RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖Week of 1/27/23

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. 

—------------------------------------------------------------

📣 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.

-----------------------------------------------------------

RBV Media

In this week’s episode of The Girl’s Table, Steph Mui is the founder of PIN (Power in Numbers), a VC-backed company that enables communities of people (including people from Stanford, YC, Sequoia Arc, Coinbase, and more) to invest in startups together. She talks about how even while not being an accredited investor, PIN lets you invest in start-ups!

She's passionate about enabling more people to become founders and startup investors by increasing access and education with PIN. She also writes "Demystifying VC", a newsletter for founders navigating VC fundraises and angel investors wanting to learn about early stage investing.

She was formerly on the venture capital investing team at NEA and helped invest over $150M. 

—------------------------------------------------------------

RBV Spotlight

DELL and OORT release details on Japan market loyalty program

The partnership between our portfolio company OORT and Dell Technologies has not expanded to Japan, after successful launches in Canada and the United States in 2023.  Dell’s customers now are offered a special deal on OORT Storage through Dell’s customer base.  The goal of this partnership is to drive easy, low-cost, low-friction adoption to all the many enterprise customers Dell Technologies works with.

OORT Storage is a cloud solution geared towards high-speed applications, like AI generation, gaming, or DeFi.  AI applications especially require the kinds of speeds only OORT can provide through cloud, where a mass amount of data must be digested in order for something like a chatbot response to take a few seconds, rather than a few minutes.

Through Dell’s marketplace, customers can receive 10TB free data archiving for three months via their backup nodes, as well as $50 in credits for data migration.  The program became available in Japan on January 18th, with the US and Canada programs running since July of last year.

—------------------------------------------------------------

Portfolio News

Venus Aerospace partners with NASA to test engine

• The joint testing initiative was for the rotating detonation rocket engines developed by Venus

• RDREs use a sort of “gatling gun” of engines, where one is always firing while the rest are cooled

• This test resulted in 4 minutes of hotfire testing, shattering the usual 1-2 second run duration RDREs are usually limited to

GET Protocol releases staking yield for $GET pools

• As added incentive for stakers securing the protocol by staking their $GET, there are staking rewards on both the Ethereum and Polygon pools

• Approximately 33% of all circulating GET is locked in staking

• Between the two pools, the current annualized return for staking is about 14% APY

Alto launches new alternative investment category: fine wine and rare spirits

• The “Vint Futures and Casks Fund” bills itself as a non-correlated asset class with an average of a 15% return in the last 5 years

• The fund is composed of securitized offerings, from stores of wines chosen by 57 wine masters, to one-of-a-kind antique whiskies auctioned at Sotheby’s

• Vint Futures and Casks Fund raised $10M in capital an has closed on more than 90 deals

—------------------------------------------------------------

🔔 Active Investment Opportunities:

Rally: Re-cap Round for the Stock Market for Collectables

• The top name in fractional investing space is rebuilding their board and raising $10M at a $5M pre-money valuation (most recent raise was Series-B for $30M)

• Traction: $300M in partnerships in pipeline, 500k users, $60M AUM, and $3M projected revenue for 2024

• Backed by Rev Ventures, Social Leverage, Anthemis Ventures, Porsche Ventures, and MLB

• Link to invest 

Deep6 AI: Clinical Trials at Turbo Speed using AI

• The costliest and longest bottleneck of bringing new health treatments to market is being accelerated by their AI matching system

• By speeding this delay, Deep6 is able to save billions in revenue, massive drug cost increases, and potentially hundreds or even thousands of lives

• Backed by Point72, GSR Ventures, Samsung NEXT, 3M ventures, and more

• Link to invest

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

• 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

• Bitscraft, Delphi Digital, and Animoca Brands are all investing

• Token sale: SAFT, $100M FMV

• Link to Invest

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

• Link to invest

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

• Link to invest

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

• Link to invest

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

• Link to invest

—------------------------------------------------------------

🥳 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

—------------------------------------------------------------

🤝 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

—------------------------------------------------------------

Onwards 🚀 

Drew, Elana, Mitchell, and Lauren