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

 Today we are excited to announce that Foundry has lead a $27 million financing round in ROLI. Based in London, ROLI makes connected hardware and software products that transform music-making with a platform that bridges the gap between acoustic and electronic instruments and allows anyone to make music.

ROLI’s Seaboard is a new kind of musical instrument, an evolution of the familiar electronic keyboard that lets players shape sound through five dimensions of touch on a soft and smooth touch and pressure responsive surface. This brings unprecedented expressivity to the instrument, enabling incredibly realistic expressions of acoustic instruments while bringing new possibilities to fully synthetic sounds as well.

ROLI sits squarely in our human-computer interaction theme. We believe ROLI’s products represent a new kind of connected music-making platform, and we’re even more excited about ROLI’s product roadmap going forward. We’re excited to be joining ROLI’s growing team of polymath engineers, artists, designers, and musicians as they build the future of connected music.

Visit ROLI.com and pick up an award-winning Seaboard RISE, or download the amazing (and free) 3D-touch enabled NOISE iOS app to get a taste of ROLI via your iPhone or iPad.

Finally, check out this amazing video of ROLI’s own Marco Parisi playing Hendrix’s classic Little Wing. Close your eyes and you’ll have no idea it isn’t a guitar playing that solo!

 

After two years of a dedicated experiment, we’ve decided to stop making new investments via our FG Angels Syndicate. We’ve learned a lot, achieved some of our goals, but ultimately have decided that the effort required to maintain our investment pace on AngelList is too great for us, at least for now.

A long history and explanation of what we’ve learned is posted at Ending Our FG Angels Experiment.

By running the experiment, we’ve better understood the leverage points at the angel / seed level that AngelList and Syndicates create, which for some investors, and many entrepreneurs, is very powerful. We’d like to believe that we’ve contributed to the evolution and dynamic of angel / seed investing through this effort. And, our friends at AngelList have been amazing to work with. We hope they feel we’ve been helpful to them on their mission.

While we are no longer going to be actively making FG Angels investments, every now and then we might do something out of FG Angels. We continue to believe that AngelList Syndicates is an effective platform for companies and investors. We simply felt that we needed to better balance the time and effort we were spending on FG Angels relative to the weight it has in our overall portfolio.

It’s important to all of us at Foundry Group to experiment around the edges of our industry and to push the boundaries of the venture model to find new and innovative ways to create value for our investors while supporting as broad a set of entrepreneurs as possible. We’ll continue to look for ways to do that.

We are excited to announce that Lindel Eakman is joining Foundry Group to lead a new initiative we are creating called Foundry Group Next.

Over the years at Foundry Group we’ve built an extensive network of companies. While we’ve invested in some of these directly, this actually represents the smallest set of companies that we are involved with. We have also invested indirectly in many others through our investment in Techstars. Yet another, and much larger set of companies, come from our investments in other venture funds.

In 2013, we started thinking hard about the future of Foundry Group. As we discussed the confluence of our fund investing strategy, our current late stage investing which we do through our Foundry Group Select fund, and our interest in acting on our unique later stage deal flow, we realized that there was an opportunity to wrap these three ideas together into a single entity that would encompass not just what we had previously called our Select strategy but would also institutionalize our fund investment strategy as well as leverage those and other relationships to invest in other later stage opportunities in our broader network.

The critical ingredient for bringing this all together was finding the person to help us execute our GP fund strategy. Fortunately we knew exactly who we wanted to work on this project.

For the past 13 years, Lindel Eakman has been the head of UTIMCO’s private equity group. He’s created an incredible portfolio of investments in venture capital funds, including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, True Ventures, IA Ventures, Techstars Ventures, and Foundry Group. In April 2007, Lindel committed to be our largest investor in our first fund, taking 20% of the fund. This was a bold move, as we only had one commitment at the time.

Lindel – through UTIMCO – has continued to be our largest investor. He has been on our advisory board and for the past eight years has been a key advisor to us. Over the years he also has become a close friend.

Lindel joins us to help execute our Foundry Group Next strategy. Our Next strategy not only allows us to continue making direct investments in high-potential startups, but would also scale-up our ability to support venture firms and funds whose vision and values align with ours. Through this activity, we hope to spread the Foundry Group values and DNA further into the overall venture and startup ecosystem.

Welcome Lindel to the gang.

P.S. To make the the lawyers in our lives happy, we need to say that in no way is this announcement an offer to sell securities or an advertisement of us raising a new fund. We have yet to announce anything regarding any new funds that we may raise in the future.