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:
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.
Despite its massive size, the real estate market has seen relatively limited technology and process innovations, mostly coming in the form of greater access to listing information and simplified connections to agents. The core real estate transaction itself has remained largely unchanged from how houses were bought and sold decades ago. Knock completely upends this process by facilitating an end-to-end seamless process for home sellers who are also buying their next home at the same time. Knock helps that consumer find their new home and purchase it on their behalf before making any necessary repairs or updates to the original home after the seller has moved out, and then listing it for sale on the open market so it receives the most competitive offer. Consumers benefit from a greatly simplified process, greater certainty of timing around both transactions, and the ability to wait to sell their old home until after they are no longer living there.
Knock fits into our marketplace theme. Similar to companies such as Havenly, Rover, and Xometry, Knock connects two sides of a complex transaction, simplifying the process in the middle. Like many marketplace companies in the Foundry portfolio, Knock relies significantly on technology to properly price transactions and to streamline cumbersome parts of the real estate buying and selling process.
Thinking of buying a new house in Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh or Dallas-Fort Worth? Check out knock.com.
Our Investment in Tidelift
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.
For open source creators and maintainers, many of whom aren’t directly compensated for their substantial efforts, Tidelift provides the financial incentive to continue to do the hard work after the initial shine of creating a popular open source package wears off.
You’ve probably seen news about security exploits like Heartbleed, Equifax, or some of the other less known—but just as damaging—open source supply chain attacks. These situations are a direct illustration of what happens when development and maintenance of widely used open source packages are underfunded.
As open source continues to become more popular, these sorts of issues will become even more common. Meanwhile, software development teams also face a less obvious, but a perhaps more insidious crisis as their development progress is slowed by an increase in the amount of time they spend fighting technical debt and other code maintenance issues related to their open source dependencies.
When you think about the fact that open source software now forms the backbone of much of the world’s technology infrastructure, working on a solution that benefits both the people who create open source software and those who use it is potentially transformational for the software industry.
We’re excited to see the progress Tidelift has made and are glad to be a part of scaling this important work over the coming years.
