We are excited to announce our third FG Angels investment in ARTtwo50 – who have raised $285K from our FG Angels syndicate.

If you’ve been to our offices, you know we are fans (and collectors) of original art. But, the art world is very top-down, rigid, and has remained relatively unchanged for decades. The ARTtwo50 team of designers, hackers, and Stanford d.school and business school grads has created a wholly different approach that they believe will change the way we buy and sell art.

ARTtwo50 has come up with a clever marketplace for emerging artists and collectors at modest price points.  All of the original, one-in-the-universe pieces from one of their 1000+ US-based artists start at $250. As artists sell more pieces, they unlock the ability to sell at higher price points. You simply take a photo of their space on the iPad application (and soon to be iPhone and elsewhere) and you receive recommendations based on colors of your space, location, and demographics displayed virtually hanging on your wall – to scale – before you buy.

So discover great art, try it on your wall, and live originally with ARTtwo50.

We are excited to announce that we’ve led Bounce.io’s Series A financing. Based in Louisville, CO, Bounce.io is an email infrastructure company that provides services to domain registrars, ISPs, and mail services providers to better manage and monetize bounced email traffic.

We love the email market, as evidenced by our investments over the years in companies such as Message Media, Return Path, Postini, and SendGrid, and from time to time, given our involvement in the email domain, we come across companies that have “discovered” interesting unaddressed “white spaces” in the market. Bounce.io is one of those companies.

While estimates vary widely, there are roughly 300 billion email messages sent every day, with 10% – 20% of those emails auto-generating bounced email notifications, which means there are on the order of 30 billion bounced email messages sent each day. Traditionally, these bounce notifications are auto-generated by the generic mail server software at a particular domain registrar, ISP, or mail provider.

Very little attention has been paid to the formatting and design of these messages. The vast majority are presented in English, regardless of the language of the sender or recipient, and the fact that these messages provide an opportunity for a user interaction and thus a branding or advertising opportunity has largely been ignored.

While the bulk of bounced messages are machine-generated and the result of out-of-date email addresses or simply the result of spammers phishing for active email addresses, a meaningful percentage of bounced email are still generated and received by human beings, and those bounce messages have a very high open-rate, on the order of 60%, which provides an opportunity for billions of new daily user impressions.

Bounce.io provides a service to allow its customers to manage and monetize their bounced email traffic though advertising, essentially providing “found money” to their customers and partners.

The company was founded in late 2012 by a group of experienced email entrepreneurs and technologists who collectively hold nearly twenty email-related patents. Founder/CEO Scott Brown in a serial entrepreneur and founder of six companies, and Tom Bartel, Chief of Ops and Privacy, is well known to us through his long-term involvement with Mobius VC and Foundry Select portfolio company Return Path.

Bounce sits squarely at the intersection of our Protocol and Adhesive themes, and we are excited to work with Bounce.io as they build the next great email company.

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.