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The Org nabs $20M led by Tiger Global to expand its platform based on public organizational charts
LinkedIn normalized the idea of making people’s resume’s visible to anyone who wanted to look at them, and today a startup that’s hoping to do the same for companies and how they are organized and run is announcing some funding. The Org, which wants to build a global, publicly viewable database of company organizational charts — and then utilize that database as a platform to power a host of other services — has raised $20 million, money that it will be using to hire more people, add on more org charts and launch new features, with a recruitment toolkit being first on the list.
The Series B is led by Tiger Global, with previous backers Sequoia, Founders Fund and Balderton Capital also participating alongside new investors Thursday Ventures, Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen (a former Balderton partner), Neeraj Arora (formative early WhatsApp exec), investor Gavin Baker, and more. From what we understand, the investment values The Org at $100 million.
Founders Fund led the company’s last round, a Series A in February 2020, and the whole world of work has really changed a lot in the interim because of COVID-19: companies have become more distributed (a result of offices shutting down); the make-up of businesses has changed because of new demands; and many of us have had our sense of connection to our jobs tested in ways that we never thought it would.
All of that has had a massive impact on The Org, and has played into its theory of why org charts are useful, and most useful as a tool for transparency.
“In many ways the pandemic has forced us to reevaluate the norms of how work happens. One of the misconceptions was the idea that you are only working when you are at the office, 9-5. But the future of work is a hybrid set up but you get a lot of issues that arise out of that, communication being one of them. Now it’s much more important to create alignment, a sense of connection, and really feeling a sense of belonging in your company,” Christian Wylonis, the CEO who co-founded the company with Andreas Jarbøl, said in an interview (the two are pictured below). “We think that a lot of these issues are rooted around transparency and that is what The Org is about. Who is doing what, and why?”
Image Credits: The Org
He said that when the coronavirus suddenly ramped up into a global issue — and it really was sudden; our conversation in February 2020 had nothing whatsoever to do with it, yet it was only weeks later that everything shut down — it wasn’t obvious that The Org would have a place in the so-called “new normal.”
“We were as nervous as anyone else, but the idea of what work would look like and how we enable people around that has gotten a lot higher on the agenda,” he said. “The appetite for new tools has improved dramatically, and we can see that in our traffic.”
The Org has indeed seen some very impressive growth. The company now hosts some 130,000 public org charts, sees 30,000 daily visitors and has more than 120,000 registered users. And more casual usage has boomed, too. Wylonis notes that The Org now has close to 1 million visitors each month versus just 100,000 in February 2020, when it only had 16,000 org charts on its platform.
Monetization is coming slowly for the startup. Building, editing and officially “claiming” a profile on the platform are all still free, but in the meantime The Org is working on its platform play and using the database that it is building to power other services. Job hunting is the first area that it will tackle.
Posting jobs will be free, and it’s integrating with Greenhouse to feed information into its system, but recruiters and HR pros are given an option to manage the sourcing and screening process through The Org, a kind of executive recruitment tool, which will come at a charge. Down the line there are plans for more communications and HR tools, Wylonis said. Some of this will be built by way of integrations and APIs with other services, and some tools — such as communications features — will be built in-house, from the ground up.
When I covered the company’s last round, I’d noted that there were some obvious hurdles for The Org, as well as potentially others like Charthop or Visier building business models on providing more transparency and information around hiring and how companies are run.
Sometimes the companies in question don’t actually want to have more transparency. And any database that is based around self-reporting runs the risk of being only as good as the data that is put into it — meaning it may be incomplete, or simply wrong, or just presented to the contributors’ best advantage, not that of the company itself. (This is one of the issues with LinkedIn, too: Even with people’s resumes being public, it’s still very easy to lie about what you actually do, or have done.)
So far, the theory is that some of this will be resolved by way of who The Org is targeting and how it is growing. Today the company’s “sweet spot” is early-stage startups with about 50-200 employees, and generally org charts are created for these businesses in part by The Org itself, and then largely by way of wiki-style user-edited content (anyone with a company email can get involved).
The plan is both to continue working with those smaller startups as they scale up, but also target bigger and bigger businesses. These, however, can be trickier to snag — not least because they will stretch into the realm of public companies, but also because their charts will be more complicated to map and manage consistently. For that reason, The Org is also adding in more features around how companies can “claim” their profiles, including managing permissions for who can edit profiles.
This might mean more managed public profiles, but the idea is that it will be a start, and once more companies post more information, we will see more transparency overall, not unlike how LinkedIn evolved, Wylonis said.
The LinkedIn analogy is interesting for another reason. It seems a no-brainer that LinkedIn, which is at its heart a massive database of information about the world of professional work, and the people and companies involved in it, would have wanted to build its own version of org charts at some point. And yet it hasn’t.
Some of this might be down to how LinkedIn has fundamentally built and organised its own database and knowledge graph, but Wylonis believes it might also be a conceptual difference.
“We think that this might be the fundamental difference between us and them,” Wylonis said of LinkedIn. “They are a database of resumes. ‘I can say whatever I want.’ But for us, the atomic unit is the organization itself. That is an important distinction because it’s a one to many relationship. It can’t be only me editing my profile. And allows us to build structures.”
He added that this was one of the reasons that Keith Rabois — who was an early exec at LinkedIn — became an early investor in The Org: “LinkedIn has been looking at this forever, but they haven’t been able to build it, and so that is how we caught his attention.”
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Vivenu, a ticketing API for events, closes a $15M Series A round led by Balderton Capital
Vivenu, a ticketing platform that offers an API for venues and promoters to customize to their needs, has closed a $15 million (€12.6 million) Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital. Previous investor Redalpine also participated.
Historically speaking, most ticketing platform startups took a direct to consumer approach, or have provided turnkey solutions to big event promoters. But in this day and age, most events require a great deal more flexibility, not least because of the pandemic. So, by offering an API and allowing promoters that flexibility, vivenu managed to gain traction.
Venues and event owners get a full-featured ticketing, out-of-the-box platform with full real-time dynamic control over all aspects of selling tickets, including configuring prices and seating plans, leveraging customer data and insights and mastering a branded look and feel across their sales channels. It has exposed APIs enabling many different custom use cases for large international ticket sellers. Since its seed funding in March, the company says it has sold more than 2 million tickets.
Simon Hennes, CEO and co-founder of vivenu, said in a statement: “We created vivenu to address the need of ticket sellers for a user-centric ticketing platform. Event organizers were stuck with solutions that heavily depend on manual processes, causing high costs, dependencies, and frustration on various levels.”
Daniel Waterhouse, partner at Balderton, said: “Vivenu has built a sophisticated product and set of APIs that gives event organisers full control of their ticketing operations.”
Vivenu is also the first European investment of Aurum Fund LLC, the fund associated with the San Francisco 49ers. Also investing in the round are angels, including Sascha Konietzke (founder at Contentful), Chris Schagen (former CMO at Contentful), Sujay Tyle (founder at Frontier Car Group) and Tiny VC.
In March 2020, vivenu secured €1.4 million in seed funding, bringing its total funding to €14 million. Previous investors include early-stage venture capital investor Redalpine, GE32 Capital and Hansel LLC (associated with the founders of Loft).
Speaking to TechCrunch, Hennes said: “You have to send your seat map to Ticketmaster, and then the account manager comes back to you with a sitemap. This goes back and forth and takes ages. With us you have a seating chart designer basically integrated into the software which you can simply change yourself.”
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Eco-friendly laundry goods subscription service smol raises £8M from Balderton
Smol is a startup that delivers to people’s homes eco-friendly laundry capsules and dishwasher tablets on subscription through letterboxes, which undercut the price of the leading brands. It has now raised £8 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, with participation from JamJar Investments. The funding will see smol push into new product categories, expand further into new markets and expand its team. Before this round smol had been funded by seed money from private investors.
Created by former Unilever employees Paula Quazi and Nick Green in 2018, it has also launched its own-brand, animal-fat-free, vegan fabric conditioner and a 100% plastic-free, child-lock packaging for its laundry and dishwashing products, as well as fabric conditioner made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic, which as recyclable. Smol also offers a returns scheme for refill and reuse.
P&G and Unilever currently dominate the market, while smol hopes to become “the Dollar Shave Club” of laundry.
Paula Quazi, co-founder of smol, said in a statement: “Having seen how the industry has barely innovated in over a hundred years we launched smol to take the hassle out of washing for families whose laundry needs have been ignored for decades.”
Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton Capital said: “When people think of technology disruption, it is normal to think of digital products and internet tools. However, technology has the power to make life better for us in the most unexpected ways and we believe Paula, Nick and their amazing team have tapped into just such an opportunity at smol.”
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Privacy assistant Jumbo raises $8 million and releases major update
A year after its initial release, Jumbo has two important pieces of news to announce. First, the company has released a major update of its app that protects your privacy on online services. Second, the company has raised an $8 million Series A funding round.
If you’re not familiar with Jumbo, the app wants to fix what’s broken with online privacy today. Complicated terms of services combined with customer-hostile default settings have made it really hard to understand what personal information is out there. Due to recent regulatory changes, it’s now possible to change privacy settings on many services.
While it is possible, it doesn’t mean it is easy. If you’ve tried to adjust your privacy settings on Facebook or LinkedIn, you know that it’s a convoluted process with a lot of sub-menus and non-descriptive text.
Similarly, social networks have been around for more than a decade. While you were comfortable sharing photos and public messages with a small group of friends 10 years ago, you don’t necessarily want to leave this content accessible to hundreds or even thousands of “friends” today.
The result is an iPhone and Android app that puts you in charge of your privacy. It’s essentially a dashboard that lets you control your privacy on the web. You first connect the app to various online services and you can then control those services from Jumbo. Jumbo doesn’t limit itself to what you can do with APIs, as it can mimic JavaScript calls on web pages that are unaccessible to the APIs.
For instance, if you connect your Facebook account, you can remove your profile from advertising lists, delete past searches, change the visibility of posts you’re tagged in and more. On Google, you can delete your history across multiple services — web searches, Chrome history, YouTube searches, Google Map activities, location history, etc.
More fundamentally, Jumbo challenges the fact that everything should remain online forever. Conversations you had six months ago might not be relevant today, so why can’t you delete those conversations?
Jumbo lets you delete and archive old tweets, Messenger conversations and old Facebook posts. The app can regularly scan your accounts and delete everything that is older than a certain threshold — it can be a month, a year or whatever you want.
While your friends will no longer be able to see that content, Jumbo archives everything in a tab called Vault.
With today’s update, everything has been refined. The main tab has been redesigned to inform you of what Jumbo has been doing over the past week. The company now uses background notifications to perform some tasks even if you’re not launching the app every day.
The data-breach monitoring has been improved. Jumbo now uses SpyCloud to tell you exactly what has been leaked in a data breach — your phone number, your email address, your password, your address, etc.
It’s also much easier to understand the settings you can change for each service thanks to simple toggles and recommendations that you can accept or ignore.
Image Credits: Jumbo
A clear business model
Jumbo’s basic features are free, but you’ll need to buy a subscription to access the most advanced features. Jumbo Plus lets you scan and archive your Instagram account, delete your Alexa voice recordings, manage your Reddit and Dropbox accounts and track more than one email address for data breaches.
Jumbo Pro lets you manage your LinkedIn account (and you know that LinkedIn’s privacy settings are a mess). You can also track more information as part of the data breach feature — your ID, your credit card number and your Social Security number. It also lets you activate a tracker blocker.
This new feature in the second version of Jumbo replaces default DNS settings on your phone. All DNS requests are routed through a Jumbo-managed networking profile on your phone. If you’re trying to access a tracker, the request is blocked; if you’re trying to access some legit content, the request goes through. It works in the browser and in native apps.
You can pay what you want for Jumbo Plus, from $3 per month to $8 per month. Similarly, you can pick what you want to pay for Jumbo Pro, between $9 per month and $15 per month.
You might think that you’re giving a ton of personal information to a small startup. Jumbo is well aware of that and tries to reassure its user base with radical design choices, transparency and a clear business model.
Jumbo doesn’t want to mine your data. Your archived data isn’t stored on Jumbo’s servers. It remains on your phone and optionally on your iCloud or Dropbox account as a backup.
Jumbo doesn’t even have user accounts. When you first open the app, the app assigns you a unique ID in order to send you push notifications, but that’s about it. The company has also hired companies for security audits.
“We don’t store email addresses so we don’t know why people subscribe,” Jumbo CEO Pierre Valade told me.
Profitable by 2022
Jumbo has raised an $8 million funding round. It had previously raised a $3.5 million seed round. This time, Balderton Capital is leading the round. The firm had already invested in Valade’s previous startup, Sunrise.
A lot of business angels participated in the round as well, and Jumbo is listing them all on its website. This is all about being transparent again.
Interestingly, Jumbo isn’t betting on explosive growth and eyeballs. The company says it has enough funding until February 2022. By then, the startup hopes it can attract 100,000 subscribers to reach profitability.
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GitGuardian raises $12M to help developers write more secure code and ‘fix’ GitHub leaks
Data breaches that could cause millions of dollars in potential damages have been the bane of the life of many a company. What’s required is a great deal of real-time monitoring. The problem is that this world has become incredibly complex. A SANS Institute survey found half of company data breaches were the result of account or credential hacking.
GitGuardian has attempted to address this with a highly developer-centric cybersecurity solution.
It’s now attracted the attention of major investors, to the tune of $12 million in Series A funding, led by Balderton Capital . Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub, and Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker, also participated in the round.
The startup plans to use the investment from Balderton Capital to expand its customer base, predominantly in the U.S. Around 75% of its clients are currently based in the U.S., with the remainder being based in Europe, and the funding will continue to drive this expansion.
Built to uncover sensitive company information hiding in online repositories, GitGuardian says its real-time monitoring platform can address the data leaks issues. Modern enterprise software developers have to integrate multiple internal and third-party services. That means they need incredibly sensitive “secrets,” such as login details, API keys and private cryptographic keys used to protect confidential systems and data.
GitGuardian’s systems detect thousands of credential leaks per day. The team originally built its launch platform with public GitHub in mind; however, GitGuardian is built as a private solution to monitor and notify on secrets that are inappropriately disseminated in internal systems as well, such as private code repositories or messaging systems.
Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker and investor at GitGuardian, said: “Securing your systems starts with securing your software development process. GitGuardian understands this, and they have built a pragmatic solution to an acute security problem. Their credentials monitoring system is a must-have for any serious organization.”
Do they have any competitors?
Co-founder Jérémy Thomas told me: “We currently don’t have any direct competitors. This generally means that there’s no market, or the market is too small to be interesting. In our case, our fundraise proves we’ve put our hands on something huge. So the reason we don’t have competitors is because the problem we’re solving is counterintuitive at first sight. Ask any developer, they will say they would never hardcode any secret in public source code. However, humans make mistakes and when that happens, they can be extremely serious: it can take a single leaked credential to jeopardize an entire organization. To conclude, I’d say our real competitors so far are black hat hackers. Black hat activity is real on GitHub. For two years, we’ve been monitoring organized groups of hackers that exchange sensitive information they find on the platform. We are competing with them on speed of detection and scope of vulnerabilities covered.”
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How a Swedish saxophonist built Kobalt, the world’s next music unicorn
You may not have heard of Kobalt before, but you probably engage with the music it oversees every day, if not almost every hour. Combining a technology platform to better track ownership rights and royalties of songs with a new approach to representing musicians in their careers, Kobalt has risen from the ashes of the 2000 dot-com bubble to become a major player in the streaming music era. It is the leading alternative to incumbent music publishers (who represent songwriters) and is building a new model record label for the growing “middle class’ of musicians around the world who are stars within niche audiences.
Having predicted music’s digital upheaval early, Kobalt has taken off as streaming music has gone mainstream across the US, Europe, and East Asia. In the final quarter of last year, it represented the artists behind 38 of the top 100 songs on U.S. radio.
Along the way, it has secured more than $200 million in venture funding from investors like GV, Balderton, and Michael Dell, and its valuation was last pegged at $800 million. It confirmed in April that it is raising another $100 million to boot. Kobalt Music Group now employs over 700 people in 14 offices, and GV partner Avid Larizadeh Duggan even left her firm to become Kobalt’s COO.
How did a Swedish saxophonist from the 1980s transform into a leading entrepreneur in music’s digital transformation? Why are top technology VCs pouring money into a company that represents a roster of musicians? And how has the rise of music streaming created an opening for Kobalt to architect a new approach to the way the industry works?
Gaining an understanding of Kobalt and its future prospects is a vehicle for understanding the massive change underway across the global music industry right now and the opportunities that is and isn’t creating for entrepreneurs.
This article is Part 1 of the Kobalt EC-1, focused on the company’s origin story and growth. Part 2 will look at the company’s journey to create a new model for representing songwriters and tracking their ownership interests through the complex world of music royalties. Part 3 will look at Kobalt’s thesis about the rise of a massive new middle class of popular musicians and the record label alternative it is scaling to serve them.
Table of Contents
- Early lessons on the tough road of entrepreneurship
- From band leader to music label founder
- Leaving music behind… but not for long
- So what exactly is Kobalt?
- The wind (finally) in Kobalt’s sails: music is booming again
- What Kobalt is today
- How I’ll assess Kobalt over the next two posts
Early lessons on the tough road of entrepreneurship
Image via Kobalt Music
It’s tough to imagine a worse year to launch a music company than 2000. Willard Ahdritz, a Swede living in London, left his corporate consulting job and sold his home for £200,000 to fully commit to his idea of a startup collecting royalties for musicians. In hindsight, his timing was less than impeccable: he launched Kobalt just as Napster and music piracy exploded onto the mainstream and mere months before the dot-com crash would wipe out much of the technology industry.
The situation was dire, and even his main seed investor told him he was doomed once the market crashed. “Eating an egg and ham sandwich…have you heard this saying? The chicken is contributing but the pig is committed,” Ahdritz said when we first spoke this past April (he has an endless supply of sayings). “I believe in that — to lose is not an option.”
Entrepreneurial hardship though is something that Ahdritz had early experience with. Born in Örebro, a city of 100,000 people in the middle of Sweden, Ahdritz spent a lot of time as a kid playing in the woods, which also holding dual interests in music and engineering. The intersection of those two converged in the synthesizer revolution of early electronic music, and he was fascinated by bands like Kraftwerk.
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Contentful raises $33.5M for its headless CMS platform
Contentful, a Berlin- and San Francisco-based startup that provides content management infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Nike, Lyft and others, today announced that it has raised a $33.5 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from OMERS Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton Capital and Hercules. In total, the company has now raised $78.3 million.
It’s been less than a year since the company raised its Series C round and, as Contentful co-founder and CEO Sascha Konietzke told me, the company didn’t really need to raise right now. “We had just raised our last round about a year ago. We still had plenty of cash in our bank account and we didn’t need to raise as of now,” said Konietzke. “But we saw a lot of economic uncertainty, so we thought it might be a good moment in time to recharge. And at the same time, we already had some interesting conversations ongoing with Sapphire [formerly SAP Ventures] and Salesforce. So we saw the opportunity to add more funding and also start getting into a tight relationship with both of these players.”
The original plan for Contentful was to focus almost explicitly on mobile. As it turns out, though, the company’s customers also wanted to use the service to handle its web-based applications and these days, Contentful happily supports both. “What we’re seeing is that everything is becoming an application,” he told me. “We started with native mobile application, but even the websites nowadays are often an application.”
In its early days, Contentful focused only on developers. Now, however, that’s changing, and having these connections to large enterprise players like SAP and Salesforce surely isn’t going to hurt the company as it looks to bring on larger enterprise accounts.
Currently, the company’s focus is very much on Europe and North America, which account for about 80 percent of its customers. For now, Contentful plans to continue to focus on these regions, though it obviously supports customers anywhere in the world.
Contentful only exists as a hosted platform. As of now, the company doesn’t have any plans for offering a self-hosted version, though Konietzke noted that he does occasionally get requests for this.
What the company is planning to do in the near future, though, is to enable more integrations with existing enterprise tools. “Customers are asking for deeper integrations into their enterprise stack,” Konietzke said. “And that’s what we’re beginning to focus on and where we’re building a lot of capabilities around that.” In addition, support for GraphQL and an expanded rich text editing experience is coming up. The company also recently launched a new editing experience.
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Sources: Balderton Capital gearing up to invest in Swedish e-scooter startup VOI
We already knew that the electronic scooter space in Europe was heating up, with Berlin’s Tier announcing today it has raised €25 million in a round led by Northzone, and rumours circulating that Delivery Hero founder Lukasz Gadowski has ventured into the space — all within the context of U.S. companies Bird and Lime recently expanding to Europe. However, now it seems that Balderton Capital could be about to make its move by investing in Sweden’s VOI Technology, another e-scooter rental play with pan-European ambitions.
According to multiple sources, the London-based venture capital firm is gearing up to lead a round in Stockholm-based VOI. Two sources say the amount being invested is $15 million at a pre-money valuation of between $35-40 million, while another source said it could be as much as $25 million. Separately, I’m hearing that with multiple term sheets on the table and the pace at which the company is growing, VOI is actually considering increasing the round to $50 million.
Other VC firms thought to be participating are Berlin’s Project A, and Netherlands-based Prime Ventures.
To date, VOI has raised just shy of $3 million in seed funding from Vostok New Ventures.
I contacted Balderton Capital earlier today, but haven’t heard back. A spokesperson for Project A also declined to comment. Neither Prime Ventures or VOI could be reached at the time of publication.
What is particularly noteworthy about Balderton’s entrance into the e-scooter market is that three of the other “big four” London VC firms have already made U.S. investments in the space. Index and Accel have backed Bird, and Atomico has backed Lime.
As I noted in my earlier Tier funding story — which marked the biggest financial backing for a European company in the space to date — this isn’t stopping a number of European investors getting busy trying to create the “Bird or Lime of Europe,” even if it is far from clear that Bird or Lime won’t take that title for themselves (which is obviously the bet being made by Index, Accel and Atomico). The general sentiment of European VCs steadfastly trying to nurture a European born competitor is that they don’t want to see the e-scooter rental market be rolled over by the U.S. in the same way that Uber rode in and knocked out many local players.
With that said, the worse-case scenario in the eyes of many of those same VCs (and those VCs standing on the sidelines not participating) is that Bird or Lime will eventually acquire the most promising European e-scooter company or companies. In other words, the downside is mitigated somewhat, failing an outright home run.
Meanwhile, Tier, VOI and Gadowski’s Go Flash aren’t the only European born e-scooter startups with pan-European ambitions. There’s also Coup, an e-scooter subsidiary owned by Bosch and backed by BCG Digital Ventures that operates in Berlin, Paris and Madrid. And just two month’s ago Taxify announced its intention to do e-scooter rentals under the brand Bolt, first launched in Paris but also planning to be pan-European, including Germany.
Not that everyone is convinced. Two early-stage European VCs I spoke to today said they hated the space. “I just don’t understand, isn’t it going to be a massive bloodbath?” said one of the VCs, before questioning the total number of rides we could see in Europe annually. “I just don’t see how Europe is going to produce multiple multibillion dollar businesses in this space. I think the market size caps it.”
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Balderton’s $145M ‘secondary’ fund will give shareholders in European scale-ups the chance to exit early
In what looks like a European first, the London-based early-stage venture capital firm Balderton Capital is announcing it has closed a new $145 million “secondary” fund dedicated to buying equity stakes from early shareholders in European-founded “high growth, scale-up” technology companies.
Dubbed “Balderton Liquidity I,” the new fund will invest in European growth-stage companies through the mechanism of purchasing shares from existing, early shareholders who want to liquidate some or all of their shares “pre-exit.”
“Balderton will take minority stakes, between regular fund-raising rounds, making it possible for early shareholders — including angels, seed funds, current and former founders and employees — to realise early returns, reinvest capital in the ecosystem, or reward founders and early employees,” explains the firm.
The move essentially formalises the secondary share dealing that already happens — typically as part of a Series C or other later rounds — which often sees founders take some money off the table so they can improve their own financial situation and won’t be tempted to sell their company too soon, but also gives early investors a way out so they can begin the cycle all over again. Otherwise it can literally take five to 10 years before a liquidity event happens, either via IPO or through a private acquisition, if it happens at all.
“The bigger picture is there are lots of shareholders who either want or need or have to take liquidity at some point,” Balderton partner Daniel Waterhouse tells me on a call. “Founders are one part of that… but I think the majority of this fund is more targeted at other shareholders — business angels, seed funds, maybe employees who left, founders who left — who want to reinvest their money, want to solve a personal financial issue, want to de-risk their personal balance sheets, etc. So we’re not obsessed with founders in this fund, we’re obsessed with many different types of early shareholders, which for many different reasons would like to get liquidity before the grand exit event.”
Waterhouse says that one of the big drivers for doing this now is that Balderton’s analysis suggests there is “a critical mass of interesting companies” that are in the growth stage: “businesses that have got a scalable commercial engine” and a proven commercial model. This critical mass has happened only over the last two years, which is why — unlike in Silicon Valley — we haven’t yet seen a fund of this kind launch in Europe.
“We think there’s now about 500 companies in Europe that have raised over $20 million. That doesn’t mean they are all great companies but it’s an interesting, crude data point in terms of the scale they’ve got to. As a consequence, within that 500 we expect there to be quite a lot of interesting companies for this fund to help and we obviously have a pretty good lens on the market. Through our early-stage investing, and working with companies from the early-stage through to exit, and then obviously staying in touch with companies we don’t necessarily invest in, we have a pretty good sense of that from a bottom up perspective on how many opportunities are out there.”
He explained that there are three aspects behind the secondary funding strategy. First is that by investing via secondary funding, more companies will gain access to the “Balderton platform,” which includes an extensive executive and CEO network and support with recruitment and marketing. Secondly, it is good for the ecosystem as it will not only help relieve financial pressure from founders so they can “shoot for the next growth point” but will also let business angels cash out and recycle their money by investing in new startups. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Balderton thinks it represents a good investment opportunity for the firm and its LPs as secondary liquidity is “underserved as a market.”
(Separately, one London VC I spoke to said a dedicated secondary fund in Europe made sense except in one scenario: that European valuations see a price correction sometime in the future promoted by the current trajectory of available funding slowing down, which he believes will eventually happen. “Funds are 10 years so they just have to get out in time,” is how said VC framed it.)
To that end, Waterhouse says Balderton is looking to do around 15-20 investments out of the fund, but in some instances may start slowly and then buy more shares in the same company at an even later stage. It will be managed by Waterhouse with support from investment principal Laura Connell, who recently joined the VC firm.
Struggling to see many downsides to the new fund — which by virtue of being later-stage is less risky and will likely command a discount on secondary shares it does purchase — I ask if perhaps Balderton is being a little opportunistic in bringing a reasonably large amount of institutional capital to the secondary market.
“No, I don’t think so,” he replies. “What we’ve seen in our portfolio is [that] the point in time when someone is looking for liquidity isn’t set on the calendar alongside when companies do fund raising. In particular as a company gets more mature, the gap between fund raises can stretch out because the businesses are more close to profitability. And so it’s not deterministic. We want to just be there to help people who are actually looking to sell out of cycle in those points of time and at the moment have very little options. If someone wants to wait, they’ll wait.”
Finally, I was curious to know how it might feel the first time Balderton buys a substantial amount of secondary shares in a company that it previously turned its nose down at during the Series A stage. After pointing out that companies usually look very different at Series A compared to later on in their existence — and that Balderton can’t and doesn’t invest in every promising company — Waterhouse replies diplomatically: “Maybe we kick ourselves a bit, but we’re quite happy with the performance of our early funds and obviously we’ll be happy to add other new companies that are doing really well into the family.”
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Simple Feast raises $12M from Balderton and 14W to expand its weekly meat-free meal-box deliveries
The vast majority of environmental experts say that avoiding meat and dairy is the single most important, and most impactful action, you can take to reduce your personal impact on Earth. Why? Because of the sheer amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere from the process of meat production. Many would agree it’s also pretty good for your health. But when most of us have been brought up with animal protein in the middle of our plates, it often feels pretty hard to achieve. At the same time, fast food delivery has been taking off, but we’re still eating the same thing: meat.
So a Danish startup has come along to try to solve this. Simple Feast delivers sustainable food to people’s homes in biodegradable boxes, and it’s now raised a $12 million series A funding round led by Balderton Capital in London, with participation from 14W in New York. Existing investors Sweet Capital and ByFounders are also re-investing the round.
Simple Feast offers what it describes as ready-to-eat plant-based food that is “sustainably produced, organic, and delivered straight to the doorstep” in biodegradable boxes every week. The meal solution delivers weekly boxes with three prepared plant-based and 100 percent organic meals ready to serve in 10 minutes.
In this respect it’s not unlike other startups, such as HelloFresh, with the main difference being that all the food is plant-based.
Jakob Jønck, CEO and co-founder of Simple Feast, says: “Climate change is real. There is no Planet B and we are facing what is arguably the biggest challenge in human history. This is a big investment for a small company, but it’s a drop in the ocean considering the challenge at hand, the politicians and industries we are up against.”
He and Thomas Ambus, co-founder/CTO, started thinking more deeply about Simple Feast when Under Armour acquired Endomondo and MyFitnessPal, their previous startups, in the spring of 2015 and got serious about it in 2016. “Ever since founding Endomondo and heading up International Operations for MyFitnessPal, I always felt a missing link when trying to move towards a healthy, sustainable diet — an actual product that didn’t compromise on taste, nor convenience, but solved the huge challenges involved with embarking on this journey towards eating plants first and foremost,” says Jønck.
Daniel Waterhouse, a partner at Balderton Capital, says: “With a global transition towards plant-based food, we believe Simple Feast is uniquely positioned to change the way we eat and create awareness about the impact of our food choices.”
The main target is families, with the parents in their 30s and 40s. “We find that women are still predominantly the decision maker when it comes to food for the family. Our most typical customers are women in a relationship in their 30s with one or two kids. Our customers are also politically interested, above the average,” says Jønck.
They are competing with restaurants, meal kits and take-away. “We are disrupting both the restaurant and the meal kit industry. Nobody has ever taken the challenge of creating climate-friendly, plant-based food seriously while serving it directly to consumers. We don´t make compromises on taste, nor convenience, and we don´t believe that we have seen that before,” he told me.
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