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.

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!

 

 

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.

PSL was announced recently and there’s an extremely comprehensive post explaining how it works at Top Seattle investors raise $12.5M for new ‘startup studio’ Pioneer Square Labs. Marcelo Calbucci, who is part of PSL, explains in his post Next Chapter: Pioneer Square Labs, why he joined and what’s unique about the approach.

We are looking forward to working with Greg, Geoff, Mike, Ben, and the PSL team on helping create some great new companies.

This year’s local election in Boulder is a critical one. The city that we love risks shutting its doors. While the business community in Boulder has contributed immeasurably to the vibrancy, charitable contribution base, economic development, and success of our community, there is a faction in Boulder that feels that our city should stop moving forward and instead should live in the past. This faction believes in a less inclusive Boulder and aims to achieve this goal by literally shutting the doors to our city.

This is what is behind propositions 300 and 301 which are proposed amendments to the city’s charter.   

This faction is well organized and well funded and the slogans make it sound reasonable.  But make no mistake:  the goal is to immediately freeze all development of all types around the city by enveloping the city a bundle of political red tape.  

In the coming days, Boulder residents will be asked to vote on the following:

#300 – Neighborhood Right to Vote on Land Use Regulation

#301 – New Development Shall Pay Its Own Way

These initiatives must be voted down.

While innocuous sounding, the names of these initiatives completely misrepresent their intent and the dire consequences that would result if they are enacted. The truth is that neighborhoods already do have a say in projects that affect them, and developers already do pay some of the highest fees and taxes in the country.  

Effectively, these proposals will create 60+ neighborhoods in Boulder.  Can you imagine what would happen if we had that many homeowner associations that had the power to hold special elections and veto land use changes approved by city council? The smallest of those neighborhoods would be comprised of just 19 houses. That’s not “local control” (which already exists), that’s a deliberate attempt to create gridlock.

These initiatives will immediately freeze important infill development, including affordable housing, transit-oriented development, neighborhood serving retail, social service centers, and day care centers. The city manager has stated that the city will stop issuing permits of any kind for at least six months while they figure out what these initiatives mean and how to implement them. Once they do start reissuing permits, these initiatives will force the city to levy such high taxes and fees that development will effectively stop in Boulder. This will stop our city in its tracks and greatly exacerbate an already expensive housing market.

These measures are opposed by six former mayors, all nine City Council members, numerous former city council members, Boulder Housing Partners, The Daily Camera, and numerous civic groups like Open Boulder, the Boulder Chamber, Better Boulder,  and others.  Open Boulder executive director Andy Schultheiss has called them “among the worst pieces of public policy I’ve seen in almost 25 years of observing and participating in local policy-making.”

It’s critically important that we defeat these measures. To do that we need to get the word out to those in our community who want Boulder to continue to be a vibrant city. The sad irony is that those promoting these measures have the time and organization to put towards pressing their backward and closed agenda while many who oppose it are busy helping keep Boulder prosperous by creating jobs and economic growth.

This is a battle we can’t afford to lose. Please take a minute to help us get the word out. Send it to your friends via email and social media. Urge your neighbors to vote and make sure you vote yourself. With ballots mailed out this week many in our community will be voting in the next seven days (over 50% of ballots are returned within a week of their being sent out).

#keepboulderopen

Seth, Jason, Brad, Ryan

_______

Below are some suggested tweets or Facebook posts should you chose to share them:

Tweet: i agree with @foundrygroup. 300 and 301 will have devastating effects on boulder. VOTE NO on both! #keepboulderopen https://bit.ly/1ReQamJ

Tweet: i stand for keeping the doors to boulder open. VOTE NO on 300 and 301. #keepboulderopen https://bit.ly/1ReQamJ

Tweet: In Boulder’s upcoming election we’ll decide if we want to live in the past or continue to thrive. #keepboulderopen https://bit.ly/1ReQamJ

 

We are pleased to announce that we have completed an investment in AvidXchange. Based in Charlotte, NC. AvidXchange (Avid) is a leading mid-market B2B payments provider with a complete invoice workflow management solution, enabling its customers to seamlessly handle invoice ingestion and payments to their respective suppliers.

Avid was founded in 2000 and is run by Mike Praeger, a long time friend of Brad’s from when they both lived in Boston in the 1990s. Mike had several entrepreneurial successes before starting Avid and has grown it in the past 15 years to a substantial company on a modest amount of invested capital.

In April, Mike approached Brad about joining his board as part of a growth investment being led by Bain Capital Ventures. Brad provided some advice on the deal but declined joining the board since we weren’t an investor in the company. After several additional conversations, Mike asked if we would be willing to invest if Bain would syndicate some of their investment to us. After a number of discussions, including with members of our advisory board, Matt Harris at Bain (with whom Seth has a long standing relationship), and Mike, we decided to pursue an investment in the business.

Avid offers its customers solutions to ingest invoices of any form and connect to over 100+ ERP/Accounting systems. Through their software, Avid helps their clients analyze their spend and efficiently pay suppliers on the AvidPay network. Avid’s software enables customers to make a paper-intensive 10-day-long process become completely paperless. As a result, the customer’s payment process will take less than three days days at 50% of the cost. AvidPay enables their customers to pay without doing any work onboarding suppliers (Avid handles all of this), monitor payments across all channels, and receive incentive rebates for using electronic payment methods.

Avid is a fascinating example of a large company, growing extremely quickly, that is hidden in plain sight. As the fastest growing technology company in North Carolina, it’s on track to be a very important payment intermediary in the overall financial infrastructure.

When we raised Foundry Group Select, our strategy was to only invest in companies that we already had an investment in. Avid is an exception to this and one we considered carefully. After talking to our full advisory board and receiving unanimous approval to do this investment, we decided to move forward with it.

We are excited about the chance to work with Mike and his team as they navigate the next wave of growth.