Welcome to MFV Partners' Fall 2021 newsletter! Last quarter has been very busy for us with new investments, our first exit and huge milestones for our portfolio companies. As we near the end of our Fund I, we are more than convinced and excited about the landscape of opportunities in deep tech. We are doubling down on our focus on disruptive deep tech companies looking to transform large industry verticals.
New Investments
Akridata is an edge-to-core video data platform to ingest, manage, understand, search and track video data to efficiently deploy deep-learning AI models. We are delighted to join Accel, Telesoft and others in the company’s $15M Series A financing round. Read why we invested in Akridata here.
Ati Motors is an Autonomous Mobile Robot company; The company builds autonomous industrial vehicles that can move payloads up to 1 Ton in factories and warehouses. We joined the company’s Pre-Series A investment round with Blume and Exfinity Ventures.
Portfolio Updates
PsiQuantum is an optical Quantum Computing hardware company that uses particles of light as quantum elements. PsiQuantum is developing a scalable Quantum Computer with more than 1 Million Qubits targeting wide variety of applications.
PsiQuantum raised $450M in Series D financing led by BlackRock and others at $2.7B pre-money valuation. Read the WSJ Coverage of the company.
Our portfolio company, TwentyBN, and their video understanding platform were acquired by Qualcomm. TwentyBN team will continue their work in Qualcomm to bring their technology in mobile phones.
We congratulate the TwentyBN team on the acquisition and wish them good luck. And this marks the first exit for our Fund I.
Agility Robotics develops Humanoid Robots with arms and legs that can work with humans and in human spaces. Agility’s flagship robot, Digit, is deployed across a variety of indoor and outdoor applications in logistics, warehouses and delivery.
Agility recently showcased some of the capabilities and use cases of their Digit Robot and was covered on CNet.
MFV Insights
Deep Tech Opportunity
One of the pervasive myths about deep tech is that you can’t build large companies in deep tech. That unicorns and big assets can only be built in software or consumer products. We wanted to debunk this myth for good. We compiled a list of deep tech companies that have passed $1B in valuation in the last 5 years. We found about 120 recent unicorns in deep tech with a combined value of $463B - that’s right, nearly half a trillion dollars of value, already created in deep tech.
Well, the other myth is that it takes a lot of capital and requires a long time to build a deep tech company. Yes, some deep tech companies do take years requiring lot of capital. Though that’s not the case with most deep tech startups. We analyzed these 120+ recent unicorns to figure out how much capital and time they required to get there. The results reinforced what we knew from our experience - that deep tech startups’ capital and time requirements are on par with other sectors.
50% of the deep tech unicorns took about 5 years and $115M of capital to get there. And 2/3rds of them took less than 7 years and about $150M of capital. Now, that’s not too much capital or too much time by any stretch of imagination!
Portfolio Summary
Boostup is the first data-led sales intelligence platform bringing together multimodal information across all conversational, CRM, activity, engagement, and time-series data in enterprises.
Boostup raised Series A round led by Canaan Partners - Coverage on Venturebeat:
SUN Mobility is the leading provider of universal energy infrastructure and services to accelerate mass electric vehicle usage.
Rescale builds industry’s first fully-managed high performance computing solution with hardware and software intelligence to automate and optimize compute-intensive workloads.
Analog Inference builds ultra low power AI processor providing the industry’s highest AI performance at the lowest power. Analog Inference’s products are built on their pioneering work on deep sub-threshold analog-in memory computation.
Summary Analytics, spun out from research at University of Washington, Seattle, uses mathematically proven AI techniques to bring large datasets down to size through summarizing and prioritizing without losing fidelity