Looking back at Eniac’s 2022

by Nihal Mehta and Anthony Ha

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!

We launched new projects, including a form where anyone can pitch Eniac for funding (recently streamlined for faster response times), plus an expanded version of the Eniac Network — our inner circle of entrepreneurs, executives, and experts who’ve agreed to support our founders.

We’ve organized more educational sessions for Eniac’s portfolio and broader community, including our virtual panel on how startups can survive and thrive in a downturn, a discussion with VSC’s Eric Gonzalez on startup PR, and Alloy co-founder Laura Spiekerman’s session on what she’s learned about go-to-market strategy. And of course, there was the time investor and hip hop legend Nas joined our Annual General Meeting.

Speaking of our portfolio, some of our investments were acquired this year, including Shine, Pulse, and Vence — the latter bought by Merck Animal Health in a nine-figure exit.

There were also some exciting personal milestones, and Business Insider even wrote an in-depth profile focused on Eniac’s origin story.

Most importantly, though, we’ve continued to invest in new startups at a steady pace. In fact, we’re proud to say that we’ve made 12 core investments so far this year, nearly as many as the 16 we did in the heady days of 2021. (And that number may go up — after publishing our 2021 year in review, we closed two more deals before the year ended.)

You may recall that Eniac announced a crypto investment strategy last fall. We’ve continued our on-ramp into the crypto market, shifting our focus from smaller learning deals (though we made a handful of those as well) to larger core checks, with web3 representing five of our 12 core deals. We’re excited about the range of our crypto investments — we backed startups applying a web3 approach to everything from the creator economy to developer tools — but that also means we invested broadly outside crypto, in areas like climate, e-commerce, and enterprise SaaS.

We can’t wait to see what’s coming in 2023. In the meantime, we hope everyone enjoys the holidays!