Mar 1, 2023

Alumni Ventures’ Impact on Our Seed-Stage Portfolio Companies Read about the impact we are having on our seed and pre-seed portfolio companies in their own words Written by 4 min Alumni Ventures serves as a value-add co-investor for all 1,000+ companies in our portfolio, whether they’re seeking their first checks or laying the groundwork for an IPO. Read about the impact we are having on our seed and pre-seed portfolio companies in their own words. In many cases, we’ve leveraged the expertise of Alumni Ventures’ ~50 investing professionals and our network of more than 600,000 community members to help them scale into promising, later-stage companies. We have since been invited by some of them to invest in additional financing rounds. Founder and CEO Sage Wohns ”As we grow the company and look for different expertise to develop in new areas, Alumni Ventures has been able to reach out to their network and find people that fit our needs. In addition, Nassau Street (for the Princeton community) has been able to go the extra mile in core functional areas like recruiting and sales, successfully leveraging their network to help us with both.” Region: New York Focus: Agolo designed its content summarization platform to help companies fight information overload. Its neural network training is powered by an extensive dataset of human-written summaries, enabling users to consume information more efficiently. How We’re Involved: Seed round alongside Google Assistant Fund, M12, Ridgeline Partners, Tensility Venture Partners, and Touchdown Ventures Co-Founders Paul Jarvis (CEO) & Henry Hutcheson (CTO) “The teams at Green D (for the Dartmouth community) and Alumni Ventures have helped make deep customer introductions. For instance, they introduced us to the CFO of a top 75 customer target. Two weeks later, we were in business together. Love the power of the network!” Region: West Coast Focus: Bateau combines HR, operations, and compliance in an accessible tech platform for long-term care facilities. Providers can create a single library for staff to find current versions of policies, forms, training videos, and other files, helping to maintain safety and compliance across multiple locations. How We’re Involved: $1.5 million pre-seed round alongside Founder’s Co-op, Liquid 2 Ventures, Ride Ventures, and angel investors Co-Founder and CEO Matt Volm “Alumni Ventures has been a great partner. They’re truly founder-friendly and not only talk the talk but walk the walk. Working with the entire Alumni Ventures team has been incredible, whether they were helping with prospective customer and investor introductions or just staying out of the way. I’d highly recommend them to any early-stage founder looking for a true investment partner.” Region: West Coast Focus: Funnel IQ is a revenue operations platform for SaaS and subscription businesses. Their go-to-market data platform and end-to-end, full-funnel analytics keep marketing, sales, and customer success teams aligned. How We’re Involved: Seed round alongside New York Venture Partners Founder and CEO Shanel Fields “Chestnut Street Ventures (for the Penn community) has been an incredible investment partner. They not only provided the financial resources we needed to grow but also jumped in the trenches with our team to make critical connections, generate prospect leads and grow our pipeline. Their support has been invaluable on our journey to drive better connectivity between 911 and the broader healthcare ecosystem.” Region: Mid-Atlantic Focus: MD Ally provides patient navigation software and telemedicine solutions that integrate into 911 computer-aided dispatch systems. The company helps transfer nonemergency callers to telemedical care, provide virtual care to triaged members, coordinate follow-ups, and automate referrals. How We’re Involved: $1 million pre-seed round alongside HearstLab, Red & Blue Ventures, and Techstars Ventures See video policy below. “The Ring Ventures team (for the Texas A&M community) kickstarted our Seed round as one of our first investors and supported us through the fundraising process every step of the way. In addition, the team has continued to make introductions to support our lead generation, team growth, and more. Highly recommend Ring Ventures as an investor.” Region: Mid-Atlantic Focus: Mentor Method is an enterprise SaaS platform helping companies match diverse talent with effective mentorship. Their solution uses a double-blind algorithm to match employees with mentors in their organization, tracks mentorship progress, and provides data analytics. How We’re Involved: $1.4 million seed round alongside Backstage Capital, Draper Associates, Elsewhere Partners, MATH Venture Partners, and Sorenson Impact Fund Founder and CEO Ed King “Alumni Ventures makes it simple to leverage not only the alumni strength of my schools (Berkeley and MIT) but also the alumni of other top-tier institutions within our network like UT-Austin. Highly recommend adding AV to your cap table if you have the opportunity to do so.” Region: California Focus: Openprise is a cloud-based data automation platform intended to leverage open data and open web technology on a single platform. Openprise bots automate dozens of critical data management processes, including data onboarding, cleansing, and more. How We’re Involved: $10 million seed round alongside Bloomberg Beta, TsingYuan Ventures, and Team Builder Ventures Co-Founder and CEO Mark Frank “From the start, Purple Arch Ventures (for the Northwestern community) was thoughtful and easy to work with, achieving the delicate balance of in-depth diligence and respect for a small startup team’s time. We’ve had a great partnership throughout our growth journey.” Region: Mountain Focus: SonderMind is a behavioral health network that addresses the three-sided marketplace between consumers, private practitioners, and partners or enterprises. Their platform helps users find a licensed therapist and comes with built-in customer support and integrations with medical billing systems. How We’re Involved: $2.5 million seed round alongside Goldwing Capital, Lanoha Ventures, Kickstart Seed Fund, Service Provider Capital, and SpringTime Ventures Founder and CEO Dipanwita Das “Alumni Ventures is one of our favorite investors. They have been a supporter of us since we were six-months old and connected us to the expertise of AV investor Bill (Schneiderman). Since then, Bill has done workshops with the entire team and personally works with me and Richard (Co-Founder and CCO) on commercial and overarching strategy. Bill has dipped in and out of everything from pricing models to contracts to connecting us to other professors.” Region: Mid-Atlantic Focus: Sorcero’s Language Intelligence Platform allows employees to access their company’s knowledge more efficiently and effectively. Their NLP suite enables the immediate deployment of solutions, automating the building of advanced knowledge bases to future-proof team members’ expertise. How We’re Involved: $1.2 million seed round alongside Pearl Investment Partners, StartEd, and Village Capital CEO Nourredine Tayebi “The team at Spike Ventures (for the Stanford community) was instrumental not only in the early stages of YASSIR but also during our growth. They recognized the potential of our venture, and, more importantly, the mission and vision behind it. Moreover, the breadth of the Stanford alumni network the team draws from is simply unparalleled, giving us access to world-class mentors, talent, and partners.” Region: Africa Focus: YASSIR is building the “super app” for French-speaking Africa. Their platform will provide an ecosystem of services — such as Uber, Doordash, Instacart, and digital banking — all delivered in a single app. How We’re Involved: Seed round alongside DN Capital, FJ Labs, Unpopular VC, and Y Combinator