We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Boundless as part of a $3.5 million financing. Based in Seattle, Boundless helps families navigate the legal immigration system with confidence.

Boundless was spun-out from Pioneer Square Labs in April. Boundless was co-founded by CEO Xiao Wang, a Chinese immigrant who previously held strategic roles at Amazon and the New York City Department of Education; President Doug Rand, a serial entrepreneur and former Assistant Director for Entrepreneurship in the Obama White House; and CTO Serdar Sutay, a Turkish immigrant who led engineering teams at Microsoft and Chef.

The company’s first product dramatically simplifies the application process for a marriage-based green card, which provides a legal path to employment, travel, and ultimately U.S. citizenship. Boundless’ web-based application translates forms and instructions into easily understood questions, helping couples complete their green card application in under two hours and for $500, including a comprehensive review by an independent immigration attorney and a ready-to-submit package arranged according to the government’s precise preferences. Boundless then supports the couple with interview preparation, follow-on forms, online guides, and tracking of every important deadline along the way.

We have been long-time supporters of legal immigration, going back to 2009 and our efforts around the Startup Visa. Our philanthropic activities, including Global EIR, have helped numerous immigrants navigate the complex US immigration system. When we first heard about the idea for Boundless from Pioneer Square Labs, we quickly introduced Doug Rand, who we’d worked closely with when he was at the Obama administration, to the team.

It’s a delight to continue to invest in Seattle-based companies, especially with our friends at Pioneer Square Labs. And, we are excited to be part of the team with Xiao, Doug, and Serdar.

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in The Pro’s Closet (“TPC”) as part of a $9M financing. TPC, based in Boulder, CO, is the world’s largest seller of pre-owned bicycles and bicycle parts.

The cycling market is large and expanding rapidly. But as bicycles become more sophisticated and expensive, a gap has opened up in the market for used bicycles. TPC’s platform solves the pain points that sellers and buyers of used bikes experience. For sellers TPC offers the quickest and easiest way to turn their used bike into cash – often to be used to purchase a new (or newer) bike. TPC also works with bicycle shops and manufacturers helping to reduce the sticker shock of new bikes by offering a trade in program for a customer’s old bike. TPC also works with bike manufacturers to help them manage and resell their demo inventories.

For buyers, TPC offers a safe and guaranteed buying experience. Their team of professional mechanics inspect, clean, and recondition each bike they sell, guaranteeing buyers that the bike they are buying is safe, free of defects, and ready to ride. Bicycles have gone the way of the car, and are now made from high-end composites, full of electronics, and have increasingly complex and proprietary parts. TPC’s unique ability to inspect and service every kind of bike from every major manufacturer provides the level of security that buyers now demand. By streamlining the procurement, warehousing, quality assurance, photographing, and listing process, TPC has become a market leader in pre-owned bikes.

TPC was founded in 2006 by Nick Martin while he was a professional mountain-bike racer for Trek. Over the last decade, Nick has brought together a team of industry experts covering cycling, sales, ops, technology, and e-commerce. We are extremely excited to partner with Nick and the TPC team to help them on their journey to be the global leader and most trusted destination worldwide to buy and sell pre-owned bikes to consumers and industry partners. You can sign up for the TPC mailing list here.

And if you’re in Boulder and want to check out some amazing cycling history, stop by their warehouse to check out their museum which has in its collection some of the coolest bikes ever made and raced.

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.