Q1 can be summarized by a few words: chaotic, formative, confirmational. We gained confidence in our areas of focus, met incredible founders and refined our perspective on the state of proptech, fintech, infrastructure and developer tools. Additionally, we both took on new responsibilities as venture scouts for Andreessen Horowitz (Paul) and 1Sharpe Ventures (George).
Despite a pull back in early stage investment, we're still seeing many new startups, leading us to believe that now is as good a time as any to be investing in this ecosystem. In Q1 we looked at over 100 deals, met with dozens of founders, and made the following 5 investments.
Doss
Doss is building tools for teams that work in the real world. In minutes, level-up your email and spreadsheets centric processes with their Adaptive Resource Platform (ARP). We like Doss because they are capturing daily behavior by bringing disjoint processes onto a single, integrated platform. This is not dissimilar to our thesis around Numeric.Â
Type Five
Type Five makes it easy to design and purchase a customizable home, online. Their initial offerings include The ADU (182+ sq ft backyard home) and The Pod (96 sq ft multi-use space, ideal for an office). We invested in Type Five because of the incredible team first and foremost, followed by our belief in their mission to make housing affordable, equitable, and sustainable.
Pax
Pax is a user interface language. Developers can use Pax to build user interfaces with the programming language Rust that compile to cross-platform apps and websites. We’re excited about Pax because it solves a hard problem that many developers face when building native applications. Combined with the fact that Rust is the second fastest growing programming language, Pax is well positioned to be the primary way Rust developers build user interfaces.Â
Basic
Basic is a federated (zero-knowledge) database. Applications that integrate with Basic are able to read and manipulate a user’s data without ever storing it. Users retain ownership of their data via their own personal data cloud. They can give multiple apps access to the their data, allowing them to share the same data across separate apps. It's secure by default and private by design.Â
Respell
Respell is a no-code AI application builder and marketplace that simplifies the process of creating AI applications, or "spells," by allowing users to chain together building blocks of AI models without writing any code. With the explosion of generative AI use cases, we believe that there’s an opportunity for a platform like Respell to serve an emerging market of builders looking to leverage large language models. Furthermore, the team is wildly impressive, and launched their product faster than we could have imagined. In the rapidly evolving world of generative AI, speed is of the essence!
Looking forward to Q2, we are excited to connect with more founders looking to change the worlds of proptech, fintech, infrastructure and developer tools. If that is you, please reach out! More importantly, we are ready and excited to help our portfolio companies as they scale. We expect Q2 to be one for building.
Thanks to our friends, family, and supporters as we continue to build out our portfolio of early stage companies.
Keep climbing,
George & Paul
Awesome Q1 gents! Really exciting stuff!