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.  

Sometimes we come across a company that we know is going to change the world. They’ve got something magic in the tank that’s simply inevitable. It’s like they’re travelling back in time and building something that that in the future will be considered obvious. That’s Mozaik.

Brad will join the board with this Series B financing and we couldn’t be more excited to work alongside Mara and James as they reshape the financial ecosystem. Mozaik  fits squarely into our Glue theme as they are building technology that scrapes and vets the entire digital world of finance and stitches the pieces back together in a more rational way. Just as Twitter has reshaped social movements, Mozaik will transform our ongoing battle against corruption and fraud.  Who knows, maybe one day it can automatically produce financial reports so that we don’t need to use accountants or auditors anymore.

At Foundry Group, we love backing young first time entrepreneurs. We’re thrilled to see where Mara and James take Mozaik. You can find out more about them here, and even more here.

Finally, Mara runs almost as much as Brad does so hopefully a marathon is in order soon.

We’re excited to announce our latest FG Angels investment: Uvize.

Uvize provides schools with an innovative software platform that their helps military veterans succeed in college. They partner with universities to deliver an online extension to their veterans center. The community site is a essentially a network that connects students with the right veteran classmate, mentor, or advisor when they need it.

Uvize also delivers incoming veterans academic orientation and preparation classes in an amazing online environment. Building skills and community before school starts increases the success rate of veterans. Uvize is founded by military veterans and a college educator.

An estimated 85% of military veterans currently fail to graduate college.  This represents billions in lost revenues to schools, but also a huge social cost as well.  Uvize aims to change that statistic.

CEO David Cass and Jason have know each other for years through a mutual friend.   CTO David Parker was a former student in Jason’s class that he teaches at the University of Colorado Law School.  Jason was a mentor to Uvize during their participation in the Techstars Kaplan program last year.

Welcome Davids!