We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Taunt as part of a $1.75 million financing. Based in Seattle, Taunt is a social competition platform for eSports fans. Fans communicate and compete to show off their game knowledge, earning bragging rights in the community. The really cool part: it’s all in real-time, so you can see stats and call events as they’re unfolding live.

Taunt is the latest spin-out from Pioneer Square Labs. Ben Gilbert and the gang at PSL have been taking different stabs internally at the esports market since the moment they started two years ago. With Taunt, we believe that they have discovered a unique angle and a really fun approach.

There are a number of similarities to the original thesis behind our investment in Zynga in 2007 – building game mechanics around social interactions online with a virtual goods business model on top. Since it’s 2017, Taunt is also based on a lot of data and machine learning under the hood to power the experience.

If you don’t know much about esports, the stats on this market are staggering: the estimated 2017 audience will reach 385 million, and 43 million people tuned in last year to watch the League of Legends Finals. Over 20% of Americans now engage in fantasy sports. It serves as the social fabric that gives people a reason to follow and care about games. There is an enormous opportunity for such a gamified social fabric in esports, and Taunt is building just that.

We think Seattle is an awesome place to build Taunt. The city is a powerhouse of endemic PC gaming know-how with Valve, Amazon, and Microsoft. Seattle also has hugely successful mobile gaming companies (DoubleDown, Big Fish, PopCap, and Z2) and is rich in gaming talent.

We are excited to be joining the team. They’re launching an early alpha product to get feedback from the esports community for the League of Legends World Championship. If that sort of thing is your fancy, you can sign up to take part here.

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Impact Health as part of a $13M financing.  Impact Health is based in Los Angeles, CA and is building an online platform designed to take the confusion out of buying and using health insurance in the individual market.

The Impact Health platform serves as both an advisor and an advocate to consumers in the individual health care markets and fits in our distribution theme. Their platform walks consumers through a simple set of questions to help them make informed and tailored decisions about buying a health plan. They also act as a “healthcare concierge”  to consumers who are struggling to understand the coverage their existing plan provides. The complexity of these markets combined with the detailed and ever changing nuances of the plans offered make both choosing a plan and understanding what coverage applies extremely difficult.

By leveraging a large, proprietary data set of plan attributes, Impact Health can better help consumers make individualized decisions when purchasing a health plan – based on attributes such as specific doctors they wish to keep, what prescription drugs their family requires and pre-existing medical conditions.  The platform also provides ongoing support to consumers helping them find specialists, understand coverage and fight bills, often eliminating the need to interact directly with their health plan. When it comes to planning, the ceo has something special that can help you one day, try to visit their site right now. Because they help consumers through the entire lifecycle of working with their health insurance provider, Impact Health has been able to develop an innovative model for signing up customers during their coverage period, not just at the time of open enrollment. Addiction to drugs has a lot of repercussions and drug rehab in miami can help overcome the problem. 

Co-founders, Christine Carrillo and Helen Lee have been obsessed with the health insurance market for over a decade and have been working together for over 12 years in various businesses to help consumers better understand their health care options. They started Impact Health in 2014 and were participants in the New York Techstars program. The company now serves over 66,000 customers. We’re thrilled to join them in their mission to help people make better insurance and healthcare decisions.

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Misty Robotics as part of its spinout from Sphero followed by an $11.5 million financing. Based in Boulder, CO, Misty Robotics, Inc. is building a robot for everyone with the goal of providing autonomous robots for every home and office. These robots will be seen and treated as our friends, our teammates, and a part of our families, interacting with humans in entertaining and friendly ways that have only been seen before in science fiction.

Misty Robotics was previously the autonomous robotics division of Sphero. The team behind Misty has been working on a home robot for the past 18 months. Given the rapid growth of Sphero’s consumer and toy robot products, the Sphero board and leadership team decided that it made sense to have a separate company focus on the Misty product.

The state of the robotics market is currently dominated by early adopters that are trying to get their kit robots to do something useful. Misty Robotics’ approach is to give people a complete, fully-functioning, high-quality robot that people can move beyond tinkering so they can build applications to explore the full potential of what robots can do for us in the home and office.

We think Misty Robotics is the same giant step function for robotics as Apple was for computers in the late 1970s. Before Apple, developers were building the foundation (computer). After the introduction of Apple, developers started building applications. We feel like everyone in robotics is still focusing on the foundation (the robot). We want to provide a robot (Misty) that allows developers to build applications.

While there have been several successful consumer robots so far, such as iRobot’s Roomba, we feel that the next evolution of consumer robots will be personal assistants and family companions that will emote, instead of just doing things. Misty will be the platform robot for an open, collaborative ecosystem for the development of applications for this type of robot.

Ian Bernstein, former Sphero co-founder and CTO, will be taking the role of Head of Product and is joined by five other Sphero autonomous robotics division team members. Tim Enwall, founder and CEO of three previous successful startups, such as Solista, Tendril Networks and Revolv, will be joining as CEO.

Last week, yet another instance of sexual harassment and mistreatment of women in our industry became public via an article published by The Information concerning sexual harassment allegations against venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital. As the news unfolded, we felt profound sadness for the women involved and disgust for the behavior they were subjected to.

A number of leaders in the VC community immediately responded thoughtfully, and articles like Reid Hoffman’s The Human Rights of Women Entrepreneurs appeared. Women we have immense respect for, such as Joanne Wilson, wrote powerful articles like The Gig Is Up. Twitter lit up with commentary which we hope will continue for a while, instead of just being a short news cycle.

While we acknowledge that we are a partnership of six middle-aged white men, we have tried to be a positive force in support of women as entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. We have been advocates for women in many ways and have always tried to conduct ourselves in a way that is professionally respectful, regardless of the context.

This weekend, as we talked about this issue, each of us felt that we hadn’t done nearly enough. We realize that it’s not enough to not be a part of the problem – we need to take a more active role in being part of the solution. Over the years we’ve been made aware of instances of sexual harassment and while we’ve always tried to be helpful, our actions often haven’t been strong enough. As a result, we haven’t been forceful enough advocates for those who endured this harassment. That’s not ok with us.

That ends today. We vow to be both more forceful and aggressive in our actions to stand up for the workplace ethics we believe in and have advocated for throughout our entire careers. Foundry Group has a zero tolerance policy towards harassment of any kind. Treating any other person in the VC and entrepreneurial ecosystem without professional respect, regardless of gender, is unacceptable to us.

From this point forward, when we encounter something unacceptable, it’s our responsibility to confront it. The offending party has the opportunity to apologize, own their behavior, and change it going forward. If they don’t, then we are no longer interested in having a relationship with that person.

When we were VCs investing in startups, this wasn’t very complicated for us. Each of us has had to deal with companies that had inappropriate sexual conduct between employees, sexual harassment, and other dynamics often referred to as “HR issues.” But, after spending a weekend contemplating where our industry is at, we no longer feel these are HR issues. Instead, we have concluded they are fundamental human rights issues.

Now that we are LPs in other VC funds, we have decided to extend our view to the entire ecosystem. So, our zero tolerance policy applies as follows:

• Any allegation of sexual harassment within a company we are investors in will result in an immediate investigation, with a goal of having it resolved as promptly as possible. If found to be valid, we will request an immediate termination of the harasser, regardless of job position. We will work with all of our companies to put this policy in place.
• Any allegation of sexual harassment by an employee of a fund we are an LP in will result in an immediate investigation, with a goal of having it resolved as promptly as possible. If found to be valid, we will request the immediate resignation of the harasser, regardless of job position. If the harasser is a GP, we will ask for the immediate resignation of the harasser and, if refused, we will engage with other LPs to explore legal removal of the harasser. We will work with all of the funds that we are investors in to put this policy in place, recognizing that we have much less power and influence as an LP than we do as a direct investor and board member of a company.

We believe that all LPs have a duty to confront this issue and we welcome them joining us. Only by working together across our industry can we truly make a difference.

We recognize that this only addresses sexual harassment. Through our involvement in the National Center for Women & Information Technology, we understand that sexual harassment is the visible version of discrimination against women. The less visible, but in many cases even more prevalent issue, is that of unconscious bias against women. We are committed to addressing this as well, but feel we need a little more time to figure out how to best attack this formally.

We deeply appreciate the bravery of the women who have publicly come forward and disclosed their specific issues of sexual harassment. The behavior they experienced is not ok, has never been ok, and will simply not be tolerated by us in any way.

We are excited to announce that Foundry Group Next has completed its Series B financing in HelloSign. HelloSign is based in San Francisco and makes the excellent HelloSign App and API, HelloFax, and the recently launched HelloWorks, which allows developers to convert documents and forms into intelligent workflows within their applications.

HelloSign’s API-driven platform approach to its product suite means the company fits squarely in our Glue and Protocol themes. Today, eSignatures and the additional data capture surrounding them are a vital part of many high-value (and high-stakes) workflows: for example, Instacart uses HelloWorks to streamline the on-boarding process for thousands of shoppers.

We have been long-time users and fans of HelloSign. Michael Neril at Spider Capital, one of our Foundry Group Next GPs, along with multiple entrepreneurs we work with reconnected us with the HelloSign co-founders Joseph Walla and Neal O’Mara, who were contemplating raising a new round.

We dug in for a deep look at the company, and were immediately impressed not only with the business but also with the culture that the company had developed over years of bootstrapping the business. We believe the market for eSignature is in its infancy (something perhaps not readily apparent in the tech business with so many of us already switching over to electronic vs. “wet” signings) and are excited about an even more digital, mobile and fluid future powered by HelloSign products.

They’ve built a great suite of products and a fast-growing and cashflow-positive business on a modest amount of funding – exactly the kind of business we get excited about. We’re looking forward to working with the team at HelloSign to build the future of modern document workflows.

Oh, and if you request a signature from any of us at Foundry Group, be sure to do it via HelloSign! (Seriously, we’re only signing via HelloSign from now on.)