Maven - EdTech for Creators
Also: CalPERS names new CIO, Hack VC raises $200M, Intel gets into crypto mining, notable funding rounds from Casa - Base64.ai - dbt Labs.
Notable Funding Rounds:
Casa (Florida) - Pre-Seed - $1,200,000 - Chaos Capital, Hustle Fund, GS Futures
Casa is a subscription-based SaaS platform that powers a turn-key white-label website, SEO, CRM, social, financing, lead-gen, and other tools to help contractors run more efficiently, get paid faster, and make more money per project. In addition, Casa consolidates the contractor tech stack and reduces software costs to eliminate the day-to-day friction for contractor-based workers.
Base64.ai (New York) - Seed - $1,490,000 - Long Journey Ventures (lead)
Base64.ai is a document processing automation startup. They use AI to extract the document type, data, text, photos, and signatures from a large variety of documents, powered via 700+ prebuilt models for IDs, driver licenses, passports, visas, invoices, and other forms. Their service can run in the cloud and through air-gapped (offline) data centers. The integration is powered by no-code forms, a single API call, and third parties such as their UiPath activity. They’re also working with companies such as Microsoft, AWS Marketplace, Nvidia, OpenAI, API3, and the list goes on.
dbt Labs (Philadelphia) - Series D - $220,000,000 - Altimeter Capital (lead)
dbt Labs develops an open-source analytics engineering tool that prepares raw data in warehouses for analysis. The platform enables a data analyst to create and disseminate organizational knowledge through data modeling, allowing clients with SQL knowledge to build production-grade data pipelines. In short, dbt Labs helps teams work like software engineers to ship trusted data faster. Their customers include Canva, Casper, Domain, GitLab, HubSpot, JetBlue, and Kickstarter. dbt Labs has raised a total of $414.4M over four funding rounds. Their investors include Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Ventures, GIC, GV, Snowflake, IconIQ, Amplify Partners, and Coatue. Andressen Horowitz and Amplify Partners have participated in all four rounds, with Andressen Horowitz also leading their Series A.
Scouted
Latest Funding: Series A ($20,000,000 led by Andreessen Horowitz)
Total Funding Amount: $25,100,000
Industry: EdTech - Creator Tools
Founders: Wes Kao - Gagan Biyani - Shreyans Bhansali
Key Investors:
Andressen Horowitz (Led Series A)
First Round Capital (Led Seed Round)
Angel Investors/Advisors:
Sahil Lavingia - Founder of Gumroad
Ankur Nagpal - Founder of Teachable
Tiago Forte - Founder of Forte Labs
Li Jin - Co-founder of too many to list creator economy projects. Here’s a link to some of her most popular posts.
David Perell - Founder of Write of Passage
Austen Alred - Co-fouder of Lambda School
Lenny Rachitsky - Angel Investor
Arlan Hamilton - Founder of Backstage Capital and HireRunner
Sam Parr - Co-Founder of The Hustle
Shaan Puri - Investor, Co-founded bebo (acquired by Twitch)
Funding Rounds:
Series A: $20,000,000
Equity Crowdfunding Round: $750,000
Seed: $4,300,000
About
Maven is an EdTech company that develops online cohort-based courses for digital-native creators. Maven believes that community is the separator between successful and unsuccessful EdTech platforms. A cohort-based course is a course where a group of learners start and end a course at the same time. It’s a community-driven experience opposed to an individualistic experience of a “learn-as-you-go” courses on platforms like Coursera or Udemy. Similar to Pallet (who I wrote about here), Maven is also a creator tool to help digitally native creators monetize their following. Most people follow popular digital creators because they value their perspective, experience, and expertise on subjects that interest them. Maven provides a platform for those digital creators to enable their followers to learn from them while connecting with other followers who have similar interests. This provides value to the creators by helping them monetize their following they have accumulated over the years. In addition, it helps the cohort participants by gaining insights directly from the creator while also connecting with other people and growing their network. Creators with cohorts on Maven include Li Jin, Sam Parr, Anthony Pompliano, Shivani Berry, Shaan Puri, Sara Sodine Parr, Sahil Bloom, Greg Isenberg, and much more.
EdTech
I believe college education is a massive bubble powered by rising tuition costs, irresponsible student loans (given and received), and an industry that hasn’t changed its product in over 100 years. I think the bubble is slowly bursting as more and more people are asking themselves if the price is worth the “experience” they’re receiving, where college seems to become more of a consumption than an investment. This is why I’m very bullish on EdTech and the future of education. We’re are going to see more and more people get direct access to the best instructors in the world for a fraction of the price. With the supporting tools being built, I believe that there is a future where more people will be hired for their proof of work/knowledge rather than a diploma that showed they were able to game an institution that hasn’t changed in 100 years for four years. Mavin platform fits into my investment thesis on EdTech perfectly.
Founders
Speaking of proof of knowledge, Maven’s founder’s background is perfect for building a successful EdTech platform. Gagan Biyani is the co-founder of Udemy (the largest platform for open online courses); Wes Kao co-founded the altMBA, which is credited with inventing the modern cohort-based course format; and Shreyans Bhansali co-founded a company that was acquired by Google, he was also the first engineer at Venmo. This is an EdTech all-star team.
News
Hack VC raises a $200M fund to back early-stage crypto startups. The investors behind the virtual hack.summit(), the largest blockchain programming event globally, have launched a $200M crypto seed fund. They have already been very active, making what is said to be around 15 investments already worth tens of millions of dollars. The investments have covered various areas within crypto, including the NFT emoji startup Yat, DeFi lending program Goldfinch Finance, and metaverse gaming company SynCity. Some of their LPs include Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and a handful of institutions.
CalPERS names Nicole Musicco as new CIO: The California Public Employees’ Pension Retirement System, the largest US public pension fund and LP in the country, has hired Nicole Musicco from RedBird Capital Partners after an 18-month for a chief investment officer. CalPERS has nearly $500 billion in assets. With Musicco’s background in private markets, many believe this could signal that CalPERS is ready to go “all-in” into private equity/venture capital after largely abandoning the asset class in the early 2000s. Last year it adopted plans to increase private equity investments to 13% from 8% and added an allocation to private debt of 5%.
Intel launches crypto mining initiative. The chipmaking giant is ramping up its crypto mining offerings with a lineup of energy-efficient accelerators. Argo Blockchain and Block will receive the chipmakers first mining ASICs later this year. The mining ASICs will offer “1000c better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining.
Recommendations:
Read:
Sequoia’s investment thesis for YouTube (2005).
Watch:
Y Combinator - Kevin Hale - How to Evaluate Startup Ideas