Freelands Ventures
Utopia Village, 7 Chalcot Road, London, England, NW1 8LH, United Kingdom
Overview
Freelands Ventures is an early stage venture fund investing at the intersection of media, technology and entertainment. They believe that success is shaped as much by access to great partners and networks as it is by capital. They provide internal strategic and operational experience and a best-in-class global network of media, brand and partner relationships to help accelerate the growth of their portfolio companies. They like to collaborate with teams where it is immediately apparent how they can add value and support to a bold ambition. They are based in London but invest wherever they find the most brilliant people and products.
- Total investments
- 3
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 0
Sector focus
- Finance
- Financial Services
Investment portfolio
- Within
Participated · Series A · Jun 2016
Within is a Los Angeles and San Francisco-based virtual reality content and technology company co-founded by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin. It uses custom-built tools and a VR app to create and distribute story-driven VR experiences. The company also operates a production house that produces its VR films as well as VR experiences for corporate and non-profit clients. Within raised $12.56M in Series A funding and intends to use the funds to expand operations and hire new people. The financing supports scaling its production and distribution capabilities while continuing to develop VR storytelling tools and content.
- Hyper
Participated · Seed · Aug 2015
Hyper is a curated video discovery platform launching to deliver a daily selection of the best short-form Internet videos. The startup employs a team of journalists and filmmakers who hand-select roughly six to a dozen videos each day, ranging from one to twenty minutes and spanning artsy to documentary topics. Selections rely on personal taste and recentness—Hyper does not post content older than a couple of days—rather than view counts or social metrics. The small editorial team drives much of the product’s value, which the founders acknowledge could pose scaling and voice-retention challenges. Hyper is currently available only for iPad and plans to roll out an iPhone version in the coming months. The company was built earlier this year by film producer Markus Gilles and cinematographer Jonas Brandau after they left Berlin’s independent film scene. Hyper has been funded with $1.1 million in seed financing.
- Ascribe
Participated · Seed · Jun 2015
Ascribe offers a blockchain-based notary and timestamp for intellectual property and creative works, allowing creators to designate and prove a definitive version of a digital asset. Users can upload images, obtain a certificate of authenticity (a public key), loan or transfer the asset, and monitor where copies appear online. The platform stores and signs each image on the blockchain to create an immutable record of existence. Ascribe is building a web crawler and web-scale machine learning similarity search to crawl and index digital artifacts and report where creators' work has surfaced. Founders Bruce Pon, Trent McConaghy, and Masha McConaghy bring experience in banking, hardware, and curation; Masha holds a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne and has curated at the Louvre and galleries. The company prototyped in fall 2013, moved to full-time operations in mid-2014, and is working with early users; it raised $2 million in a seed round from institutional and angel investors.
Team
No current team members are available.