Participated · Series B · Mar 2026

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 · Series A · Aug 2020

Stream provides enterprise-grade chat and activity feed APIs that enable product teams to build in-app messaging and feeds at scale more quickly and cost-effectively than building in-house. The company powers experiences for over a billion users across its two products and serves customers in healthcare, education, finance, fitness, dating and social segments. Notable customers include Healthline, Powerschool, Stocktwits, Freeletics, Match, TaskRabbit, Imgur and Dubsmash. Stream plans to invest heavily in scaling its global team across engineering, sales, and marketing following the fundraise. Founded by Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli in Amsterdam, the company participated in Techstars NYC and later moved its headquarters to Boulder, Colorado. Today Stream employs 55 people in Amsterdam and Boulder as well as remote employees and recently closed a $15 million Series A to support growth.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2020

Stream offers APIs for activity feeds and chat that developers can integrate into apps with a few lines of code. The company began with activity‑feed APIs and expanded into chat, currently integrating third‑party chatbots and using Dolby for audio and video while planning to bring more components in‑house. Stream has said it wants to add end‑to‑end encryption and build more chatbot and media capabilities itself. Its technology is used across sectors including healthcare, education, finance, virtual events, dating, gaming and social. Notable customers include TaskRabbit, NBC Sports, Unilever, Delivery Hero, Gojek, eToro and Stanford University. Apps that use Stream’s services collectively cover more than 1 billion users, and the company reported chat revenue grew 500% in 2020. Stream was co‑founded in Amsterdam in 2015 and now has its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, while retaining a substantial team in Amsterdam. Stream builds APIs focused on activity feeds and, more recently, chat to help product teams add social features to their apps. The company started with activity feeds and began developing a chat API about 10 months ago after customers tried to build chat on top of feeds. Customers named in the article include Harvard, Dubsmash and Healthline. Stream is a five-year-old, 60-person startup with offices in Boulder and Amsterdam and was founded by Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli. The founders entered Techstars when the company was two months old in 2015. During the COVID-19 pandemic some smaller customers folded and one larger customer went bankrupt, but demand rose from education, healthcare, online events and religious communities. Financially, Stream closed a $15 million Series A led by GGV Capital, bringing total funding to $20.25 million. Stream offers an API for creating personalized news feeds that app creators can embed and scale within their apps. Its clients include Product Hunt, Google's Fabric, and Unsplash, and its feeds reach around 200 million end users. The company says news feeds are the dominant way of discovering content online and are used in 22% of apps. Stream plans to use new funding to accelerate product development, expand support for larger customers, add multi-region capabilities, and enhance machine-learning for personalization. It also intends to build up a small marketing and sales effort and grow its team. Stream has raised a total of €4.75 million to date and maintains an office in Boulder, CO. Stream sells newsfeed development and management as a service, building on an open-source feed project its team created. The original open-source project is about three years old and has been downloaded 250,000 times. Founders Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli began working on Stream in August after leaving prior startups and participated in the Techstars NY accelerator. Originally founded in Amsterdam, the company relocated operations to Boulder due to visa issues. Stream reports 120 companies are "in production" with the service, including its largest customer, GoldenLine.pl. The company positions its managed feed offering as a scalable alternative to costly in-house feed solutions used by many apps.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2019

Newspack is an Automattic-built, WordPress-oriented platform aimed at helping news organizations publish and monetize content with built-in support for subscriptions, metered paywalls and user accounts. Automattic positions it as an all-in-one solution tailored especially for local and small news outlets that lack development resources. Media organizations can apply to work with Automattic during the platform’s development phase. The service will be free during development and is expected to cost $1,000–$2,000 per month afterward. Details about product features remain thin in the announcement, but the project targets easier monetization workflows than vanilla WordPress. The company notes larger publishers may not necessarily move to Newspack, while smaller single-topic or local sites could benefit from the multiple monetization options.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2018

NewsGuard builds a ratings and "Nutrition Label" system that evaluates the 7,500 most accessed and shared news and information websites in the U.S., assigning Green, Yellow, or Red ratings. The company will hire dozens of trained journalists as analysts; two analysts independently review each site and produce editable Nutrition Labels, with senior editorial officers resolving disputes. A 24/7 SWAT Team will rate newly trending sites in real time. NewsGuard will supply free browser plug-ins to news literacy groups, schools, and individual consumers and will license its ratings and labels to social media, search platforms, and other aggregators. The company plans to launch in the U.S. ahead of the mid-term elections and then expand to other countries. Financially, NewsGuard has raised $6M in funding to support these operations.