We are pleased to announce that we’ve completed our initial investment in TeamSnap.  Located in Boulder, CO, TeamSnap is building a software platform that helps people manage groups that they belong to such as sports and hobby groups.

With our portfolio company investments related to our Marketplace and Distribution themes, we’ve been consistently interested in solving problems of friction in markets that are willing to pay for both access and efficiency.  Companies such as Sympoz, PivotDesk, and Rover are examples that address systemic friction in procuring the goods and services their particular markets want.

As we’ve thought deeper about both of these themes, we’ve begun to see similarities in them.  By removing communication barriers, these companies have either created large markets unknown previously, or have taken well-known markets and exponentially increased their size and value.

While we still feel that both of these themes are distinct, we’ve learned much from the intersection of them.  We believe that TeamSnap is a good example of a company that builds on the linkage between these themes and, while it is in our Marketplace theme, it clearly has potential to also be in our Distribution theme.

TeamSnap allows managers of groups (initially sports teams, but applicable to any group) and members of groups to communicate and collaborate through a single platform.  Gone are the days when coaching your child’s basketball team requires tens, if not hundreds of emails to set up practices and games.  No longer will members of a college swim team not know the location of their next meet.

The company will use the financing to expand their offerings and focus on all types of groups, not just sports.

We are very excited to work with CEO Dave DuPont and the rest of the team.

 

 

We’re excited to announce our investment in Prompt.ly, our second FG Angels investment. Today, Prompt.ly announced they have closed a $1.5M financing, with $325,000 coming from our FG Angels syndicate.

Prompt.ly provides a mobile-first SaaS platform to empower the “invisible economy” of service providers across the world – think psychologists, massage therapists, personal trainers, housecleaners, tutors, gardeners, etc. It is estimated that these service providers account for over $1 trillion of economic activity annually in the US alone. You can watch Prompt.ly’s introductory video to learn more.

Ryan knows Prompt.ly founder/CEO Richard D. Titus from attending The Lobby Conference with him for many years. Among other things, Richard was co-founder of Schematic (acquired WPP) and Razorfish Los Angeles. He was also executive producer of the documentary film Who Killed the Electric Car?  Prompt.ly co-founder/CTO Eli-Shaoul Khedouri is a serial entrepreneur and previously served as Chief Architect of Information Security Systems for New York City in the wake of 9/11.

We are excited about the deep entrepreneurial and technical background of the founders of Prompt.ly and we are intrigued by their vision of a mobile-first SaaS app that integrates aspects of CRM, time management, accounting, and payments into a single app that can serve all the business needs of solo entrepreneurs and service providers. We also like how Prompt.ly nicely fits into our Marketplace and Distribution themes.

Now that we have closed our first two FG Angels investments and worked some of the kinks out of the process, we look forward to steadily increasing our investment pace and working towards our goal of closing fifty AngelList investments in a year’s time.

We are excited to announce our first FG Angels investment in OnTheGo Platforms. Today, OnTheGo announced they have closed a $700,000 financing with $330,000 coming from our FG Angels syndicate.

We are fascinated with Google Glass and the potential for more tightly integrated human computer interaction as a result of technologies like Google Glass. We met the CEO, Ryan Fink, and his partners from OnTheGo six months ago, gave them some feedback, and made some introductions for them.

One of those introductions was Eric Norlin, who runs the Glue and Defrag Conferences. Eric also has an angel fund with our friend Paul Kedrosky called SK Ventures and they did a small convertible note investment in OnTheGo. Eric told us how excited he was about the progress OnTheGo had made in a short time that we re-engaged about the time that we were launching FG Angels.

We decided to make OnTheGo our first FG Angels investment. We committed about 60 days ago and it’s taken us since then to work through all the AngelList process dynamics, legal docs, and Syndicate formation dynamics. Ryan and his team were very patient with us as we kept saying “just hang in there another week.”

Along with our FG Angels syndicate, our friends at Social Leverage also joined in the round. This is how we think angel deals like this should work – lots of small participants who are committed to helping the entrepreneurs.

We have a few more FG Angels investments in the process of closing, after which point we believe we’ll get into a healthy rhythm for 2014 with the goal of having 50 investments done by year end from this syndicate. But for now – and always – OnTheGo Platforms will have a special place in our hearts as our first FG Angels investment.

Today, our portfolio company DataHero announced their product is exiting beta into GA release, and that they raised a new round of funding led by Foundry Group. Even better, they announced integration with their portfolio company cousin SendGrid, allowing easy analysis of send and open rates, and easy drag-and-drop cohort analysis of SendGrid’s data. DataHero also announced additional integrations with dataset provider Quandl and customer service app Desk.com.

We’ve been incredibly impressed with the progress the team has made since we led their initial seed round in 2012 and believe strongly in their vision of making sophisticated data visualizations accessible to anyone. While historically most business intelligence software has focused on accessing data residing in enterprise SQL databases, we see the future being radically different: mission-critical enterprise data increasingly resides in disparate vertical SaaS applications and cloud storage systems, and best-in-class BI tools will make it easy to access and analyze these important data sources in just a few clicks.

DataHero has already started down this path and has announced integrations with the likes of Box, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Salesforce, MailChimp, Desk.com, Survey Monkey, Desk.com, Stripe, GitHub, Quandl, and SendGrid. DataHero’s list of connections will continue to grow as time goes on.

We’re looking forward to working with DataHero as they continue their mission to build their next-gen BI/dataviz platform. Oh, and we were also super happy to receive these excellent (better than reality) cartoon versions of ourselves from team DataHero last week:

We are pleased to announce that we’ve co-led the $11m Series B funding of littleBits. Based in New York, littleBits mission is to democratize electronics so that society can be creative with electronics in the way it is with software.

We love robots and electronics. The maker movement is in full swing. 3D printing doesn’t seem foreign or cutting edge any more. Consumer electronics companies – like Fitbit – are accelerating at an unprecedented rate. The Internet of Things is no longer a strange phrase.

littleBits is on a mission to Internet-enable every physical device on the planet. To give everyone – from kids to adults – the components to be able to do amazing things with electronics, the same way we can do things with software. Just as MakerBot set out to make 3D printing mainstream, littleBits is on a mission to give everyone electronics they can use to create, learn, and build things.

We’ve looked at many dozens of “Internet of Things” related companies and passed on all of them. Many of the technologies were interesting, but none had the vision, leadership, or broad goals of littleBits. It wasn’t until spending time with littleBits founder and CEO Ayah Bdeir, that we finally felt like we’d met someone who had the potential to create a transformational company in this arena.

We’re excited to welcome Ayah and the littleBits crew to the Foundry Group family.