Pre-Seed Weekly Roundup (March 13th, 2021)

Want to make sure you stay on top of the pre-seed startup market? Good, because I am starting up a new segment on my newsletter called Pre-seed Weekly Roundup. I’ll cover a few interesting pieces of news + wins from my former podcast guests.

Startup Pre-Seed News

• Professor Scott Galloway raises $30M to build an online school that upskills managers.

• Gather, a virtual HQ platform, raises a $26M Series A from Sequoia, Index, Y Combinator and others. It’s worth noting, I invited them to come on my podcast in March…of last year :)

• Praxis Society is looking for more people to join their house network, with their most recent location opening in New York. Their CEO has been on the podcast, and you can listen to his ambitious vision here.

• Tinyseed raises $25M to back bootstrapped startups, which is interesting timing and IndieVC is now shut down.

• Here’s a wonderful thread on how breaking into VC isn’t really breaking into VC, written by Geri Kirilova.

• Here’s another great thread written by Chris Fralic on the journey from for Roblox, from seed to IPO. Great education for aspiring investors.

• First Close Partners backs 60 funds led by underrepresented fund managers, helping to widen access to capital for underrepresented funders and founders .

• Reconcile announces their most recent drop, which is a cashflow management platform for consumers.

• CashDrop, who is one of the hottest seed/A stage startups right now in the world, is hiring for a react engineer.

• Pipe raises $50M to disrupt venture capital. They raise from non standard sources, to stay aligned with their mission and vision with the right stakeholders on board.

Forward Thinking Founders Wins

As many of you know, I try to interview founders on my podcast before they find major success. When the founders raise capital, I also love to shout them out and cheer from the sidelines! In the last week:

• Stripe leads a round to back Safepay, with participation from Soma Capital, Mantis, and others. This is after Safepay got into Y Combinator the S20 batch. We interviewed Ziyad Parekh on FTF in January of 2020, before all of that. Congrats on the success!

• Chrissy Cowdrey raised her $1.3M seed round led by Active Capital, with participation from Hustle Fund, AdaptVC, and others. We interviewed Chrissy in April of 2020. Congrats on the raise!!

• Mainstreet raises a $60M Series A, led by Signalfire. We interviewed Doug Ludlow, their CEO, in September of last year. Check out that interview here. Go team!

• Zapier acquires Makerpad, marking their first acquisition ever! We interviewed Ben Tossell, founder of Makerpad in January of last year. Congrats on all the success, Ben!

Thanks for reading my pre-seed newsletter! Hopefully you learned something new. See you next week.