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- RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖
RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖
Open Deals, Portfolio Updates, Crypto News, RBV Fund I Closing & More
Joshua Howard
November 24, 2023
Welcome to the latest edition of the Red Beard Ventures newsletter, where we dive into exciting updates and insights from all over blockchain, frontier tech, and the angel investing landscape.
In this week's RBV Weekly Newsletter:
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!
We wanted to take a moment to say a big thank you this Thanksgiving!
Your support means the world to us, and we're grateful to have you on this journey with us.
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📣 As a reminder, Red Beard Ventures has a syndicate, fund, and a tokenomics accelerator:
The Red Beard Ventures Syndicate is stage agnostic and invests in Frontier Technology with a focus on Web3, Space, FinTech, Sports, Robotics, Biotech, and Climate. We invest anywhere between $100k - $1.5M.
The Red Beard Ventures Fund I invests $100k - $1M in Pre-seed and Seed blockchain-based companies.
Denarii Labs is a tokenomics accelerator in partnership with Horizen Labs Ventures, where we invest $100k into companies interested in designing and launching a token, over a twelve-week hands-on program.
In the latest update on the Denarii Labs accelerator, our founders dug deep into Market Makers; what they do, how they help, and more. Matt Engel, head of BD for Kairon Labs, marshaled the curriculum for this week and gave a comprehensive education into the world of market makers. These firms control the liquidity and bid activity for assets in a marketplace, making sure they stay available and stable.
Read more about the past few weeks!
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🚨 TL;DR: This Week in Crypto
This Week:
CZ steps down from Binance, pleads guilty
Ordinals, BRC tokens have second wind
Tether freezes scammer funds
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🪙 Crypto News:
Changpeng Zhao pled guilty to not maintaining a proper anti-money laundering program, among related charges
Part of the agreement is that CZ must step down from Binance
The nearly $4.4B settlement is one of the largest penalties ever obtained from a corporate defendant in the US
Working alongside DOJ investigators, Tether froze funds connected to Southeast Asian criminal organizations
The scams those funds were involved with were bad actors gaining the trust of a stranger to solicit investment into a phony exchange or business
Earlier this year, Tether also froze almost $1M at the request of Israel’s counter-terror bureau
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🗃️ Portfolio News:
Since the launch of the AI studio, 500k users have joined Limewire
This news comes at the same time as the acquisition of BlueWillow, a leading image generation model and the world’s 2nd largest discord community
Their SDK will make onboarding new front ends into their betting feeds and smart contracts much easier
With various utilities in this SDK, a usual week+ long integration now takes a few hours
Docs for live betting can be read on their docs site
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💸 NFT Alpha:
After raising $40M for the Blur ecosystem, the founder Tieshun Roquerre announced the formation of an L2
The reasoning behind launching the L2 - named BLAST - relate to staking yield, dApp performance, and a native stablecoin
The announcement thread can be read on the founder’s X page
These collections of inscribed satoshis have dominated after a resurgence
5.6M have been inscribed this November alone
The buyerbase for BRC-20 NFTs has expanded nearly 400%
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🔔 Active Investment Opportunities:
Versus Game: Gamified Ads using Gen-AI
This B2B tech helps media, publishers, and brands use generative AI to make interactive content
Eric Schmidt, investor and board member, said “This is the most powerful real-world AI application” he’s seen
Almost 1000 digital media partners including Forbes, USA Today, ESPN, ABC, Microsoft, and more
Emerge: follow-on with the cutting edge in virtual reality touch technology
Emerge has developed a mid-air haptics for users to ‘feel’ objects in the virtual world
They use precise ultrasound to create 3D forms
Past and current investors include Steel Perlot, Soma Capital, M13, Vulcan Ventures, and more
Oort: Decentralized AI-powered AWS
Also investing out of Red Beard Ventures Fund I, where we have committed $500k
Oort offers 80% savings, AI-powered smart search, and blockchain integrations
Their no-code LLM is able to act like an expert on any dataset available, with simple conversational commands
We are receiving a 1:1 Token warrant for our investment
Veremark: Global background checks for the remote-worker world
This Series B round is with Stage2 Capital, Samaipata Ventures, Triplepoint, and more
Veremark stores encrypted background check data on the blockchain as a verified digital credential
Experiencing massive growth and giant clients like McDonalds, Grant Throton, Pepsi, and more
Revenue for 2024 projected to be $9m, up from a projected $4.2M this year
Minima: the future of the “Internet of Things”
Minima is purpose-built for device-to-device or device-to-blockchain communication
This is the first solution that’s economical, scales well, and is technologically advanced enough to handle mass data through extremely small hardware
The IoT landscape is projected to hit $5,000,000,000,000 (five trillion) by 2030
IoT infrastructure has been lacking innovation, hindering this growth
Canva: deeply discounted shares in a quadruple-deca-unicorn
We are bringing this amazing allocation to our LPs at a significant discount
Last round valuation was $40B; these shares are at a 36% discount
Canva has significantly higher revenue than their main competitors
Millions of users and growing, adding AI tools, and more
Tactogen: Mental health medicine using MDMA therapy
Science is now learning of the therapeutic effects of MDMA, and Tactogen is developing non-psychedelic ‘enactogens’ that provide a more focused, gentle healing
Conservative estimates suggest up to 25% of adults could benefit significantly from MDMA therapy
First patent awarded in April, on the road to FDA approval
Investing alongside Lifeforce Capital, and co-syndicating with Gaingels
National Cycling League: an NFL-style fan-friendly facing format
NCL is a revolution (get it, like a bicycle) in a sport ripe for racing fans of all types
Expansion plan in place expected to generate $5.2M in revenue from 8 events
10 signed teams, 2 year broadcast deal with Warner Bros., and Discovery+ listing
Low CapEx model for a high participation sport is a recipe for success
The National Thoroughbred League (NTL): Pioneer of team-based horse racing
Invest alongside Red Beard Ventures as part of the 100% ownership of the New Jersey Horse Racing team.
Key figures include rappers Nelly and Rick Ross, NFL star Kayvan Thibodeux, the NBA's Danny Green and retired basketball player Baron Davis.
Revenue streams from league-wide, mixed, and local sources.
Upcoming launch in Nashville with a $500,000 race and a concert by Anderson Paak.
NTL incorporates Web3 concepts for NFTs, digital games, virtual experiences, metaverse activations, and DAO participation.
Tafi: The Global Leader in 3D Assets and Text-to-3D genAI
Largest commercial library of 3D assets in the world; customers include Coca-Cola, HBO, Warner/DC, Coinbase, and others
Their product DAZ 3D (link to demo here) creates ultra-HD fully compatible and customizable characters
Exclusive partnership with NVIDIA to train even greater AI capabilities
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
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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 had an incredible time at National Thoroughbred League SoCal Cup: Nov 11, Los Angeles CA - It was great to see so many of you there and to connect with the other NTL owners!
We hosted another Pickleball event in Santa Monica for Founders and Investors - Thank you to everyone who came!
If you are a founder and want to come to the next one RSVP here.
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🤝 We are hiring!
We are looking for part-time 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, Mitchell, and Lauren