10.2024: Pumpkin Seeds

My favourite early-stage rounds from October 2024: 

• The spooky season kicked off with a bit of alchemy. Alchemy Health, an in-house pharmacy for HIV clinics, raised a $31 million seed round led by a16z Bio + Health. Other investors include Magic Johnson, Twine Ventures, and Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. The company provides the infrastructure to develop, operate and scale in-house pharmacy programs, and offers services to organisations to build in-house pharmacies for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), Ryan White and STD clinics. HIV is a massive problem globally, and the Alchemy team has spent a total of 18 years working in Africa building HIV access programs.
• Abel Police raised $5M from Day One, YC, and more. Abel helps police officers spend less time on paperwork by converting bodycam footage into complete police reports. The founder, Daniel Francis, pivoted to Abel after helping a close friend escape a domestic violence situation despite the delayed response time by the police. Beyond solving a pretty important problem for police departments, adoption of Abel – or its competitor Axon, could hopefully reduce the role of racism in police arrests. Abel is currently based in San Francisco, but hopefully more cities adopt its technology.
• Hummingbirds, a platform that connects local nano-creators with brand campaigns in their area, raised a $5.4 million seed round. This round, with participation from M25 and Next Level Ventures, brings Hummingbird's total amount raised to $10 million. The new capital will support the platform’s expansion into 20 more cities by 2025, including Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Denver, Colorado. The most unique thing about Hummingbirds is its business model. Hummingbirds charges brands a platform fee, allowing creators to keep 100% of their earnings, which is far more accessible for small and emerging creators. The creator economy is set to boom over the next decade, and companies solving for B2B opportunities are onto something key. Authentic, community-driven influencer marketing will be key in the near future; this is a win-win for all.
• Dreamwell AI, a Toronto, Canada-based provider of an influencer marketing automation platform, raised a $2.5m seed round led by Tim Draper (via Draper Associates) with participation from Panache Ventures and BDC Capital Seed Venture Fund. Dreamwell is taking a different approach from other creator marketplaces such as Hummingbirds and Passionfroot by focusing on ad value and profitability. I'm betting on all three to figure things out and scale well.
• Buddy.ai, an AI-powered tutoring platform for young learners, has raised $11 million in a seed funding round led by BITKRAFT Ventures, with support from Educapital and others. Buddy.ai’s AI platform features proprietary Speech Recognition (BSR) technology specifically designed to recognise and understand children’s voices. With a database of over 25,000 hours of children’s speech and developed over four years, BSR is optimised for younger users. The market for people learning English as a second language (ESL) is ~$70bn, and tailoring the product to the next-gen just makes sense.
• Accounting automation startup Numeric raised a $28M Series A led by Menlo Ventures, just five months after its $10m seed round. This recent funding included participation from 8VC, IVP, Founders Fund, and Friends & Family Capital. Numeric's product addresses close management, reconciliation and secondary reporting & analytics. The risk of hallucinations is a big concern with an AI tool made for something as delicate as accounting, but Numeric accounts for this via oversight by on-demand human accountants. AI-powered accounting is pretty tough, but Numeric appears more than competent, with revenue growing 4x to the single-digit millions.
• Paebbl, a company turning captured CO2 into permanent, carbon-storing materials, has raised a $25 million Series A funding round led by Capnamic and Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund. The Nordic-Dutch company is one of a growing number of European startups looking to pull planet-heating carbon from the atmosphere, and this can’t come soon enough for governments across Europe. The company aims to launch its demonstration plant by mid-2025, increasing production to 3 tons daily and sequestering 1 ton of CO2. This facility will support future commercial-scale operations, where the next step is a commercial-scale plant. Paebbl is set on delivering a technology scale-up at an unprecedented pace – safely – and the world will thank them for this.

Bulls

• Smashing is a new app curating the best content on the web. I've used Smashing a few times, and enjoyed it far more than I expected. I think the broad focus on multiple forms of web content – ranging from news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, etc – allows people find what works for them, and scroll without as much fatigue from other content-driven apps. It's still early days, but I expect it to get acquired in a matter of time.

Bears

• Revyze is a community-driven platform that provides short-form educational videos for college application support. In other words, it's a TikTok-style app with a sharp focus on high school education subjects like math and literature. It sounds interesting, but I've got low expectations — primarily as web3 incentives seem somewhat unclear to me.
• Boardy is a professional networking startup driven by AI voice technology. I don't get to use all the products I come across, but I tried Boardy out myself. It was fun to use – especially the call with the Boardy AI agent – but I think the product is missing a lot of key direction which could hinder future market-fit. It's still early days, so hopefully they find a good fit in a matter of time...potentially after a pivot.