GFT Ventures Q1 Update
Welcome to the Q1 2022 newsletter from GFT Ventures! We hope you will benefit from our fund updates and portfolio company highlights, as well as our overall industry observations and thought leadership exchanges. Please feel free to share our newsletter with your colleagues and friends using the “Share” button at the bottom of this post. Any additional questions or comments may be directed to team@gft.vc. And you can always visit our GFT Ventures website to learn more about us.
Sharing Our Progress to Date - A Note from Our Founders
We’re extremely pleased to report that 2021 turned out to be an incredibly productive first year for the Fund! We met, and quite frankly exceeded, even our most aggressive expectations.
Most notably, the Fund has now raised over $75M in closed and committed capital. Commitments are accelerating, and we now anticipate that the Fund will quickly exceed our initial $100M target. If you were thinking about deploying capital towards the Fund, now would be an ideal time.
We have now closed four fantastic startup investments to date, each one sourced through GFT’s extremely proprietary deal pipeline. And we should be able to share news of our fifth investment very shortly. As veteran operators and ecosystem builders, we bring not only deep technical expertise, but also a broad and robust network of potential partners, customers and co-investors to our portfolio companies. The result is that GFT is quickly developing a reputation as the “go-to” early stage funding source for entrepreneurs building solutions based on AI, Data Science and Blockchain platforms - and our deal flow clearly reflects that.
The growth opportunities ahead of us in our core focus areas of frontier technology are nothing short of staggering. We love what we do, and are so excited to share with you our passion to support the world’s best and brightest frontier technology entrepreneurs, solving the world’s hardest problems for the largest markets.
Best regards,
Jeff Herbst and Jay Eum
Founding Managing Partners, GFT Ventures
Featured Portfolio Companies
GFT Ventures led Addressable’s Series A Round
What it does:
Addressable is an automated marketing platform that helps brands connect with their customers through handwritten letters and notes. Leveraging AI and data science techniques, it turns direct mail marketing into a full stack SaaS with audience targeting, personalization, baked-in attribution, and automated note-writing. The company is currently generating significant revenues, and early adopters include real estate agents who are looking to supercharge their outbound marketing campaigns with personalized notes that deliver 10x the response rate of traditional mail.
Why we found it exciting:
With CCPA and GDPR blocking the use of cookies online, and ROI on paid customer acquisition continually decreasing, there is an extremely large unmet need for new, unregulated channels to reach customers offline. Customers can now leverage Addressable to target audiences offline, through the delivery of personalized messages via automated handwriting technology, and subsequently track the attribution and effectiveness of their campaigns. The company’s long-term vision is to create “physical cookies” by collecting customer information across various neighborhoods and building a large proprietary database in the physical domain, which will inevitably become valuable to companies across multiple industries.
GFT Ventures is thrilled to partner with Addressable on their journey to become a category-leader in automating the direct mailing marketing space.
GFT Ventures in the Spotlight
NFT Startup Unblocked Raises Seed Round at $90 Million Valuation from Tiger Global, Dapper Labs, Jay-Z
GFT Ventures’ portfolio company Unblocked raised a Seed Plus round of $10M at a post-money valuation of $90M led by Tiger Global Management. Founder Harrison Wang discusses the details here.
Figment Accelerates its Leadership Position in Web 3 with $110 Million Series C Fundraise
GFT Ventures’ portfolio company Figment announced a $110M Series C fundraise at a $1.4B post-money valuation. The round was led by Thoma Bravo and it further cements Figment’s position as one of the world’s largest blockchain infrastructure and services providers.
GFT Ventures co-hosts Innovators’ Night at CES 2022
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, GFT Ventures co-hosted an extremely successful and well-attended Frontier Technology Innovators Night! We partnered with SK Hynix, a highly valued strategic LP / investor in GFT, to produce the event.