Participated · Series A · Jan 2021

Flockjay runs a tech sales training curriculum positioned as an on-ramp to tech careers for people who lack traditional networks. It operates a bootcamp with a pay-if-you-get-placed model (zero cost if you don’t get a job; 10% of income for the first year if you do, which nets out to roughly $6–7K). A few hundred students have completed the program so far, and the company aimed to train 1,000 people in 2021. Students’ average pre-training income is $30–35K and graduates can expect $75–85K; about 80% of students find a job within six months. Roughly 40% of students don’t have four-year degrees, half identify as female or non-binary, and half identify as Black or Hispanic. The company plans to expand its offerings into a continuous-membership model and deepen alumni networks as it scales.

Participated · Series E · Dec 2020

Creditas has built an integrated financial services platform that combines secured lending with complementary insurance and investment products, all delivered through a technology-first, customer-centric approach. The company’s offering now expands into full banking and wealth-management capabilities through its recently completed acquisition of Andbank Brazil, approved by the Brazilian Central Bank. Management views the deal as the consolidation of a complete ecosystem that unites credit, insurance and investments under one roof. Creditas continues to strengthen its leadership bench, hiring former BBVA executive Ricardo Forcano as Chief Technology & Operations Officer to oversee Technology, Operations and People. The initial close of its Series G financing pegs the firm’s valuation at USD 3.3 billion, underscoring investor confidence in its growth trajectory. VEF, an early backer, converted its outstanding convertible loans into equity in this round at a lower valuation, yet still recorded a positive uplift in its reported NAV. No revenue or user figures were disclosed in the article, but the company is characterised as one of Latin America’s foremost fintechs.

Led · Series B · Jan 2020

Flutterwave operates a payments infrastructure network that processes payments for businesses across Africa and has handled over a billion transactions worth more than US$50 billion. The company has previously raised over US$500 million in funding and is now undertaking a Series E round valued at $3.2 billion. Flutterwave’s roadmap emphasizes a 'stablecoin-first' payment architecture, embedding RLUSD into its core ecosystem and using the XRP Ledger for faster settlement. It plans to unify traditional fiat methods (cards, mobile wallets, bank transfers) with stablecoin settlement via a single API to reduce frictions in cross-border payments. The company positions these product developments to expand remittance corridors, improve liquidity and pricing predictability, and scale services for SMEs and global enterprises operating in Africa. With the strategic partnership and capital from Ripple, Flutterwave aims to accelerate infrastructure scaling and the adoption of digital asset-enabled settlement across the continent.

Participated · Equity · Dec 2019

Jow is a Paris, France–based provider of a grocery shopping and menu recommendation app that helps users plan meals and shop more quickly. The platform partners with retailers and brands and combines retail media, consumer data, and algorithms to generate personalized meal plans and shopping lists. Jow works with major grocery retailers including Auchan, Carrefour, and Intermarché. The company reports over 6 million users globally and 150 million meals served. Jow raised $13M in additional funding and had previously raised $20M from investors named in coverage. The company intends to use the new funds to expand into the US market. CEO Jacques-Edouard Sabatier leads the business. Jow is a meal- and grocery-planning service that recommends meals, lets users customize weekly plans and automatically generates shopping lists. The app transfers those lists to major French supermarket brands (Carrefour, Auchan, Intermarché, Leclerc, Monoprix and Chronodrive), covering over 4,000 stores, and lets users choose pickup or delivery. Jow does not process orders or own inventory; it generates revenue from grocers and operates with a lean team of 35 employees. Users have ordered 20 million meals through the app, and nearly 70% of products in a customer’s basket come from Jow’s recipes. Founded in 2018, the company plans to expand to new countries starting with the U.S. Jow positions improved meal planning as a way to reduce reliance on food-delivery services, save money and cut waste. Jow combines recipe recommendations, personalized menus and one-click online grocery ordering to let users complete a weekly food shop quickly after onboarding. The app’s recommendation engine factors in tastes, household details, appliance availability and supermarket stock to auto-fill users’ carts. Jow claims its recipe-to-cart feature represents on average 75% of products users add to their carts, with staples making up the remainder. The service is free to end users; Jow generates affiliate revenue from supermarkets seeking to acquire younger, mobile-first customers and is largely asset-light, built on top of retailers’ existing infrastructure. The startup supports five leading French grocers (Monoprix, Carrefour, Auchan, Chronodrive and E.Leclerc) and reports that 90% of customers shop using mobile devices. Jow positions itself to improve the online grocery user experience and accelerate e-grocery growth versus takeout and recipe-kit alternatives.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2019

Honeycomb is a San Francisco–based provider of an observability platform used by engineering teams to investigate cloud application behavior. Led by CEO Christine Yen, the product helps teams quickly understand what their code does for real users in unpredictable, complex cloud environments. Customers include HelloFresh, Stripe, Slack, Fender, Vanguard, and LaunchDarkly. The company raised $50M in a Series D round, bringing total funding to $150M. Honeycomb intends to use the funds to accelerate geographic expansion, support and contribute to OpenTelemetry, and build a cohesive integration strategy across the software development ecosystem. Kelly Watkins, former VP of Global Marketing at Slack and CEO of Abstract, joined Honeycomb's board of directors as part of the round. Honeycomb provides a software observability platform that helps developers and SREs understand, debug, and optimize production cloud applications and microservices. The platform is used by teams at companies such as Stripe, Slack, Heroku, and LaunchDarkly. Honeycomb ships features like BubbleUp, an analytical engine built on a proprietary datastore that surfaces hidden outliers, and integrates with AWS, Kubernetes, MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Its tooling emphasizes exploratory analysis over aggregate APM metrics to speed investigations and surface where engineers should look for problems. Founded in San Francisco in 2016, Honeycomb positions itself for modern cloud-native architectures and continuous troubleshooting. Financially, the company raised a $50M Series C and had previously raised around $47M; it says the new funding will support expansion into Europe, including building a dedicated European team. Honeycomb is a San Francisco-based provider of cloud observability for distributed systems, led by CEO Christine Yen. Its platform enables modern development teams to learn, debug, and improve production systems so business-critical apps perform with minimal disruption to users. Customers use the product for fast incident response, system optimization, and delivering pain-free releases across the software engineering cycle. The company currently serves more than 300 customers. Honeycomb intends to use the new funds to expand operations and broaden its business reach. The company has raised a total of $46.9m to date. Honeycomb provides observability solutions for modern Engineering and DevOps teams to observe, debug, and improve production systems. The company was co-founded by Charity Majors and Christine Yen in 2016 and is based in San Francisco, CA. Customers include Intercom, Optimizely, Shipt, Meetup, and Fender. Honeycomb closed an $11.4M funding round that brought its total funding to $26.9M. The company intends to use the funds to grow teams across all business functions, particularly sales, marketing, and customer success. As part of the round, Ariel Tseitlin from Scale Venture Partners will join Honeycomb’s Board of Directors. Honeycomb is an observability provider for software engineers based in San Francisco, CA. Co-founded by Charity Majors (CEO) and Christine Yen (CPO), the company enables engineers to create and analyze data about the behavior of their software. Its tooling lets users move from visualizing aggregate trends to pinpointing exact problems such as a stalled shopping cart, a query starving a system, or a problematic user. Customers include Fender, Axios, Intercom and Travis CI. Honeycomb raised an $11.5M Series A, bringing total funding to $15.5M. The company intends to use the funds to expand sales and marketing and deepen R&D activities.