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- RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖Week of 1/10/24
RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖Week of 1/10/24
Team RBV Open Deals, Portfolio Updates, Crypto News, & More
Joshua Howard
January 10, 2024
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:
📻NEW EPISODE of Red Beard Radio 📻:
In this first episode of the new year, Elana and Drew discuss their personal goals for 2024, what's in store for Red Beard Ventures this year (including the big RBV Summit in February), sourcing deals that will thrive in the upcoming bull market, and so much more! 2024 is bound to be a year full of deal flow, collaboration, and learning, so tune in and get ready for an exciting year of growth!
To sign up for the Red Beard Ventures Summit 2024, visit the event page. The two-day virtual summit taking place on February 6th and 7th, is a premier event in the Web3 and Frontier Tech space covering a wide range of sectors from blockchain and tokenomics to sports, AI, biotech, and more.
Join us for a weekly dose of investing knowledge and industry expertise.
Subscribe now! → @red-beard-radio
Red Beard Radio is Sponsored by Alto. Alto makes it easy for individuals to invest in alternative assets with their retirement funds through a self-directed IRA. Access private deals on Alto Marketplace, their new platform for accredited investors.
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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 where we invest $100k into companies interested in designing and launching a token, over a twelve-week hands-on program.
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RBV Deal Spotlight
Truflation: Investing in Tokenized Indexes Infrastructure
Inflation-linked assets in traditional finance are one of the biggest sectors by TVL; nearly $3 TRILLION is locked in inflation-linked bonds alone, expected to hit $5 Trillion of on-chain value by 2030. As the industry of tokenized Real World Assets (RWA) spools up into the financial powerhouse of tomorrow, we are seeking out the infrastructure that will make these dreams a reality.
Enter: TRUFLATION. Starting as a better source of inflation data, they have since gained viral media attention, become a preferred partner to Chainlink’s oracle network, and is quickly becoming the go-to source for custom index products.
Red Beard Ventures Fund I is investing $400k into this token pre-sale round, with great terms: 5% unlocked at Token Generation Event (TGE), and 95% daily vesting over 24 months.
Note: we are closing this investment early Friday morning, so if you have interest in joining this round, please invest via Red Beard Ventures Syndicate.
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Portfolio News
This monday, Gate.IO and BitGet will be listing $OORT for trading
Developers that were granted testnet tokens can exchange them 1:1 for the mainnet token
10% of the token supply, that going to investors, will have a four year linear vesting
In just a few days, 571 Worlds have been minted, with $324k staked
Each of these Worlds are owned by the community members, who can vote to allocate resources
A World is an encrypted social space for posting content, gating memberships by tokens, and holding a self-sovereign membership
Working together, the partnership is maturing the technology of Rotating Detonation Rocket Engines (RDREs)
The application of these rockets are expansive, and extremely necessary for near-earth planetary exploration
They have found that, entering the second year of their contract with NASA, Venus says to anticipate the technology to be key for hypersonic global travel
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🔔 Active Investment Opportunities:
Carro: Embedded Marketplaces for Influencers, Streamers, and Creators
Carro's platform allows anyone to sell products from the world's best brands without spending capital upfront, making inventory commitments, or handling fulfillment.
Rev to date, $2M; 3.x2 GMV growth Sept to Nov; partnered with 20k brands
Investing alongside PayPal Ventures, Alpha Edison, 11:11 Media, and more
Moviepass:The Relaunched Cinema Subscription Platform with Nearly 1M Waitlist
This series A is after the original founders repurchased the company post-acquisition
Investing alongside Animoca, Kelly Ventures, Caritas, and Sand Hill Angels
Est. $100M+ ARR sitting on waitlist for full relaunch
Discord: 175M MAU Communication Platform with IPO Looming
We are acquiring shares at an implied valuation of $6.5B, 56% discount to previous round
Discord previously rejected an acquisition offer for $12B
Expected to cross $640M revenue this year
Exclusive deal with gen AI company Midjourney, only available as a Discord app
Kraken: Secondary Shares for one of the Largest, Oldest Crypto Exchanges
Trusted by over 9M traders worldwide, they are #2 in total spot volume in the US
Shares are trading at implied valuation of $2.1B, a 15x upside against Coinbase
Kraken holds 47% of the top 10 altcoin pair market depth
They are also launching their own own bank, announced in March
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
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
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:
Events are a great way to stay informed in our industry, so we are planning for a very full 2024. 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!
RBV Syndicate members are invited to attend Red Beard Ventures Summit 2024!
This will be a summit of RBV portfolio and ecosystem companies, to educate, popularize, and give better familiarity to the cutting-edge tech and Web3 startups we have helped fund or worked with closely over the years. It will include a special Demo Day for the five cohort companies in the Denarii Labs token accelerator program, to showcase the new token projects they have built alongside our mentors and tokenomic experts. More information can be found at the Summit Event Page
Here is a partial list of the speakers attending:
Sandy Carter - Unstoppable
Will Weinraub - Crypto Toys
John Crain - Superrare
Roham Gharegozlou - Dapper Labs
Jerome Faury - Immersve
Amir Sarhangi - Super Mojo
Dirk Lueth - Upland
Kevin Beauregard - Atmos Labs
Robby Yung - Animoca
Adam Struck - Struck Capital
Ben Lakoff - Ben Lakoff
Sohrob Farudi - Fan Controlled Football
Jeri Ellsworth - Tilt 5
Asad Malik - iRocket
Peter Weijmarshausen - Humane genomics
Sam Clark - Terran biosciences
Ted Moskovitz - Texas Ranchers - Major League Pickleball
Randall Lane - NTL (National Thoroughbred Racing League)
Eric Satz - Alto
Matt Mireles - Oasis
Maliha Akhtar - Alethea AI
This year we will also be attending ETH Denver on February 29 through March 3.
Red Beard Ventures ETH Denver 2023 dinner
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🤝 We are hiring!
Red Beard Ventures is seeking a Venture Capital Intern to join our team. The intern will focus on identifying and evaluating potential investment opportunities, writing deal memos, and helping with the operations of the syndicate and fund. This internship spans 6 to 12 months, requiring at least 20 hours per week of remote work. For those interested in this position, here is a link to our application.
We are also 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