08.2024: Adam and EV

My favourite early-stage rounds from August 2024: 

• Napkin is a text to visuals generator which recently raised a $10m seed round led by Accel and CRV(TSN). I’m quite bullish on this due to the variety of use cases and ability for follow-on product development down the line. I won’t be surprised by an acquisition by Canva, Notion or Figma in their future. 
• Bandana, a startup for wage workers to find better jobs, raised an $8.5M seed round led by General Catalyst (TC). The job search tools (that work) are tailored to office positions, leaving wage workers to use less-convenient or desirable alternatives. Bandana is providing the level of detail of the former and the flexible working enabled by the latter. I’m not sure if I think they’ll take off, but I hope they do. 
• Chariot, a payments company dedicated to Donor Advised Fund (DAF) giving, raised $11M in funding led by Maveron. Chariot’s ‘DAFpay’, their 3-click payment option, enables donors to use their DAF in more places, more often, and unlocks more DAF gifts with better information for nonprofits. Chariot is enabling net-positive impact with a useful product. I’m all in.
• Gaussion, a UCL spinout building ultrafast and safe EV battery charging, raised £2.85m in a seed round led by BGF and UCL Technology Fund (UCL). The team is comprised of founders Dr Thomas Heenan and Dr Chun Tan who have built a world-leading and award-winning team based at a state-of-the-art R&D facility in London. The EV market has been promising, and contributing to its infrastructure is an extremely clever approach.
• Intramotev are on a mission to revolutionise freight transport with its innovative autonomous, battery-electric railcars. Intramotev secured a substantial $14 million in Series A funding led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Alpaca VC (ST). Its railcars are pretty awesome: fully battery-electric with built-in sensors, and manufactured in St. Louis, MO as well. Similar to XShore – another company in my quasi-portfolio – I’m quite excited at the prospect of EV-powered transport beyond cars and bikes.
• Levels raised a $10m Series A Extension to further develop its metabolic health app and wearable. The round included $3 million in crowdfunding from more than 2,000 investors, as well as investments from Long Journey, a16z, and others (MS). I’m generally quite bullish on health wearables, but not sure where I stand with Levels. I know healthcare companies typically struggle with finding product-market-fit, but this is their third Series A round in two years. Make of that what you will.
• Lettuce Financial, an automated accounting and tax solution for ‘solo-preneurs’, raised a $15M Series A led by Zeev Ventures (FN). Perhaps not ripe for market, but I estimate within a matter of years this will take off as solopreneurship is becoming more popular. The indie hackers and digital nomads will love this one.
• Bland AI, an AI automating phone calls for enterprises, raised a $16M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners (BW). Bland was initially focused on customer support, but the new round is to expand to other roles including sales and internal ops. I’ve been particularly bullish on Bland – they were one of the earliest companies which inspired my quasi-portfolio – and I am quite optimistic about their future progress. 

Bulls

• OrgOrg creates internal tools for companies of any size ranging from SMBs to enterprise users. OrgOrg is currently the only company from YC S24 on my list, and will likely remain that way for a while. The founder, Wayne Crosby, previously worked at Amazon and GoDaddy before selling his first startup to Google. For me, this doesn’t just demonstrate experience working at both startups and large enterprises, but probably some first-hand insight from using (potentially inefficient) internal products in various organisational environments. I’ve got a particularly good feeling about this one.
• Superhuman is a powerful email tool with productivity, collaboration and sales integrations. In short, the name fits. Despite the AI bubble and ongoing funding frenzy, I love seeing companies building AI-enabled tools which actually add value. Superhuman includes text-prediction/autocomplete, automated follow-ups, read receipts and more…alongside integrations to Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce. My favourite thing about Superhuman is its focus on collaboration which can be a drag for medium-large teams. Bullish!
• Simplify is an AI assistant for job search. I don’t always get the pleasure of trying all the products on my list(s), but I added Simplify after personally using it some weeks ago. It has all the things I’m looking for, and I was quite pleased with the follow-ups. Simplify is recommended as one of the go-to job boards for students across the US, and I’ve personally started recommending it to my peers.
• Tezi is an AI workspace for hiring managers. Tezi is certainly one of the better-looking ‘AI for hiring’ tools I’ve come across and perhaps why I’m betting on them. Max – Tezi’s AI agent – reminded me a lot of Ava, the AI BDR by Artisan. The job-application process is quite similar to the property search one due to the vast inefficiencies on both ends. The team has experience from Instacart, Pinterest and more, and I expect the recently closed $9m seed to pave the way for future wins.

Bears

• Hangout is a social listening app. I believe ‘social listening’ is a promising space – and certainly more so than social viewing (R.I.P. Teleparty) – but I don’t think they’re solving it the best way. Spotify Jam does this well, and I think any new product could work upon existing cues to guide strategy. Hangout appears poorly thought out, and I think this is an instance where less is indeed MRR.
• Viggle and Hedra are AI video generators. These products have various use cases: some are promising and others are potentially problematic for society. Based on those which we’ve seen thus far, I can’t imagine these to be any different. As usual, happy to be proven wrong. 
• BeMe is a digital behavioural health startup for teens. It’s very rare to evaluate a space I’ve worked on this closely, but I have some conviction in betting against BeMe. To begin, this is neither a novel idea nor an innovative approach. Hence: it begs the question why has no one else succeeded before? The short answer: insofar as there is a stigma surrounding mental health, products encouraging vulnerability would likely be swimming upwards. People – especially young people – are wary of discussing behavioural or emotional wellness. To hack this, we tried to anonymise the experience by creating VR characters through which people could share their emotions. Unfortunately, the privacy and harm risks outweighed its potential. I think the BeMe team is focusing on something critical, but perhaps needs a different approach in doing so. At that point, I would be glad to bet on them.
• Feeling Great is a mental health chatbot. Just like BeMe, I can speak with some conviction after spending considerable time on a similar product. To begin with, there are tons of ‘mental health chatbots’ available: age-old ones like Wysa and newer ones like Sonia. The rationale is sound and these should work, but Feeling Great’s product is seemingly lacking tested clinical approaches. I think there are other ways accessible treatment could be executed BetterHelp does this pretty well at the moment, but I believe there’s more potential to bridge the gap in the space.