2022 was a reminder for all of us that everything is not just 📈, and we need to be mindful of building long term businesses solving real problems efficiently. While the market correction was painful to experience, we have to remember it’s still early innings for the cloud, developer tooling, and cybersecurity, all areas of growth heading into 2023. We also believe this cycle will be the best time to deploy capital as only the best and 😜 founders on a mission will start companies now, building lean and mean from day one.
With that backdrop, here’s our 2022 recap which was another year of growth, learning, and fun at boldstart. We’re 🙏🏼 to our founders, limited partners, co-investors, and friends for your continued partnership, support, and encouragement.
2 New funds: boldstart vi + opportunities iii
In June, we announced $367M of new funds, $192,168,111M fund VI and $175M opportunities iii, to continue supporting developer first, crypto infra & SaaS founders from Day 1 to scale (🧵).
Announcing $367M in new @Boldstartvc funds, vi $192,168,111 + opp iii $175M for existing cos🚀
— Ed Sim (@edsim) June 1, 2022
Same mission + more excited than ever to be a Day One partner for technical, under🐶 founders building the future of Developer First, Crypto Infra & SaaS
Who's ready to build 🏗️? pic.twitter.com/UsOgjRmYLn
TEAM
We promoted both Shomik Ghosh (from Principal) and Ellen Chisa (from Founder-in-Residence) to Partner. We couldn’t be more excited to expand our partnership from 2 to 4 as both Ellen and Shomik not only embody what it means to truly serve founders 24/7 but have also led some amazing investments in the latest funds.
We’re also fully distributed like our portfolio companies. Ed and Eliot moved to Miami 🌴 (more on the move here), Shomik moved back to SF/Bay Area, and Ellen remains in Boston. We’ll now have more coverage around the clock for our founders.
boldstart also received some recognition this year as Ed Sim was selected to both the Midas Seed List (#10) and Midas Brink List. This is a testament to the work of the entire team and more importantly our founders.
PORTFOLIO
- 🤝 Day one lead in 11 founding teams: (most still in stealth) representing 🇮🇱 🇩🇪 🇫🇷 🇨🇦 🇪🇪 🇺🇸
- 🚀 🦄 Day one to scale:
Snyk $196M Series G at $7.4B (developer first security)
Blockdaemon $207M Series C at $3.3B (crypto infra startup) - 💰 Day one to follow on funding: Over $750M in follow on funding for the portfolio including those above and:
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*Jit — $38.5M round (automated security for devs)
*SpectroCloud — $40M Series B (enterprise Kubernetes made easy)
*Slim — $31M Series A(build secure containers faster)
*Robin — $30M round (OS for the office)
*Stellate — $25M Series A (GraphQL edge caching)
*Recolabs $26M Series A (collaborate securely)
*Amberdata $30M Series B (crypto data infra)
*Wallaroo $25M Series A (MLOps made easy)
*Kumospace $21M Series A (virtual office platform)
*Smallstep $26M Series A (automated certificate mgmt for DevOps)
*Jeli $15M Series A (incident mgmt & analysis)
*Cloudquery $15M Series A (OSS data integration for security/infra)
*Upstream $12.5M Series A (easiest way to create a DAO)
*liveblocks $5M Seed (APIs + tools to enable real time collaboration), boldstart co-led pre-seed as well in 2021
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We’re thrilled to have participated in all of these rounds to continue supporting our portfolio companies! - 💪🏼 Day one to exit: Huge Congrats to TopCoat on its sale to Snyk. It’s 🔥 to have one portfolio company buy another and even more awesome when the new data reporting product gets rolled out to thousands of enterprise customers. Also 👏🏼 to Sling on its sale to Toast, Coherent Path on its sale to Movable, and Tilt on its sale to Docker. We are 🙏🏼 to have partnered since day one with all of these companies and are excited to see these products add significant value to even larger customer bases.
- 🏗 ️From idea to product launch: New company launches out of stealth (all links to TechCrunch) include
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Protect AI (Security for AI & ML models)
Stellate (Content delivery network for GraphQL)
Steadybit (shift ⬅️ chaos engineering)
Dope Security (Secure Web Gateways reimagined)
CommonPaper (build, negotiate, sign deals in minutes using OSS contracts)
Easop (equity grant mgmt solution)
Tres (Treasury mgmt system solution). - 👩🏼💻 More amazing angels/advisors added to the boldstart family: We continued doubling down on our enterprise angel/advisor network bringing diversity and some of the best builders and doers in product, engineering, and sales to help our founders accelerate their path to product market fit with folks from Slack, Auth0, Chainalysis, Fireblocks, MongoDB, Datadog, and more…
- 🏕️ First bold.camp held for 0–1 developer first founders on west coast with more to come on East Coast and Israel in 2023. Here’s a great summary from our working sessions on Demystifying PLG.
Nothing like power of a focused community of developer founders: last week we hosted @Boldstartvc camp to demystify PLG + provide frameworks/hacks to go from 0-1.
— Ed Sim (@edsim) December 22, 2022
Here lessons learned from experts at cos @snyk @auth0 @BuoyantIO @D2iQ
Slides incl.https://t.co/CK12bsWr2F
If you’re a technical founder iterating on your next startup in developer tooling, crypto infra & SaaS reach out and DM boldstart or any one of us:
Ed Sim, Eliot Durbin, Shomik Ghosh, Ellen Chisa
Thank you!