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 http://www.revolar.com.
Our Investment in Havenly
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.
Our Investment in TrackR Helps You Find All of Your Things
We are pleased to announce we led an $8.7 million investment in TrackR. Based in Santa Barbara, CA, TrackR has a series of products to help you locate all the physical things you own.
As mobile phones and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) become ubiquitous, each of us is now carrying around a GPS-enabled supercomputer in our pocket. While many more physical products are becoming connected with the Internet, the vast majority of things we own don’t have an Internet connection. As a result, they are effectively “off the grid.”
TrackR has created a set of small, low cost physical products that can be used to track these non-connected items, such as your wallet, keys, phone, pet, bike, luggage, and – well – anything you want to keep track of. The first TrackR products are the size of a quarter and contain hardware that includes a BLE connection and a replaceable battery that lasts up to a year. The TrackR can be fastened or stuck to any device and subsequently uniquely identifies it going forward.
The TrackR connects, via your mobile phone, to upload its location using the GPS location of the phone. Since TrackR uses BLE, it can run in the background and constantly update the location of any item with a TrackR that you are in BLE range of. This works for TrackRs that are registered to you as well as any other TrackRs in the wild.
The magic of this is that with enough TrackRs in the world, the company can create a “CrowdGPS” piggybacking off the mobile phones out in the world. Once TrackR’s software is installed on a critical mass of phones in a geography there is GPS location coverage in “almost real-time” for every TrackR in that geography. So, if someone steals your bike and is riding it around, any mobile phone that has the TrackR software on it will connect as the bike thief rides by you, transmit the GPS coordinates, which you’ll then see on your mobile phone.
TrackR is also releasing an in-home product that you install in each room. Then, in addition to knowing where something is out in the world, you’ll also know where it specifically is in your house, down to the room. No more lost keys as you are rushing out to dinner.
TrackR was started several years ago by friends and first time entrepreneurs, Chris Herbert and Christian Smith, after they graduated from UCSB. We are excited to go on their journey with them.
We’ve Joined the Circus!
Two Bit Circus, that is. Today, we are excited to announce that we’ve co-led a $6.5m Series A investment in Two Bit Circus with our friends at Techstars Ventures.
Our Human Computer Interaction theme continues to evolve and provide fertile ground for investments. One of our core beliefs about HCI is that as computing continues to progress and becomes increasingly common, it will saturate our world in such a way that it will “vanish into ubiquity” and result in people interacting with computing in situations where they may not even be consciously aware that they are doing so.
We believe there is an opportunity to re-invent live entertainment and interactive social events through creatively deployed hardware and software entertainment-focused tools. Events like the Maker Faire, Cirque du Soleil, and even the tech-heavy installations built for the Burning Man festival point towards people’s hunger for these kinds of experiences.
Over the summer, we met Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman, co-founders of Two Bit Circus. These guys, along with the rest of their incredible team, are the very definition of mad geniuses, and the kinds of folks we aspire to work with.
Two Bit Circus is a modern high-tech circus creating the future of fun. They are artists, inventors, educators, and performers building big games, telling stories with technology, and they make liberal use of lasers, fire, and robots, all in service of reinventing the way people play.
To experience what the company is about first-hand, check out their upcoming STEAM Carnival next weekend in San Francisco, November 6 – 9 at Pier 48 at AT&T Park.
One other awesome item that Brent & Eric have on their resumes prior to founding Two Bit Circus is the work they did on the Rube Goldberg OK GO video This Too Shall Pass while at Synn Labs:
We are looking forward to working with the team at Two Bit Circus to reinvent live and interactive entertainment!
Our Investment In Pioneer Square Labs
We are pleased to announce that we have completed our initial investment in Pioneer Square Labs (PSL). Based in Seattle, PSL is a startup studio, an 8-person team of founders, developers, and designers who rapidly test and validate new startup ideas before recruiting an executive team to build out an actual spin-off company.
The co-founders are Greg Gottesman, Geoff Entress, Mike Galgon, and Ben Gilbert. Greg is a co-founder of Madrona and long-time VC. Geoff worked with Greg at Madrona for a decade and is one of the most prolific and successful angel investors in the Pacific Northwest. Mike was the co-founder of aQuantive which was acquired by Microsoft for $6.2 billion. Ben was a co-founder of Madrona Labs with Greg.
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.