We couldn’t be more excited to welcome 2022! Although 2021 was a tough year in many regards, it was also an incredible one. Start-up funding hit an all-time high. We’re seeing more interest from people to follow their passion and become founders. And in many ways, it feels we’re entering a golden decade for technology.
Across the V1 portfolio, our teams have been accomplishing incredible things during an unprecedented time. And while we’re focused on the future, we always like to recap the news of the past quarter. Here are some highlights from Q4.
New investments:
We announced our investment in Gadze Finance and welcomed Mike Silagadze and Andrew McGrath (from Top Hat) back to the portfolio. Gadze’s ultimate vision is to democratize finance by providing access to custom investment products to anyone.
We made three cleantech announcements in Q4. Moment Energy is creating sustainable energy storage systems by repurposing retired electric vehicle (EV) batteries. EnPowered is an on-bill payment platform designed to make it easier for businesses to invest in energy-efficiency projects – and thus increase the rate of cleantech adoption. And EnergyBank, a New Zealand company with an amazingly ambitious project developing deep ocean gravitational energy storage technology that can store excess renewable energy during periods of oversupply.
Read the blog announcements:
Fundraises and Exits:
Gencove raised $10M series A to accelerate the adoption of high-throughput and cost-effective genome sequencing across industries.
Scanwell, a leader in smartphone-enabled at-home medical tests, was acquired by BD. BD collaborated with Scanwell to develop the app used with the BD Veritor™ At-Home COVID-19 Test.
Select Product & Company Updates:
Dapper Labs sees a future for DAOs on @flow_blockchain and has acquired Brud. You can read about the news here.
And in other news, Dapper Labs announced that its Flow blockchain is now “controlled by community,” with Flow community validators running 68% of the blockchain network’s consensus nodes.
Uniswap v3 has been deployed on Polygon after working its way through Uniswap governance.
Outreach made its second acquisition, swooping up revenue intelligence startup Canopy.
Coinbase announced their new NFT marketplace! You can join the waitlist here.
FirstParty launched their self-serve tool to make it incredibly easy to collect first-party data.
EnPowered launched its payment solution to accelerate cleantech adoption. You can read about the launch on the EnPowered blog.
Patch is expanding to Europe.
Booster is partnering with Renewable Energy Group to bring renewable fuels directly to fleets. You can read about the partnership here.
The Placenote team launched Dapple, an A.I.-assisted interior design app that makes anyone great at designing spaces.
Purpose Investments launched carbon-neutral crypto ETFs with the help of Patch.
SuperRare launched Space Race #1, where $RARE holders voted for the first Spaces they’d like to see bringing decentralized curation to the SuperRare network.
Cape Privacy and Snowflake are partnering to enable financial services organizations to use encrypted data for powerful predictive modeling in the cloud.
Powered by Stacks, the City of Miami will give residents bitcoin wallets and pay them in BTC using their treasury yield.
Headout unveiled a brand refresh – you can check it out here.
And last but not least, Tenderly rolled out the first phase of their support for developers building Arbitrum.
To stay up to date with real time updates, follow us on Twitter.
Happy New Year!
