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- RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖Week of 1/19/23
RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖Week of 1/19/23
Team RBV Open Deals, Portfolio Updates, Crypto News, & More
Joshua Howard
January 19, 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:
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
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.
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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
Hytopia migrating to Arbitrum
The open-ended game creation platform has decided to move out of the Polygon ecosystem and towards Arbitrum, a premier Ethereum L2. Spokesman and co-founder of Hytopia, ArkDev, went into detail about this significant change to their infrastructure, and what it means for users, developers, and stakeholders.
The decision was partially based in the Polygon Foundation’s decision to drop support for Polygon Edge, their in-house framework and toolkit for developing on Polygon. The loss of support pushed Hytopia into considering migrating to other ecosystems, and as Arbitrum has partnered with a great suite of infrastructure support and partnerships, this made for a natural choice.
One of the biggest changes users will see is a ~50% decrease in block times, making most any transaction noticeably faster going from a 1.1 second to a .25-.5 second space between blocks. In a game like Hytopia, this is a noticeable bottleneck that will reduce friction for in-game interactions.
For game publishers on Hytopia, they will also now be able to create an app-chain specific to their game. MetaFab is their game launch product, and now for games above a certain size that would otherwise just run slowly on Polygon, they can spin up an L3 under Arbitrum dedicated to their game, and even receive node rewards for running the validators for it themselves.
You can read more about their migration and the changes it will incur at this link: Blockchaingamer.biz
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Portfolio News
Among the protocols on the popular ETH scaling solution, Azuro’s betting protocol broke the top spot for daily fees
At $111k over the 24 hour period, they did more than the next two - Uniswap and Polygon itself - combined
Among other top spots for the chain, they also beat out AAVE, MetaMask, and Sushi Swap
Number of ‘Chainlets’ - app-specific sub-chains - deployed: 124
Number of transactions on the testnet: 11 Million+
Number of wallets generated: 1 Million+
The new software release is now live and on-chain, with a host of major improvements
Each user gets a wallet upgrade, previously requiring 10 $BLD, now free with their first interaction with an Agoric smart contract
The update also included enhanced support for IBC, the cosmos-native cross-chain message protocol
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🔔 Active Investment Opportunities:
Aetos: 3D interactive AI facilities management
Reduces the staffing needs for the multi-billion industry of facilities management with AI digital-twin management and 24/7 live facility data
300%+ ARR in one year; 84% gross margins; GAM of $3 Billion ARR
Invest alongside Tech Operators, Valor Ventures, Atlanta Seed Company, and more
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
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
Follow-On with the Mid-air touch technology- imagine a virtual handshake with Vision Pro
Emerge has developed a mid-air haptics for users to ‘feel’ objects in the virtual world
Contracts signed with Disney, Sony, LG; deals with HP, Tencent, and Meta in the works
Investors include Eric Schmidt's Family office, Soma Capital, M13, Vulcan Ventures
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
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