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.
In the U.S. alone, it is estimated that over 25 million people suffer from anxiety and/or depression. Globally, over 500 million people suffer from these disorders. This global mental health crisis has been exacerbated by the current COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on the world’s healthcare system and economy, with less than half of those suffering receiving the care they need. Healthcare payers are finally starting to pay attention, especially in light of increased scrutiny and litigation over insufficient coverage for mental healthcare.
Meru is revolutionizing mental healthcare with the goal of bringing accessible, effective, outcome-driven treatment to the masses. They’ve partnered with insurance companies and self-insured employers such as Aurora Public Schools, John Muir Medical Corporation, and Douglas County in Colorado to offer the Meru program to their customers and employees.
The company was co-founded by Kristian Ranta (CEO), Albert Nazander (CTO), and Riku Lindholm (COO). Having lost friends and family members to depression, the founding team launched Meru to fight mental illness by creating an effective and scalable solution. Their mission is to empower 10 million people suffering from mental health challenges by 2027.
Meru is building an easily-accessible online solution that provides patients with remote therapists and psychiatrists, anonymous peer-groups, biofeedback wearable, and a 12-week digital therapeutic treatment program. Meru’s program consists of continuous remote clinician support, at-home therapeutic lessons and practices (e.g. cognitive behavioral therapy, biofeedback, and mindfulness), as well as sleep medicine and nutritional psychiatry for a complete solution to healing depression and anxiety. They’ve recently published groundbreaking peer-reviewed clinical results with Harvard Medical School and Rutgers University researchers, showing symptom reduction rates that are 2-3x stronger than what is typically seen with the current standard of care. Meru is currently seeing about a 90% treatment completion rate and average weekly engagement of five days/week, which is far ahead of typical behavioral health treatments.
We met the Meru team through our partners at Freestyle and the company fits in our Distribution theme. We care deeply about mental health and believe Meru is well-positioned to take on the huge opportunity and responsibility of combating mental health worldwide.
Our Investment In Code Climate
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.
Two years ago, Code Climate launched Velocity, their Engineering Intelligence solution for software organizations. Managers can troubleshoot and action process improvements with their teams, while executives can make better strategic decisions with high-level insights into how the department is progressing. Teams from companies like Gusto, BBC, and Condé Nast have used Velocity to ship software 20% faster. Thanks to this early momentum, Velocity revenue has grown over 300% in the past year.
The success of the Velocity product and the continued commitment and enthusiasm of our partners at USV drew us to Code Climate. Our further engagement with the Code Climate team solidified our interest and excitement around what they’re building. The team plans on using the funding to accelerate adoption and expand the predictive, AI-powered insights powering Velocity. Code Climate will also be further investing in its open, extensible Engineering Data Platform to connect information across DevOps systems.
The CEO, Bryan Helmkamp, and his team will be a great fit in our Foundry family and we are excited to welcome them. Bryan and his co-founder, Noah Davis, built the business after experiencing their own need as software engineering leads. Code Climate fits in our Glue theme and sits nicely alongside developer and ops oriented infrastructure companies in our portfolio like Pantheon, Sensu, Fritz.AI, and Mapbox.
Learn more about Code Climate by visiting https://codeclimate.com/ or better yet, go sign up for Velocity NOW. To make engineering analytics accessible to all newly distributed teams, Code Climate just released a free version of Velocity for qualified teams.
Our Investment in Fritz AI
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.
The product is a mobile-AI-focused SDK + cloud service to assist mobile developers with creating AI/ML solutions for building applications. Leveraging this end-to-end machine learning platform, developers can quickly build, release, and iterate Al/ML models on mobile. This includes dataset gathering, model management, model training, cross-platform deployment, and analytics on AI models and their real-world performance. Fritz hosts custom models from developers and pre-trained AI/ML models for developers to use. Their vision is to offer a self-service, end-to-end platform that empowers teams to shift focus and resources away from managing complex machine learning projects and towards creating mobile experiences that delight their customers.
Fritz AI fits in Foundry’s Glue theme, and has been used to enable intelligent apps on over 50 million devices worldwide. Fritz AI makes it easy for developers to teach their apps how to see, hear, feel, think, and sense. Using the platform, developers have been able to deploy apps to detect crop disease for farmers in East Africa, power on-device skincare diagnosis and treatment for dermatology patients, and, most importantly, transform a piece of paper into a lightsaber.
Co-founders, Dan Abdinoor and Jameson Toole previously worked together at Jana Mobile, where they felt the acute pain point of building AI/ML solutions on mobile and decided to start Fritz AI to solve this problem. We met them several years ago at an Uncork founders summit and were immediately excited by what they were building.
Fritz AI’s developer-first approach to solving this big, complex, increasingly relevant problem reminds us of our early investments in SendGrid and Mapbox. With millions of apps being deployed on iOS and Android each year, not to mention the increasing number of other intelligent devices ingrained in our daily lives, we see a huge opportunity to support developers in creating incredible interactive experiences for their customers.
We’re thrilled to welcome Dan, Jameson, and the Fritz AI team to the Foundry portfolio, as they work to bring the power of machine learning to the edge.
Our Investment in Moxxie Ventures
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.
Prior to launching Moxxie, Katie and five of her Twitter colleagues co-founded #ANGELS, an investment collective with a portfolio of over 120 investments. Their mission was twofold: (1) leverage their expertise building and scaling tech companies to help more entrepreneurs succeed and (2) get more women on the cap tables of successful startups. Since co-founding #ANGELS, Katie has invested in 40 companies, including Cameo, Carta, Coinbase, Ethel’s Club, Lambda School, Literati, Modern Fertility, Shape Security and Threads.
In addition to being an active angel investor, Katie has spent her career at some of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing tech companies. She was an early product leader at Google, led Twitter’s global expansion as VP of International and then VP of Global Media, and, most recently, led global marketing, communications, policy, and recruiting as CMO at Color Genomics. Katie also served as a digital strategy advisor in the Obama White House, was on the board at Time Inc. through its acquisition by Meredith Corp., and is a current board member at Paris-based mass media conglomerate, Vivendi.
We’ve known Katie as an operator for many years via Twitter’s acquisition of Foundry portfolio company, Gnip. Post-acquisition, Moody served as Twitter’s VP/GM of Data and Enterprise Solutions and worked closely with Katie as she led Twitter’s global media team. Our first-hand knowledge of Katie’s hustle, operating expertise, and extensive network got us excited about Katie as an emerging manager.
We are thrilled to add Moxxie to our portfolio of Partner Funds and welcome Katie, officially, to the Foundry family. We look forward to overlap with our Marketplace, Glue, and Distribution themes.
Gifts from the Foundry Group Network
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.
