platform while simultaneously supporting numerous album releases from established and new artists who have adopted Topspin’s technology to enable them to release their music direct-to-fan. As a reminder, Topspin provides advanced marketing tools and services to enable recording artists to build successful brands and businesses online.

Many musicians chose to release their music using Topspin’s platform in 2008. The two highest-profile releases to date have been David Byrne and Brian Eno’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today and Paul McCartney’s The Fireman. The Fireman’s Electric Arguments made The AMG Top 50 Album list for 2008, while the Byrne/Eno album (one of my personal favorites of the year) wound up on a boatload of year’s best lists, published by the likes of AMG, Sound Opinions, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Uncut and the NPR Listeners.

The Investments We Made In 2008

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 10:53:12 +0000

We made seven new investments in 2008. Two of the investments were seed rounds, four were first rounds, and one was a second round investment. We invested across three of our themes: Glue, Human Computer Interaction, and Digital Life. We covered plenty of geography with investments in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and Boulder.

While the global economy took a major downtown in 2008, we are strong believers that great companies can be started in any economic environment. We invest in the very early stages of a company’s lifecycle with a view that it will take them three or more years to hit their stride. As a result, we don’t try to time markets. Instead we pace our investments deliberately and strive for a consistent investment pace through the investment period of our fund.

What Does Foundry Group Invest In?

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 12:34:22 +0000

Of all the questions that we get, this one is the most common: “What do you guys like to invest in?”

Unlike many venture capital firms that invest in certain geographic regions or specific technologies and sectors, Foundry Group’s investing activity is largely driven by a thematic approach. The themes we pursue tend to be horizontal in nature and are often driven by underlying technology protocols and standards or emerging market trends and customer needs. Rather than looking for short-term hits, we focus on themes that have the ability to drive a cycle of innovation (and hence provide multiple investment opportunities) over a period of five to ten years or more. We invest across North America in a multitude of sectors tied to our thematic approach.

Politics and Music

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:27:41 +0000

It’s a scary thing to think of these two spending time together, but the political machine and the music industry have become strange bedfellows as of late. Specifically, we’ve been following the royalty negotiations and legislative actions surrounding Pandora.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Pandora, it’s an Internet music streaming company that allows listeners to discover new music based on what they already like. And best of all, it’s free. Jason wrote a post about his affection for Pandora recently and we all like Pandora here at Foundry Group.

Calling All Techies: Boulder Wants You!

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:44:16 +0000

If you’ve been following our blog, you already know that we think Boulder, Colorado, is an amazing place for tech startups. Boulder doesn’t get the same press as high-profile tech meccas like Silicon Valley, Seattle and NYC, but we do have a real culture of entrepreneurship and proximity to a major research university (and all the energy and culture that come with a college town). Equally important, the gorgeous surroundings of the Rocky Mountains mean Boulder isn’t all work and no play. Even our Silicon Valley-turned-Boulder transplant partners, Ryan and Jason, had to admit Boulder has a lot to distinguish it from the valley.

Our Investment in Pie Digital

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:46:43 +0000

We are happy to announce the latest addition to the Foundry Group family, Pie Digital. Pie has developed an affordable software platform, desktop device and service that, together, dramatically simplify the installation, maintenance and expansion of home computing equipment and networks. Pie makes it easy for consumers to connect and maintain their computers and the multitude of other digital devices in their home, enabling them to access and share documents, music and video files without worrying about the complexities of technology support. Simply put, Pie has created an “IT department in a box” for the average consumer.

How we use technology at Foundry

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:50:29 +0000

As a technology focused venture capital firm, we’re often asked how we make use of technology in running our business. While some software exists to help finance firms run their operations, there’s no magic “venture capital in a box” software (at least one that we’ve found) that would enable us to manage every aspect of running our firm. As a result we’ve put together our own technology infrastructure that helps us manage our business, better track information and more easily keep each other informed about what we’re up to.

Lijit Completes Series C Financing

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:11:41 +0000

Lijit Networks, one of our portfolio companies, just announced today that it closed a $7.1 million financing led by Foundry Group. This financing gives Lijit the financial resources to focus its efforts on rapidly growing its already sizeable base of publisher users, launching its search-powered ad network, and further expanding Lijit’s cool people-oriented search solutions.

We’ve blogged previously about Lijit and the role it plays in what we call our implicit web theme. Foundry Group has been involved with Lijit since its formation, so we’ve witnessed everything from the birth of its idea through its technology development phase to the company’s successful market introduction.

Our Investment in EmSense

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:01:25 +0000

We are happy to announce that we’ve added another exciting company to our portfolio. EmSense, based in San Francisco, has created the first scalable physiological and brainwave measurement technology platform, which provides accurate and objective moment-by-moment analysis of how a large audience responds emotionally and cognitively to media messaging.

EmSense marks Foundry Group’s third investment in our Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) theme (joining Smith & Tinker and Oblong), as well as our second investment in a company whose technical founders, including CTO Hans Lee, hail from the MIT Media Lab, a place chock-full of big-brained wizards who can do magical things with technology. In our previous blog posts about HCI we’ve alluded to the idea that computers might one day react to our thoughts. In fact, that has been possible in the lab for years, and the technology that enables this is now leaving the labs and is being deployed in the real world.

Zynga Completes $29 Million Round Led by Kleiner Perkins and IVP

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:15:10 +0000

Our portfolio company Zynga announced today that they have closed a $29 Million Round of Financing Led by Kleiner Perkins and IVP. We participated in the financing alongside of our co-investors Union Square Ventures and Avalon Ventures. Bing Gordon, a co-founder and former Chief Creative Officer of Electronic Arts and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins has joined Zynga’s board.

Brad wrote about the financing and Zynga’s progress on his blog in a post titled Doubling Down. There were numerous other articles and blog posts about the financing today, including extensive ones in the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch.

The University of Colorado and Entrepreneurship

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:46:36 +0000

As you may have read in a prior post on Boulder’s Culture of Entrepreneurship, we feel that one ingredient necessary to create and sustain this culture is engaged university activity. We are lucky to have the University of Colorado in our backyard and fortunate that it has consistently engaged in activities that foster and create entrepreneurship initiatives.

While none of us attended CU, we’ve all adopted it as our “other school” and have become very involved with several different groups.

Our Investment in Topspin

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:55:42 +0000

We are extremely pleased to announce our investment in Topspin Media’s Series B financing. Topspin is a media technology company headquartered in Santa Monica, California, dedicated to developing leading-edge marketing software and services that help artists and their partners build businesses and brands. Topspin’s platform helps artists manage their media catalogs and other assets, connect with fans and generate demand for their music.

Had our investment closed a couple of weeks earlier, we wouldn’t have been able to talk about it immediately, but the company recently un-stealthed themselves in true rock & roll style by appearing on the cover of the June 28th issue of Billboard magazine.

Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:14:42 +0000

One of our recent investments, Gnip, has launched its first service. Gnip is all about making data portability suck less. Remember our friend the Ping server? Gnip is the next generation of it designed specifically for the many-to-many webservice-to-webservice world.

Data sharing between two services is no big deal. It happens every day using RSS, Atom, XMPP, and open APIs. Two years ago this was still a novel idea and the power of an API could project a company like Twitter into geek mainstream overnight since it was easy to write a web app that could read and write from it. Or you could grab someone’s RSS feed and go to town with it. A ping server was really helpful here – rather than having to constantly check everyone’s RSS feeds, you could check the ping server and when something you cared about changed, go to the RSS feed.

There is no “I” in Foundry

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:04:47 +0000

Among our core beliefs at Foundry Group is the idea that we bring more value to our business as a team than as individuals. We believe that as a group we have more impact on our portfolio companies, are better at making investment decisions and are more thoughtful about the themes in which we invest.

This is somewhat of a departure from the typical venture capital model, in which venture partners are often islands unto themselves – free to pursue their version of venture capital in whatever way they see fit and to whom their fellow partners function less as a sounding board and more as an arbitration panel through which they must pass deals before they can be officially approved. While we recognize that our business will still be built on individual reputations and that it’s simply not practical (or wise) to have every partner involved in every aspect of the businesses in which we have investments, we believe that our team philosophy will ultimately drive better returns for the companies in our portfolio and subsequently for our investors. For us – who each bring different expertise and backgrounds to Foundry – this is a core operating philosophy and one that we believe characterizes the next evolution of the venture capital business.

Our Investment in Smith & Tinker

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:47:21 +0000

It is time to announce the newest member of our portfolio: Smith & Tinker. Consider this more of teaser announcement since S&T is not quite ready to describe in detail just what it is they are up to. As a preview, we’ll say this much: they fit within our human-computer interaction (HCI) theme and the tagline on their web site reads, “reinventing play for the connected generation”. To quote further from their site, S&T says the following:

Boulder’s Culture of Entrepreneurship

Wed, 28 May 2008 10:49:47 +0000

If you saw our prior post about what Jason and Ryan learned by moving to Boulder, you read about the vibrancy of Boulder’s entrepreneurial spirit. We decided to follow that post up with some specifics regarding the startup culture of Boulder and some of our related activities within it.

TechStars: If you are a frequent reader of Brad’s blog, you’ve probably seen some of his posts on TechStars. Brad’s not the only Foundry Group partner, however, who is involved. We are all mentors along with many other local and nationally known entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. It’s been great getting to know the TechStars teams and help build some interesting businesses. As part of our “evil plan” we figured that many of the teams would fall in love with Boulder and then decide to permanently relocate here. We’re happy to report that our evil plan is succeeding. We think it’s been important to the continued vibrancy of the Boulder community to not only grow, but to also import great entrepreneurial and software development talent. TechStars has also become a large hub of activity to stay in touch with the great Boulder community.

Our Investment in Lijit

Wed, 21 May 2008 15:50:30 +0000

As we’ve previously written, one of the things we intend to do with our blog is highlight the companies and entrepreneurs in whom we’ve invested. While it’s always nice to give our portfolio companies some exposure, it’s also a good way to provide concrete examples of the investment themes Foundry Group is pursuing.

The purpose of today’s post is to introduce one of those companies—Lijit Networks. The company fits into our Implicit Web theme, which focuses on tools and services that help users manage the information overload created by today’s Internet. The goal of the Implicit Web is to identify relevant content in a more efficient, intelligent and proactive manner and to present it in more insightful and actionable views. (You can read more about our thoughts on the Implicit Web in this previous post.)

Foundry Group Joins the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado

Tue, 06 May 2008 06:25:27 +0000

All of us at Foundry Group try hard to be substantive members of our community. We have all chosen to live in Boulder, Colorado and we share the belief that giving back to the community in which we live is an important part of supporting this goal. In addition, we strongly believe in the cliché of “putting our money where our mouths are.” As a result, we are proud to announce that we have recently become members of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.

Theme: Digital Life

Thu, 01 May 2008 12:01:36 +0000

As part of our ongoing discussion of the investment themes we focus on at Foundry Group, it is time to discuss digital life. Certainly anyone who is reading this blog post is living a digital life, and among the partners at Foundry Group, we are all gadget-lovers, early adopters of software and online services, part-time IT support staff for our own home networks, and digital media creators, curators and consumers.

Our digital life theme evolved from our own experiences as early-adopter creators and users of digital media, as well as from time spent over the years evaluating dozens of investment opportunities that we categorized as digital home, digital living room or convergence companies. After sifting through the landscape of these digital home companies for several years, we came away with only one investment: Sling Media, makers of the Slingbox.

Did Darwin Skip Over Email?

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:35:09 +0000

In a time when many folks view Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as the new darlings of the Internet, we still believe that email has been and will long continue to be one of the Internet’s few enduring killer apps.

Several of us at Foundry Group have been deeply involved with the email industry as insiders and investors at a number of email-related companies, including early email service providers (Email Publishing and MessageMedia), email hosting companies (Critical Path), email security companies (Postini), and email delivery assurance companies (Return Path). Email has been a successful theme in our historical investments over the past dozen years, and we believe it has an equally bright future.

What We Learned By Moving To Boulder

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:57:07 +0000

In a follow up to our Who We Are post, Ryan and I thought we would compare VC life in Boulder, CO to that of the Silicon Valley. In some ways it’s remarkably similar and in some ways wonderfully different.

For those of you who don’t know, Ryan and I met in 2000 while at the California offices of Mobius Venture Capital, became quick friends and even started a band or two. (Shameless Plug Alert: Our band Soul Patch has recently released a new album. Check out the web site and buy on CDBaby, iTunes and Amazon. Become a fan on Facebook!). When the concept of the Foundry Group was born, one thing that the five of us agreed on was the need for one (and only one) office.

Our Investment in Memeo

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:07:21 +0000

Since the launch of the Foundry Group blog, we’ve written at length about our thematic investing style, some of the specific themes we are looking at (HCI, Glue and Implicit Web), our backgrounds and our view of how geography factors into our investment criteria. We have yet to write about any of the companies we’ve actually invested in thus far – something we plan to do regularly in this space.

Not all of our portfolio companies are ready for us to start making noise about them, which is hard for us since we are passionate about the entrepreneurs and companies we back. But for those companies that are publically launched and have announced our investment, it is high time we start talking about them. Over the next several weeks you can expect to see posts from us on each of the investments we’ve made so far (at least the ones we can talk about) – a trend we’ll continue as we add new companies to the portfolio.

Who Are We?

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:49:05 +0000

Every venture capital firm starts with people. In our case, Foundry Group consists of four experienced venture capitalists – Brad Feld, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson – who have been working together for the past eight years. We all met through our work at Mobius Venture Capital. Following is the story of what we have done and how we found each other.

Brad started his career as an entrepreneur in 1987 by creating a very creatively named company, Feld Technologies, with a partner in Boston. Feld Technologies was funded with ten bucks and was acquired in 1993 by a public company called AmeriData Technologies. While at AmeriData, Brad started making angel investments and was a seed investor in successful companies such as NetGenesis (IPO), Critical Path (IPO), and Harmonix (acquired by MTV.) In 1995 Brad moved to Boulder, Colorado, and shortly thereafter connected with the guys at Softbank who were aggressively investing in the first wave of Internet-related companies. Brad worked as an affiliate of Softbank until 1997 when – with three other partners – he co-founded the firm that became Mobius Venture Capital.

Is “Geography” a Cliché in Venture Capital?

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:12:15 +0000

Most entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital have heard the popular cliché: Venture capitalists only invest in their backyard. The venture press and popular media are full of interviews with venture capitalists who emphatically state they’ll only invest in companies that are within driving distance, live in the same area code/zip code, or belong to the same golf club.

While there are often plenty of reasons for us not to invest in a given startup, geography (or, more specifically, lack of physical proximity to us) generally isn’t one of them. As we’ve already discussed in a prior post, Foundry Group takes a thematic view of investing. If we then further layer a geographic filter on top of our thematic approach, the potential universe of investment opportunities shrinks dramatically—too dramatically, we think.

Theme: Glue

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:17:11 +0000

In our continuing series discussing some of our investment themes, we’d like to introduce a topic that we’re calling “glue”. Glue is our term for the web infrastructure layer that facilitates the connections between web services and content companies. As this ecosystem becomes increasingly complex and as web sites and web based applications rely on more underlying services, this “glue” layer of the Internet is becoming more and more core to overall web infrastructure.

Theme: Implicit Web

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:11:11 +0000

Now that we’ve blogged about our thematic investing approach at Foundry Group, we thought we’d spend some time explaining some of the themes we are excited about. Yesterday we wrote about our interest in next-generation human-computer-interaction applications and technologies, and today we are going to talk about another one of our active themes.

One of the areas we are deeply interested in is what we (and many others) call the implicit web. While it may be imperfect as an umbrella term, it is easier for us to say (and still respect ourselves) than something like Web 3.0, which we sincerely hope does not ever enjoy the ubiquity (and subsequent meaninglessness) that the Web 2.0 moniker attained.

Theme: Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:37:47 +0000

As we mentioned in the previous post, at Foundry Group we structure much of our investment analysis and thinking around themes. For us, a “thematic investment approach” is something broader than investing in market sectors, rather we look at the world in a horizontal fashion. A theme is applicable across consumer and enterprise customers, and is usually based on an underlying technology, protocol or broad market trend that we believe will drive investment opportunities for a five to ten year period as the familiar adoption/disruption dynamics play themselves out over time.

What Is “Thematic Investing?”

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:39:25 +0000

Now that we are up and running and making new investments, one of the questions we are often asked is “what types of companies do you guys like to invest in?” That is usually followed up with “what sectors do you find interesting?”

The easy question to answer is the first; we like to invest in seed and early-stage information technology companies in the United States and Canada. The harder question is the one about which sectors we invest in. We like to call ourselves “thematic investors,” which as an answer to the sector question is usually met with “huh?” Let us explain.

Hello World!

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:00:00 +0000

Foundry Group raises $225 Million Early-Stage Venture Capital Fund

We are now officially in business. With fundraising completed in November of last year and a brand new shiny website, we can officially take the wraps off what we are doing and say “Hello World!”

For those of you who don’t know us, we are a Boulder, Colorado-based venture fund that invests in early-stage Internet and software companies across the United States. Collectively, we have over 50 years of experience and have been together as a team for over seven years. We are entrepreneurs, operators, engineers and service professionals and we bring a wide range of skills and experiences to our portfolio companies.