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- RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖
RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖
Open Deals, Portfolio Updates, Crypto News, RBV Fund I Closing & More
Joshua Howard
March 15, 2023
By now, you’ve likely heard of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and the uncertainty it’s caused in the Web3 world. Red Beard Ventures understands the concerns that have rippled through the financial ecosystem, and have carefully separated the doomsaying against the facts. As a trusted and innovative firm, we want to take this opportunity to reassure you that we and our portfolio companies remain strong, stable, and committed to a bright future.
It is events like this that truly highlight the unique value that DeFi and decentralized tech brings. The risks involved that lead to these liquidity crunches exist only in traditional finance, where everything that would be on-chain and publicly audible is hidden and ‘trusted’ to be done right. Thankfully, our robust infrastructure, diversified holdings, and proactive risk management strategies have allowed us to navigate these challenging times with confidence, ensuring that we continue to support our partners and foster the growth of groundbreaking web3 technologies. We were lucky enough to avoid becoming a creditor of SVB, and though we reached out to our portfolio with a helping hand, the few that were affected are now whole again.
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🚨 TLDR: This Week in Crypto
Bank runs cascading effects felt throughout industry
Bitcoin hits 9 month high
Shanghai update for Ethereum live on testnet
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📣 As a reminder, Red Beard Ventures has both a syndicate and fund:
The Red Beard Ventures Syndicate is stage agnostic and invests in Frontier Technology with a focus on Web3, Space, FinTech, Robotics, Biotech, and Climate. We invest anywhere between $100k - $1.5M.
The Red Beard Ventures Fund I invests $250k - $1M in Pre-seed and Seed blockchain-based companies. Our 2nd and final close will be March 31, 2023.
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🔔 Active Investment Opportunities:
GET protocol: The Premium NFT Ticketing Solution
GET has been building NFT ticketing since 2016
They have a full range of ticketing products for event holders, from self-service to full concierge, and also whitelabel solutions
Issued nearly 3.4 Million tickets (1.7M in 2022 alone), over 17k events
Investment includes a token grant AND discounted token purchase rights
Colossal: A Real-Life Jurassic Park
Colossal is using genetic engineering to clone extinct species
The Woolly Mammoth is set to once again walk the Earth in 2027!
Their technology of reconstructing ancient DNA to the point of cloning is revolutionizing the biotech field
This is their series B, and we are co-syndicating with our friends at C3
They have signed ten LOIs with zoos for paid exhibits, with a projected $500M in yearly revenue
Simply Eggless: The Future of Egg Alternatives
Simply Eggless is the second-largest producer and supplier of plant-based eggs globally, with a revenue of $2M in 2022
Their products are sold in over 2.8k stores in North America and the company is looking to expand to 1k more stores, serving their massive popularity among Gen Z and Millennials
The main ingredient used by Eggless is lupin bean, which offers high protein, excellent baking functionality, and is environmentally friendly
The competitors in vegan egg alternatives all fall behind Simply Eggless, which has a much more versatile and shelf-stable product
Emerge: Real Touch Feedback in Virtual Worlds
Featured in the World Economic Forum and invested in by the best of the best
A16Z, Soma Capital, Eric Schmidt, and other industry leaders are in this round or converting their SAFE
This series B round is at a great valuation for how much the company has done, and is accelerated by a deal with Disney and Star Wars for a VR game Spring ‘23
Knights of Degen: Co-Founded by Drew Austin! Web3 Sports & Gaming Ecosystem + $10M in Sales + Acquired League DAO Defi Fantasy Protocol
KoD is building a meta-game for sports betting fans that rewards degen activities, from betting, to fantasy gaming, to building as a DAO contributor.
Assets of KOD include fantasy gaming software, bet2earn protocol, mobile application, media network, p2e gaming assets and teams, professional sports ownership stakes, nfts, and more.
The KOD Inc. cap table will be allocated 30% of the Degen Token market supply.
BoostVC (Coinbase, Etherscan, Alta, Wyre) is leading the round w/ participation from RBV Fund I
Seed, $30M Post-Money + Token
Loupe: Digital Video E-Commerce Infrastructure Enabling Real-Time Shopping of Sports Cards and other Alt Assets. $37M GMV in First 18 Months
Loupe is a new card-collecting experience like no other! It's a unique, innovative sports card collectorverse that combines e-commerce, streaming, and community into one platform
The platform allows users to buy packs, watch live openings, connect with other collectors, and participate in a growing community of rapid collectors.
In 2022: $45M GMV is projected
More than 50% of Loupe sellers do >$500,000 in sales; 12 sellers have surpassed $1M in sales
Series B, $65M Post-money Cap
Blocklords: GoT Meets Axie - Revolutionizing Play-To-Earn Gaming
Blocklords already has 120k pre-registered for their play-to-earn game
The medieval-based game allows players to craft their narrative while simultaneously earning cryptocurrency for tasks they complete within the game (Play-to-earn model).
Blocklords is focusing on delivering value to the user first to build up the user base and ecosystem first - This approach seems to be working by their massive sign-up and connection numbers
Money earned can be used to progress in the game or traded on crypto exchanges.
Bitscraft, Delphi Digital, and Animoca Brands are all investing
SAFT, $100M FMV
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🥳 Upcoming Events:
In-person events are a great way to stay informed in our industry, so we are planning for a very full 2023. We would love to hear about any other conferences you will be attending this year, so please let us know as we are still planning our event calendar! We have provided our tentative list for 2023 below:
NFT LA
SXSW
NFT NYC
Consensus
VeeCon
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🎙️ New Podcast Episode:
In this week's episode of The Girls Table, Elana Dickman, also known as TradingFemale is joined by Jeff Morris Jr. who is the founding partner of ChapterOne. Jeff began investing in 2016 as an angel and a scout for Index Ventures. He was a seed investor in Dapper Labs, Compound Finance, The Graph, Dharma Labs (acq. OpenSea) and more.
Prior to VC, Jeff was the VP of Product and Revenue at Tinder. In the role, he led the revenue team to the #1 top grossing app in the App Store (($20M to $1.2B ARR) and managed the business from the early days of monetization through the IPO.
Watch the Latest Episode Here: https://youtu.be/xiDXvqU4SRI
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🪙 Crypto News:
“They’re out of control” - Brian Quintenz
Comes shortly after Leticia James, NYAG, alleged ETH was a security in KuCoin suit
Industry voices are coming to support a bipartisan legislative solution
BTC hit $26k shortly during Tuesday
Some see this as opposition to the banking system as a safer custody
Silvergate, SVB, and other crypto-friendly banks have been under extreme pressure from US officials
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🗃️ Portfolio News:
Brackets can now be minted directly to the blockchain, and players get rewarded for it
Creating a tournament with 10 or more entrants will get an automatic 1,000 DGEN added to the prize pool
The brackets come just in time for March Madness, a massive event in the KoD community
One of the top crypto podcasts had Ram Ahluwalia on to discuss the SVB collapse
The self-described “Elder Millennial” brought his expert options to help explain the situation facing banks, crypto, and the VC community as a whole
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💸 NFT Alpha
Launching on VeVe digital collectables app
The Cookie Monster collection will have 5,555 editions, for $60 each
Meta once pitched NFTs as part of their ‘metaverse’
Announced in a Twitter thread Monday, the plans for an ability to connect wallets to Meta services is being shelved
This comes as Mark Zuckerberg announced 2023 as the year of “Efficiency” for Meta
Symbiogenesis’ official website will launch March 17
The game will be split into six chapters, and each character NFT will be sold as the chapter is released
The teaser movie can be seen HERE
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🎉 We had a successful first close for Red Beard Ventures Fund I, and started receiving commitments towards our second and final close. We would love to talk if you are interested in learning more about the fund, you can reply back to this message to schedule a time to speak with the team.
Below we have provided some additional information about RBV Fund I:
Red Beard Ventures Fund I is a full-stack web3 fund investing across blockchain consumer applications, infrastructure, gaming, the metaverse, and DeFI in both equity and tokens and Pre-Seed through Series A
Fund I closing March 31, 2023
We have completed 15 deals, deploying $6.5M in capital
All LPs in the fund will have their carry reduced by 50% (20% reduced to 10%) on any investments made via the syndicate going forward
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🤝 We are hiring!
We are looking for syndicate vertical leads in the following categories - if you are interested please reach out and we can discuss the opportunity in greater detail:
Biotech
Space
Robotics & Automation
Climate
Fintech & SaaS
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Onwards 🚀
Drew, Elana, Whit, Mitchell, and Lauren