I’m super excited to share we closed our Seed+ round of funding for Diem and as part of that, we’ve allocated some of this raise for our community to invest on the same terms as our venture capital partners!! ?????You can see the news featured in Fortune by the awesome, Emma Hinchliffe, this morning.
I’m particularly proud of this fundraise, not because the market in 2024 was hard (it was very hard), but because I had to fundraise and close this round while recovering from a very bad concussion (a journey i’m still on 13 months+ post-accident!) Upon reflection, I realized I actually cannot remember a lot of the conversations I had and spent most of the raise in a huge amount of pain, with a very dimly lit B&W screen, to the point that I couldn’t see who I was talking to a lot of the time ?? Needless to say, it was not easy.
But! On the more positive side, enabling our community (in-app and beyond) to invest is something I’ve wanted to do for years—I’m a strong believer that the people helping to shape this new internet should be owners in it too. The link to co-invest is here: https://lnkd.in/e6xDG5y9
The article touches on the growth we've seen amidst the Meta Policies/TikTok band/Trump inauguration––all of which are causing people to seek alternate internet platforms that they trust to keep them and their data safe. The article also features some updates I’m really proud of that we released to the app on Inauguration Day. A few of those include:
?? Updates to anonymous mode to protect searches looking for information on things now more at risk of subpoena (eg. reproductive health, gender affirming care, sexuality & marriage equality).
?? Updates to our privacy policy to reflect our company’s commitment to rigourously resisting any subpoena for a user’s personal data. We already separate identity from content in our database.
???? Updated abortion resources in search results, including a map view of state rights and providers when asking related questions. Lots more to come here!
Finally! Very excited to have welcomed some awesome new investors to Diem, including: Precursor Ventures (Charles Hudson), Alumni Ventures (Lucas Kirshenbaum Mason Hale), Swizzle Ventures (Jessica Kamada), Rogue Women's Fund (Caroline Lewis), Gaingels, Otherwise Fund (Tracy Chou) + angels including: Dan Shipper, Cheryl Kellond ??, Jill Soley, mallory contois and more via Play Money!. Joining our long-term partners at Stellation Capital (Peter Boyce II, Rhian Horton), Acrew Capital (Maitree Mervana Parekh, Vishal Lugani), Flybridge (Chip Hazard), X-Factor Ventures (Jules Pieri) & Techstars (Jenny Fielding).
Co-invest here: https://lnkd.in/e6xDG5y9
Read the article here: https://lnkd.in/eFybRbfM
Here’s to building a more inclusive internet, together ??
#internet #community #searchengine #ai #socialmedia
