Friends of Script Capital (AJ & Evan),
As you probably saw on Twitter/LinkedIn, we formally announced the close of our $38M Fund II and rebrand to Script Capital. We also shipped a shiny new website and emerging brand that we will continue to develop in the coming months. Also, new headshots!
General Updates
Fund I surpasses 1x+ DPI
On the back of some notable exits including Datadog’s acquisition of Sqreen, Spotify’s acquisition of BettyLabs, Alteryx’s acquisition of FeatureLabs as well as Graph Protocol, Audius and Origin Token’s meteoric rise, we’re excited to share that we have now (far) exceeded 100% distributed on our 2017 vintage fund I. We still hold the vast majority of our largest positions and have many new substantial “Return the fund” investments emerging after a wave of Series B fundraises. Our performance puts us easily within the top 5% of venture capital funds for our vintage according to Cambridge Associates benchmarks. And we’re just getting started!
SPC + Script web3 Founder Fellowship
We have been longtime collaborators with our friends Ruchi Sanghvi and Aditya Agarwal and the tremendous community of builders they have assembled at South Park Commons.
Having shared a similar excitement for the emergent web3 ecosystem for a number of years, we recently decided to partner for the next cohort of SPC’s “Founder Fellowship”: An accelerator-like program that will be exclusively focused on web3 projects. (Read about it here.) The fellowship provides a $400k investment for 7% of the company into 15+ companies per batch, and works closely with companies over a 10-week period to conceptualize, build, and launch compelling new projects in the web3 ecosystem.
In addition to partnering with South Park Commons, we are engaging the broader ecosystem to help support our cohort of founders. Mike Vernal of Sequoia, Dylan Field of Figma, Li Jin of Variant, Multicoin and many others are contributing as visiting mentors and session leads. Stay tuned to @scriptcapital on twitter for more updates on the batch.
Portfolio Updates
Gamma raises $7M to bring the slide deck to the 21st century
Our portfolio company Gamma recently announced they raised $7M led by Accel to build a new more interactive and extensible presentation platform. The Gamma founders previously led engineering and finance teams at Optimizely and have assembled an incredible product and engineering organization in a very short time. We co-led the pre-seed in 2020 alongside our friends at South Park Commons.
Read more about the recent fundraise on TechCrunch
Sign up for the Gamma private beta
People Analytics platform Orgnostic raises $5M from Earlybird
Our portfolio company Orgnostic is seeing tremendous adoption of their people analytics platform for HR leaders, CEOs, and team managers to make smarter, faster decisions about their people. On the back of the strong enterprise adoption, they recently closed a $5M seed round led by EarlybirdVC, one of the top performing venture firms in Europe. CEO Luka Babic was formerly head of People Ops at Infobip (European unicorn) and CTO Igor Bogicevic previously was a co-founder at Seven Bridges Genomics. We led Orgnostic’s pre-seed in 2020 and doubled down in this round.
Read more about Orgnostic’s fundraise and company plans
OneRoof, Hyper-localized Nextdoor raises $1.25M
We recently co-led the pre-seed of OneRoof, an app that helps you meet and connect with neighbors in your apartment building. We invested alongside our friends at General Catalyst, Dream Machine and UrbanUS. The app is already live with over 500+ buildings in New York City and Miami and seeing remarkable engagement as people emerge from the pandemic and look for authentic IRL connections.
Read more about OneRoof on TechCrunch
Octane raises $2M seed to build usage-based billing platform
Software billing startup Octane recently raised a $2 million seed round to advance its pay-as-you-go billing software.
CEO Akash Khanolkar and his co-founders met a decade ago at Carnegie Mellon University and have since spent time as software engineers at Facebook and Google. The new round of funding was led by Basis Set Ventures and included Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Github CTO Jason Warner and Script Capital.
Read more about Octane on TechCrunch
Passport Shipping raises $39M Series B led by TCV
Passport is an international shipping carrier platform that helps e-commerce brands expand their footprint globally by coordinating international shipping logistics, international returns, localized customer support, import/export regulatory compliance and local VAT/Duty compliance for the multi-trillion dollar international e-commerce industry. The company recently raised a $39M Series B led by TCV, a large growth-equity firm.
Read more about Passport’s Series B
Check out the Passport website
The Graph announces $50M strategic sale to Tiger Global
The Graph, an indexing protocol for blockchains, announced it raised $50 million in a strategic token sale led by Tiger Global. Blockwall Digital, Fenbushi Capital, FinTech Collective and Reciprocal Ventures also participated in the round. This new funding will support grants for core development efforts, protocol R&D and provide a runway for the strategic initiatives of the Foundation, whose treasury is overseen by The Graph Council.
TheGraph continues to establish itself as one of the most critical middleware infrastructure providers in the web3 ecosystem, and recently announced partnerships and integrations with Figment.io, Near Protocol, Arweave, StreamingFast, and others. We invested in TheGraph’s first financing round in 2018.
Groovetime launches NFT minting platform for dance & movement creators
Our portfolio company Groovetime recently launched their NFT marketplace for dance and movement on Solana. They are the first marketplace focused primarily on movement for dance creators. CEO Kwasi Ohene-Adu was previously an engineering leader at Google, Color and Highfive technologies and an operating partner at Goodwater Capital. We led Groovetime’s pre-seed in early 2020.
Check out the Groovetime NFT marketplace
ElroyAir raises $40M from Lockheed Martin to accelerate VTOL Cargo Aircraft
ElroyAir continues to make significant commercial progress with its tremendously ambitious VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) autonomous cargo aircraft. Their engineering and leadership teams are about as outstanding as they come, and their hard work and dedication are reflected in the sheer magnitude of the Chaparral’s build and flight systems.
Delivery drones deployed today are designed for small payload “last-mile” deliveries of a single parcel at a time, while ElroyAir’s bet is on the larger market opportunity for heavier-payload “middle-mile” logistics (e.g. warehouse to warehouse).
Read more about ElroyAir’s Series A
Check out the ElroyAir website
Vahan, a blue-collar job placement platform built on WhatsApp, raises $8M Series A
Vahan, a Bangalore, India-based jobs & livelihood platform for blue-collar workers, raised USD 8m in series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. Vahan currently places 7000+ blue-collar workers across 200 cities every month in gig-economy jobs. Customers include leading gig-economy companies such as Zomato, Uber, Flipkart, Swiggy, Rapido, Grofer’s, Dunzo and Shadowfax. We participated in the seed round in 2019.
Read more about Vahan’s fundraise
Orchest raises $3.5M seed round
Our portfolio company Orchest recently announced a $3.5 million seed round led by Gradient Ventures and Basis Set Ventures. The company is building an open source integrated development environment tool for data scientists so they can develop, iterate and deploy data pipelines without having to rely on an infrastructure or engineering team. We participated in the pre-seed in early 2020.
Read about the seed round in TechCrunch
Navier closes $7M seed raise to bring electric boats to the masses
Navier has made considerable progress towards realizing their ambitious vision to bring electric boats to the masses. The N27 watercraft aims to cut the operating costs of marine vessels by over 90%, which opens up an entirely new market in the form of regional transport (think Manhattan, London, SF Bay, etc...). Founders Sampriti Bhattacharyya and Reo Baird met at MIT where they received a PhD in mechanical engineering and degree in Electrical & Computer engineering respectively. They are currently working with America’s cup foiling experts and maxxed out their pre-sale.
Read more about Navier in Electrek
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That’s it for this quarter - reach out to AJ (email) or Evan (email) directly if you’re interested in connecting with the companies listed in this update or any others on our website before they’re included in the next update =)
Stay safe, healthy, and humble.
AJ Solimine (aj@script.capital)
Evan Tana (evan@script.capital)
https://script.capital/