Led · Equity · Feb 2023

My NFT Wars is a joint venture between iLogos Game Studios and the developers of Blockchain Cuties Universe building a Web3 massively multiplayer online role‑playing game (MMORPG) based on a Play-Create-Own model. The game is free-to-play and leverages tokenomics and NFT character development to reward players and enable an in-game economy. Players earn the $GMFI token through victories in raids and battles and can spend tokens on characters, land pieces, dungeons, raids, arenas and other features. All minting events will be connected to the unit economy to prevent an overflow of tokens on the market. Players can participate in the My NFT Wars treasury either actively or passively, with gameplay modes including auto-battle and an active mode where players build characters, form teams, and join raids. The company announced a $2M private funding round that provides early financial support for development and tokenomic rollout.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2019

S’More’s core product deliberately blurs profile photos (and initially blurs video chat) so users must interact before images fully reveal, aiming to foster more meaningful relationships. The startup recently launched a completely rebuilt app with real-time conversation prompts and a paid option to promote profiles. New features include blurred video chat and other multimedia elements on the product roadmap such as video, audio, and games. The app has seen early traction with 160,000 downloads in its first year and “thousands” of paying users, including a 50% increase in subscriptions after the January relaunch. Funding has been used to assemble a named “founding team” (chief architect, head of operations, head of product and design, senior developer). S’More is also pursuing content strategy, producing “anti-superficial” dating content and running a celebrity dating show on Instagram Live with 60 episodes so far. S’More is a relationship dating app that blurs profile photos and unlocks images and private content as users engage, prioritizing personality, values, and conversation over initial looks. Its matching algorithm recommends profiles based on location, age, sexual orientation, interests, opinions, values, hobbies, gender identities and learned attraction preferences. Profiles support more than 20 criteria with interactive icons and multimedia, and the app uses required photo verification and a publicly visible behavior-based rating score to reduce catfishing and encourage higher-quality community behavior. The company positions itself as a disruption to swipe-based dating apps and aims to elevate online dating standards toward relationship-focused experiences. S’More currently has a public waitlist of over 8,000 singles and has opened national sign-ups at smoredate.com. Founder Adam Cohen Aslatei brings experience from Chappy (Bumble’s gay app) and The Meet Group and has consulted for several social discovery companies.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2019

Flo Health is a London-based fertility-focused period-tracking app offering cycle and ovulation tracking, symptom monitoring (users can track over 70 symptoms), and personalized health insights. The company says it has served some 380 million users globally, with about 70 million monthly active users on its free product and roughly 5 million paid subscribers. Flo monetizes through premium subscriptions and intends to keep subscriptions as its core business model. The company plans to expand features for perimenopause and menopause, continue integrations with devices like Apple Watch, and may pursue acquisitions to grow inorganically. Flo highlights its privacy and security posture, noting a settled 2021 FTC investigation and dual ISO certifications (ISO 27001 and ISO 27701). Founded in 2015 by Dmitry Gurski and his twin brother, Flo operates from London with a major hub in Vilnius and runs a pro-social program that provides free premium access in 66 countries, benefiting nearly 16 million women. Flo Health, Inc. announced it received $49.704991 million in funding. The investment was provided by VNV Global AB and Target Germanium GmbH. The transaction closed on September 9, 2021. The Series B round was led by Target Germanium GmbH and included new investor VNV Global AB (publ). The funding was raised at a post-money valuation of $800,000,000. The article does not disclose operating metrics, product details, or future plans. Flo Health is a Belarusian women's health app with broad reach: about 10% of women aged 15–40 in Europe and the US use Flo. The company introduced monetization in early 2019 and says it doubled active audience year-over-year with average monthly revenue growth of 30%. Flo is described as the most popular and commercially successful product in its category. Today the company employs 140 specialists in the CIS and plans to grow headcount to 200 by year-end. Management says investments will be directed at further product development and team growth. Following the extension, Flo's valuation rose to $230 million. Flo Health develops Flo, a women's health product that combines a neural-network-based period and ovulation calendar, a personalized content feed, and anonymous social/group chat functionality. The app targets females across life stages (menstruation start, cycle tracking, conception, pregnancy, early motherhood, menopause) and emphasizes safety and trusted health information. Flo makes intensive use of data science and AI to deliver personalized content and services and is available in 22 languages on iOS and Android. Launched in October 2015, the app has been downloaded over 70 million times and reports 28 million monthly users; the user base grows by about 4.5 million downloads monthly. Flo is the number one female health product by active audience in the U.S. (per App Annie) and has sizable penetration in over 100 countries, with 60% of users in the U.S. and Europe. Company leadership cites ambitions to scale further and leverage investor partnerships for product and market expansion across Asian, European, and American markets. Flo Health develops Flo, an AI-driven women's health app that provides cycle tracking, conception preparation, pregnancy support, early motherhood tools and menopause care. Since its October 2015 launch the app has been downloaded over 60 million times and records 22 million monthly active users, with installs growing by about 4.5 million per month. Over 4 million women have become pregnant using Flo, a figure that the company says is increasing by roughly 500,000 per month. Flo uses neural networks and proprietary AI algorithms to improve cycle predictions, detect concerning symptoms, and deliver personalized guidance and prompts to seek medical care. The company employs 100+ specialists (around 70% women), offers the tracker in 22 languages, and reports roughly 60% of users are in the US and Europe. Flo aims to reach 100 million monthly active users, build a large anonymous women's community, and expand scientific and research partnerships to advance personalization and medical credibility.

Participated · Series C · Mar 2019

Academia.edu is a San Francisco‑based platform that lets researchers, teachers and professionals share, discover and publish academic papers across disciplines including physics, chemistry, biology, health sciences, ecology, earth sciences, cognitive science, maths and computer science. Led by CEO Dr. Richard Price, the service offers recommendations, citation features and plans to host peer‑reviewed journals so academics can be reviewed and published on the platform. Academia.edu has indexed over 32 million papers dating back to the 1600s and is adding 30,000–60,000 papers each day. The site attracts about 28 million monthly visitors and its algorithms generate roughly 20 million paper recommendations per day. The platform connects users to content from 42% of the world’s faculty across more than 16,000 universities, including Oxford, MIT, Cal‑Berkeley and NYU. The company intends to use the new funding to expand its publishing and peer‑review offerings. Academia.edu is a San Francisco-based platform that hosts and distributes scholarly research, making academic papers available for free online. Founded in 2008 by Richard Price, the company offers a mobile app and a premium product suite. It reports paying subscribers at more than 11,800 universities worldwide and recently unveiled a mobile app allowing more than 23 million pieces of scholarly work to be read for free and stored offline on iOS devices. The company says it will use new funding to invest in natural language processing and machine learning to recommend papers relevant to researchers, and to continue investing in its mobile app and premium offerings. These investments target product improvement and user engagement across its free and paid services. Academia.edu is a San Francisco, CA–based online community where academics share research papers. The platform allows users to upload and share papers, monitor analytics around the impact of their research, and track the work of academics they follow. The company is led by founder and CEO Richard Price. According to the company, 4,308,424 academics have signed up, adding 1,629,811 papers and 861,492 research interests. The company raised $11.1m in a Series B round led by Khosla Ventures. As part of the financing, Khosla Ventures’ Ben Ling will join the board and Vinod Khosla will join as an advisor. Existing investors Spark Capital and True Ventures participated in the round. Academia.edu operates a social network for researchers that helps them distribute and discover scholarly papers, using SEO and analytics to track readership. In 2011 the site’s registered userbase tripled to 800,000 and researchers were uploading about 2,500 articles per day. The site drew roughly 3 million unique visitors, many arriving via Google search. Founder Richard Price said the company benefits from the Open Science/open access movement and aims to foster that trend going forward. Price also described Academia.edu as the largest platform for sharing research articles. The company announced a funding round to support expansion and continued growth of the service. Academia.edu is a web-based network designed to help researchers connect with peers and find material relevant to their fields. Launched in September 2008, the site combines social-network features—user profiles tagged with research topics—with a discovery-focused News Feed that surfaces papers based on those tags. CEO Richard Price says the academic community has been neglected by the evolution of the web and the product aims to change how academics find and share research. Users create profiles, tag themselves with research topics, keep in touch with peers, and receive a stream of recommended research items even if those items haven't been shared by contacts. As of the article, Academia.edu had 137,000 registered users, was growing by about 15,000 users per month, and received over 600,000 unique visitors monthly. Competitors mentioned include Mendeley and ResearchGate.