It’s now easy to say that Talent/Hack is becoming the new MindBody for fitness professionals to fully manage their bookings, business, and payment processing. As early Zoom investor Emergence Capital invests $17 million, we’re assembling the firepower around the table to ensure that Talent/Hack is a monster company.

But startups are never always up and to the right, despite what TechCrunch will make you believe. Instead they are the product of thousands of sleepless nights, grit, hard conversations, and comfort in ambiguity led by people generally with more conviction than sanity. It’s cliche to say, but true startup leadership takes suspending disbelief, and having dogged determination when literally everyone doubts you. There’s a point when your friends question you, your family questions you, and you somehow never quite question yourself, despite the logic that you should. Where that grit comes from I don’t know, but when you meet people like Alexandra Bonetti you see it in their eyes and feel it in their passion. We wrote the first check into Talent/Hack when the website had barely been designed in Venezuela, Bonetti’s home country. Having known her since 2004, and seen her fight and succeed in many other things in life, writing a check into her company was a “no brainer.” At the pre-seed we back people and ideas, not companies. We don’t look at metrics, we look at market size. We are far more psychologist than financial engineer. And when you sit across the table from Alexandra you feel that no matter what, she’s going to make it happen.

Looking back on a few years with Talent/Hack we’ve all seen highs and lows, personalities flare and egos battle, but we’ve never seen Alexandra waver. This is the type of character we look for in every founder. Grit, determination, humility to listen, and charisma. Charisma is the ability to walk into any room and hire anyone, to convince people of the impossible. When Jack Dorsey pitched Square a decade ago I heard someone mumble next to me, “that wasn’t a pitch, that was a seduction.” Great leaders persuade, and they never stop believing in what they’re building. You can’t always be right, but you have to believe you are until your users tell you otherwise, and then you have to be as decisive as possible to change course based on feedback.

We couldn’t be more proud to have been partners with Alexandra since 2004, and day-zero of Talent/Hack many years after, and to see her rise to become the very first Latina-led portfolio company of Emergence Capital.

#onthat5to9 #talenthack

As the first investor and advisor to Kumu, the fastest growing livestream app in South East Asia now backed by over $100 million from General Atlantic, SIG, and Open Space Ventures, we’ve participated in what it takes to build a great company beginning with an idea on the couch, and a loose idea of which direction to go.

Reflecting on the leadership styles of CEO Roland Ros and Co-Founder and President Rexy Dorado, it’s been interesting to note the role of storytelling, humility, and authenticity as ingredients that have led to Kumu’s success over the past four years. They’ve exercised a reserved optimism, a patience, but also a hunger to push the pace. It’s important to hold the steering wheel, but also not to grip too tightly.

It’s easy to look back and think we always had product market fit, but the truth is there were 6-9 months of iterative product where Kumu was a messaging app, and a profile page. It took the humility of listening to an astute and informed intern who saw the desire for real-time video engagement between participants. It took the authenticity and deep love of the Philippines that Roland and Rexy brought to the table that communicated that Kumu was different, and meant to empower.

It took the vision of Tony Wang and his insights about real time engagement taking off across Asia that primed the Kumu team to push the pace and product cadence when we knew the opportunity was ripe. It took the whimsy and design vision, not just data and product, that created Kumu’s little Carlito and a brand that endeared itself to the 12 million plus across the world. It took strategic engagement with investors like Lisa Gokongwei of Summit Media, and Hian Goh from Open Space Ventures to build a suite of advisors around us who could unlock tools like media, out-of-home campaigns, and access to distribution. Lisa knew what it took to build a future media empire, and Hian had helped GoJek scale across South East Asia.

Looking back over the years, leadership has to drive both cadence and openness, both optimism and skepticism. And it’s the hired team that believes the vision that creates the sustainable inputs, the debris thrown into the vortex of product development that begins to pick up pace with creativity and iteration. Four years on and $100 million dollars later it’s easy to pat yourselves on the back, but what’s hard is to look under the hood and ask how and why has this team been so successful. We’re proud of the vision and continued work ethic of Roland, Rexy, and the entire Kumu team.

Congrats on $100 million, and on still only being 1 percent done.

Congrats to support Christie Horvath and Allison Foxworth on their next step scaling pet insurance across America, and welcome Revolution Ventures to the team with the closing of Wagno’s $12.5 million Series A.

When we invested in Wagmo in their pre-seed with our portfolio Iñaki Berenguer, founder of CoverWallet (acquired by AON), we saw the opportunity of under-penetrated insurance markets in the US. Christie was still at HBS, and there wasn’t even a working website, but the Venn diagram of complex underwriting models and cute puppies don’t overlap often. Two Culture Cap co-founder Simon Wagner, originally from Bavaria, also understood the broader global context of insurance markets in Germany where pet insurance is far more popular among consumers.

Insurance is more popular in Europe in part due to different levels of risk tolerance and offerings, but also due to easier onramps and claims processing. Wagmo pioneered their Wellness plan before going into full insurance products, where they offered cheaper plans and reimbursement options for pet check-ups, hair cuts, and wellness purchases such as flea and tick and heart worm preventative medications. Today they’ve processed over 30,000 wellness claims with payouts happening almost instantaneously via PayPal and Venmo (i.e. not your grandpa’s pet insurance).

When I worked in product management at Google 15 years ago we used the adage to “eat your own dog food.” What this means is “use your own products.” If you don’t like what you build, no amount of convincing will ever get others to like what you do. So with Wagmo we’re excited to see Christie and Allison continue to build the pet insurance brand that I’ve used with my Cavalier King Charles, Pippa, since day one. She’s pretty into the treats, and I’m pretty into the easy Venmo reimbursements. So needless to say we’re both into “eating our own dog food.”

Congratulations to Uri Tintore and Pablo Viguera on closing their $43 million Series A, 18 months after their launch into Latin America. When we invested in Belvo’s pre-seed round while it was still in Spain, many questioned whether Plaid could simply move into other markets ahead of them. Many questioned whether a team from Spain could make inroads into Latin America, and whether this particular team had the grit or perseverance to tackle such a hard problem in a foreign market. Opening finance meant pushing incumbents who are slow to adopt new technology.

Since graduating from Y-Combinator, and closing a Seed round from the top investors in Latin America such as MAYA Capital and Kaszek, Belvo has continued to press the pace. Now active with 60 clients across Mexico, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, they handle millions of API calls, allowing companies to connect to over 90 percent of the personal and business bank accounts across Latin America. They’re additionally partnering with gig economy platforms like Uber and Rappi, and we can’t wait to see the synergies with them helping enable our other portfolio companies in Latin America like JEFA (NuBank for Women), Flat.MX (OpenDoor of Mexico), Sami (Oscar Health of Brazil), and Ninety Nine (RobinHood for Spain).

Over a dozen neobanks, new credit providers, online ERPs, personal finance management (PFM) and wallets are now building on top of Belvo’s infrastructure rails, meaning they’re enabling the next generation of LatAm fintech players. Early movers like David Velez, founder of NuBank, spotted this trend and are investors along with us in Belvo, now plugging them into NuBank’s over 30 million customers.

We believe in open finance as a way to level the playing field to a new generation of younger players, companies, and entrepreneurs, and Belvo are empowering this new trend. Congrats on the next phase of growth! 🚀

Over the past few years we’ve had portfolio companies like Kimono Labs (acquired by Palantir), Lomotif, (acquired by ZASH), and CoverWallet (acquired by AON) exit in nine-figure transactions, but today’s UI Path IPO was a watershed moment in one of the largest software IPOs in US history, with the stock increasing 23% on the day.

Check out their performance here: UI Path (NYSE: PATH)

UI Path came out of Bucharest, and over the past years has scaled to over 3,000 employees, offering best in class “robotic process automation,” or RPA. Unlike other platforms, however, that highlight tech-only solutions, UI Path has always believed in a Human + Machine approach. To this end, the way in which we came to know the founders was based on an invitation by their CMO to speak at their annual conference in Miami, specifically about these “Two Cultures.” It’s only fitting that the way in which we met the company, on stage at their annual conference in front of thousands of attendees, was to highlight the very thing we –and they– believe in most. Over the following months we worked to invest in this great company.

Technology is not a singular solution, but a tool that supplements human instincts, behavior, and expertise. This Human + Machine approach propelled them to a roughly $36 billion dollar market cap, and pole position on the future of automation.

Thank you to all our friends and partners on this journey!

At Two Culture Capital we try to operate quietly, and invest smartly, but if you’ll indulge us in one annual review, here’s a short overview. Looking back on 2020, which was a very tough year for the world, we are reflective and thankful of our global reach and network that enabled us to partner with incredible founders across four continents from pre-seed to IPO. Check out our Full 2020 Year in Review.

We are immensely thankful for our global friends and thought partners who enable us to cast the net wide without traditional regard for stage, geography, or sector. Unlike most firms who are geo or stage driven, we are trust driven, and invest in the relationships we have in doing this for the last decade. Some of the highlights were:

CoverWallet (Acquired by AON)

We kicked off 2020 with a ~50x exit from CoverWallet’s sale to AON. Founded by Spanish three-time entrepreneur Inaki Berenguer, we’ve known him a decade, and even worked at his prior startups. We were the first check into CoverWallet.

Belvo

Backed repeat Spanish founders building the Plaid of Latin America before Y-Combinator. After demo day they raised $10M from Founders Fund and Kaszek.

Sami

Participated in the largest Series A in Brazil health history alongside Redpoint, MAYA, Monashees, and Valor Capital, four of the top funds in Brazil. Sami is building the Oscar Health of Brazil, an accessibly priced health insurance company.

Kin Euphorics

Followed on in Kin’s Series Seed with Canaan after investing in their pre-seed. Kin Euphorics is the leading company in the zero-proof beverage space.

Carta

Participated with Lightspeed Ventures in Carta’s Series F alongside Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and others in the leading private market stock and options management platform building a private market exchange.

Flat

Invested alongside Y-Combinator, ALLVP and the founders of Uber and OpenDoor in the leading instant buyer in Mexico, facilitating home buying online.

Robinhood

Invested with Sequoia Capital in Robinhood’s Series F alongside NEA and Ribbit Capital in the world’s leading zero-commission brokerage platform.

(Stealth)

Invested alongside First Round Capital in the Seed round of a future of work platform created by the founders of Optimizely, a recently-exited unicorn.

UI Path

Invested alongside Tiger Global, Coatue, Sequoia Capital and Accel in the Series E of UI Path, leader in future of work robotic process automation (RPA).

JEFA

Invested alongside Foundation Capital and Magma Partners in the Pre-Seed round of JEFA, a bank focused on the 1.3 billion unbanked women in the world.

Kettle Re

Invested alongside True Ventures, Homebrew, and Inspired Capital in Seed round of artificial intelligence and machine learning re-insurance startup Kettle Re.

Relativity Space

Invested alongside Tiger Global, Ballie Gifford, BOND Capital and IQONIC in the Series D of 3-D printing and rocket company Relativity Space.

Finantier

Invested pre Y-Combinator alongside our friends at East Ventures in the Plaid of South East Asia, a leading team out of Google, Lending Club, and EV’s EIR program.

Nirvana

Invested alongside ENIAC and Arc Ventures in a vertical payments solution for the health care industry founded by veterans of Mt. Sinai and Enigma.

Kumu

Followed on in Kumu, the #1 app in the Philippines where we were the first check. Kumu over 7 million users create 30,000 live streams every day.

We couldn’t be more excited about 2021 and doubling down not only on the founders who have been kind enough to allow us on the journey with them, but also to partner with the next generation of founders solving big problems, anywhere on Earth. What we also realize is that while we’re excited about the SpaceX Starship and the Hyperloop getting us from point A to B faster than we ever imagined, you can also run a fully global fund from one or two desks, a Zoom subscription, and WhatsApp.

Over the past years we’ve seen open banking as the opening act of open finance. Pioneered by Plaid in the United States, we’ve seen this opportunity as one that is deeply local, based on relationships and collaboration. As such, these regional opportunities have presented themselves from Belvo in South America to Finantier in South East Asia. We were fortunate to know the founders of Belvo from their time running Verse, Venmo of Spain. When they told us they were later founding Belvo, the open finance platform for South America, we made a decision to seek out other companies focused on this mission. In order to connect these entrepreneurs we created a WhatsApp group of founders focused on open finance in places as disparate as Mexico City, Lagos, Dubai, Cape Town and Jakarta. It was through this WhatsApp group that we were introduced to Diego, Edwin and Keng at Finantier.

A decade ago I’d met a young man interested in venture capital. That man was Willson Cuaca, founder of East Ventures, the most successful early stage fund in SE Asia. When we learned that Finantier was being incubated out of Willson’s offices, and Keng Low had been an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at East, we dialed in.

Today, Finantier is building the infrastructure on top of institutional finance in SE Asia that extends and makes possible an expansion of entrepreneurship. The same way that Stripe and Plaid made connectivity to finance a single API accessible via a few lines of code, Finantier will facilitate an expansion of entrepreneurship, and it’s this new wave of creation that they will empower that excites us the most.

We couldn’t be more excited to partner with East Ventures, and Finantier on their journey to bring open finance to Indonesia, and more broadly to South East Asia. People say you cannot be a global pre-seed investor, but with today’s tools such as Slack, Zoom and WhatsApp groups curated by brilliant portfolio CEOs, we disagree. An intro from Mexico City to Singapore led to a Zoom call from New York.

Read more about Finantier’s pre-seed round in Tech in Asia.

We see the 2020s like the 1860s. On May 10, 1869 Leland Stanford pounded in the final gold spike connecting the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific tracks, thus completing the Trans-Continental Railroad. This thoroughfare paved the way to small town developments, the movement of goods and commerce, and an opening of the frontier. Similarly, companies like SpaceX and Relativity Space are creating the new rails to space. This infrastructure, like the railroad, will enable hundreds of ancillary businesses to crop up alongside the tracks, and up and down new frontier towns.

Over the past decade, we’ve been continually tracking Space Tech not as a “Moonshot,” but as the reality of next generation infrastructure. Based on time spent in Washington, DC where legacy infrastructure has long overstayed its welcome, and early advising days at Spire Global, one of the early pioneers launching cube satellites into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), we believe space in the 2020s will be transformative.

Notably, constellations of LEO sats will begin to replace geo-synchronous satellites. This trend will be driven by the supply of rocket capacity and access into LEO making deploying constellations easier for startups, not just legacy players who can spend tens of millions of dollars to put heavier satellites into GEO. And this arrival of new players (like SpaceX StarLink) providing services like fast rural connectivity from LEO will force incumbents to compete. GEO satellite latency cannot compete with LEO speed, and so incumbents in telecom and entertainment will also move from GEO to LEO.

Consumers vote with their wallets, and for speed and quality. This shift in demand will mean legacy providers need to create LEO constellations, thus more payload demand.

In addition to legacy players moving into LEO, the physics of atmospheric density mean that startups in LEO must be highly specialized. “Your drag is your shelf life,” so satellites trade off sensors and capability with power consumption and weight.

Hyper fragmentation in remote sensing companies also drives more payload demand as each company is specialized. Remote sensing companies like our portfolio company Umbra Lab invented a new antenna to balance power and mass. Umbra will focus exclusively on synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and extremely high resolution imagery with very fast revisit times that are enabled by their patent. Other companies like Spire focus exclusively on AIS, ADS-B, and GPS-RO (maritime, flight, and weather data respectively). They consciously do not do imagery as a weight trade-off, and instead leave this to Maxar, Planet Labs, and specialists like Umbra who do nothing but imagery. Companies like Shadow Break which integrate many data feeds are next gen geospatial intelligence companies in the “Space to Cloud” sector.

These trade offs driven by physics that mean specialization and payload demand place a premium on access to the right orbital paths, and the option to launch into these orbital planes in weeks, not months or years. Payload demand already outpaces supply, especially as providers like SpaceX use much of their own payload capacity to launch StarLink, their revenue engine for inter-planetary exploration. And as many orbital paths can only be reached from launch sites like Vandenberg AFB and Cape Canaveral, the few companies like Relativity Space who can launch from these locations are in pole position. While heavy rockets like StarShip, SLS or New Glenn offer hypothetically low price-per-kg payload pricing, these are the long haul space equivalent of the Airbus 380. People want point-to-point service, which is where companies like Relativity Space, Loft Orbital, and Momentus Space come in. These mid-size rockets and LEO infrastructure services become important players in helping companies get nano and small satellites into the right orbits.

Elon Musk isn’t so dissimilar from Leland Stanford, and the evolution of infrastructure is commerce. The early 2020s are paving the way with infrastructure, but if the railroad is precedent, the next phase is real estate development next to the railroad, and commerce. With our involvement and investments in companies like Umbra Lab and Relativity Space we believe this is only the beginning of this new frontier.

Imagine if the next time you got a vet bill you could simply upload the PDF from your phone, and receive a PayPal, Venmo, or ACH payment within 24 hours. Now imagine that pet insurance company also actually reimbursed you. Meet Wagmo, a pet wellness and insurance company that actually works (unlike all of the other ones).

Founded by Christie Horvath and Ali Foxworth, Wagmo is a tech-first pet insurance company with easy to understand plans, super fast claims processing, and exclusive discounts and community benefits. Horvath and Foxworth leveraged their insurance expertise and experience as pet owners to build an entirely new and digitally-focused experience around pet insurance from the ground up — including faster claim processing times, easier-to-understand products, and a well-equipped pet parent concierge. This unique model allows Wagmo to go above and beyond traditional pet insurance, delivering a high-tech, high-touch experience tailored to fully support new and overwhelmed pet parents through every step of the journey.

We met Christie while she was still a student at Harvard Business School and helped her navigate her company’s move to New York via Techstars. We loved Christie’s passion for pets and insurance, a Venn Diagram not often overlapping, and we decided to write one of her very first pre-seed investment checks while still at HBS.

Wagmo came to market quickly due to their innovative approach of unbundling “Wellness,” which cover things like grooming, flea and tick meds, and basic check ups, and “Insurance” plans, which offer more catastrophic coverage. Today Wagmo Wellness is available nationwide, and Wagmo Insurance coverage is available in 13 states, expecting to be available nationwide in 2021. They’re already industry leading in claims processing, with 24-hour turnaround on wellness plans.

Wagmo is backed by Harlem Capital, The Fund, Female Founders Fund, and Techstars. Read more about their $3M Seed round in AlleyWatch.

We first got to know Uri Tintore, founder of Belvo, while he was still the CEO of Verse a Spanish peer-to-peer payments app that was later acquired by Square. Our Spanish portfolio CEO Iñaki Berenguer, founder of CoverWallet which he sold to AON insurance, had been an angel investor and suggested we meet the team.

It’s not often that you meet a charismatic rocket scientist, but Uri had previously co-founded Capella Space, a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imaging startup that’s raised tens of millions of dollars, while still at Stanford GSB. I still recall our first conversation I took while on holiday in Bologna, Italy, pacing around a piazza. When he told us post-Verse that he’d be building the Plaid of Latin America alongside Pablo Viguera, former head of Revolut Spain, we jumped on board alongside our friends at MAYA Capital in Brazil, Venture Friends in Greece, and Capitoria in Berlin.

Uri and Pablo subsequently took their idea from Barcelona to Y-Combinator where they closed an additional $10 million from Kaszek Ventures and Founders Fund, arguably the top VC fund in South and North America respectively. Today they’re building out open banking extensibility and application programming interfaces (API) across Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, flanked by angel investors who’ve founded businesses like Rappi and NuBank. After the Visa acquisition of Plaid for $5.3 billion in the US in January 2020, we think the opportunity in Latin America is ripe, and this is the top one-percent team to build out both infrastructure and brand.

What we love about Belvo isn’t just their technical prowess, it’s also the way with which they deliver technology with brand and authenticity. Entrepreneurship requires both art and science, two cultures, and we believe Uri and Pablo engage both.

Read about Belvo’s $10M Seed from Founders Fund.

Alexandra Bonetti is no stranger to fitness. As the founder of Bari Studio she built and sold a franchise frequented by the Tribeca crowd we can’t afford to brunch with. But what she learned running that business is that hiring is hard. Hiring great instructors, people with the know-how, charisma, and panache to rep your brand front of house is tough. And then, after you invest in training them, sometimes they quit.

Alexandra founded Talent / Hack because she was deeply frustrated by this problem, and in working with so many trainers she realized that the problem was two-way. Trainers run small businesses. They may work for multiple studio houses, and have a personal brand on the side. Managing schedules, bookings and invoicing is a full time job, after you’ve already helped someone else run a caloric deficit. And just because you kick someone’s butt for a living doesn’t mean the business should kick yours.

Talent/Hack aims to address this pain point by building a bespoke platform only for fitness. Sorry LinkedIn, but you’re like generic YMCA to Equinox at rush hour. Built as a stand alone destination for fitness professionals managing careers, not clients, Talent/Hack offers a suite of services for fitness talent management, hiring, as well as business organization, branding, and booking. And with Talent/Hack Spaces, they’ve begun to take over the logistics of digital course management and billing. It’s like MindBody finally took off the sweats, got off the couch, and put on that LBD.

Read about Alexandra and Talent/Hack on that 5-to-9.

Real estate transactions have not changed for almost half a century in Mexico. That is until Flat.MX showed up. Founded by serial investors and entrepreneurs Victor Noguera and Bernardo Cordero, former founder of e-commerce platform Linio Mexico, Flat is bringing the instant buyer (iBuyer) model of real estate transactions to Mexico. Over the past decades the gap between wanting to sell your home and finding a buyer has held steady at around six months. And for a person looking to buy, the search process has long involved walking the streets iPhone in hand, taking note of the homes with “Se Vende” signs peeking out of windows and on lawns. Not wanting to look the part of the dawdling tourist snapping stylish façades across CDMX, Victor and Bernardo decided that there had to be a better way for to house hunt.

By focusing on technology, and building a payment and exchange system online, Flat.MX has shortened this gap to one of days rather than months. Flat’s relationships with local financial partners helps clients facilitate the necessary credit to move on a property, and they’ve provided immediacy, transparency, and practicality in an otherwise opaque market. Like OpenDoor did in the United States, Flat is moving residential real estate transactions in Mexico into the 21st century.

With over $25 billion of turnover in residential property in Mexico on an annual basis, Flat sees this as a massive opportunity. And if it gives SoftBank an extra excuse to allocate some of its $5 billion already earmarked for Latin America, we don’t mind.

Flat is backed by ALLVP, Y-Combinator and the founders of OpenDoor, Figma, Uber and others. Read more about Flat’s $4.6M Seed in TechCrunch.

Cuban-American founder and CEO Jen Batchelor grew up between Miami and Saudi Arabia with a concoction of worldview that primed her to see possibility through different eyes. As a wellness founder frustrated by the hypocrisy of SoulCycle smash sessions followed by endless rosé and boozy brunches, and as a student of Ayurveda, she knew there was a different path to balance and bliss. Along with Matt Cauble, one of the original founders of future of food and beverage company Soylent, she set out to build a better social tonic sans alcohol, but sexier than your little Shirley Temple.

The result was Kin Euphorics, a company that offers a zero-proof alternative to awaken your evening, or close out your nightcap. With three exceptional beverages, they can make eyes at you from behind the bar in some of the finest cocktail lounges across the globe, or the Kin Spritz is pret-a-porter as a stout little can that packs the horsepower of Red-bull into a summer-cool smoothness of Aperol on a balmy day. And if you’re more in need of the classy turndown service without the mints, prime your pleasure with the milky warmness with a Kin Dream Light nightcap.

Read more about Kin in Vogue or anywhere painfully cool.

When we participated in the seed round for Madrid-based Ninety Nine, the first Spanish company bringing zero-commission brokerage to Spain & Latin America, it was with the perspective that democratizing access to ownership matters.

When E*Trade brought brokerage to the Internet in the early 1990s from a small Palo Alto office, Wall Street heralded it as crazy. When Robinhood pioneered zero-commission brokerage from a mobile phone they turned the line at Starbucks into the trading desk where a twenty-something buyer could invest in the markets. Not dissimilar from the early 1990s, incumbents heralded it as irresponsible, and claimed that investing had been turned into a dangerous game. While qualifications, proper information and risk tolerance are undoubtedly necessary for more complex things like trading options, these apps fundamentally democratized access and gave anyone the tools formerly reserved for the few who could call their stock broker.

“Equity is the atomic unit powering the entire stack of entrepreneurship… Without equity, it’s not possible to align incentives in a way that is attractive to highly skilled employees relative to other employment.” - Tribe Capital

Carta, the de facto platform for all things equity management, isn’t dissimilar. Carta offers a platform for companies, employees, investors, and limited partners to manage their private equity ownership, or illiquid shares of stock in a company. These shares of stock, these atomic units of ownership, are the currency of business, and Carta believes that by democratizing access and the feasibility of buying and selling these units, they can provide greater degrees of freedom for wealth generation and transfer.

As investors in all three of these platforms, we see financial access and the democratization of markets and equity as a continuing theme, and we agree with Tribe Capital that equity is the atomic unit of entrepreneurship. Read more about the latest Series F rounds in Carta and Robinhood, and the launch of Ninety Nine.

Carta Series F with Lightspeed

Robinhood Series F led by Sequoia

NinetyNine Launches its App

Two years later Bloomscape has expanded into a nationally-known brand with dozens of options large and small to bring the real jungle into the urban jungle. As owners of over 30 Bloomscape plants ourselves, we know the level of satisfaction that comes with having a Zoom background people compliment and think is fake… don’t worry, it’s not, and the health benefits of living in a world surrounded by toxin-filtering plants.

Congratulations to Justin Mast and the Bloomscape team on securing their $15 million Series B from Joel Cutler and General Catalyst. We couldn’t be more pleased to be on this wheelbarrow of a journey with our co-investors who’ve also founded and built companies like AllBirds, Away Luggage, Warby Parker, Kayak, and Priceline.

Read more about Bloomscape’s Series B in TechCrunch.

When we met Vitor Asseituno nearly a decade ago it was in San Francisco’s Rock Health incubator, founded by Halle Tecco. Vitor has since gone onto build and exit a healthcare company in Brazil, and was then the organizer of one of the largest healthcare conferences in Brazil, which he was nice enough to ask me to keynote.

When Vitor told us he was linking up with Luiz Guilherme Berardo to build Sami, what he called “the Oscar Health insurance of Brazil,” we were intrigued. When he further told us he’d managed to bring on people like Alan Warren, Oscar’s former CTO, Sergio Ricardo, Amil’s former CEO who helped the company exit to United Healthcare for $4.9 billion, and Paulo Veras, founder of 99, it further demonstrated to us a key human characteristic of founders we love – they have a charisma, and the capacity to tell stories that resonate with people who can move the company forward. This human quality, often overlooked in our “techie” world, matters in leadership, it matters in fundraising, it matters in sales, and it matters in hiring.

Over the course of many months of getting to know the team, and their goal of providing cheaper and more accessible healthcare to Brazil’s over than 200 million person population, we decided to join Redpoint eVentures, Valor Capital Group and monashees in what has become the largest health Series A round in Latin America. We couldn’t be more proud of the team, mission, and incredible investing partners.

Read more about Sami’s Series A in Bloomberg.

We met Kettle Co-Founder Nat Manning a decade ago when he was running geo data platform Ushahidi in Kenya, and later worked with Nat when he went to the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, working with groups like USAID and FEMA as Hurricane Sandy battered the Southern US coast. Nat has always been a mission driven technologist aiming to solve big, intractable global problems, so when he partnered with insurance veteran Andrew Engler to form Kettle Re we knew we wanted to back them as they aimed to apply deep learning to better model risk.

Kettle uses data from roughly 50 sources including NOAA weather data, NASA MODIS and LIDAR satellites and leverages neural networks to better calculate the probabilities that a wildfire will hit a particular area. The world has seen its fair share of catastrophic events, but ingestion of public and private data coupled with the latest in deep learning technology make it such that risk should be better understood, predicted, and structured. Kettle reinsurance is doing just that, now backed with $4.7 million of seed capital from Two Culture Capital, True Ventures, Homebrew, Anthemis, Acrew Capital, and Inspired Ventures. Kettle is leveraging the best of human and machine to solve some of the 21st century’s most salient problems.

Read more about Kettle’s $4.7M Seed in Forbes.

Congratulations to Arjun Thyagarajan and the Wise team on their $12M Series A round led by e.ventures, alongside Grishin Robotics, Base10, and Techstars. As one of the first investors into Wise Banking alongside The Fund and Techstars, what we loved about Arjun’s vision was that there are many small businesses who touch financial services but don’t have the desire or capacity to make such a large investment in offering those services to their customers on their own. Instead, Wise allows these SMBs to extend bank accounts and other financial services to their clients using Wise.

The same way Amazon might extent a line of credit cards to loyal merchants, but use JP Morgan to manage those cards, Wise allows any platform to extend financial services such as bank accounts, co-branded cards, or invoicing to their customers. As they say, “we built a bank so you don’t have to.” The world doesn’t need any more.

Read more about the Wise Series A in TechCrunch.