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.
Foundry Group Holiday Gift Guide 2018
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.
Aрру holidays: For ѕаfе оnlіnе shopping, make ѕurе уоur аррѕ аrе downloaded from a trusted source, ѕuсh as the Andrоіd Mаrkеt, Aррlе App Store оr thе Amazon Aрр Store. Whеn уоu dоwnlоаd the арр, іt wіll аѕk fоr vаrіоuѕ “реrmіѕѕіоnѕ.” Be ѕurе tо rеаd thrоugh thеm аnd note whether thеу mаkе ѕеnѕе… fоr еxаmрlе, does a shopping арр nееd ассеѕѕ to уоur contact list? Another wау to сhесk on the safety оf apps is tо read through the feedback in thе соmmеntѕ section of thе market and сhооѕе аррѕ wіth a hіgh rаtіng.
Thеrе’ѕ nо рlасе lіkе hоmе fоr thе hоlіdауѕ… fоr ѕаfе оnlіnе hоlіdау ѕhорріng. Rеmеmbеr, a ѕесurе nеtwоrk connection – lіkе that іn mоѕt hоmеѕ or wоrkрlасеѕ – is ideal. Publіс Wi-Fi can bе hасkеd bу someone wіth thе rіght tools, еxроѕіng your раѕѕwоrdѕ, bіllіng іnfоrmаtіоn, and оthеr ѕеnѕіtіvе data. Therefore, іf you’re using a рublіс соnnесtіоn, it’s best tо limit yourself tо wіndоw-ѕhорріng and рrісе comparing, rаthеr than buуіng. Find Women glove mitts on this site along with the best outdoors gear for you.
Inspired by our friends at Techstars and their Techstars Holiday Guide, we thought it would be fun to highlight some of our direct and partner fund 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. And of course, be sure to check this website to see all the coupon codes available.
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.)
Calibrate invests in early revenue startups to accelerate growth, drive commercialization, and maximize outcomes through appropriately-sized financing. They typically target an initial investment of $5 million in companies generating revenue between $1 million and $5 million. Current Calibrate portfolio companies include Alpha, Broadly, Built Robotics, Embodied, and Soft Robotics.
We often talk about networks and how that relates to our investing activities. Calibrate fits squarely into our network and we’ve co-invested with them many times including in Broadly, VictorOps, Yesware, Misty Robotics, Sphero, FullContact, and Occipital. They’ve also invested multiple times with our friends at True Ventures.
Jason and Kevin work extremely hard for their companies and this was a big motivator for our investment in Calibrate. We are happy to support them as an LP in their initial fund and we look forward to many more shared investments.
Our Investment in the Costanoa Opportunity Fund
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.
It’s a huge luxury to invest with people you’ve known and worked with over such a long time. It is fair to say that, having been deep in the trenches with Greg in multiple situations over many years, we know the stuff of which he is made. There are few investors or board members we trust or admire more.
In the six years since founding Costanoa, Greg has managed to surround himself with truly outstanding people. The recent addition of Mark Selcow as General Partner is perhaps the most visible sign of what has been a long, methodical approach to building a truly great team firm. All along the way, Costanoa has made significant investments in itself, assembling a set of highly experienced and dedicated resources–Operating Partners Martina, Jim and Michelle, for example–to enable the Firm to better help its portfolio companies. In LP-speak: Costanoa has been spending its management fees well. It has been supremely gratifying to watch Costanoa evolve into a deeply resourced team on a mission to help entrepreneurs succeed faster in their efforts to build impactful, enduring businesses.
As we have noted before, one of the goals of our Partner Fund investments is to expand and deepen our network of positive contributors to the venture industry. While many of the funds we back are newer or next-generation firms, we also love having the opportunity to invest in our existing relationships, in situations where we are able to take a longitudinal view of the people and partners that make up a team. We think this significantly de-risks our strategy and can help drive better overall returns. As was the case here, we like to engage early and deeply in the process with our GPs, helping sort through issues and, if possible, catalyzing the fundraising process by being willing to commit early. In short, we like to dig in and help. It is also worth saying explicitly: we really love to back good human beings.
Our investment in Costanoa Opportunity Fund I is a textbook example of our Partner Fund strategy at work. Congratulations to the entire Costanoa team. We look forward to many years of continued partnership, co-investing, and “family” dinners.
