We are pleased to announce that we’ve co-led the $11m Series B funding of about.me. Based in San Francisco, about.me is a platform for representing personal identity online allowing users to create and maintain a curated page for self-expression. For examples, take a look at Brad Feld, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson.

We have long been obsessed with the notion of online identity and self-expression. One of our early Foundry Group investments, Gist tackled part of this problem, but was acquired relatively earlier in its life by RIM. More recently, our investment in FullContact addresses the idea of a definitive contact record for everyone on the planet, generated automatically from publicly available data.

about.me solves the opposite side of this problem – it allows everyone on the planet to create and maintain a definitive contact record for themselves. But this isn’t a boring contact record, nor is it a canned, dull, uninspired list of things you’ve done and places you’ve worked. It’s a beautiful, user crafted articulation of one’s online identity, that anyone can easily create.

And that’s only the beginning. about.me combines identity with search, discovery, and communication. Interested in learning more about some of your favorite venture capitalists or people living in Boulder, CO? After you’ve found them, you can communicate with them while clearly articulating your own identity, in a way in which each of you are in control of.

We’ve known Tony Conrad, the co-founder of about.me for many years. We’ve invested with him, and his partners at True Ventures, in many companies. We think about.me is special and decided to go all in with Tony and True to go after what we think is an opportunity to finally create the definitive source for identity and self-expression online.

As of today we have made 13 investments via FG Angels – 11 have been announced and two will be closed within a week.

On 10/1/13, we announced that we were going to create a syndicate on AngelList and start doing seed investments that way. Our plan was to make 50 seed investments by the end of 2014, using the angel strategy that Brad has been using for his own angel investing since 1994.

We spent the balance of 2013 figuring out a long list of legal issues, including vexing ones like the 99 investor problem, and whether we were going to use 506(c) or 506(b) for our securities exemptions.  We opened up the FG Angels syndicate, and closed our first investment in early January 2014 in OnTheGo Platform.

Since then we’ve closed a total of 11investments. You can see them on the FG Angels tab on our Foundry Group portfolio page.  The other two will be announced and put up on the site once they close.

The FG Angels syndicate now has 193 investors who commit up to $455,000 per investment. At first we thought these were interesting numbers, but now we realize they are simply vanity metrics given the 99 investor rule.

Each of our syndicates have ranged between $125,000 and $300,000, not including the $50,000 from us. It’s been hard to figure out what drives this on a case by case basis as we are generally equally enthusiastic about each of the companies. Originally we were using a minimum of $1,000 per investor but decided to raise it to $2,000 given the 99 investor rule. That had a little impact, but less than we expected.

A month ago we felt like the issue might be syndicate fatigue, which surprised us given that we’ve been clear that we are going to do 50 investments and the best strategy for an angel would be to invest in each of them along side us. But then we had a few investments where the amount trended up, so that probably wasn’t it.

It’s been an interesting experiment so far. AngelList has continued to be awesome to work with and we are excited about the angel portfolio we have been creating.

Today we’re pleased to announce our Series A investment in Nix Hydra. Nix Hydra is a software entertainment company dedicated to creating fun, interactive products for young women on new and emerging technology platforms.

The studio’s debut game, Egg Baby, is a virtual pet egg that hatches into a variety of gift-giving creatures depending on how players treats the egg. The game quickly became a phenomenon in the U.S. after it launched in 2013, touting almost 9 million downloads with no marketing spend. The company has plans for a number of other titles and will use the financing to expand their underlying gaming platform, extend the Egg Baby franchise, and create new games and titles.

The company was founded by Lina Chen and Naomi Ladizinsky, who first met as undergraduates at Yale and then went on to work separately in the entertainment industry before coming together with the vision of creating a gaming company targeted to women and run by women.

In the past several years casual and social gaming has emerged as a large and fast growing category in the entertainment industry. At Foundry we’ve already experienced the kind of outsized growth and return potential that this segment is capable of with our investment in Zynga. Recently, the market has evolved and become more specialized with mobile becoming the dominant gaming platform.

We love the idea of an entire company focused on games for girls and young women. While there have been some individual titles targeted towards this segment, we don’t believe that any broad platforms have emerged with this focus. Some of this is because few game developers, game company executives, and investors are women.

As a result of all of this, we felt there was a huge gap in the market and very deliberately set out to find a gaming platform focused on young women.

We’re excited to welcome Lina, Naomi and the team at Nix Hydra to the Foundry family and look forward to forging new ground with them to bring creative, funny, and fun games to this market.

We are pleased to announce that we’ve co-led Distil Networks’ Series A financing, along with Techstars’ Bullet Time Ventures. Based in Arlington, VA, Distil Networks provides advanced bot detection and mitigation capabilities to its customers on public and private clouds.

The term “bot” refers to an automated software program that runs over the internet and accesses and interacts with websites. The most common example of a bot is a web crawler (also known as a spider), employed by search engines to index the web and enable online discovery. By and large, web crawlers are welcomed by website owners, as discoverability and searchability are crucial to their business.

However, there are many examples of unwanted or malicious bots, which can be employed to steal content, engage in advertising fraud, scan for security vulnerabilities, steal user data, or engage in denial of service attacks. The consequences of these bots’ activities range from relatively benign to criminal and destructive, and it is estimated that nearly a quarter of web traffic can be attributed to unwanted bot activity.

Numerous companies offer products that provide protection against DDoS attacks, which is just one facet of the larger bot prevention landscape. Distil approaches the bot prevention and mitigation problem more broadly, which allows the company to address a broad variety of customer pain points in the e-commerce, online data, advertising, and security domains. Any company that posts valuable data online, either for free or behind a paywall, is a potential customer of Distil Networks. Distil recently published a fascinating report on the bot landscape, available here.

Distil’s products are built upon their proprietary bot detection and mitigation technology which identifies bots via multiple approaches including unique fingerprinting technology that tracks bots regardless of their IP and machine learning techniques that get more intelligent with time. The tech is easily deployed in the cloud via DNS modification or within a site’s infrastructure via a physical or virtual appliance.

Distil fits nicely into our Glue and Protocol themes, and joins an exciting group of cloud infrastructure companies in our portfolio, including the likes of MongoLab, Pantheon, and SendGrid.

Distil Networks was founded in 2011 and participated in the 2012 Techstars Cloud program in San Antonio, Texas. We’ve been following the company closely since their graduation from the program, and are excited to join Distil’s founders Rami Essaid, Engin Akyol, Andrew Stein, and the rest of the Distil crew to help build Distil into a great success.

We’re happy to announce our latest FG Angels investment in Rachio.

Rachio has created a device called “Iro” which is a smart irrigation controller that is powered by intelligent cloud-based software and is controlled via an intuitive, lightning-fast iPhone and Android app or web-dashboard. Iro is incredibly easy to install and set up, replacing only the existing control box, and modernizes the entire irrigation system. With the push of a button in the app, Iro connects to the internet via WiFi.

Once connected, homeowners have full control at their fingertips. Sprinklers can be turned on instantaneously from anywhere in the world. Or, allow Rachio’s intelligent software to automatically manage scheduling. Automated scheduling is optimized for water-efficiency and landscape, utilizing variables including: landscape characteristics, weather, seasonality, water budgets and user feedback. Iro provides homeowners with a product experience that empowers them to have better landscapes with less time, less water and less money so they can spend more time enjoying their yard.

Founder Matt Reisman was a former student in the class that Jason co-teaches at the University of Colorado.  Jason and Matt have stayed in touch since Matt took the class and we are excited to work with him and the team.