Betaworks invests, accelerates, and builds companies and projects from scratch — our focus right now is on web3, crypto media, NLP/CV, applied machine learning and tools for thinking.
Since 2008 we have built products from the ground up like Giphy, Dots, Bitly and Tweetdeck, and invested in many amazing companies including Venmo, Superplastic, Anchor, Gimlet, Rec Room and Hugging Face. We believe fiercely that human potential can be realized through technology so long as we place what is human at the core of what we build. We believe we can build better, and throughout the Betaworks ecosystem that is what we aspire to do, day in and day out. And we do believe that “betas” work.
In 2016, we launched Betaworks Camp, a thematic residency and investment program for early-stage companies. Camp allows us to immerse ourselves in emerging tech categories and work closely with the startups in each cohort.
For the last ten years we have invested in early stage start-ups related to areas we are building in. Previous investments include: Tumblr, Kickstarter, Medium and Venmo. We continue to do so through our seed and series A $50m fund.
We have built products for the social web since 2007. Recent successes include GIPHY, the search engine for gifs; and Dots, the beautiful mobile gaming franchise. In 2018, we launched Betaworks Studios, an IRL social club and virtual community for founders and funders in the NY tech space and beyond.
Some of our earlier products included Bitly, Chartbeat, and Tweetdeck, the latter of which was sold to Twitter. In 2012, we also acquired and relaunched Digg and Instapaper, which was sold to Pinterest in 2016.
We make pre-seed and seed investments in companies building the future of how we live, work, and play online.
Our investment size ranges from $250K to $500K and typically we are among the first to invest. Startups we’ve invested in include Twitter, Tumblr, Kickstarter, Product Hunt, Rec Room, Anchor, and Hugging Face. We work closely with companies around thematic areas including in our Camp programs around Voice, Conversational Software, Synthetic Media, and “Fixing The Internet”.
As the name Betaworks suggests, we 💛 betas. If you have something great we’d love to speak with you. Contact the Betaworks Ventures team here.
Camp combines Betaworks’ building and investing experience into thematic investment and in-residence programs for startups in frontier technology. Camp themes reflect the areas on which we are most focused and evolve along with our investment theses.
Each camp consists of three months “in-residence” at Betaworks to help early stage companies with product development, platform strategy, data science, branding, and fundraising. Entrepreneurs have access to the Betaworks team, its network and to a carefully curated group of industry leaders to assist with both general company-building needs and with topics specific to each theme. Each camp company receives pre-seed funding of $250k.
Past camp themes have included fix the internet, live, audio, computer vision, synthetic media, and botcamp. More details on the Camp page.