VU Venture Partners

Congrats to EarthGrid PBC on winning the Startup World Cup. EarthGrid is using plasma to dig tunnels 100x faster and 1/10th the cost. VU Venture Partners is proud to be an early investor in EarthGrid, going after one of the biggest market opportunities in the world for creating the underground infrastructure for water, electricity, data, and transportation.

?? Exciting News: Wegrow has raised €7M ?? I’m thrilled to share that Wegrow has secured €7 million in Series A Funding, led by Nauta with support from Wille Finance and our fantastic investors at Shapr Ventures, ScaleFund, VU Venture Partners & she1K. After moving from the corporate world to the start-up scene, I’m proud of how the Wegrow platform is reshaping the way leaders like Mondelēz International, Bayer, Campari Group, HP, Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, and Henkel share and scale best practices. With this funding, Wegrow will focus on: - AI-Powered Efficiency: Sharing best practices in under a minute! - Boosting ROI: Elevating client ROI from 10x to 30x! - Expanding Horizons: New developments for finance, tech, and more! If you’d like to learn more about how Wegrow is revolutionising best practice sharing, I’ll be in Japan on 17 October 2024 and Singapore on 23 October 2024. Let’s grab a coffee! ?? Thanks for being part of this journey! #Wegrow #Productivity #ScaleSmart #BestPractices

?? Looking for New Startup Investment Opportunities: Q4 Kickoff! ?? We're looking to invest in 2-4 companies this quarter, from Pre-Seed to Series B stage companies, across verticals and geographies. If you're a startup founder and meet the below criteria, we want to hear from you! Apply Here: https://lnkd.in/gz2XU4hS Learn more about our Global VC Fund, VU Venture Partners: https://lnkd.in/gABScqde ? Honest SAM Calculations: Bigger the better! Our average portfolio company has a SAM of ~$60B-$70B, but smaller SAMs are OK too— but only if you have a strategy to achieve mass market penetration. SAM = # Potential Customers x Avg. Revenue Per Customer. ? Unique Approach: Show us how you do things differently, such as how (not what) you provide the solution, unique business model, unique channel strategy, unique value prop of the solution, etc. ? Fast Mass Market Adoption: Do you have a clear method to achieve mass market growth in a short period of time? We’re looking for companies with strategies that scale fast and large. ? Multiple Unfair & Sustainable Competitive Advantages: What you got? First to market...first mover advantage...no thanks. Fast follower...with enlightened approach...yes please! ? Magnitude of Improvement: Are you solving problems in a way that’s significantly better than the status quo? Quantify it: Zero to 1? or 10x-100x+ better, faster, cheaper, or all three! Whether you're pre-Product/pre-Revenue (nothing is too early for us) or already in Growth Mode (nothing has too much traction for us to consider investing), we’re here to help you scale your company 20x - 100x+ (fyi - That's also our target return). ?? If this sounds like you, submit your pitch on our website and let's get started! We're gearing up for our Q4 startup meetings and can't wait to hear your story. ????

Are you looking to raise funding for your startup? ?? This is your chance to get direct answers from a top-tier investor! Join us for a live Q&A with J. Skyler Fernandes, a seasoned investor and Founder & General Partner at VU Venture Partners, where you'll learn about: ?? Key metrics investors look for. ?? How to make your startup attractive to investors. ?? The best funding sources: Angel Investors, VCs, grants, and loans. Don't miss the opportunity to ask your questions! Register now [?? in the comments]

I’m incredibly proud to share that I was recently featured in The New York Times! It’s been an incredible journey raising over $20M for AOA Dx to advance ovarian cancer diagnostics, but the article also touches on some of the tougher realities of fundraising, especially for female founders. “Female-founded start-ups received 7 percent of pre-seed and seed funding, the earliest funding a start-up raises, in 2023, up from 5 percent in 2015, according to the data platform Crunchbase. For women-founded businesses seeking investments past a Series B round, typically the third funding round, the share of venture capital dollars contracted to 1 percent from 2 percent over the same period, according to Crunchbase.” While we’ve been lucky to have amazing support from many investors who truly believe in our mission, there’s still a long way to go to make sure more female founders have the same opportunity to raise the capital they need—especially beyond the early stages. The system needs to change, and I’m determined to help make that happen. Big thanks to Good Growth Capital (Amy Salzhauer, John Friedman, Samuel Scofield), Y Combinator (Surbhi Sarna), Labcorp (Megann Watters, Christina Dixon Smith), RH Capital (Alice Zheng, Elizabeth Bailey), Avestria Ventures (Linda Greub, CFA, MBA, Tracy Dooley MD), Astia (Victoria Pettibone), The Helm (Lindsey Taylor Wood), Adaptive Capital Partners (Shi-Ying Lau 刘诗莹, Rosalind Tan (陈燕晴)), VU Venture Partners, LongeVC, Gore Range Capital, Joyance Partners, Pioneer Fund, AlleyCorp, FemHealth Ventures, Emmeline Ventures, Catalytic Impact Foundation for your belief in us and for helping move the needle with your dollars. Let’s keep pushing for more opportunities for women founders to raise the big rounds and build transformative things! Thank you Nell Gallogly for telling this story.

Big News: Wegrow secures €7M Series A to revolutionize best practices sharing & scaling!??? We’re excited to share that Wegrow has raised €7 million in Series A funding! A huge shoutout to Nauta for leading the round, with support from Wille Finance and our existing investors Shapr Ventures, ScaleFund, VU Venture Partners, and she1K. Our platform is already transforming how industry giants like Mondelēz International, Bayer, Campari Group, HP, Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, Henkel, and Suntory share and scale their best practices in marketing, sales and supply chain departments. This fundraising will now help establishing Wegrow as the global leader on the topic through 3 key priorities: ?AI-Powered Efficiency: We’re integrating cutting-edge AI to slash the time needed to share best practices to under one minute and help teams to find solutions to their business challenges in seconds. ?Boosting ROI: We will measure and amplify productivity gains, aiming to elevate ROI from 10x currently to 30x for our clients. ?Expanding Horizons: New customized developments are on the horizon for finance, tech, production, R&D and HR departments, to drive ROI to more areas of your business. Dive into the full story and what’s ahead in our PR announcement. Thanks for being a part of our journey! #Wegrow #Producivity #ScaleSmart #BestPractices

Congrats to EarthGrid PBC, a VU Venture Partners portfolio company, on this big announcement and milestone! EarthGrid Announces Groundbreaking Joint Venture with EnerTech, a KIA Entity, to Deploy $18B in U.S. Underground Utility Projects. EarthGrid has developed a disruptive tunneling technology using plasma to create underground tunnels 100x faster and 1/10th the cost! Tunnels can be created in various sizes for utilities (Electricity, Water, Data), transportation, and underground building infrastructure. The plasma effectively turns earth into lava and slices through like soft butter! Read Press Release: https://lnkd.in/gbDen4BK?

Exciting Milestone: Bonded, VU's Investor Syndicate, has grown to over 5,000+ accredited investors across angel investors and family offices! A 2x growth in the past 6 months from 2,500+ to 5,000+ investors! If you're an accredited investor, join Bonded. There is no cost to sign up: https://lnkd.in/d5pFi2XK. Select your preferences and invest across Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Real Estate opportunities. Get access to proprietary deal flow and co-invest with top tier funds. Each year we curate and select ~15 venture capital opportunities and 4 real estate private equity opportunities. Opportunities are sourced from over 20,000+ deals per year, due diligenced by our global VC/PE fund team of 70+ investors, and hyper curated at a ~0.1% selectivity (~20 investments / 20K opportunities)! Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/dSYXVtBw

Congrats to Touchcast TM1 Model Beating GPT-4o! Touchcast today unveiled the TM1, a Level 2 reasoning AI metamodel powered by Agentic Pipelines as a Service (APAS). This advancement in accuracy is complemented by the lowest inference cost on the market, positioning TM1 as the definitive solution for advanced AI workloads. Touchcast is a VU Venture Partners portfolio company focused on the AI Generative Web and Multi-Modal Content. Learn more:

??Here in Singapore to admire Atomionics, a revolutionary AI quantum sensor platform for 3D mapping underground - offers unprecedented accuracy and efficiency at 10,000x better resolution, 20x faster, and 1/10th the cost. ??Dreaming big isn’t always the norm in Asian society. Visions like these can be fragile without the right support, and brilliant ideas can be stifled without sufficient room for trial and error. But who says there can’t be a $100B mining company that doesn’t do mining? Behind this humble lab door, something extraordinary is unfolding... ??And this is just the beginning. The galaxy is the limit for you guys, Sahil Tapiawala. Excited for what’s to come and privileged to be part of and support the ride. “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” - Eleanor Roosevelt #Quantum #AI #DeepTech #DualUse #FutureOfMining #EnergyTransition #ResourceExploration #Moonshot #DreamBigAimHigh #Venture #Sustainability #Impact #Singapore SGInnovate SEEDS Capital IQT (In-Q-Tel) PASPALIS VU Venture Partners