Participated · Seed · May 2023

Mycocycle cultivates white-rot mushrooms to break down waste and produce renewable, bio-based polymers and materials. The company selects fungal strains via natural selection and does not genetically modify them. It operates bio-processors that maintain optimal temperatures (about 60–80°F) for roughly two-week cycles and kills the fungi at the end of a run to prevent continued growth. Outputs can be used as insulation, acoustic panels, or filler; fungi can encase rubber in mycelial webs that Mycocycle can reprocess. The startup is refining a process to recycle crumb rubber from old tires and demonstrated its system on scrap drywall from a Meta data center. Founder and CEO Joanne Rodriguez, who started the company in 2018, aims to capture a portion of the large plastics market and compete with legacy materials companies. Mycocycle expects to bring in over $1 million in revenue this year and says it will be margin positive. Mycocycle leverages a patent-pending, fungi-driven process to detoxify and transform building and industrial waste—including asphalt shingles, insulation board, crumb rubber, gypsum drywall, and fibers—into a renewable, low-carbon mycelium-based raw material. The company blends lab-cultivated fungi with debris at the point of waste generation to neutralize petroleum-derived contaminants and reduce environmental contamination from burial or burning. Its process is designed to drive circularity in the construction supply chain, divert waste from landfills, and lessen the need for virgin material extraction. Since launching, Mycocycle has treated 12,000 pounds of material through paid pilots with customers across waste management, recycling, and manufacturing, and with building owners and contractors such as META and Lendlease. The startup plans to validate reuse of its biobased byproduct and scale deployment within the built environment. Led by founder and CEO Joanne Rodriguez, the company was founded in 2018.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2021

Elotl provides a Nodeless Kubernetes Platform that provisions just-in-time, right-sized, cloud-agnostic compute for applications and terminates instances when apps stop, removing the need to manage servers or clusters. The platform targets enterprises and CI/CD workloads, and the company cites customers such as Robinhood and Symphony and a Flare.build use case. Elotl reports demonstrated 60–80% cost savings for customers, simplified multi-tenant security, and claims a 5x expansion in deployments over the past year with increased adoption velocity for CI/CD workloads. The company was founded in 2016 by Madhuri Yechuri, who previously worked at ClusterHQ, VMware, and Oracle, and is based in San Francisco. Elotl has joined the Mobile Native Foundation as a founding member and is focused on simplifying operations for Kubernetes users on AWS and GCP. The company plans to continue building the platform, hire across departments, and expand to multiple cloud providers.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2021

Preemadonna’s flagship product is Nailbot, a connected at-home manicure device that prints personalized photos, emojis or user-created designs on nails in five seconds. The product pairs hardware with a mobile app art marketplace and a built-in community of Gen Z creators. CEO and founder Pree Walia leads the company and frames the business around creativity, self-expression and mobilizing users as co-creators. The company positions nail art as a playful, social and creative category and says it intends to pioneer ways to decorate the nail — and eventually the entire body — for its Gen Z community. Preemadonna is an alum of the HAX hardware accelerator and the Founders Factory program and was named a winner of the Women Founders Represent program. Financially, the company announced a $5.6M overall seed round to support its plans and growth.