Looking back at 2018
After taking a handful of days off at the beginning of January to recharge batteries we carved out some time to look back at 2018 and boy what a year 2018 was! In a 60 seconds summary: we invested in 6 new portfolio companies, had 1 exit, welcomed amazing new follow-up investors in our portfolio and moved to a new office. Also, we had to write-off one portfolio company, may you rest in peace Lesara (we will spare your time by writing the 100th article about it, there is enough material in the media).
New investments
Together with EQT Ventures we invested in Wandelbots, which raised a EUR 6m Series-A. With their unique approach to training and programming robots with human movements aided by AI, Wandelbots is working on democratizing robotics by making their training and set up accessible to non-experts.
We are extremely eager to see what the future holds for them and how they will continue to revolutionize robotics in the upcoming months and years.
Along with other international investors including Western Digital Capital (US), Ventech (France) and Shenzhen Capital Group (China), Paua took part in the USD 10m Series-A of Codasip, the leading IP-provider and tools vendor for RISC-V processors. RISC-V is an open source processor architecture introduced in 2010 at the University of California Berkeley and supported by those companies focused on enabling processor innovation.
We are very proud to back a company that is envisioning the democratization of preventive healthcare in corporations. Also, we are stoked to invest for the first time with the health tech team of Earlybird! Rolf wrote a great post on Bodylabs, check it out. This is yet another investment in Munich, Bavaria (right now the second biggest city in our portfolio, with the potential to be #1 soon)
There is no secret about it, we love Pipedrive and we are proud to have backed the company 4 years ago. We even use it for our dealflow ! When we heard that their long-time, all-star and standup comedian CMO Andrus Purde was starting his own company we got immediately excited. We took on the role of lead investor and were joined by multiple business angels in a pre-seed round raised by Outfunnel. Outfunnel is a SaaS marketing automation tool focused on SMBs solving the problem of data silos in marketing and sales.
Phase
We love teams with great ambitions and Nick and Vlad for sure have one. They are on a mission to turn upside down digital design and liberate designers from code. We backed them with a pre-seed round and are happy to be part of their journey. While the team is busy cooking their product why don´t you join their Slack community and have a look at the Phase Magazine?
Askby
We met Hans and Saju when they used to lead the Analytics team of one of our portfolio companies and since then kept in touch and followed their entrepreneurial journey so when they told us about their NLP research idea we naturally got interested and are happy to support them in their new adventure.
Follow-up rounds
Our existing investments kept busy as well and we were delighted to welcome several fantastic new follow-up investors in the portfolio!
Exit!
We are delighted that our portfolio company Homeday was able to get on board strategic investors of the calibre of PurpleBricks and Axel Springer! We feel that they will be able to support and take Homeday to the next level much better than we ever could. We wish the team best of luck going forward!
2019…now what?
We look at 2019 with much hope and determination. Our goal is very simple: we want to find great engineers and we want to help them build B2B tech giants. In particular, we are super excited about robotics, smart factories, industry 4.0 and machine learning. If you are an engineer with big dreams write us a small email :) -> federico@pauaventures.com
