Betaworks Fund

Last year, we set up betaworks ventures, a $50m seed and series A fund, with myself, Matt Hartman, and Peter Rojas as partners. Today I am sharing some details about the fund, announcing our new venture fellows program and sharing some learnings one year into the fund.

Venture Capital is Changing

The landscape of venture capital is changing. One measure of that change has been the multitude of products available now to help people and companies get started. There are studios, incubators, accelerators, startup schools, venture builders, and startup communities — a myriad of options with different names and differences in quality, but what they all have in common is the goal of helping startups get started.

We do three things at betaworks — we build companies from the ground-up (1–3 per year), we accelerate companies in specific thematic areas (8–20 per year), and we make seed & pre-seed stage investments (12–15 per year). The venture capital fund we launched last year invests across all of these areas. The reason we are able to work in this manner with 30+ companies per year is that we dive deep on specific theses and themes, and then we build, accelerate, and invest around those categories. We did this with early social media, mobile apps, and more recently with conversational software, voice/audio-first products, and AR/VR. What ties these categories together is our deep interest in improving how technology affects human interactions.

The Fund

When the fund invests at the pre-seed and seed stage, typical check sizes range from $250k-$500k. Thematically, the areas that we are currently focussed on include:

• Conversational interfaces, which includes voice first products. and text-based computing, chatbots, AI, messaging-as-a-platform and NLP; Examples the fund has invested in are Shine, Poncho, Dexter, Hugging Face and Dirty Lemon.
• Spatial computing, which includes virtual reality, augmented reality, computer vision, and camera-first applications and services; Examples include Rec Room (Against Gravity) and Viro.
• Native media, which includes podcasting and social audio; Examples include Gimlet Media, Me.me, and Anchor.
• Playable media, which includes eSports and game streaming; Examples include Boom.tv and CHKN
• Emergent Behavior in Legacy Ecosystems, which includes innovation within more mature markets such as social, mobile, and real-time data. Examples include Remote Year, Workflow, and Pingboard

These areas will evolve over time, but fundamentally we are interested in founders who are building natively for emerging interfaces and platforms. We believe that the next wave of massive, highly-scalable network-driven software businesses will be created by those who understand the opportunities and possibilities enabled by new ways in which we engage with computing — and with each other.

Who is Involved?

Investors in the fund include existing betaworks investors, family offices, and a number of strategics that we work closely with.

We also have a number of amazing individuals assisting us as venture fellows, a new program we’ve created as part of the fund. These extraordinarily talented people who we have had the fortune of working with over the years at betaworks — they will serve as advisors to the fund, helping us to scout out the best founders and stay on top of trends in the market.

Fellows in the fund are:

• Brian Donohue: Engineer at Pinterest and fmr CEO of Instapaper (acquired by Pinterest in 2016)
• Bianca St. Louis: CEO and Founder of The CESuite, where she propels action that fosters an inclusive and innovative tech ecosystem.
• Jake Levine: Founder of Electric Objects (now part of GIPHY), and is a former betaworker, where he spent a few years as the GM of Digg. He’s also a part time partner at Notation Capital.‍
• Margot Boyer-Dry: Founder of Lorem Ipsum, a cult newsletter and agency that brings brands and consumers together to engage on whatever’s cool right now.
• ‍Andrew McLaughlin: Co-founder, Higher Ground Labs. Formerly betaworks, Obama White House, Google, Digg, Medium‍
• Maya Prohovnik: Head of Ops at Anchor; formerly ran Hackers in Residence at betaworks
• ‍Iain Dodsworth: Previously founder of TweetDeck and now about to launch Gathers — a news analysis platform‍
• Ana Rosenstein: Fmr Associate, betaworks ventures‍
• Mark Linao: Director of Corporate Development for a media technology company, formerly founding associate of a venture fund.‍
• Ryan Leslie: CEO of SuperPhone, hit artist and musician‍
• Veronica Belmont: Product at Growbot.io, startup advisor, host of Mozilla’s IRL podcast‍
• Ian Hogarth: London-based entrepreneur and angel investor. He co-founded Songkick.‍
• Nathan Bashaw: Founder and CEO of Hardbound‍
• Jana Lee: Principal at Bluerun Ventures, previously founder of Tapestry (a betaworks company).‍
• Paul Murphy: Co-founder and CEO of Dots, a mobile game studio.‍
• Joshua Auerbach: Chief Operating Officer of SpokenLayer. Before SpokenLayer he held a variety of roles at betaworks, most recently as a Partner and the company’s Chief Financial Officer.‍
• Joy Marcus: Managing Director @ Gotham Ventures, Fmr CEO @ Bloglovin’‍
• Dr. Gary Flake: Independent scientist, author, and inventor, that currently advises over a dozen startups, public companies, universities, and non-profits.‍
• Hilary Mason: Founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs, Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners‍
• Baratunde Thurston: Emmy-nominated TV host, futurist comedian, activist and author of How to be Black.‍
• Glenn Otis Brown: Chief Digital Officer of the Obama Foundation, Board of Directors of Texas Tribune‍
• Jesse White-Cinis: Chief Software Architect @ Lucid, LLC‍
• Sam Mandel: CEO of Poncho and a partner at betaworks studio, llc. Sam has worked at TweetDeck, Liberation Entertainment, Time Warner and AOL.‍
• Andrew Kortina: Intellectual explorer, co-founder of Venmo, & co-founder of Fin‍
• Wael Ghonim: Social Entrepreneur and Internet Activist‍
• Allison Behringer: Independent podcast producer. Host and creator of “The Intern,” a first-person documentary podcast about working at betaworks. Currently developing a new podcast.‍
• Alex Chung: CEO of the awesome Giphy

How is it Going?

We hit the ground running with this new fund last year. We already have over a year of investments, including several made by betaworks that were warehoused in anticipation of the fund and then moved in after its creation. We’ve also made an investment into each company that’s participated in our accelerators. The portfolio is strong. We have several companies that have done up rounds, one has exited (to Apple), and many are emerging as leaders in each of the areas we are focused on.

If you’re a founder building something you think we’d be interested in, please get in touch with us. We’d love to chat with you.