Crew Capital's Community Newsletter #18

Welcome to the February edition of our Community newsletter! We have some exciting announcements to share including a new seed investment, a new Series B financing at one of our portfolio companies, and an amazing interview with a cofounder of UiPath. Read on for more!

Recent Investments

Seal Security: This month we congratulated Itamar Sher, Alon Navon, Lev Pachmanov, and the entire Seal Security team on coming out of stealth and announcing their seed financing! We're incredibly excited to be investing in Seal’s $7.4M seed round alongside our friends at Vertex Ventures Israel, PayPal Alumni Fund, and CCL.

By harnessing the power of generative AI, Seal Security is the first to offer a unique remediation tool that streamlines and automates the patching process for open-source vulnerabilities, shifting the MTTR (Mean Time to Remediate) from months to mere hours. Seal's automated pipeline approach enables organizations to remediate over 95% of critical and high severity vulnerabilities identified in the last 5 years. Seal's patches are fully compatible, which minimizes the need for extensive updates and testing, simplifies developers' tasks, and effectively addresses the vulnerabilities that concern security teams most. Crucially, the patches are open source, continuously maintained, tested, and verified for production use on GitHub.

?? Check out our blog post that highlights our investment thesis, and read more about the company from TechCrunch!

RobCo: The RobCo team led by Roman H?lzl, Paul Maroldt, Constantin Dresel secured a $42.5M Series B financing round led by Lightspeed. We are thrilled to continue supporting RobCo's mission to revolutionize robot automation for SMEs across Europe together with Sequoia Capital, Kindred Capital VC, and Promus Ventures!

RobCo specializes in creating adaptable robotic kits for SME manufacturing tasks like machine handling and palletizing. These kits allow for easy assembly and customization through the RobCo Studio platform, enabling remote configuration and management with a digital twin. Its low-code system reduces the need for complex programming, featuring a modular design with future-proof interfaces and an innovative sensor/software layer for hardware longevity.

?? Check out more about the company and details about the financing round here!

Content from the Crew Collective

Founder Insights: We recently sat down with Lavinia Cojocaru, one of the original members of the co-founding team of UiPath, to learn more about her career, life, and experience building UiPath. We discuss the journey of building a business from zero to IPO, the opportunities and challenges around international expansion, and the mindset and culture shifts that take place as a startup scales to thousands of employees.

Lavinia is one of the most successful women and technologists in the European tech ecosystem. As a co-founder of UiPath, she helped build one of the most successful technology companies to ever come out of Europe. Despite her success, Lavinia remains grounded, humble, and kind. Her story is not just about building a massively successful startup, but also about the power of staying true to one's values in the process.

A short preview:

As much as anyone would strive for comprehensive documentation on a project, it’s nearly impossible during hypergrowth; documentation can become outdated quickly if it’s not kept concurrent to changes. “Teams must interact, become acquainted, and build a rapport, which fosters natural collaboration,” Lavinia said. “We emphasized having people work from different locations and encouraged team members from various places to meet in person for brainstorming sessions. Even in a tech-focused world of asynchronous work, spread across the globe, the human element still makes a significant impact on the quality of work to Lavinia. “The key lies in encouraging open communication through internal tools and supporting contributions from all team members, irrespective of their rank or role,” she said.

?? Check out the whole interview!

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What have our start-ups been up to this month?

• Subskribe, the adaptive CPQ, billing, and revenue platform for modern SaaS companies, announced their latest product release, Subskribe Sales Room,?an intuitive and interactive digital sales room experience where clients can collaborate on deals, showcase a branded experience, share key collateral, measure engagement, close quickly with e-signature.

• Common Paper, the contract collaboration software designed to improve the process of commercial contracting, released the Common Paper Benchmark Report, built on data from over 1,000 companies and insights from more than 45 legal experts, reveals key information for founders and GTM leaders navigating the complexities of commercial contracts. Learn about median time-to-sign durations—3 days, 1 hour for SMBs and 4 days, 9 hours for enterprises—and how contract negotiations vary by company size. The report covers Cloud Service Agreements, Design Partner Agreements, and Mutual NDAs, providing a comprehensive look at common contract terms to help you secure faster signings.

• Trickest, the crowd sourced platform designed to reduce online threats for automated offensive cybersecurity, announced this month a series of new updates that will empower their business users to execute workflows through the company's self-hosted machines, improved user management, secure data handling, and integration of custom tools and scripts.

Job Openings

We're always on the lookout to connect exceptional candidates with our portfolio companies. To learn more about the opportunities, reach out to our Head of Platform, Sonia Damian at [email protected]. If you want to explore all available job opportunities within our portfolio companies, please visit our career page.

• Seal Security, the first generative AI solution for automated, scalable open source vulnerability remediation is looking for their first Account Executive based in US or Israel.
• Rillavoice, the leading conversation intelligence software for outside sales is looking for a Partnership Manager, Software Engineers, Client Growth Associates, AI/ML Engineers and Talent Acquisition Partners based in New York.

• Aktos, the operating system that powers the $18B Credit Collections industry is looking for Senior Full-Stack Engineers (ideally backend leaning). The team is split across LA, NYC, and Canada, and is open to different geographies for this role, though time zones in ET or PT are preferred.
• Stealth company ?leading the transformation of how research is created and consumed, leveraging cutting-edge voice capture and AI technologies, is looking for a Founding Full-Stack Engineer based in NYC.

Quote of the Month

"Don’t take the acceptance or rejection from investors too personally.?Try to keep perspective and focus on the underlying economics in the business you’re building, because that is what really matters.?If you’re solving customer problems, the signal that will confirm that is the response from your customers. It doesn’t really matter how good you are at fundraising.?Ultimately if you don’t provide value to your customers the business won’t work out."

Jake Stein, CEO of Common Paper in Lessons from a repeat fou