Blog

We’re pleased to share the news that our portfolio company Model-Prime has emerged from stealth and raised $3.3 million in funding from Eniac Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and Quiet Capital.

Founders Arun Venkatadri and Jeanine Gritzer were both veterans of the self-driving industry at companies like Uber, Aurora, and Motional. While there, they saw the challenge facing new companies that would have to build these robotics and autonomy data platforms and tooling from scratch.

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The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer — the world’s first non-mechanical, general-purpose computer — was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering on February 15, 1946.

John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert, the hardware engineers who designed the computer (known as ENIAC), have been justly celebrated as technology pioneers. Much less well known are the six women who programmed ENIAC and truly brought it to life: Betty Holberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman, and Frances Bilas Spencer.

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Our portfolio company Sutro officially launched to the public today — and it also announced that it’s raised $2.2 million in funding led by Eniac Ventures. (Check out the fundraising deck on Business Insider.)

Sutro is led by an impressive pair of founders: CEO Owen Campbell-Moore, who was previously a Product Manager at both Facebook and Google (where he co-founded and led the Progressive Web Apps team), and Tomas Halgas, who worked on machine learning at Facebook and co-founded Sphere (acquired by Twitter).

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When I look at all the startups I’ve built or backed during my career as a founder and investor, I’ll admit they can seem a bit disconnected, covering everything from social to robotics to genomics to gaming. But as I reflect on my investments, on my own startups, and on how I want to spend my time moving forward, I’ve realized that many of those seemingly disparate dots are connected through a concept that I’m calling foundational [open] ecosystems — and the companies they spawn.

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The Eniac team has grown again, with the addition of Sofia Badalameti, who will be working as chief of staff to Eniac co-founder Nihal Mehta.

Sofia comes from a family of entrepreneurs. It’s even something she studied at the University of Richmond — along with her B.A. in Rhetoric and Communication Studies, she minored in Entrepreneurship and Journalism. Her experience wasn’t limited to the classroom, either: While in school, Sofia also started a successful quesadilla-making business that quickly cornered the market on feeding hungry college students.

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This past week, I attended ETHDenver. While no single conference can fully encapsulate a space as broad as web3, it still offered an opportunity to confirm that web3 is alive and well, and to get a sense of what’s top of mind for builders and investors (and yes, Eniac is still looking at crypto deals). Here are four observations I took away from the event:

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The position is based in our NYC HQ and the opportunity to partner closely with our co-founder Tim Young. We are looking for a team member with a balance of hustle, passion for learning, and strong organizational and communication skills — someone who is ready to play a key role in serving the founders we work with, as well as the broader startup community.

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I’m excited to share the news that Eniac led a $3.1 million seed funding round in Attention last year, which was announced today in TechCrunch.

We love working with repeat founders — and in this case, Attention’s Anis Bennaceur (CEO) and Matthias Wickenburg (CTO) actually used to compete against each other at their respective startups Mixer and Swipecast.

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This has been a year of uncertainty, inside and outside the venture industry, but Eniac was as busy as ever.

For one thing, we made some exciting additions to the team, with Rifki Zable joining as our Vice President of Finance, and Monica Lim joining as an investor. Both of them have already made Eniac better in countless ways — and we were thrilled to get to know them outside of Zoom, since the Eniac team is back in-person in our New York HQ. We even hosted a few events!

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As a seed investor, I’m always thinking about how to find the next unicorn before they’ve even built a product. Recently, I’ve realized that I’m looking for a new category of founder, which I’ll describe as “low code, higher go-to-market” — founders who may not have exceptionally strong technical chops, but make up for it with their strength in areas like sales, storytelling, and fundraising, as well as deep knowledge and connections in specific industry verticals.

Of course, it’s always been valuable to have someone with those skills leading a startup. (And we’re grateful to Alloy’s Laura Spiekerman for recently sharing so many relevant go-to-market insights with our founders.) But in the past, those teams would still need a technical co-founder. Now, many of them can get started without one, even if they can’t code at all.

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