Ubiquity Ventures

For the first time ever, I just gave my "Becoming a Master Fundraiser" talk outside my own portfolio! Every September I deliver it behind closed doors to Ubiquity Ventures CEOs at our annual summit. Yesterday, thanks to Tim Brown (Allbirds co-founder, now a partner at Icehouse Ventures), I shared it with a room of New Zealand founders at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The talk exists because the obvious answers to fundraising are usually the wrong ones. Three examples: 1) Fundraising is sales. The person across the table is quietly asking whether backing you will get them promoted. Hand your champion the ammunition to convince their colleagues. 2) Skip the breakthrough. The best fundraises start from pent-up customer demand, and the winning pitch starts and ends with customer impact, using the smallest amount of technology necessary to deliver it. 3) Announcing the valuation you want does nothing. Attractive valuations come from competition, and competition starts at two term sheets. Run your process so offers arrive at the same time. So why open the vault for this group? New Zealand has been one of the most productive startup ecosystems of my career. I backed Rocket Lab in 2014 at <$50 million valuation, and it now trades at a market cap near $50 billion. I backed Halter in 2018, now a $2 billion company. Two of the world's most consequential deeptech companies, both born in New Zealand. I don't expect they'll be the last! Thanks for organizing Tim Brown -- and great to see this group of New Zealand entrepreneurs punching far above their weight: Lucy Pink, Brooke Roberts, Leighton Roberts, Eric Laakmann, Danny Purcell, Jessica Venning-Bryan, Shaun Quincy, Zarina Alexander, Joshua Nuu-Steele! And the amazing team from Icehouse Ventures: Robbie Paul, Mason Bleakley, Steph Benseman More behind-the-scenes founder guidance like this on my Substack. Subscribe link in the first comment.

We ❤️ nerds and nerds aim for mastery:

Had a blast with my Strut Consulting crew this week in San Francisco — strategizing how to take Ubiquity Ventures to the next level. Their help nailing the foundation of finance, operations and more helps Ubiquity to focus on the real stuff: nerding out with technical founders as they turn their dreams into reality. Great to see you Lauren McDavid Victor, Elizabeth Medina, Kasper Ciszek. And congratulations on Strut’s 10 year anniversary Kristen Ostro and Nicole Fuller

Amazon Web Services (AWS) features Halter in their latest video:

What advice would you give a student who wants to start a company? In our latest Ubiquity University video, BusRight founder Keith Corso makes the case that college is the best time to do it. He built a venture-backed startup with real customers before graduating from Northeastern. A few of his takes: - The safety net is strongest while you're in school. No mortgage, no dependents. The real risk is waiting until it's gone. - Pitch competitions are the cheapest capital you'll ever raise. Keith collected $75K with zero equity attached. - Student goodwill has an expiration date. Doors that open for "a student doing research" close once you have a title and a company email. Full video in the comments. #UbiquityVentures #BackedByUbiquity #founders #startups

Learn more about Eclipse Space and how co-founder Kyle Leveque thinks about the opportunity for sovereign-owned satellite communication constellations in our latest post below!

Behind every Ubiquity founder is the Ubiquity Extended Team, 50+ operators who have built in the real physical world and roll up their sleeves alongside our companies. One of them is Matthew Brown, former VP of Finance at Tile, where he learned just how different hardware economics are from software. He brought that playbook to Ubiquity Ventures-backed Halter and its CEO Craig Piggott in its earliest days. Inventory, tooling, margins, cash tied up in things you can hold in your hand. Matt had already navigated those traps, so Halter got to skip the lessons that usually cost hardware startups real time and money. That is the difference between advice and experience. Our Extended Team has built the hard things before, so our founders do not have to learn every lesson the expensive way.

A pharmacy that fills and verifies prescriptions without a pharmacist on site. That's Queue. More than 4,000 pharmacies closed last year, one in four pharmacy jobs sits empty, and even the big chains lose money on the prescriptions they fill. Queue is building the first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy to fix all of that. The system already supports 250 of the most commonly prescribed medications in the US, has secured a major national pharmacy chain as a customer, and delivers prescription fulfillment at up to 96% lower cost than a traditional pharmacy. The founders: Nick Desai, a repeat healthcare founder who raised more than $165M for his last company, Heal. Joshua Liu, CTO, who built hard things at Tesla and Zipline. They know the regulatory weight behind every prescription and the engineering it takes to automate it safely. We co-led their $13M seed round with AlleyCorp, alongside Riot Ventures, House Capital, Grep Ventures, and Banter Capital. Full story in the comments. #deeptech #robotics #ubiquityventures #seedstage

A country that wants its own satellite internet has had two options. Build tens of thousands of satellites, a megaconstellation only a superpower can afford. Or rent from Starlink and run its national infrastructure on someone else’s network and terms. Eclipse Space found a third path. A dedicated constellation, a fraction of the size and cost of Starlink. One that the customer operates and controls. Co-founders Derek Huerta and Kyle Leveque are exactly the kind of founders we look for. Derek spent more than seven years at SpaceX building the satellite payloads behind Starlink, including leading the team behind the phased array antennas that connect those satellites to the ground. Kyle has been part of the space community for years, and our team has known him through that world for more than a decade. Together, they built Eclipse to bring megaconstellation technology to countries and carriers that want to own and operate their own satellite networks. Today, Eclipse makes its public debut, and we’re proud to be early investors alongside our friends at Space Capital and Tectonic Ventures. Read the full story in the comments. #deeptech #space #satellites #ubiquityventures

🚀