We are happy to announce the closing of our sixth fund, Foundry Group Next. The $500 million fund is a continuation of our Foundry Group Select Fund approach but expands on our previous Select Fund strategy with the addition of two important components.

Foundry Group Select allowed us to make growth investments in the most successful companies from our early stage funds. Supporting these existing portfolio companies with meaningful capital in their scale-up phase provides flexibility to our companies and allows us to remain syndication agnostic in our investing.

Foundry Group Next continues this strategy but also gives us the ability to invest in growth stage companies outside of Foundry Group that fit within our thematic investing activities. Over the years, we have seen a meaningful number of attractive growth investments that we could not address given our early stage strategy and original Foundry Group Select strategy. By opening our investment activities to include a small number of growth investments outside of Foundry Group companies, we can take further advantage of the work we’ve done to become experts in our key themes.

Many of these growth opportunities stemmed from our personal investments in other early stage venture funds. We decided to formalize this investing activity in Foundry Group Next by adding Lindel Eakman to our team. Lindel was previously our largest LP while he was at UTIMCO and is now leading our Foundry Group Next investments as an LP in other early stage VC funds.  We are excited to partner with other funds that we respect and strengthen those existing relationships.  We also anticipate that some of their portfolio companies will be candidates for a direct investment from Foundry Group Next.

In Foundry Group Next, we are also happy to welcome a small number of new Limited Partners to our family. We are pleased to partner with such a great group of investors.

We very much look forward to working with another group of great entrepreneurs and VC fund managers in our Foundry Group Next Fund.

– Jason, Ryan, Seth, Brad, and Lindel

We recently led a $35 million financing at Formlabs. In case you were wondering, lasers are super cool.

In 2010, when we invested in MakerBot, the maker movement was just beginning. While 3D printing technology had been around for 30 years, there were no desktop 3D printers. The concept of using an additive process for 3D printing, where you built up a 3D object from continuous extrusion of a material such as ABS or PLA (plastics) was well understood. But this technology had not been brought to the desktop at a $2,000 price point. MakerBot did that and created an entirely new market segment within the 3D printing industry.

Last year we invested in Glowforge, a company playing into the same trend that made MakerBot successful but in an inverse way. Instead of an additive process, Glowforge uses a subtractive process to create objects. Glowforge has a product that uses lasers to perform the subtractive process. In the same way that MakerBot completely disrupted the 3D additive manufacturing industry, we believe that Glowforge can completely disrupt the 3D subtractive manufacturing industry. Last week we announced that we led a $22 million financing for Glowforge.

In 2011, at about the same time that MakerBot was starting to scale, another new company – Formlabs – was founded with the vision of also creating a desktop 3D printer. However, unlike the technology that MakerBot used which was called FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling), Formlabs used a technology called SLA (Stereolithography) which has many advantages over FDM, but is more complicated to implement. As a result, it took Formlabs longer to get their product into the market.

In the fall of 2012, Formlabs did a $2.95 million Kickstarter campaign. In the early summer of 2013, around the time Stratasys acquired MakerBot, Formlabs started shipping their Form 1 printer. By the end of 2015, Formlabs shipped their Form 2 printer, which is a spectacular product.

While we knew Formlabs because of our MakerBot investment, we didn’t meet Max until after Stratasys had acquired MakerBot. I knew Max from a distance because we were both in the Netflix documentary Print the Legend. Even though there are many cringe-worthy moments, it’s a powerful story about the creation and emergence of MakerBot, Formlabs, and desktop 3D printing.

In 2014 Max hunted me down at a talk I did in Boston hosted by Katie Rae and Reed Sturtevant with my uncle Charlie about his book The Calloway Way: Results and Integrity. We talked for a little while and he made a powerful impression on me that I tucked away deep inside my brain.

This spring, Max and his cofounder Natan Linder reached out to me about having Foundry Group lead a financing. The company had only raised one major round of $19 million, led by Barry Schuler at DFJ Growth. Barry had a long history with 3D printing and he had put in a term sheet to lead the round Makerbot was considering. When Stratasys acquired the company, Barry invested in Formlabs. I’m on the board of littleBits with Barry and have loved working with him so between Barry’s encouragement, Max’s direct approach, and my love of lasers, we dug into Formlabs.

In the past two years, 3D printing has gone through the classic Gartner Hype Cycle bottoming out in the trough of disillusionment.

At this point, we think there is an enormous void for a new market leader as we move into the slope of enlightenment. We are honored to get another shot at this with our investment in Formlabs.

Oh – and lasers are super cool.

We have some entertaining news to share with you today. We have recently registered with the SEC and are now considered Registered Investment Advisors. Did we do this so that we can have cooler business cards? No. Did we do this because our back office was lacking in purpose? Heck no.

We had to, per the SEC rules. And the reason you ask? Well, we can’t tell you that or we could possibly break some other SEC rules. So for now, just accept that your friendly neighborhood venture capital firm is now subject to a lot of new and stimulating paperwork.

Why are we even bothering telling you this? Because it will affect what we can say on the Foundry Group blog and personal blogs that we write. We’ll have to be careful with statements that we make about companies we invest in. We’ll also be cautious in what we write about our funds or the industry in general. According to the SEC rules, we can no longer write anything that “promotes” our funds. While we’d argue that we never try to promote our firm, but just write anything that comes to mind and try to have fun doing it, with our new registration status comes new responsibilities.

This will be a learning process for us and our goal is to bring you content that is still 100% transparent. Please be patient with us if there are hiccups along the way, or perhaps even questions that we can’t legally answer in the comment sections anymore.

And as always – thank you all for the support. We love what we do and the community, and our interaction with you through our blogs, is a big reason why. And, don’t worry, there will be a third VC video from us – someday.

Our investment in Fitbit was our first effort to invest in the notion of human instrumentation. As the quantified self became a broad meme around 2010, we decided that over the next 20 years there would be an increasing integration of technology into the human body to help measure, test, and regulate our health and overall organic functions.

We’ve looked at many companies that are doing things in this area, but almost all trigger the need for either FDA approval or engagement in some sort of regulatory or invasive process. While the body hacking movement is fascinating, the side effect of implanting physical devices in one’s body creates issues that we aren’t ready to contend with.

So – we’ve continued to look. At the Upfront Summit earlier this year, we were introduced to Shireen Yates, the CEO of Nima. Shireen and her co-founder Scott Sundvor are MIT grads with major food allergies. They had a vision for creating a consumer device that could be used to test foods in real time for various allergens, such as gluten, peanut, dairy, and soy. The product would be non-invasive, but have proprietary chemistry that would create a huge moat around the business, since making the tests simple, fast, and accurate is incredibly difficult.

They had a phenomenal response to a pre-order campaign for their product with its first test, which was for gluten. The chemistry and the device are separate, so in addition to being able to do various types of tests with the same physical hardware, the chemistry comes in disposable units for each test, allowing people to use the Nima product for many tests across different allergens.

In addition to the recurring revenue from the disposable chemistry models around gluten, the product roadmap includes new chemistry models for tests around dairy, peanut, and other allergens. Further, as the chemistry evolves, there is the possibility of combining multiple tests into one chemistry package, as well as evolving the threshold of the sensors.

Finally, given that the sensor is a separate device connected to your smartphone, the software side of the business has very similar characteristics to Fitbit in terms of creating regular, continuous measurements around data for an individual, as well as around composition of food, and consumer access to this data.

We are excited to be joining our friends at SoftTech VC, Upfront Ventures and, SK Ventures on this journey with Shireen, Scott, and the team they’ve built.

Foundry Group has always focused on community. From our work across all manner of community organizations, to bringing key industry conferences to our home town of Boulder, to supporting entrepreneurs, we’ve always looked for ways to engage productively in the markets we work in.

We’re firm believers in doing more than just talking. We are founders and major supporters of Pledge 1% and The Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and have watched them grow into nationally – now internationally – acclaimed organizations.

But we wanted to do more to align the Foundry brand with our commitment to give back to the communities in which we live and work. To really put a stake in the ground about what Foundry stands for.

It is with great pride that we announce that Foundry Group has achieved B Corp Certification through B Lab®.

Certified B Corps are for-profit companies certified by the nonprofit B Lab® to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Certified B Corps pledge to not only focus on their bottom line but also on the community at large.

We are also excited that two fellow Colorado venture firms – Colorado Impact Fund and Greenmont Capital Partners – are announcing their B-certifications alongside us. We hope this sends a message to the broader industry that we can all do well by doing good and encourage others in the industry to make the leap to Certified B Corporations®.

We will join 75 other Certified B Corps in Colorado and over 1,700 in nearly 50 countries around the world including well-known leaders New Belgium Brewing, Patagonia, Seventh Generation, Ben & Jerry’s, Kickstarter, Etsy, Warby Parker and Hootsuite.

We also join notable tech B Corps in Colorado such as Rally Software (the first ever B Corp to go public with that certification), Namaste Solar, Simple Energy, and dojo4.

We believe that a group of people acting together towards a common goal can have a far greater impact than when they act alone. With this in mind we challenge everyone reading this to consider joining us in the B Corp movement. #BtheChange