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.
Backbone provides an intuitive and modern user interface that puts everything in one place, centralizing data and communication between internal and external teams. The platform enables customers to design, annotate, iterate, and push to production faster than ever before, with some customers reporting a 10x increase in speed to market. With Backbone, users can do things like manage the milestone calendar, create tech packs, iterate on designs, track factory communications, sample phases, and purchase orders, all through to the end product.
We’ve seen first hand from investing in DTC brands the inefficiencies and difficulties in getting great products to market. With Backbone’s modern and seamless platform experience, we believe it is the only real solution for brands to work in a fully digital workspace.
Backbone fits in our glue theme, enabling process automation and seamless collaboration through software.
Backbone is already serving some of the most exciting consumer brands out there including Warby Parker, Away, Parachute, Outdoor Voices, allbirds, Movado, and Betabrand, a Foundry Group portfolio company. Having Betabrand as a (very happy) customer wasn’t our only connection to Backbone. Our partner fund, Spider Capital, was one of Backbone’s earliest investors. Spider’s managing director, Michael Neril, introduced us to Backbone’s CEO, Matthew Klein, several years ago and has been keeping us updated with the company’s progress along the way. We’re excited to have Matthew and the team indirectly and, now, directly in the “Foundry family.”
Backbone was founded by fashion and consumer goods industry veterans (and brothers), Matthew and Andrew Klein. Having felt the pain point themselves for many years, they decided it was time to build a better solution for developing next generation products.
You can find Backbone’s announcement of the financing here and tell your DTC friends to check out Backbone!
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.
Ordermark helps restaurants maximize profits by consolidating orders from multiple online ordering services to a single dashboard and printer located in the kitchen — the heart of a restaurant’s operations. They integrate their service with existing restaurant technologies, including Point of Sale (POS) systems, kitchen display systems, accounting tools, and last mile delivery companies. Restaurants are seeing increases in incremental revenue of 30% or more from using Ordermark’s technology. Ordermark works with small operations as well as many of the world’s top chains including Buffalo Wild Wings, Little Caesars, Papa Johns, and Sonic. The company is based in Los Angeles, California, with an office in Denver, Colorado.
We originally met Ordermark during the Techstars Boulder screening committee process, in which Seth and Jason are involved. We mentored them through the Techstars Boulder program and were excited when three of our partner funds – Matchstick, TenOneTen, and Techstars – invested in the Series A round.
We’ve continued to help, and the more we got to know CEO Alex Canter and his leadership team, the more we realized what an incredible platform they’re building. Alex is a fourth-generation owner of the world-famous Canter’s Deli. The product works in part because he and his team understand, from experience, the needs of the restaurant industry.
Ordermark falls into our Glue theme, connecting third-party ordering solutions and point-of-sale systems to help restaurants understand, consolidate, and grow their delivery businesses. We are excited to have Ordermark join the Foundry portfolio family.
Our Investment in Quiq
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.
Quiq believes that the future of commerce and service conversations between companies and customers will be asynchronous in nature and occur primarily over digital channels like messaging and chat. They are the enterprise market leader in asynchronous customer service over SMS/Text, web chat, in-app messaging, and social platforms. Their customer base includes Overstock, Pier 1, Office Depot, and Men’s Wearhouse.
Quiq falls into our Glue theme along with companies like Help Scout, Mapbox, and Pantheon that deploy software to smooth communication between disparate systems over diverse platforms. Quiq is a product-driven company with a proven leadership team. We are excited to partner with them.
Our Investment in Mixhalo
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.
Mixhalo is the brainchild of Mike Einziger, co-founder and guitarist of the multi-platinum selling band Incubus and acclaimed violinist Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger, and is led by CEO Marc Ruxin, a long-time friend of Foundry’s and musictech veteran with whom we are delighted to have the opportunity to work.
Mixhalo fits directly into Foundry Group’s human-computer interaction (HCI) investment theme, and their tech has been used on tour by Incubus, Metallica and by Aerosmith in their ongoing Vegas residency, and is being piloted this summer at venues like Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View. We experienced it at a prog-metal show (Polyphia!) in Boulder, and we were also fortunate to see (and hear) the Aerosmith show in Vegas via Mixhalo, and it is an amazing and immersive experience. The quality improvement is akin to switching between standard definition and 4K video on your TV – once you’ve experienced it, you won’t want to go back. We’re excited to be working with the entire Mixhalo team and an incredible group of co-investors to make their platform ubiquitous.
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:
