2021 In Review: 15 New Investments, 13 States, and 60% female or minority founders
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2021 was another challenging year for all of us. Despite the continued disruption to all of our lives, VC continued its tear reaching new highs in terms of funding and valuations. We are extremely excited by this continued momentum and believe that we are only in the early innings of continued growth and disruption from emerging technology companies.
Last year, we saw nearly 3,000 companies and had 1250 formal applications (up 15% from 2020) through Wendal (our proprietary AI platform). Wendal acts as our initial analyst and automatically feeds us companies that fit our model and we are likely to write checks to.
Out of the 1,250 applications we ended up investing in 15 companies (1.2%). The 15 companies came from 13 different states (including 2 provinces in Canada). These deals ranged from Halifax all the way to Los Angeles. We also made 6 follow-on investments into existing portfolio companies.
In addition to unique geographic footprint of our investments, we have a much more diversified founder base than average Venture Funds. Of our 15 investments, 60% of our CEO-founders were either a woman or minority, more than 8x higher than the VC average. This was not something that we set out to accomplish, we believe it was merely a bi-product of our data-driven approach.
In addition to meeting and investing in amazing entrepreneurs, we had several new developments for us here at Connetic:
- Launched our Venture Partner Program
- Expanding our Scout Program
- Launched a new business vertical (Retail Sales) focused on helping scale CPG portfolio companies
- Passed 90 portfolio companies
- Launched The Aggregate Podcast
- Starting leading pre-seed and seed deals
- Passed 10,000 TeamPrint…
