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.

Today we’re excited to announce that Foundry has lead a $3 million financing round in Revolar. Quite simply, Revolar transforms the way people keep themselves and those they love safe by providing a simple way to notify friends, family or a monitoring service that they feel threatened or are in trouble.

Revolar is a discrete, wearable device that uses Bluetooth Smart™ to signal an alert to your loved ones via a text or email message. You can wear Revolar under clothing or on a keychain, clipped to a purse, etc. If you ever need help, simply press Revolar and an alert message with your live location information is sent to your friends and family.

With one press Revolar sends a yellow alert, which lets your contacts know you don’t feel comfortable and want them to know your location (the system then begins tracking your location until the alert is cleared). A rapid double press of Revolar sends a red alert, which tells your contacts you are in immediate danger and to get you help right away.

We’re often drawn to entrepreneurs because of the passion they bring to building their businesses. This is particularly true of the Revolar team, who are truly on a mission to enhance personal safety and make the world a safer place. Founder and CEO Jacqueline Ros created Revolar as a direct result of the experience of her little sister, who was assaulted twice as a teenager. This mission of Revolar is personal.

Based in Denver and with a team of 9 (and growing), Revolar’s product launches in Q1 2016. You can find out more about Revolar as well as pre-order one for yourself or a loved one at www.revolar.com.

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Havenly, Inc. Based in Denver, CO, Havenly is creating a marketplace matching interior designers with clients.

Nearly $60B in annual home furnishing sales are not influenced by an interior designer.  The vast majority of people either try to furnish their homes by themselves (which takes a ton of time, conviction and knowledge) or try to rely on “free” in-store design services (which are stuck to a single brand and have misaligned incentives due to commission structures).

Similarly, there is a market of interior designers that is just as frustrated.  They don’t have a channel to meet potential clients and have no way to advise on smaller jobs (for instance a single room or two) and still make a decent living.  Some estimates believe that there are over 10,000 underutilized designers in this country alone.

There have been several companies that have tried to enter this space, but they either focus on selling home goods directly to the consumer with design as an afterthought, or have tried to disinter-mediate professional designers by either crowdsourcing design or allowing anyone to act as a designer and thus drive down design costs to nearly zero.

This appears to be a situation where two large ecosystems are concurrently frustrated.  Our marketplace theme posits that in this case, technology can be the answer to galvanize these two markets and create an interesting business.

Havenly is building a platform to connect professional designers and clients.  For one flat fee, a consumer can have a professional designer create several different treatments for their space.  Each user has the ability to “shop” different designers that fit their particular aesthetic, as well.  Designers create their own profiles on the system and the platform uses proprietary algorithms  to help the pairing process as well.  Havenly customers and designers can purchase home goods directly from the company and they already have many vendor relationships.

The company was founded by sisters Lee Mayer and Emily Motayed and well as Jesse Dixon. Lee has previously worked at Bankrate, Canon and Bain & Company. Emily has been at American Express and Huron Consulting.  Jesse was previously with Walmart.com  We were introduced to Havenly through our involvement in FGAngels.  The FG Angel syndicate led their seed round.

Havenly is based in Denver, CO and currently has 16 full-time employees. We are stoked to work with the team.