Participated · Equity · Jan 2025

Openvibe is an app launched in 2024 that integrates open social networks including Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr, and Instagram Threads into a single, user-friendly timeline and supports cross-posting. The product aims to simplify access to networks that use different protocols (ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr) so newcomers don’t need to switch apps. Openvibe is available for free on iOS and Android and plans to introduce a subscription plan to generate revenue. With new capital, the company intends to accelerate product development, expand its user base, add integrations with additional social platforms, and refine the user interface. The app’s approach targets users who want a single gateway to the open social web and tooling for multi-network posting. Automattic’s participation was noted as significant given its history of backing open-source projects that compete with Big Tech.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2023

Liquid AI, co-founded by robotics luminary Daniela Rus, is building general-purpose AI systems powered by liquid neural networks. Liquid neural networks use neurons governed by equations that predict each neuron's behavior over time, giving the architecture flexibility inspired by roundworm brains. Because of that design, these models are much smaller than traditional AI models and require far less computing power to run. Liquid AI plans to develop tailored liquid neural networks for applications in e-commerce, consumer electronics, and biotech. The company recently raised $250 million and is reportedly valued at over $2 billion. As part of the investment, Liquid AI will work with AMD to optimize its models for AMD GPUs, CPUs, and AI accelerators. Liquid AI develops models built on liquid neural network architecture, which the team says are much smaller, more compute-efficient, interpretable and able to adapt over time compared with typical large generative models. The company has demonstrated the architecture on tasks such as drone navigation, where liquid models generalized to unseen scenarios and outperformed other algorithms. Liquid AI plans to commercialize the architecture by building liquid foundation models beyond GPTs and by offering on-premises and private AI infrastructure plus a platform for customers to build domain-specific models. The team includes co-founder Daniela Rus and founding members Ramin Hasani (CEO), Mathias Lechner (CTO) and Alexander Amini (chief scientific officer). The company currently has a 12-person team and expects to grow to about 20 by early next year. Liquid AI targets applications ranging from drone search-and-rescue, wildlife monitoring and delivery to sequential-data domains such as power grids, medical readouts, financial transactions and severe weather prediction.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2023

Offsite operates a curated marketplace of more than 250 hotels and venues with pre-negotiated discounts on room blocks, meeting spaces, food and beverage, and related logistics. It offers two main planning options: a searchable, Airbnb-style venue marketplace and end-to-end retreat planning services billed as a per-person flat fee. Its full-service offering covers flight booking, venue selection and contracting, agenda creation, budget management, visa procurement, restaurant reservations, and management of vendors such as activity providers, photographers, speakers, transportation, and event production staff. Since launching in 2021, Offsite has planned hundreds of retreats across more than 15 countries for clients that include startups, hospitals, hedge funds, communities, and venture firms. The company is led by founder and CEO Jared Kleinert and intends to use newly raised funds to expand operations and broaden its business reach.

Participated · Seed · Jul 2023

Bluesky operates a social network and an open social ecosystem built on the AT Protocol (ATProto) that enables interoperable apps. Since its Series A, the platform has grown from 13 million to over 43 million global users and its Atmosphere network contains around 20 billion public records. The developer ecosystem is expanding, with over 400,000 monthly downloads of developer tools (SDK) and more than a thousand apps on ATProto used weekly. Bluesky has not integrated cryptocurrencies and is not built on blockchain technology, though some crypto-oriented investors have backed the company. Leadership changed when CEO Jay Graber transitioned to chief innovation officer, and the company says it is hiring a new CEO to drive commercial growth. The company is using recent funding to scale its team and continue development of its app and underlying protocol.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2021

Hoppscotch provides an integrated API development suite including a collaborative web client, a CLI for CI/CD integration, and an API documentation generator. Founded in Kerala, India in 2019 by Liyas Thomas, the project is open source and can be self-hosted for data control. The company claims about 500,000 developer users and reports usage from teams at Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and IBM. Hoppscotch for Teams is in public beta to support group- and project-level collaboration. To commercialize, Hoppscotch plans a hosted cloud service and enterprise-grade features such as SSO, plus premium support and on-premises deployment options. The startup raised $3 million in seed funding to accelerate product development and enterprise go-to-market efforts.