We’re excited to share that our portfolio company Boxed has just gone public via a merger with Seven Oaks Acquisition Corp and is now trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “BOXD.”
Boxed is the second Eniac investment (after Owlet) to go public this year through a SPAC merger.
MoreEniac has been investing in sustainability for over a decade. It is an important space for us and a lifelong personal passion of mine. Over the years, we’ve found that our thesis in the space — and the investments we make as a result — often extend beyond the scope of just “climate.” I thought it would be helpful to explain our thinking, and why we’ve refined our investment thesis to center around sustainability rather than climate-tech.
MoreShould founders try to find out who’s investing in their investors? Here at Eniac, we believe they should — in fact, Hadley recently tweeted that he’s been “very surprised” that founders don’t bring this up more often. And all the responses made us realize it’s worth discussing the topic in more depth.
One thing that became clear is that there’s still a lot of confusion about how the VC model actually works. Contrary to what many people seem to believe, VCs aren’t just wealthy individuals who invest their own money. They do generally put money into their funds, but the vast, vast majority comes from outside investors called limited partners (LPs) — in other words, VCs have to go through the pain of fundraising themselves.
MoreWelcome back to Ask a Seed VC, Eniac’s advice column on startup fundraising and investing. Today we’re answering a question from Electra Coustoftides, co-founder and CEO of Xworks:
While boostrapping and investing in ourselves over the last year+, we have also been applying to early stage, angels, VC’s, accelerators etc. who all say they are interested in investing in early stage companies however most of always the feedback returns as “too early for us.” (We also understand this could either literally mean too early or code for we are not interested.) However, our questions are the following:
We’re excited to share that Propelo just announced its $12 million Series A.
We first invested in the company’s seed round in 2019, back it was known as LevelOps. But we haven’t said much about the investment publicly until today, when — along with revealing the series A — founder/CEO Nishant Doshi and his team also publicly launched the Propelo platform.
Like so many of our seed deals, we backed the company when it was pre-product and pre-launch. The reason was simple: Nishant. He’s a repeat entrepreneur, and when his previous startup CirroSecure was acquired by Palo Alto Networks, he became the larger company’s vice president of engineering.
MoreOver the past 10 years, Eniac Ventures has prided itself on staying ahead of the most important platform shifts. In fact, we like to think we’ve done our part to fund those shifts, with early bets in mobile, cloud, and AI. Now we’re making a commitment to the next big computing platform — blockchain technology.
MoreThe Eniac Ventures team has grown again!
This year, we’ve already announced hiring three new investment professionals — Dan Jaeck, Tim Wang, and Lacey Wisdom. (We’ve made content and operations hires, too.) Each of them has quickly become an integral part of our diligence and decision-making process, and they’ve just been joined by Claire Rafson.
MoreWelcome back to Ask a Seed VC, our advice column on startup fundraising and investing. We’ll be doing something a little different today: Answering a few questions that were submitted via Twitter.
The first question comes from Howard Stark: How do you determine your “ask”? That number can range from $200k for a bare bones attempt where one mistake can kill you to $1M for a comfortable shot at your goal with room to maneuver. Or should you fit your ask to each VC’s preferred check size?
More“Katz is a legend.”
That’s how Eniac Ventures co-founder Nihal Mehta explained his eagerness to meet with Michael Katz eight years ago, and why he didn’t hesitate to invest in Katz’s then-new startup mParticle.
After all, the man had already taken his first company Interclick public, and it was ultimately sold to Yahoo.
Fast forward to 2021 and mParticle has just announced a $150 million Series E led by Permira’s growth fund. So we asked Katz to join us for the latest episode of Eniac Extras.
MoreMore exciting news from the Eniac portfolio: Alloy just announced that it has raised $100 million in Series C funding — and with a post-money valuation of $1.35 billion, it’s officially a unicorn!
To learn more about Alloy’s success and how the company might evolve in the future, we interviewed CRO Laura Spiekemerman and CTO Charles Hearn (they founded Alloy with CEO Tommy Nicholas), along with Eniac co-founder Nihal Mehta.
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