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.
Happy Holidays from your friends at Foundry Group.
Our Investment in Kindred Ventures
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.
Steve has been an angel/seed investor since 2009. He formed Kindred Ventures in 2014 to invest his personal capital and has since invested in over 50 startups. He was a founding advisor and investor to Uber, and an early investor to many other major tech companies including Coinbase, Postmates, Poshmark, Zymergen, and Blue Bottle Coffee. He has co-founded, or served on the early founding team of, several tech companies throughout his career, including imeem (acquired by Myspace), SoundTracking (acquired by Rhapsody), and Bitski. Kanyi was previously a partner at Collaborative Fund in New York, where he led early investments in over 30 startups, including Tala, Earnest, Particle, Zendrive, and JUST. Prior to venture capital, Kanyi also spent several years as a co-founder and operator at startups in the San Francisco Bay Area.
After working closely together on Heartbeat Health (a shared investment that Kanyi also co-founded), Kanyi and Steve found that they were kindred spirits both to each other and the founders they back. They began investing together in 2018 and officially launched the new VC fund with the support and backing of LPs in 2019.
We initially met Kanyi in 2016 through our network of emerging VCs in New York and our partner fund, USV. Like most who meet him, we were immediately drawn to Kanyi. He has a certain spark and magnetic quality that we love to see in GPs, and is also incredibly thoughtful and a prolific writer on the subject of innovation and democratizing access. We worked closely with Kanyi as he began to think about starting a new type of venture firm and partnering with Steve, who brings over 20 years of experience and relationships in Silicon Valley. We enjoyed getting to know Steve and spending time with the Kindred team in the early days of developing their strategy and fund model. We were even more intrigued by Steve as we called around and heard from founders and investors just how incredibly valuable he is as an investor and advisor, especially when it comes to product and the founder journey.
We’re thrilled to partner with this team and the deep network of next-generation talent they are tapping as they build Kindred. We look forward to overlapping with them in our Marketplace, Protocol, Glue, and Human Computer Interaction themes.
Our Investment in WHOOP
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.
WHOOP collects physiological data that helps individuals optimize the way they train, recover, and sleep. You can find some of the best athletes in the world wearing a WHOOP, including Rory McIlroy, Lebron James, and Tiger Woods. WHOOP is also a great tool for anyone – from CEOs to weekend warriors – who are interested in increasing their physical performance or simply wish to better understand how exercise, activity, sleep and other factors affect their ability to perform at their jobs and their hobbies.
We were introduced to WHOOP by our friends at Founder Collective. All of the Foundry partners started wearing the WHOOP straps and found the experience to be both unique and impactful. We love the holistic approach WHOOP has taken to ensure a delightful customer experience and believe the data and insights that WHOOP users are able to gain are invaluable. Through a SaaS mindset, the team has created a product with fantastic customer engagement and satisfaction. In fact, the business model for WHOOP is unlike most other wearables – WHOOP provides a free strap for a monthly subscription to their data and insights service.
WHOOP falls into our Human Computer Interactiontheme. We are thrilled to partner with them as they bring a new level of data and intelligence to the personal fitness market.
