Tag: acrew capital

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Alto raises $40 million to help individuals make tax-savvy investments in assets like crypto and artwork

Alternative investments are having a moment. Their popularity has surged over the last decade, with the asset class growing from just over $3 trillion in 2008 to more than $10 trillion in 2019, according to data provider Preqin. 

Institutions have fueled a large part of this growth, investing at record pace into alternatives like crypto, private companies and real estate. Some ultra-wealthy investors have made a windfall investing in alternatives using tax-advantaged accounts, a strategy billionaire Peter Thiel used to grow his Roth individual retirement account from $2,000 to $5 billion in 20 years, tax-free, ProPublica reported last year. 

Now, average investors are seeking a slice of these markets, lured by the potential of making outsized returns, which are even more appealing if they come tax-free.

While investing dollars from one’s tax-advantaged retirement account in alternatives has long been legal, it has remained largely inaccessible to average retail investors. Veteran investor Eric Satz realized this in 2013 when he first tried to deploy money from his IRA into private companies and was met with pushback from his financial advisor, who was concerned about the potential risks, Satz told TechCrunch in an interview.

After 10 weeks of research and logistical hurdles, Satz was finally able to make his first tax-advantaged alternative investment through a self-directed IRA. 

“At the end of this 10-week process that seemed to have the goalposts constantly moving in terms of what was required in order to make the investment, I wrote the custodian that I was using a check for the privilege of making this investment that I discovered and did all the homework and research on,” Satz said. 

Frustrated with these complexities, Satz tried to go through the same process using three different custodians, and found that his experience “got worse each time.” The onerous process, according to Satz, explains why less than 2% of the $35 trillion in assets sitting in individual retirement accounts is invested in alternatives. In contrast, most high-net-worth investors and institutions have much higher allocations to alternatives, ranging from anywhere between 15 to 80%, Satz said.

Retirement accounts are particularly suited to making early-stage investments in private companies because of their long duration and risk-return profile, Satz said. Using self-directed IRA companies to make such investments was costing Satz over $500 a year in fees, a problem he aimed to solve for others by launching Alto in 2018.

Alto’s self-directed IRA platform provides a simpler, more affordable option for individuals to invest their retirement savings into alternatives, according to the company. The Nashville-based startup provides its users with access to a host of alternatives through its partnerships with over 70 investment platforms, including AngelList, Grayscale and Masterworks, the company says.

Alto hosts nearly 20,000 funded accounts representing close to $1 billion in assets, Satz said — and 40% of the accounts are dedicated to holding cryptocurrency, he added.

Alto announced today that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Advance Venture Partners, whose founder and managing partner David T. ibnAle is set to join the company’s board of directors. Existing investors Unusual Ventures, Acrew Capital, Alpha Edison, Foundation Capital, Gaingels and Coinbase Ventures also participated in the round. Alto last raised $17 million for its Series A in April 2021. 

The startup plans to use the fresh funding to grow its team of product and engineering employees from 50 today to 120 by the end of 2022, Satz said. It also plans to grow its content offering to help investors educate themselves on alternatives, though the company is not a registered broker-dealer or investment advisor.

While crypto is one of the fastest-growing areas of interest for Alto users, Satz said he expects demand to grow in other areas, including private company investing and artwork. 

“I think what you’ll see from us in Q1 and Q2 is greater penetration into collectibles and collectibles marketplaces. There’s just some product innovation that we are coming out with that will make that a lot easier for most folks,” Satz said. “I [also] think we’ll see some innovation in 2022 in fund access, and the ability for more people to participate in fund investing.”

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Kettle books $25M for its reinsurance platform against fire and other catastrophes

One of the most noticeable — and noted — effects of climate change has been its impact on how other events in the environment — be they natural or man-made occurrences — play out: forest fires burn more violently and for longer; floods happen more often and are more severe when they do; and so on, with climate change often cited as the main culprit for all of the catastrophes. Today, an insurance startup called Kettle that believes it has built a better product — specifically, reinsurance underwriting product to insure insurers — to account for catastrophic events like these, by way of better data science, is announcing some funding on the heels of (sadly) more need for its services.

It has closed a Series A of $25 million, money that it will be using to build out tools and services for a specific set of catastrophes in one specific market: fires in California. Acrew Capital is leading the round, with Homebrew, True Ventures, Anthemis, Valor, DCVC, and LowerCarbon Capital also participating.

Kettle’s longer-term plan is to expand to more disaster types, and more states, in the coming years, but for now, fires in California present a particularly acute set of problems.

Events like the Caldor and Dixie fires have contributed to an overall rise in the rate and size of wildfires in California, Kettle says. 2020 saw over 4% of the state burning. On average there are some 10,000 fires every year in California, but the outsized nature of some of the fires seems to be growing, with 14 fires causing 98% of the damage due to wildfire in the state.

Nathaniel Manning, Kettle’s CEO who co-founded the company with Andrew Engler, said that these forces have created a gap in the market for insurance: in short, those who might want to insure their homes against these kinds of wildfires are either unable to, or end up having to pay exorbitant premiums.

Manning said that this is primarily because insurance companies — while ironically being the trailblazers in data science decades ago to determine risk for unexpected events — have failed to keep up with how to use that technology to account for recent developments like climate change, subsequent catastrophic environmental events, and their impact on the things that typically get insured like property, life, automobiles and so on.

“The industry hasn’t updated,” he said. “It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma.” Typically, insurance companies are using the same modeling that they have always used to try to understand what are new kinds of risks, “but you can’t look at the last five years and determine the next ten years anymore.” Communication, and making it more accurate and reflective of the situation at hand, is something of a fixation for Manning: prior to Kettle, he had been the CEO of Ushahidi, the crowdsourced information startup.

Kettle mostly presents itself as a reinsurance technology provider to customer-facing insurance companies (it also currently resells insurance that it underwrites via one channel, aimed at the most expensive properties and their owners, starting at anything over $3 million and up to $10 million).

This is a huge business, typified by incumbent behemoths like Lloyd’s of London, who in theory mitigate the risk insurance companies face when they get the formula wrong. Manning’s belief is that reinsurance companies also are not using enough data, and accurate enough data science or technology overall, to do their jobs to match today’s circumstances.

Reinsurance is currently a $400 billion-a-year industry, but it’s struggling with the cracks just starting to emerge. There has been, Kettle said, a 68% drop in return on equity because catastrophes, and their unintended consequences, have caused more than $1 billion in damage over the past 15 years. This presents an opportunity to provide a different spin on how to provide this service. Kettle’s approach is to pinpoint specific situations — in this case wildfires in California — to provide reinsurance specifically for policies or parts of policies that cover just that.

Using machine learning in which it combines weather data, satellite imagery and other data sets, Kettle applies a lot what has helped AI stand out from non-AI processes in other fields: the ability for machines to simply make more calculations than any human or even group of humans can.

“Normally, an insurance company will run between 10,000 and 100,000 simulations to predict outcomes,” Manning said. “We run over 500 bill This means that it can account better for eventualities to help create pricing that meets them. Kettle claims to have been accurate on its predictions 89% of the time so far. In August, Kettle said that some 26 insurance carriers have been in contact with it to help model their risk, and Manning told me that the company expects three to four commercial deals to close by the end of this year.

There is often something a little weird feeling about technology that essentially is built around the idea of bad events happening, and potentially profits from those things that go wrong. Insurance often falls into the category, not least because a lot of insurance hasn’t really been built that well, to fit modern times, and often feels exploitative, or arbitrary, or there by grace of lobbyists making sure it is mandated, more than any actual need for it. (And insurance fraud speaks to the other side of that inefficiency coin.)

Manning accepts this, but also sees it very differently.

“I think the industry itself is very poorly managed,” he admitted. “The incentives are not in the right direction, and creating a system where the customer and company have different incentive structures is not great.

“But I do think it’s important,” he continued. “As a homeowner, if my home burns down I’ll get its value back. That can be a truly life changing thing.”

For investors, the disruptiveness Kettle is bringing is what attracted them, although longer term you have to imagine that the big incumbents can’t not be considering how to update their data models, too. And that could mean more business for Kettle, or an acquisition, or… death, which is perhaps fitting for a insuretech. For now, though, there’s a lot of potential still for this young startup.

“When you take a minute to think about it, it becomes very obvious why traditional reinsurers can’t accurately underwrite climate risk — their methodologies  look to the past,” says Lauren Kolodny, Partner at Acrew Capital, in a statement. “And our climate is changing in ways that can’t be predicted on the basis of historical data. Kettle is solving a massive, global problem. And we’re so thrilled to deepen our partnership with this incredible team.”

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Ketch raises another $20M as demand grows for its privacy data control platform

Six months after securing a $23 million Series A round, Ketch, a startup providing online privacy regulation and data compliance, brought in an additional $20 million in A1 funding, this time led by Acrew Capital.

Returning with Acrew for the second round are CRV, super{set} (the startup studio founded by Ketch’s co-founders CEO Tom Chavez and CTO Vivek Vaidya), Ridge Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. The new investment gives Ketch a total of $43 million raised since the company came out of stealth earlier this year.

In 2020, Ketch introduced its data control platform for programmatic privacy, governance and security. The platform automates data control and consent management so that consumers’ privacy preferences are honored and implemented.

Ketch raises $23M to automate privacy and data compliance

Enterprises are looking for a way to meet consumer needs and accommodate their rights and consents. At the same time, companies want data to fuel their growth and gain the trust of consumers, Chavez told TechCrunch.

There is also a matter of security, with much effort going into ransomware and malware, but Chavez feels a big opportunity is to bring security to the data wherever it lies. Once the infrastructure is in place for data control it needs to be at the level of individual cells and rows, he said.

“If someone wants to be deleted, there is a challenge in finding your specific row of data,” he added. “That is an exercise in data control.”

Ketch’s customer base grew by more than 300% since its March Series A announcement, and the new funding will go toward expanding its sales and go-to-market teams, Chavez said.

Ketch app. Image Credits: Ketch

This year, the company launched Ketch OTC, a free-to-use privacy tool that streamlines all aspects of privacy so that enterprise compliance programs build trust and reduce friction. Customer growth through OTC increased five times in six months. More recently, Qonsent, which developing a consent user experience, is using Ketch’s APIs and infrastructure, Chavez said.

When looking for strategic partners, Chavez and Vaidya wanted to have people around the table who have a deep context on what they were doing and could provide advice as they built out their products. They found that in Acrew founding partner Theresia Gouw, whom Chavez referred to as “the OG of privacy and security.”

Gouw has been investing in security and privacy for over 20 years and says Ketch is flipping the data privacy and security model on its head by putting it in the hands of developers. When she saw more people working from home and more data breaches, she saw an opportunity to increase and double down on Acrew’s initial investment.

She explained that Ketch is differentiating itself from competitors by taking data privacy and security and tying it to the data itself to empower software developers. With the OTC tool, similar to putting locks and cameras on a home, developers can download the API and attach rules to all of a user’s data.

“The magic of Ketch is that you can take the security and governance rules and embed them with the software and the piece of data,” Gouw added.

3 adtech and martech VCs see major opportunities in privacy and compliance

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Acrew Capital, Jeff Bezos back Colombia-based proptech La Haus’ $100M debt, equity round

La Haus, which has developed an online real estate marketplace operating in Mexico and Colombia, has secured $100 million in additional funding, including $50 million in equity and $50 million in debt financing.

The new capital was obtained as an extension to the company’s Series B, the first tranche of which closed in January. With the latest infusion, Medellin, Colombia-based La Haus has now secured $135 million total for the round and over $158 million in funding since its 2017 inception.

San Francisco Bay Area venture firms Acrew Capital and Renegade Partners co-led the round, which also included participation from Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, Endeavor Catalyst, Moore Strategic Ventures, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Rappi’s Simon Borrero, Maluma, and Gabriel Gilinski. Existing backers who put money in this round include Greenspring Associates, Kaszek, NFX, Spencer Rascoff’s 75 & Sunny Ventures, Hadi Partovi and NuBank’s David Velez. 

Jerónimo Uribe (CEO), Rodrigo Sánchez-Ríos (president), Tomás Uribe (chief growth officer) and Santiago Garcia (CTO) founded the company after Jerónimo and Tomas met Sánchez-Ríos at Stanford University. Prior to La Haus they started and ran Jaguar Capital, a Colombian real estate development company with over $350 million of completed retail and residential projects. 

The company declined to reveal at what valuation the extension was raised, with Sánchez-Ríos saying only that it was “a significant increase” from January.

The Series B extension follows impressive growth for the startup, which saw the number of transactions conducted on its Mexico portal climb by nearly 10x in the second quarter of 2021 compared to the 2020 second quarter. With over 500 homes selling on its platform (via lahaus.com and lahaus.mx) the company is “the market leader in selling new housing in Spanish-speaking Latam by an order of magnitude,” its execs claim.  La Haus expects to have facilitated more than $1 billion in annualized gross sales by the end of the year. 

Like the US, a two-tier venture capital market is emerging in Latin America

The startup was founded with the mission of making it easier for people to buy homes and helping “solve LatAm’s extreme housing inequality.” Its end goal is to accelerate access to new housing by both generating and curating supply and demand and then matching it with its technology, noted Sánchez-Ríos. 

“In the last six months, our chief product officer has built a product that allows this to happen 100% digitally,” he said. “Before it would take a lot of time, people involved and visits. We want to provide people looking for a home a similar experience as to people looking for their next flight at delta.com.”

It has done that by embedding its software to developers’ new projects so that it can bring that digital experience to its users. 

“They are able to view the projects on our sites, we match them and then they can see in real time which units of a particular tower are available, and then select, sign and pay for everything digitally,” Sánchez-Río said.

Image credit: La Haus

The need for new housing in the region and other emerging markets in general is acute, they believe. And the pace of building new homes is slow because small and mid-sized developers – who are responsible for building the majority of new homes in Latin America – are cash constrained. At the same time, mortgages are mostly not affordable for consumers, with banks extending only a fraction of the credit to individuals compared to the U.S., and often at far worse terms. 

What La Haus is planning to do with its new capital – particularly the debt portion – is go beyond selling homes via its marketplace to helping extend financing to both developers and potential buyers.It plans to take the proprietary data it has been able to glean from the thousands of real estate transactions conducted on it platform to extend capital to developers and consumers “more quickly, with much lower risk and at better terms.”

Already, what the startup has accomplished is notable. Being able to purchase a home 100% digitally is not that easy even in the U.S. Pulling that off in Latin America – which has historically trailed behind in digital adoption – is no easy feat. By year’s end, La Haus intends to be in every major metropolitan area in Mexico and Colombia. 

Its ultimate goal is to be able to help new, sustainable homes “to be built faster, alleviating the inequality caused by lack of access to inventory.”

To Acrew Capital’s Lauren Kolodny, La Haus is building a solution specific to the issues of Latin America’s housing market, rather than importing business models – such as iBuying – from the U.S.

“For many people in the United States home equity is their largest asset. In Latin America, however, consumers have been challenged with an impenetrable real estate market stacked against consumers,” she wrote via email. “La Haus is removing barriers to home ownership that stifles millions of people from achieving financial security. Specifically, Latin America has no centralized MLS, very costly interest rates, no transactional transparency, and few online informational tools.”

La Haus, Kolodny added, is breaking down these barriers by consolidating listings online, offering pricing transparency and educating consumers about their financing options.

Acrew first invested in the startup in its $10 million Series A and has been impressed with its growth over time.

“They have a unique focus on new housing — a massive industry worldwide, but especially in emerging markets where new housing is so necessary,” Kolodny said. “The management team…knows real estate in Latin America better than anyone we’ve met.”

For its part, the La Haus team is excited to put its new capital to work. As Sánchez-Río put it, “$50 million goes a lot further in Mexico and Colombia than in the U.S.”

“We are going to be very aggressive in Mexico and Colombia, and plan to go from four to at least 12 markets by the end of the year,” Jeronimo told TechCrunch. “We’re also excited to roll out our financing solution to developers and buyers.”

Brazilian proptech startup QuintoAndar lands $300M at a $4B valuation

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Cybersecurity unicorn Exabeam raises $200M to fuel SecOps growth

Exabeam, a late-stage startup that helps organizations detect advanced cybersecurity threats, has landed a new $200 million funding round that values the company at $2.4 billion.

The Series F growth round was led by the Owl Rock division of Blue Owl Capital, with support from existing investors Acrew Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

The announcement of Exabeam’s latest funding, which the company says will help it on its mission to become “the number one trusted cloud SeCops platform in the market”, coincides with the news that CEO Nir Polak, who co-founded the company in 2013, will be replaced by former ForeScout chief executive Michael DeCesare.

DeCesare is a big name in the cybersecurity space, with more than 25 years of experience leading high-growth security companies. He joined ForeScout as CEO and president in February 2015 after four years as president of McAfee, which at the time was owned by Intel. Under his leadership, ForeScout raised nearly $117 million in an upsized IPO that valued the IoT security vendor at $800 million.

Polak, meanwhile, will shift to a chairman role at Exabeam and “will continue on as an active member of the executive team and remain at the company,” according to the funding announcement.

“Nir has built an incredibly robust, diverse and inclusive culture at Exabeam, and I am committed to helping it flourish,” said DeCesare. “I’m thrilled to join Nir and the whole leadership team to help drive the company through its next phase of growth.”

Exabeam, which has now raised $390 million in six rounds of outside funding, says it expects to use the new money to fuel scale, innovate and extend the company’s leadership. “It gives us the opportunity to triple down on our R&D efforts and continue engineering the most advanced UEBA, XDR and SIEM cloud security products available today,” commented Polak.

The company adds that it has made significant investments in its partner program over the last 12 months, which now includes more than 400 reseller, distributor, systems integrator, MSSP, MDR and consulting partners globally. Exabeam also has more than 500 technology integrations with cloud network, data lake and endpoint vendors including CrowdStrike, Okta and Snowflake.

It’s clearly expecting these investments to pay off, describing its “outcome-based approach” to external security as perfectly suited to support organizations as they manage exponential amounts of data and return to the post-COVID workplace in a variety of hybrid scenarios. After all, hackers are already beginning to target employees who have started making a return to the office, and this threat is only likely to increase as more companies begin to dial back on remote working and start welcoming staff back into workplaces.

“Exabeam is poised to be the next-gen leader in the cloud security analytics, XDR and SIEM markets,” Pravin Vazirani, Blue Owl Capital’s managing director and co-head of tech investing, said in a statement. “We led this round of funding to provide the company with the resources necessary to support its sustainable, long-term growth and value creation.”

Meet 5 cybersecurity unicorns that could IPO in 2020

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Pie Insurance raises $118M for data-driven workers’ comp coverage

Pie Insurance, a startup offering workers’ compensation insurance to small businesses, announced this morning that it has closed on $118 million in a Series C round of funding.

Allianz X — investment arm of German financial services giant Allianz — and Acrew Capital co-led the round, which brings the Washington, D.C.-based startup’s total equity funding raised to over $300 million since its 2017 inception. Pie declined to disclose the valuation at which its latest round was raised, other than to say it was “a significant increase.”

Return backers Greycroft, SVB Capital, SiriusPoint, Elefund and Moxley Holdings also participated in the Series C financing.

The startup, which uses data and analytics in its effort to offer SMBs a way to get insurance digitally and more affordably, has seen its revenues climb by 150% since it raised $127 million in a Series B extension last May. Its headcount too has risen — to 260 from 140 last year.

Pie began selling its insurance policies in March 2018. The company declined to give recent hard revenue numbers, saying it only has grown its gross written premium to over $100 million and partnered with over 1,000 agencies nationwide. Last year, execs told me that in the first quarter of 2020, the company had written nearly $19 million in premiums, up 150% from just under $7.5 million during the same period in 2019.

Like many other companies over the past year, Pie Insurance — with its internet-driven, cloud-based platform — has benefited from the increasing further adoption of digital technologies. 

“We are riding that wave,” said Pie Insurance co-founder and CEO John Swigart. “We believe small businesses deserve better than they have historically gotten. And we think that technology can be the means by which that better experience, that more efficient process, and fundamentally, that lower price can be delivered to them.”

Foresight raises $15M for its construction workers’ compensation platform

Pie’s customer base includes a range of small businesses including trades, contractors, landscapers, janitors, auto shops and restaurants. Pie sells its insurance directly through its website and also mostly through thousands of independent insurance agents.

Workers’ compensation insurance is the only commercial insurance mandated for every company in the United States, points out Lauren Kolodny, founding partner at Acrew Capital.

“Historically, it’s been extremely cumbersome to qualify, onboard and manage workers’ comp insurance — particularly for America’s small businesses which haven’t been prioritized by larger carriers,” she wrote via email. 

Pie, Koldony said, is able to offer underwriting decisions “almost instantly,” digitally and more affordably than legacy insurance carriers.

“I have seen very few insurtech teams that come close,” she added.

Dr. Nazim Cetin, CEO of Allianz X, told TechCrunch via email that his firm believes Pie is operating in an “attractive and growing market that is ripe for digital disruption.”

The company, he said, leverages “excellent,” proprietary data and advanced analytics to be able to provide tailored underwriting and automation. 

“We see some great collaboration opportunities with Allianz companies too,” he added.

Looking ahead, the company plans to use its new capital to invest further in technology and automation, as well as to grow its core workers’ comp insurance business and “lay the groundwork for new business offerings in 2021 and beyond.”

As Next Insurance makes its first acquisition, insurtech looks energetic

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Aqua Security raises $135M at a $1B valuation for its cloud native security service

Aqua Security, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based security startup that focuses squarely on securing cloud-native services, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series E funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by ION Crossover Partners. Existing investors M12 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates and Acrew Capital also participated. In total, Aqua Security has now raised $265 million since it was founded in 2015.

The company was one of the earliest to focus on securing container deployments. And while many of its competitors were acquired over the years, Aqua remains independent and is now likely on a path to an IPO. When it launched, the industry focus was still very much on Docker and Docker containers. To the detriment of Docker, that quickly shifted to Kubernetes, which is now the de facto standard. But enterprises are also now looking at serverless and other new technologies on top of this new stack.

“Enterprises that five years ago were experimenting with different types of technologies are now facing a completely different technology stack, a completely different ecosystem and a completely new set of security requirements,” Aqua CEO Dror Davidoff told me. And with these new security requirements came a plethora of startups, all focusing on specific parts of the stack.

Image Credits: Aqua Security

What set Aqua apart, Dror argues, is that it managed to 1) become the best solution for container security and 2) realized that to succeed in the long run, it had to become a platform that would secure the entire cloud-native environment. About two years ago, the company made this switch from a product to a platform, as Davidoff describes it.

“There was a spree of acquisitions by CheckPoint and Palo Alto [Networks] and Trend [Micro],” Davidoff said. “They all started to acquire pieces and tried to build a more complete offering. The big advantage for Aqua was that we had everything natively built on one platform. […] Five years later, everyone is talking about cloud-native security. No one says ‘container security’ or ‘serverless security’ anymore. And Aqua is practically the broadest cloud-native security [platform].”

One interesting aspect of Aqua’s strategy is that it continues to bet on open source, too. Trivy, its open-source vulnerability scanner, is the default scanner for GitLab’s Harbor Registry and the CNCF’s Artifact Hub, for example.

“We are probably the best security open-source player there is because not only do we secure from vulnerable open source, we are also very active in the open-source community,” Davidoff said (with maybe a bit of hyperbole). “We provide tools to the community that are open source. To keep evolving, we have a whole open-source team. It’s part of the philosophy here that we want to be part of the community and it really helps us to understand it better and provide the right tools.”

In 2020, Aqua, which mostly focuses on mid-size and larger companies, doubled the number of paying customers and it now has more than half a dozen customers with an ARR of over $1 million each.

Davidoff tells me the company wasn’t actively looking for new funding. Its last funding round came together only a year ago, after all. But the team decided that it wanted to be able to double down on its current strategy and raise sooner than originally planned. ION had been interested in working with Aqua for a while, Davidoff told me, and while the company received other offers, the team decided to go ahead with ION as the lead investor (with all of Aqua’s existing investors also participating in this round).

“We want to grow from a product perspective, we want to grow from a go-to-market [perspective] and expand our geographical coverage — and we also want to be a little more acquisitive. That’s another direction we’re looking at because now we have the platform that allows us to do that. […] I feel we can take the company to great heights. That’s the plan. The market opportunity allows us to dream big.”

2020 was a record year for Israel’s security startup ecosystem

 

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Ex-General Catalyst and General Atlantic VC announces $68M debut fund

As of 2019, the majority of venture firms — 65% — still did not have a single female partner or GP at their firm, according to All Raise.

So naturally, anytime we hear of a new female-led fund, our ears perk up.

Today, New York-based Avid Ventures announced the launch of its $68 million debut venture capital fund. Addie Lerner — who was previously an investor with General Catalyst, General Atlantic and Goldman Sachs — founded Avid in 2020 with the goal of taking a hands-on approach to working with founders of early-stage startups in the United States, Europe and Israel.

“We believe investing in a founder’s company is a privilege to be earned,” she said.

Tali Vogelstein — a former investor at Bessemer Venture Partners — joined the firm as a founding investor soon after its launch and the pair were able to raise the capital in 10 months’ time during the 2020 pandemic.

The newly formed firm has an impressive list of LPs backing its debut effort. Schusterman Family Investments and the George Kaiser Family Foundation are its anchor LPs. Institutional investors include Foundry Group, General Catalyst, 14W, Slow Ventures and LocalGlobe/Latitude through its Basecamp initiative that backs emerging managers. 

Avid also has the support of 50 founders, entrepreneurs and investors as LPs — 40% of whom are female — including Mirror founder Brynn Putnam; Getty Images co-founder Jonathan Klein; founding partner of Acrew Capital Theresia Gouw and others.

Female-founded startups landed more deals globally in 2019 than ever before

Avid invests at the Series A and B stages, and so far has invested in Alloy, Nova Credit, Rapyd, Staircase, Nava and The Wing. Three of those companies have female founders — something Lerner said happened “quite naturally.”

“Diversity can happen and should happen more organically as opposed to quotas or mandates,” she added.

In making those deals, Avid partnered with top-tier firms such as Kleiner Perkins, Canapi Ventures, Zigg Capital and Thrive Capital. In general, Avid intentionally does not lead its first investments in startups, with its first checks typically being in the $500,000 to $1 million range. It preserves most of its capital for follow-on investments.

“We like to position ourselves to earn the right to write a bigger check in a future round,” Lerner told TechCrunch. 

In the case of Rapyd, Avid organized an SPV (special-purpose vehicle) to invest in the unicorn’s recent Series D. Lerner had previously backed the company’s Series B round while at General Catalyst and remains a board observer.

Prior to founding Avid, Lerner had helped deploy more than $450 million across 18 investments in software, fintech (Rapyd & Monzo) and consumer internet companies spanning North America, Europe and Israel. 

When it comes to sectors, Avid is particularly focused on backing early-stage fintech, consumer internet and software companies. The firm intends to invest in about 20 startups over a three-to-four year period.

“We want to take our time, so we can be as hands-on as we want to be,” Lerner said. “We’re not looking to back 80 companies. Our goal is to drive outstanding returns for our LPs.”

The firm views itself as an extension of its portfolio companies’ teams, serving as their “Outsourced Strategic CFO.” Lerner and Vogelstein also aim to provide the companies they work with strategic growth modeling, unit economics analysis, talent recruiting, customer introductions and business development support.

“We strive to build deep relationships early on and to prove our value well ahead of a prospective investment,” Lerner said. Avid takes its team’s prior data-driven experience to employ “a metrics-driven approach” so that a startup can “deeply understand” their unit economics. It also “gets in the trenches” alongside founders to help grow a company.

On the diversity front, 2020 may prove a tipping point

Ed Zimmerman, chair of Lowenstein Sandler LLP’s tech group in New York and adjunct professor of VC at Columbia Business School, is an Avid investor.

He told TechCrunch that because of his role in the venture community, he is often counsel to a company or fund and will run into former students in deals. Feedback from numerous people in his network point to Lerner being “extraordinarily thoughtful about deals,” with one entrepreneur describing her as “one of the smartest people she has met in a decade-plus in venture.”

“I’ve seen it myself in deals and then I’ve seen founders turn down very well branded funds to work with Addie,” Zimmerman added, noting they are impressed both by her intellect and integrity. “…Addie will find and win and be invited into great deals because she makes an indelible impression on the people who’ve worked with her and the data is remarkably consistent.”

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Two new efforts push to transform more people into limited partners of VC funds

Venture funds have historically counted on a few types of investors — or limited partners — for their investing capital. One of these groups is institutional investors — think pension funds, university endowments, hospital systems and the like. Another is corporations. A third bucket centers on the family offices of wealthy individuals.

It’s a fairly small universe, in other words, but two new initiatives, both announced this week and both very different, are looking to change the equation — and could usher in similar efforts soon.

Arlan Hamilton came out with her news first. Hamilton is the founder of Backstage Capital, a venture firm focused on investing in startups founded by people of color, women, and teams with members from the LGBTQ community. In short, diversity is at its very core. But Hamilton, who is herself Black, isn’t interested in funding diverse founders alone; she is also interested in enabling more people from diverse backgrounds — including socioeconomically — to invest in venture capital as an asset class.

Toward that end, earlier this week, on the private investing platform Republic, she opened a new fund that anyone — including unaccredited investors — could back under a Securities and Exchange Commission rule called Reg CF, or Regulation Crowdfunding.

Hamilton hit the upper boundary of what Reg CF allows an outfit to raise — $1,070,000 within a 12-month period — in what seemed like hours from 2,790 investors who were invited to invest as little as $100. But more could be coming. The reason why: that rule underwent a change in November under former SEC chair Jay Clayton, and will next month begin allowing outfits to crowdsource up to $5 million. The process could be slowed down by the incoming SEC chief. (President Biden has appointed former regulator and former Goldman partner Gary Gensler, who must now receive Senate confirmation.) If it’s not, however, it’s easy to imagine more unaccredited investors being invited to fund other, and larger, venture funds soon.

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A second initiative this week has similar objectives to Hamilton — bringing more diverse investors into the ranks of limited partners — though it has a different approach and it’s targeting accredited investors only, which basically means individuals who are earning $200,000 a year and/or have a net worth of $1 million or more.

Launched by Acrew Capital — a Palo Alto- and San Francisco-based early-stage venture spearheaded by veteran VC Theresia Gouw — the firm revealed yesterday that it’s currently raising a traditional growth-stage fund with a twist. In addition to giving its current limited partners a crack at investing in the new fund, it is also opening the vehicle up to more women, people of color, and underrepresented individuals who may not have had a chance historically to invest in a later-stage private vehicle.

The key here is Acrew’s emphasis on growth-stage investing. While more women and people of color are breaking into the ranks of seed-stage investing, it takes a long time to make money with early-stage funding. Meanwhile, growth-stage funds are more exclusive because the companies they back are closer to an “exit” typically. That makes them very appealing to institutions — including mutual funds and hedge funds — which leaves a lot of room for the kinds of individuals who Acrew hopes to bring into the fold.

Like Backstage, diversity is in DNA of Acrew, which Gouw cofounded with Laura Kolodny, Vishal Lugani and Mark Kraynak, colleagues from their previous fund, Aspect Ventures.

It’s little surprise that the firm — which says 88% of its overall team is female and 63% comes from underrepresented backgrounds —  would be the first to publicly focus on pulling more women and people of color who are angel investors, board members, and C-level execs into the world of later-stage deals.

But it’s also strategic on the part of Acrew, which focuses largely on fintech and cybersecurity, and which has stakes in the highly valued challenger bank Chime, and the big data security analytics company Exabeam, among many others.

As Kolodny explains it, a growing number of companies is focused on enhancing diversity in the board room, and having an LP base filled individuals from underrepresented groups (with highly vetted networks), works out well for everyone involved.

In fact, it’s an approach that they hope won’t distinguish the firm for long, says Kolodny. “Our hope is that five years from now, a venture firm helping companies to add diverse independent board members and diverse executives won’t be a unique strategy.”

The hope,” she adds, “is [this effort] gets people to embrace a new standard around what is what is expected of venture firms.”

Pictured above: the members of Acrew Capital who are part of its first growth fund, which it has dubbed its Diversity Capital Fund.

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Cyber insurance startup At-Bay raises $34M Series C, adds M12 as a new investor

Cybersecurity insurance startup At-Bay has raised $34 million in its Series C round, the company announced Tuesday.

The round was led by Qumra Capital, a new investor. Microsoft’s venture fund M12, also a new investor, participated in the round alongside Acrew Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Munich Re Ventures, and Israeli entrepreneur Shlomo Kramer, who co-founded security firms Check Point and Imperva.

It’s a huge move for the company, which only closed its Series B in February.

The cybersecurity insurance market is expected to become a $23 billion industry by 2025, driven in part by an explosion in connected devices and new regulatory regimes under Europe’s GDPR and more recently California’s state-wide privacy law. But where traditional insurance companies have struggled to acquire the acumen needed to accommodate the growing demand for cybersecurity insurance, startups like At-Bay have filled the space.

At-Bay was founded in 2016 by Rotem Iram and Roman Itskovich, and is headquartered in Mountain View. In the past year, the company has tripled its headcount and now has offices in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and Dallas.

The company differentiates itself from the pack by monitoring the perimeter of its customers’ networks and alerting them to security risks or vulnerabilities. By proactively looking for potential security issues, At-Bay helps its customers to prevent network intrusions and data breaches before they happen, avoiding losses for the company while reducing insurance payouts — a win-win for both the insurance provider and its customers.

“This modern approach to risk management is not only driving strong demand for our insurance, but also enabling us to improve our products and minimize loss to our insureds,” said Iram.

It’s a bet that’s paying off: the company says its frequency of claims are less than half of the industry average. Lior Litwak, a partner at M12, said he sees “immense potential” in the company for melding cyber risk and analysis with cyber insurance.

Now with its Series C in the bank, the company plans to grow its team and launch new products, while improving its automated underwriting platform that allows companies to get instant cyber insurance quotes.

Cyber insurance is changing the way we look at risk