I am delighted to be introducing myself as the newest member of the Foundry team. As an Investor, I will be assisting the investment team in nurturing the Foundry network of CEOs, partner funds, and investors, identifying and evaluating investment opportunities, and helping with anything else that needs to get done behind the scenes.

My first exposure to the startup world is when my dad started his own business after decades as a large-company employee. He saw a problem in the market, knew he could do things differently, make his service better than competitors, and the rest, as they say, is history. He bootstrapped the business and realized tremendous growth through hard work, long days, and unparalleled determination. Having a front-row seat to his entrepreneurial journey changed me, without me honestly realizing it at the time. I never thought of him as a founder until later in life when I could truly appreciate what that meant, but I am grateful that his entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic are rooted in my DNA.

I graduated from college with a degree in finance just in time for the financial crisis to set in. The closest thing to the banking job I was seeking at the time was in the accounting office at a Chicago auction house. Having never been to Chicago, or the Midwest for that matter, and with few other job options in such tumultuous times, I packed my car and drove west. Chicago turned out to be a great city to live in. The auction house was run very much like a scrappy startup and turned out to be a great first job for me. I was forced to think on my own, come up with creative solutions to problems, and mentally (and sometimes physically) run on all cylinders to get things done.

The next chapter led me to the University of Chicago Investment Office, managers of a $12 billion endowment and ultimately stewards of the University’s financial health. I will forever be grateful to my boss there, Loryn, who took a chance on me despite my complete lack of experience and helped guide me as my career grew over my 11 years there. A few years into my tenure at the endowment I was accepted to the part-time evening MBA program at Booth. Aside from a great education, Booth gave me a start at network building and dynamic thinking which I have been able to apply to all aspects of my life. The endowment culture rewarded my natural curiosity and creative thinking; a simple, “why do we do things this way?” resulted in collaboration, innovation, and efficiency. I credit my nature to help others and give first (shameless theft of Foundry’s motto) to my success at the University, to why I have built so many lasting relationships there, and to why I was given so many opportunities.

I helped launch the Startup Investment Program, an initiative created by the University President aimed at providing supportive capital to University-affiliated founders. My involvement in launching and running the program gave me the opportunity to meet many of the University’s countless entrepreneurs as they pitched their ideas, raised capital, and transformed and scaled their ideas into full-fledged businesses. It introduced me to the nuances of venture investing and quickly became a large part and most rewarding aspect of my job.

The latest chapter in my life was a move to the sunshine state – and obviously I mean Colorado and not Florida (fun fact: I was in Aspen when the pandemic hit and just never left!). My partner and I always say that we were some of the luckiest pandemic participants because all aspects of life converged for us in March 2020. Our relationship, jobs, friends & family, health, and housing (not a small feat in our town) just worked out. Although not without its challenges, small-town living and mountain air have done wonders for my mental and physical health. Once I started flexing my Booth-built networking muscles again, I found a huge range of really interesting people in our little mountain town who were interested in talking about literally everything. Folks I met while hiking, biking, and in the gondola line have since become good friends, professional resources, and mentors (many of whom encouraged the search that led me to Foundry). One such relationship started with a chance encounter on a bike ride and has since led to a non-profit board seat and a close friendship.

Actually, the real latest chapter is with Foundry. Foundry itself was an obvious fit given my first in-person meeting involved hiking, a dog, and an honest conversation about a mission rooted in innovation, network, and a give-first mentality. Foundry has built an impressive platform and I’m looking forward to contributing to the team with my strategic, technical, and organizational expertise. I am equally parts grateful and excited to be part of the Foundry team. I am based in Aspen and will be spending lots of time in Boulder and look forward to continuing to meet all the great humans in the Foundry network. You can reach me at meredith@foundry.vc.

Special shoutout to my UChicago endowment family for introducing me to Jaclyn and being so supportive in my transition – thank you!

I am thrilled to join Foundry as the Head of Network. It is truly exciting to be part of the Foundry mission and to support our Founders/ CEOs and partner funds. This role comes at an interesting junction in my career. First, I am passionate about the startup ecosystem stemming from multiple roles in startups. Second, my preferred focus is building programs/ products that solve customer problems. And finally, I have benefited from being part of the Foundry family and the Network. The stars have aligned with this role! With that, I want to take a moment to say hello and introduce myself. 

A little about me…..My path to tech startups has not been direct. In fact, I started in clothing, specifically running production for a clothing company. I spent my early career going between vendors and factories to ensure that our clothes were being constructed efficiently and true to the original designs. This unique experience positioned me for a career in tech, specifically in working across multiple teams to bring ideas to fruition.  

From that start, I spent many years in large tech companies. My responsibilities ran the gamut from launching new brands to developing multi-million dollar strategic programs. However, I came to realize that my happy place is in startups. I have been part of several startups (of various stages). One in particular stands out as it became part of the Foundry portfolio. I joined Bounce.io in 2013 and by early 2014 Foundry had invested. Eventually, Bounce.io pivoted the core product and service, becoming Threatwave. We were acquired by another Foundry company, Return Path, in 2017. 

The Threatwave experience was eye-opening for me. The pivot provided me first hand exposure to the hard decisions and interesting challenges that face founders/ CEOs. Additionally, Foundry and the Network positively impacted us with support in hiring, funding and shared learnings. And finally, I personally got invaluable support from other operators in the Network through meetups like the Foundry Women’s Exec Summit.  

The most personal learning from my startup years is the realization that I love connecting with customers and working on cross-functional solutions to their problems. At Foundry, I have the opportunity to channel that enthusiasm to develop programs and resources that support Foundry’s portfolio, including Founders, CEOs, partner fund managers, and other members of the Foundry ecosystem. 

I am honored to be part of this amazing and highly regarded team.  And I look forward to being a champion of the Foundry Network. I am based in Boulder and look forward to speaking with as many of you as possible. I can be reached at mbarbour@foundry.vc.

Special thanks to my Threatwave and Return Path families, especially for bringing me into the fold.

While the promise of the cryptocurrency market and its goal of decentralization is hotly debated, blockchain technology continues to attract thousands of talented developers and founders. They see a disruptive technology that provides a new way of building companies and connecting society. Some estimate that there are over 20k active blockchain developers, growing 100% year-over-year, and over 83m unique crypto wallets. But it’s still early days, and there’s a significant need for infrastructure to support this massive technological shift.

Building web3 applications in today’s market isn’t efficient or scalable. A major challenge for developers working on NFT projects, web3 social, token gating, and other decentralized applications is retrieving, managing, and utilizing the user data necessary to build strong user experiences consumers have grown accustomed to.

Coherent is solving these challenges with core infrastructure that provides web3 user data to blockchain developers via a suite of APIs. With Coherent, developers can do in minutes what used to take weeks. The product powers a rich set of user experiences using the most common pieces of blockchain data, sharing information such as: human-readable transaction data, tagging for query transaction types, aggregating all NFTs in a user’s portfolio that includes metadata, cached images, floor price, and rarity, balances for tokens on a given chain, and more. 

Working toward its vision of a multi-chain offering, the company is starting with products for the Ethereum developer community, followed by Polygon and Solana.

Our investment in Coherent is particularly exciting for us as the company is led by a Foundry alum – our former intern, Carl Cortright, who we fondly referred to as “CTI” (Carl The Intern). Carl worked with us while studying machine learning and computer science at CU Boulder. He went on to intern for Coinbase, ultimately joining after graduation and working his way to senior software engineer and a member of the Coinbase Ventures team. Carl is joined by fellow Coinbase alums, Justin Choi and Ellen Choi. At Coinbase, the team worked together to develop critical platform infrastructure and experienced first hand the problems they’re solving at Coherent. In keeping with our network-driven investing strategy, Foundry co-led Coherent’s seed round alongside our partner fund Kindred Ventures, who bring significant expertise in web3 and company-building. Matchstick Ventures, a Foundry partner fund, and Coinbase Ventures also participated in the round, and the company recently joined Techstars Boulder’s summer 2022 class.

We are thrilled to welcome Coherent into our portfolio, to welcome Carl back to Foundry, and to support the development of core infrastructure in web3. You can learn more about Coherent and the financing here. 

Industrial workplaces are complex and dynamic environments dispersed over large geographic footprints. The efficiency, safety, and effectiveness of frontline workers often depend on timely communication with colleagues in other geographies, along with access to information contained in various formats on different systems throughout an enterprise. While the ubiquity of mobile devices solves some of these problems, they require users to hold them and use their hands to manipulate them. This activity is challenging, if not impossible, in many workplace situations, such as repairing industrial equipment. 

RealWear has solved the “hands-on” issue with head-mounted wearable devices and in doing so has become the market leader in assisted reality wearables for the frontline industrial workforce. Long regarded as the best solution for collaboration, looking up reference information, and logging work activity, RealWear devices can be attached to any hat, including the omnipresent hard hats worn by frontline workers in industrial settings, to deliver real-time data and communication capability anywhere. Built on Android technology, RealWear allows workers to have hands-free access all their daily applications, including videoconferencing, CMMS, over 100 workflow and data visualization systems, and any Android-based application. 

Foundry led RealWear’s Series C financing. Andrew Chrostowski, RealWear’s co-founder and CEO, is an Air Force veteran and former President of Scott Safety, a Tyco International company acquired in 2017. He has spent his career as an operator in the industrial applications space. In addition, Brad has known one of RealWear’s co-founders, Ken Lustig, for many years.

At the onset of Covid, enormous energy was focused on enabling office-based workers, especially in non-office environments. While many frontline workers continued to work at job sites during Covid, much less attention was paid to better enabling their efficiency, especially when interacting with their often remote office-based peers. We believe that technology enablement for frontline workers is the next phase in transforming the 21st-century workplace, and are excited to be working with the team at RealWear to help enable this transformation.

“The technology is magical.”

When we hear a statement like this from one of our partner funds, we pay attention. This one came from David Waxman of TenOneTen Ventures several years ago during a portfolio review. He was referring to a portfolio company called Regard (formerly known as HealthTensor), which is building an artificial intelligence co-pilot for physicians to help diagnose medical conditions.

If you’ve seen a doctor recently, they’ve likely had a laptop in tow. Physicians are spending substantial time on documentation, which takes away from the time they can spend with patients. While healthcare technology has significant benefits, it often makes a physician’s job harder, not easier. Most physicians did not endure extensive schooling and training to spend more time on documentation than with patients. With nearly 50% of physicians reporting burnout in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and 20% of the clinical workforce leaving the field from 2020 to 2021, this is a critical time for our healthcare system.

Regard’s mission is to bring medicine into the modern era through software that enhances physicians’ workflows and enables them to focus on what matters most—providing the best available care and improving health outcomes. Integrated with leading EMR providers, Epic and Cerner, Regard’s proprietary algorithms mine and then aggregate a patient’s entire medical history via their electronic health record. The software analyzes and synthesizes this patient data, recommends diagnoses, automates note-taking, and even captures missed revenue. As one user describes it, “It’s like having a high-quality medical intern in my pocket.” Since its launch in 2020, Regard’s technology has been used with 30,000 patients and has diagnosed over 420,000 medical conditions that providers might have otherwise missed.

The company was co-founded by CEO Eli Ben-Joseph, COO Nate Wilson, and CTO Thomas Moulia, who, together with the broader team, bring a unique and important combination of technical and industry expertise. We were introduced to the Regard team by two of their seed investors, TenOneTen and Calibrate Ventures, both in the Foundry partner fund portfolio. In line with our network-driven approach of investing with our partner funds, Regard also fits in our Glue theme, alongside companies like Spekit and Code Climate, which similarly leverage integrated technology to enhance user workflows. We co-led Regard’s $15.3m Series A with Calibrate, alongside existing investors TenOneTen and Susa Ventures and new investors Brook Byers and Drew Houston.

We’re thrilled to partner with Regard on its mission to advance healthcare. If you know a healthcare provider, encourage them to check out a demo. While it may not be actual magic, it’s pretty darn close.