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Revent — a new European early stage (pre-seed to series A) venture capital fund with an ‘impact’ focus — is coming out of the gate today, and is poised to reach its target of a €50m ($60m) fund, with the first close of that already completed. Focusing on environmental and societal problems, Revent will be looking to fund startups with both ‘purpose and profit’. Headquartered in Berlin and investing across Europe it will hone in on companies in Climate-Tech, health and wellbeing, and economic empowerment.
The founding partners are Otto Birnbaum, who was previously with French VC Partech, but also worked at HelloFresh; Dr. Lauren Lentz formality of McKinsey and an expert in impact measurement; Emily Brooke MBE, founder of Beryl, a micromobiilty startup; and Henrik Grosse Hokamp who worked previously for Partech’s late-stage fund.
Revent’s founder LP is Benjamin Otto, managing Partner at the Otto Group. Otto is part of the influential and powerful Otto family in Hamburg, founders of the Otto Group. Benjamin Otto also backed the launch of two other German VCs, e.ventures and Project A. Other investors in the fund include Max Tayenthal (N26), Sascha Konietzke (Contentful), Verena Pausder (Fox & Sheep), Luis Hanemann (e.ventures), Benjamin Roth (Urban Sports Club) and Dr. Florian Heinemann (Project A).
Revent has so far made four investments: Tomorrow Bank, a sustainable challenger bank based in Hamburg
; Sylvera, a London-based company that developed AI-enabled monitoring of nature-based carbon offsetting projects; Tmrow, a Denmark-based team building technology products for consumers and companies to understand and reduce their carbon footprint; and net purpose, an impact datastream for asset managers to understand the quantitative net impact of their portfolio, acting like a “Bloomberg” terminal of impact.
Commenting on the launch, Otto Birnbaum, Revent General Partner said: “We’re not acting as philanthropists, but rather aim to demonstrate that achieving very attractive financial returns is possible precisely because of the positive impact these companies will achieve.”
Benjamin Otto, Revent Anchor Investor said: “Social and ecological challenges have reached a new level of urgency. We depend on entrepreneurial innovation to find new solutions. With Revent, we want to create a platform for founders that not only provides them with optimal support but also contributes to a change in mindset: Entrepreneurial success and social-ecological impact can reinforce each other.”
Speaking to TechCrunch, Brooke and Lentz said the “purpose economy” has been accelerated by the Covid pandemic, which has amplified many of the planet’s systemic problems, such as inequality of access to healthcare, EdTech, creating massive changes in the world of work. Their mission, they tell me, is to positively affect the lives of 1 million people and to abate 5 million tons of C02. In order to achieve this, the fund will link fund carry to its impact goals.
They also say they are seeing a new wave of founders who want to tackle these problems. While overall VC investment is up only by about 2%, investment in ‘impact’ spaces such as ed-tech and mental health is booming.
As Brooke told me on a call: “We want to build a new version of venture capital, that authentically and genuinely prioritizes environmental returns and societal returns, along with commercial.”
Lentz said: “We think that there is this generation of founders who are looking for an investor who really brings both financing and an impact mindset. So not a classical impact-first impact investor, or a classic VC that is only looking at the growth trajectory and the financial upside returns. And we think that this founder is looking for an investor who really believes that these two things reinforce each other, and that the returns are going to be generated by positive societal impact, and that there needs to be a European home for this kind of founder.”
The main question is, how are they going to measure the impact?
Lentz said: “We view this holistically, and we start very early, so when we’re in diligence we go through a structured process of basically trying to assess the team, the founder DNA, how committed are they to achieving positive impact. We’re investing very early, usually pre-product, so we need to understand what is the motivation for this team. And then we try to systemically look at the different dimensions of impacts or how deep the impact, how many people will they reach, what additionality are they offering. We go through a structured exercise during the due diligence. And then we do something a bit unique which is we do an impact forecast. And so before we pull the trigger and invest we basically take what the founders have told us, and what we have learned through our conversations about possible growth trajectories, and we try to make some estimates and assumptions around the depth of the impact that the company will have. So it might be how much carbon do we think that the company will be able to beat or avert over the next eight years, or how many lives would they be able to significantly affect and to what extent… We’re not building a 20,000 line model, but we are trying to put some rigour around what we expect to happen on the impact side. Only if we anticipate that the company is going to have very significant potential upside from a commercial point of view and also very significant impact upside would we invest.”
From the chemical refineries that line the Gulf Coast to oilfields of West Texas, heavy industry has always been a big part of the economy in the Lone Star State.
Now, as venture capital moves in to the state as part of an exodus from California, a new fund is combining Texas’ industrial past with its high technology future.
That fund is Ironspring Ventures, which has closed its first investment vehicle with $61 million nearly two years after it launched its fundraising efforts.
The fruit of a partnership between Adam Bridgman and Peter J. Holt, the co-founders of an earlier investment vehicle called Holt Ventures, and Ty Findley, a former investor at G.E. Ventures and the Pritzker Group, the firm’s mission is to “accelerate digital adoption across legacy heavy industries,” according to Bridgman.
Each member of the Ironspring team has a long history with industrial technologies and deep roots in the Texas economy. Findley, a managing partner, grew up “in the middle of nowhere in East Texas” but comes from a family of entrepreneurs who built businesses along the Texas and Louisiana border.
“I joined up with our other co-founder and managing partner, Peter Holt,” said Bridgman. “That was really step one for us pursuing this broader mission of investing in legacy industry at the early stage of digital innovation. We were fortunate to find a strong cultural alignment and rare experience with Ty [Findley]. After co-investing over a period of time we got to know each other very well. We joined forces and it’s been a nice journey over the last year-and-a-half of formally launching and formally closing the fund in December.”
The first deal that the three men invested in together was Augmentir, a service providing information and support for remote workers. “Everything comes back to these words ‘digital industrial’ for us,” said Findley. “There’s this massive gap where people forget that almost the majority of GDP in this country is manufacturing.”
So far, Ironspring has invested in four portfolio companies, Mercado, which is developing a service to improve the import process; Icon Build, a company developing 3-D printing tools and technologies for the building industry; FastRadius, which brings design tools and services for prototyping and industrial design; and GoContractor, a safety and compliance management service.
The firm’s average check size is around $2.5 million and investments will range from $1 million on the low end to $4 million on the high end, according to the firm’s partners. That means looking for what the firm called “post-seed” deals.
And the firm is looking for technology that is transforming how businesses design products, build them, and provide services and operate across the wide range of industrial output.
“We’re trying to organize around those themes,” said Bridgman.
Parler returns from limbo, Uber lobbies Europe and we have more details about Notion’s outage. This is your Daily Crunch for February 15, 2021.
The big story: Parler is back online
The social network known for its far-right user base was dropped by infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services for posts advocating violence. Now it’s back online, albeit with all old posts and content removed for reasons that are currently unclear.
The company says the new site is built with “sustainable, independent technology and not reliant on so-called ‘Big Tech’ for its operations.”
In addition to a new website, Parler also has a new chief executive. Following the ouster of John Matze, Parler is now led by interim CEO Mark Meckler, founder of the Tea Party Patriots — one of the groups involved in organizing the January 6 pro-Trump demonstration that turned into a storming of the U.S. Capitol.
The tech giants
Uber lobbies for ‘Prop 22’-style gig work standards in the EU — The ride-hailing and on-demand food delivery giant has published a white paper in which it lobbies European policymakers for what it describes as a “new standard” for platform work.
GM unveils a refreshed Chevy Bolt EV and its bigger, yet compact crossover sibling — The new vehicles share much of the same DNA but have their own distinct differences.
Google slapped in France over misleading hotel star ratings — Google has agreed to pay a €1.1 million fine over misleading star ratings for hotels.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Notion’s hours-long outage was caused by phishing complaints — With the company’s domain offline, users were unable to access their files, calendars and documents.
Delivery company goPuff is in talks to acquire the UK’s Fancy — Fancy has a strikingly similar model to its potential buyer, leading some to describe it as a mini goPuff.
Private equity firm Marlin snatches up e-commerce optimization platform Lengow — For merchants using Lengow, the platform is the glue that makes all the moving parts of e-commerce stick together.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Investors’ SPAC push could revamp the private market money game — Is this venture capital’s natural evolution?
From dorm rooms to board rooms: How universities are promoting entrepreneurship — Earlier this year, 15 top U.S. universities joined forces to launch a one-stop shop where corporations and startups can discover and license patents.
The Series A deal that launched a near unicorn: Meet Accel’s Steve Loughlin and Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig — Their episode of Extra Crunch Live streams on Wednesday at 3 p.m. EST/12 p.m. PST.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Examining the ‘pipeline problem’ — An AI Now researcher analyzes the history behind a common excuse for the lack of diversity in tech.
India lifts restrictions on mapping and surveying to help local firms — The Indian government said local firms will no longer need a license or other permission to collect, generate, store and share geospatial data of the country.
Meet the Black Female Founders from TC Include at TC Sessions: Justice 2021 — Don’t miss your chance to meet some founders currently participating in TechCrunch’s Include program.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/15/daily-crunch-parler-is-back-online/
In an earlier article, I wrote about how and when to build go-to-market teams at deep tech companies. There, I noted that it is more important for growth hires at deep tech companies to have functional expertise than industry expertise.
But how do deep tech companies connect and cultivate strong relationships with talented nontechnical growth people outside of their industry? In this article, I answer this question, articulating exactly how to:
- Write role descriptions that entice talented growth people.
- Create company marketing materials that brands your startup well to talent.
- Craft thoughtful end-to-end candidate experiences for growth talent.
- Close top growth candidates.
Incredible growth people are independent and creative and are drawn to environments that explicitly value these traits.
Write a job description that explains how you operate
Underscore the autonomy. Incredible growth people are independent and creative and are drawn to environments that explicitly value these traits. Growth talent wants to know that they have room to experiment, fail and iterate with the support and trust of their company. Highlight the creative agency you give to your growth team. Paint the role as one of managing a subset of the startup and its initiatives.
Show you are ready for a growth marketer. Do not expect your growth person to be a panacea for the company. Growth people work cross-functionally, but there are boundaries where the growth role starts and ends. Growth people cannot sell a product that is not ready. Growth people cannot fix product bugs. Growth people cannot replace excellent customer service. Ensure your role description is clear on what the growth person would do and what they would lean on other teams for. Demonstrate that you have a team structure in place where a growth marketer could fit in and thrive.
Articulate your talent needs. Growth is a broad category. Some growth marketers are more creative. Others are more quantitative. Some have more industry experience. Others have more functional experience. Be clear on what type of growth marketer you need and how this person’s talents would complement those of the existing team.
Use marketing to share your history and chart the future
Generate excitement and establish credibility. People can naturally be skeptical about new technologies and younger companies. Do anything you can to ameliorate these concerns. Link to relevant news articles from well-known publications and thought leaders in your industry. Incorporate customer testimonials that speak to the transformative impact your product creates. Name drop well-known advisors, investors and team members.
Dick Costolo and Adam Bain, renowned early Twitter execs who served as company’s CEO and its chief operating officer, respectively, have quietly closed a second venture fund just one-and-a-half years after disclosing they’d secured $135 million for a debut fund under their firm, 01 Advisors.
According to an SEC filing, they wrapped up their second fund late last week with $325 million in capital commitments from 81 investors.
We’ve reached out to the firm and hope to share more soon. In the meantime, its strategy appears to center around more concentrated bets in both the consumer and enterprise spheres — with checks going out both early and sometimes later in a startup’s trajectory.
Among these recipients is Literati, a nearly five-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based book club subscription service that raised $40 million in Series B funding in January led by Felicis Ventures; Tipalti, a 10-year-old, Israel-based company that develops automation software for global payments and raised $150 million in Series E funding at a $2 billion valuation back in October (01 Advisors joined as a follow-on investor); and SpotOn Transact, a payments software startup that raised $50 million in Series B funding last year led by 01 Advisors. (Worth noting: the company raised a $60 million Series C round just six months later. DST Global led that next round, with participation from 01 Advisors and others.)
In fact, numerous of the outfit’s investments have hit the gas during the pandemic, including the San Francisco-based mental health and wellness platform Modern Health, which last week announced $74 million in Series D funding just a few months after announcing $51 million Series C funding. The startup, reportedly now valued at $1.17 billion, has raised roughly $170 million to date; 01 Advisors has joined the last two rounds.
01 Advisors has itself largely remained the same size since it publicly launched in August 2019, years after Costolo and Bain had begun investing in startups on an individual and joint basis.
In addition to Costolo and Bain and Dave Rivinus, who spent four years in corporate development and finance at Twitter and is also a founding partner of the firm, Kelly Kovacs is a partner at the firm. Kovacs was Costolo’s chief of staff at Twitter before joining Color Genomics in a similar capacity, then founding her own startup meant to empower executive assistants. She joined 01 Advisors full time in 2018.
Jenny Pater is meanwhile the firm’s operations manager.
01 Advisors did recently list a position for a senior associate.
Costolo, who great up in Troy, Michigan, found himself in the headlines in October when he fired off an incendiary tweet about the decision of Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong to publicly discourage employee activism and political discussions at work, a stance that drove at least 60 employees to take a severance package offered to them afterward.
While some business leaders were quick to praise Armstrong, Costolo wasn’t shy about hiding his disgust over Armstrong’s position. “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution,” he tweeted. “I’ll happily provide video commentary.”
Bain, a long-suffering Browns fan (like all native Clevelanders), has meanwhile been busy, too. In addition to scouting for startups, he now sits on the public company boards of both the real estate tech outfit Opendoor and the space tourism company Virgin Galactic.
01 Advisors served as a co-sponsor of the SPAC that took Opendoor public, along with investor Chamath Palihapitiya. Palihapitiya also spun up the blank-check company that took public Virgin Galactic and the company invited Bain to be a director as that merger was coming together.
Earlier bets by the pair — as angel investors — include the corporate travel site TripActions and the connected fitness startup Tonal.
