When other firms were investing and raising eye-popping sums, Clean Energy Ventures took a different approach. It appears to be paying off.
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If you thought autonomous driving was just for cars, think again. The so-called ‘autonomous navigation’ market — where ships steer themselves guided by AI, resulting in fuel and time savings — is projected to grow from $4.46 billion in 2023 to $5.33B in 2024 alone. Orca AI is a London-based startup that claims to have […]
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The perception in Silicon Valley is that every investor would love to be in business with Peter Thiel. But the venture capital fundraising environment has become so difficult, that even Valar Ventures, one of the VC firms he helped found, has raised a much smaller fund this year compared to previous ones. Thiel set up […]
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There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated handyman to take care of all the random tasks on a homeowner’s to-do list. The company raised $9 million last June in a Series A […]
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In 2017, Vinod Khosla told CNBC that the job “of the radiologist will be obsolete in five years.” While the founder of Khosla Ventures later revised that timeline to as long as 15 years, he maintained that AI image recognition could soon diagnose disease on scans better than human doctors. Seven years later, radiologists are […]
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When Itai Ben-Zaken’s first startup failed in 2018, the former BCG consultant and Wharton MBA spent months trying to understand what he could have done differently during the five years he ran the company. After analyzing most of his major decisions, he concluded that while Comprendi, a digital ad recommendation business, was an interesting offering, […]
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Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention to step back after Fund III, the firm’s current fund, in an email, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Fika confirmed the transition […]
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Kyle Kuzma is a lot of things. He’s a forward for the Washington Wizards NBA team and a 2020 NBA champion. He’s also a style icon — depending on who you ask — and an angel investor. Now he’s an adviser at a venture fund too.
“I’m part of a new generation of the NBA,” Kuzma told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “For me, I’ve always been a hustler and somebody that is very interested in business and doing things just to set up my family’s generational wealth. I think getting into venture is only going to take that to a different stratosphere.”
Kuzma, 28, joined early-stage-focused Scrum Ventures in March as an adviser to help with the firm’s sports and entertainment fund, which is targeting $120 million. The partnership started in January when Kuzma’s agent, Austin Eastman, was connected to Scrum managing director and partner Michael Proman. Kuzma said he was impressed with Scrum’s team. Proman said the positive sentiment was mutual.
“The thing about Kyle is, I personally didn’t really even understand how extensive his interests were in the venture space until after getting introduced,” Proman, a former NBA employee on the business development team, said. “Kyle is really interested in understanding the venture playbook but more so from the venture side.”
Proman said Scrum’s sports fund, where Kuzma will be helping, is a little different than other sports-focused VC funds, because it focuses on tech that could be useful to athletes or enterprise sports customers and is also applicable to other industries. Ozlo Sleepbuds is a good example. The company makes earbuds to help people sleep better. While sleeping well is incredibly important for athletes, it’s important far beyond professional sports too. Scrum participated in the company’s $6 million seed round earlier this year.
Scrum’s broad approach to sports tech makes Kuzma a good adviser, as opposed to another NBA player, Proman said, because Kuzma has already invested across several sectors. Kuzma started angel investing in 2020 and has built up a portfolio that includes soda alternative Lemon Perfect, which has gone on to raise an additional $67.8 million in venture capital; consumer data company, Surf; and watch marketplace, Bezel.
“His investment portfolio is pretty diverse; it’s not just your classic sports tech,” Proman said. “There are a lot of folks out there that want to invest into what they do 24/7, and while they may be great at providing insights and analysis of those technologies, in many cases those aren’t venture-backable technologies.”
Kuzma said he plans to be a hands-on investor, and while he knows a name like his could be a marketing boon for the companies he works with, he said he doesn’t just want to rest there and would rather use his status to help companies expand their network using his connections. He also thinks his experience playing basketball makes him a good fit as a VC because he’s used to working in a competitive environment where you don’t succeed unless you work as a team.
“I bring a competitive nature,” he said. “When you play sports at the highest level like the NBA, you are playing chess and not checkers. We are smart; we are not just athletes. We are not just people that play sports and not do anything else.”
Kuzma’s presence has already proved beneficial for the firm, Proman said, as working with an athlete like Kuzma has led to an uptick in inbound interest in the firm. Good inbound interest — he clarified.
Kuzma isn’t the first NBA player to get involved with venture capital. Kevin Durant’s family office, 35V, invests heavily in startups. Steph Curry is the anchor LP of Penny Jar Capital. Former players like Andre Iguodala and Michael Redd have taken more formal roles in the industry, too, by launching firms of their own, Mosaic and 22 Ventures, respectively. Kuzma is the latest NBA player to dive into venture, but he likely won’t be the latest for long.
“Joining Scrum Ventures is really exciting for me,” Kuzma said. “I want to further my portfolio and just my reach in the VC world. As athletes, they always tell you to diversify your portfolio as much as you can. This is the next iteration of me as an entrepreneur.”
Blockchain startups were red-hot when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to launch her own crypto-focused venture firm. But shortly after Haun announced that Huan Ventures’ two funds totalled $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices cratered, and FTX collapsed.
Despite having a massive arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures didn’t rush to scoop up stakes in crypto and web3 on the cheap, and many observers wondered when the firm would pick up its deployment pace.
While Haun Ventures says it wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands (and capital) through crypto’s downturn, the firm was perhaps more cautious than it initially intended.
But now that bitcoin prices have rebounded to their previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is increasing dramatically. Including some of its token positions, the firm has made 48 investments across its early-stage $500 million and $1 billion later-stage acceleration funds, Haun Ventures told TechCrunch.
The firm’s latest investment is Agora, an app that streamlines voting and other decision-making for decentralized autonomous organizations. The firm led a $5 million seed round into Agora on Tuesday, with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.
Sam Rosenblum, a partner and investment team lead at Haun Ventures, said that a significant impediment to DAO participation had been the lack of a simple user interface that allows members to approve (or vote on) the implementation of software upgrades to the protocols they are governing.
The process was highly fragmented. Certain decisions were made in a separate Discord channel, then “you then [the community would] go somewhere else to take a vote on allocating dollars in the treasury towards a certain project,” Rosenblum said.
Agora solves this issue for DAO members by providing an easy-to-use community and protocol governance solution. “Historically, if you wanted to participate in resource allocation of a protocol treasury, you had to do a bunch of on-chain actions yourself, which probably means you have hardware and software setup that most people don’t have,” Rosenblum said.
Agora is supposed to make DAO participation straightforward for non-technical users. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which simplified coin trading for most people.
The company was founded in 2022 by Charlie Feng, who co-founded fintech Clearco; Coinbase product designer Yitong Zhang; and software engineer Kent Fenwick.
Agora, which is essentially a SaaS offering, is already used by protocols such as Optimism, ENS and Uniswap.
Rosenblum explained that these protocols are happy to pay for Agora because it helps lower the barrier to participation in their community.
While activity is certainly accelerating in the crypto world, Rosenblum didn’t say exactly when Haun Ventures will be done deploying its current fund. But he did say that investing will continue into next year.
In the world of startups, it’s not uncommon to see talent from successful companies go on to found their own ventures. This is particularly evident in fintech in Europe, where alumni from unicorns like Monzo, N26, Revolut and others have started a flurry of new companies.
Andrena Ventures, a solo GP fund based in the U.K, wants to support this startup factory snowball effect by investing in such second-generation startups at the pre-seed and seed stages. To do so, it has raised $12 million from backers including several VCs and entrepreneurs.
The firm’s general partner, Gideon Valkin, told TechCrunch that while he will fund talent with roots in European and British fintech, Andrena itself is sector agnostic. He expects most of his portfolio companies to focus on other categories like AI, climate tech and B2B enterprise solutions.
Andrena has already made its first investment: Nustom, an AI startup founded by Monzo’s co-founder, Jonas Templestein, whom Valkin reported to when he worked at Monzo. Nustom hasn’t publicly launched yet (which explains its succinct website), but it already boasts a long list of investors including OpenAI, Balaji Srinivasan, Garry Tan, Naval Ravikant and others.
Andrena’s participation in Nustom’s party round reflects the firm’s thesis and strategy: Most of the time, it will contribute between $100,000 and $400,000 to rounds that will be led by others. However, Valkin hopes that his network will make it easier for founders to raise Series A rounds, potentially from his limited partners or from other investors he’s connected to.
By leveraging his network and by writing relatively small checks, Valkin hopes to gain access to hot deals in which larger funds may not be able or willing to participate.
Having a small fund means that small investments have the potential to return all of the invested capital; for a larger firm, such investments wouldn’t move the needle or be worth the risk. Valkin knows that side of the equation: After leaving Monzo, he became an angel investor himself and started working as a seed investor at VC firm Entrée Capital, which is now one of Andrena’s limited partners.
But managing a solo fund isn’t without challenges, and not just because the management fees are proportionally smaller. As my colleague Rebecca Szkutak noted last year, “emerging managers have been on the same roller coaster as startups for the last few years.”
Valkin says he’s taken a significant pay cut, but he sees this as a plus: Founders can see him as a trusted partner who has equally as much at stake. “I think that aligns us really nicely,” he said. His value proposition is to open up his network to founders and help them raise a Series A round, while also relying on his operational know-how.
This mix is more common in the U.S. than in Europe, where many local VCs have never started a company. But things are changing, and angel investing is increasingly common among European entrepreneurs, especially in fintech.
One of Andrena’s LPs, Taavet+Sten, is an investment vehicle run by Wise co-founder, Taavet Hinrikus, and Teleport co-founder, Sten Tamkivi. Both are former Skype employees, and have now formally launched an early stage venture fund, Plural, with two other partners.
The fact that the pair chose to back Valkin can be seen as a validating signal for his thesis. With swarms of early fintech employees looking for their next challenge, the name that Valkin picked for his venture is fitting: Andrena is a type of bee, and “pollination, in my mind, is probably the best analogy for what I do,” he said.
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