Issue #3 - We're back with new deals, funding announcements and exciting news!
Hello 👋 and welcome to Issue #3 of Playbook Deal Flow!
It’s been a while since the last issue and A LOT has happened since then!
Firstly, I’m very excited to share the next evolution of the Playbook brand with the launch of Playbook Ventures and our syndicate, the Playbook Angel Network.
The Startup Playbook Podcast started over 6 years ago on the principle of having successful founders, investors and operators sharing their journey and lessons to help the next generation of startup founders. We now get to take this one step further.
Playbook Ventures is a collective group of "friends and guests" of The Startup Playbook Podcast that have joined forces to invest in and support the next generation of startup founders.
We privately launched in May this year and to date, we have completed 4 deals (of which 2 are led by incredible female founders) and onboarded 40+ investors on our platform.
I'm also delighted to share that we have brought on experienced operator James Harrisson as our Investment Manager and have built a stellar advisory board of experienced investors in Jackie Vullinghs (Partner at AirTree), Wendell Keuneman (General Partner at Tidal Ventures) and Lauren Capelin (ANZ Ecosystem Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS)).
And finally, we are incredibly grateful to LaunchVic for selecting us as one of the recipients of their Angel Network grants. Through their support, we are able to scale our impact in supporting great founders and creating a pathway for angel investors to get started on their journey.
If you want to see the deals I’m personally investing in (sneak peak later in this newsletter 👀), and invest deal-by-deal into early stage startups alongside an incredible community of founders, operators and investors, you can apply to join the Playbook Angel Network below:
And if you are joining us for the first time, welcome! If you enjoy what you are reading, please consider subscribing to ensure that you don’t miss a future issue of the newsletter below:
Before getting into the meat of this newsletter, I wanted to share a disclaimer that this newsletter is not here to provide financial, legal or investment advice of any kind. All of the information presented in this newsletter comes directly from the founder(s) and you should always do your own Due Diligence before making an investment
With all that said, let’s get into Issue #3 of Playbook Deal Flow!
The Deal Room
Each edition I’ll share details of a few companies that are currently fundraising. If you would like more information or want to connect with the teams, hit the “request an intro” button…I always do double-opt in intros…
Here are the companies selected for Issue #3 👇
ReciMe
ReciMe is a cooking platform for anyone to discover, publish and monetise recipes.
🤔 The Problem: The problem is two-fold: (1) Cooking creators don't have the tools to monetise their recipe content. (2) homecooks are always asking the question: “What am I going to cook tonight?”
🙌 The Solution: ReciMe is a platform for cooking creators to publish and monetise their recipe content and for users to discover trusted recipes
🔑 Key Team members: The team is female-led and they’re all passionate homecooks. The 3 co-founders are: Christine Nguyen, ex-BCG; Ivy Nguyen, ex-NAB and Will Kent, ex-AMP Capital tech analyst
🚀 Traction: Since their launch in November 2021 they have scaled to 10k users, currently growing 50% MoM with 3k+ recipes on ReciMe, all user generated.
😇 The Ask: Raising $500k Pre-Seed on $3.5M pre-money valuation, received conditional pre-approval from the Alice Anderson Fund and have $100k in the round left. Min cheque size is $10k.
Bloom Impact Investing
Bloom is a Fintech startup that helps people invest to fight climate change
🤔 The Problem: Today, the average retail investor cannot invest in cleantech companies and clean energy infrastructure as they are restricted to wealthy sophisticated investors.
🙌 The Solution: Bloom has created a simple investment platform and a unique scientific investment methodology so that people can invest in clean energy projects and unlisted climate impact investments from $500.
🔑 Key Team members: Camille Socquet-Clerc: Co-Founder & CEO - 10 Years in Digital Marketing, Extensive Network in Cleantech, EX-eCommerce Manager of Michael Hill
Dr. Bertrand Caron: Co-founder & CTO - Full-stack Software Developer, PhD in Data Science, AWS /Cloud data architecture expert
Daniel East: - CIO (Ex-CIO at Future Super)
🚀 Traction: 160+ paying customers, $1,200 MRR with $1.3M FUM, +30% MoM in FUM
😇 The Ask: Raising $2M Seed on a $9.5M valuation - Prominent lead in Fintech is investing $500k and the existing cap table 500k so $1M is left to fill the round. Min cheque size is $20k.
Want to have your startup featured in a future issue of Playbook Deal Flow? Get in touch here
The Memo:
Each edition, I’ll go a little deeper into one company and this month our featured company is klikit. We’re extra excited about this one because they’re also our next Playbook Angel Network deal!
If you’ve ever walked into a restaurant and looked behind the counter, you’ve probably seen a mess of 8-10 different iPads with a bunch of cables tangled up. This is the current reality for restaurants who need to use multiple delivery aggregators (such as Uber Eats, Menulog etc) to ensure they get full coverage. klikit is software that allows restaurant kitchens to manage all their food delivery aggregators through one device and system.
But helping kitchens improve efficiencies is just the beginning. klikit intends to become the pipes and rails infrastructure allowing celebrities & brands to monetise their audience by creating virtual brands inside under-utilised restaurant kitchens.
From The Rock’s Teremana Tequila brand to the Kardashian’s Skims, there are many examples of celebrities and influencers leveraging their audience to launch brands. This process however comes with a tonne of overhead and costs to manage the process end-to-end.
YouTube star MrBeast recently launched “MrBeast Burgers” which went on to sell 1M+ units in <60 days post launch. This is an example of a well executed virtual brand, but it took him several months of preparation to get this brand off the ground.
We are seeing more and more virtual brand launches in the creator economy, and klikit is aiming to facilitate these in a frictionless way.
🤔 The Problem:
Currently, food delivery is not only not cool - but also highly broken. Operators need to manage multiple devices in store to account for all their delivery channels, while simultaneously being experts across the new marketing mediums of today; Google, Facebook, Instagram and now TikTok (body rolls just to sell burgers!).
🙌 The Solution:
klikit, is a software ecosystem that tackles all sides to the problem. They offer distributed SaaS that aggregates all your sales channels to a single device or POS, while at the same time uses the data to partner with celebrities and brands to enable their own fast food franchises at scale through their merchant network.
🔑 Key Team members:
Chris Withers (Founder, CEO): Former VP of Gojek (14B+ IPO), CSO of Pathao and Head of Growth for Uber Eats across Asia-Pacific.
Rita Chang (CMO): Former Under Armour, Nike and most recently the CMO at Alter Global, renowned Silicon Valley VC fund.
Mark Beaven (CCO): Previously Country Lead at GetSetup, and prior to that was CRO for Mentorloop - a Blackbird funded mentoring EduTech.
Stephen Tucker (COO): Previously Head of Operations APAC at Gemini, and before that Revolut - additionally rose through the ranks of Uber Eats to become Head of Global Product Analytics based out of SF.
🚀 Traction:
klikit launched in early March, and since then has expanded to 5 countries with more on the way. They’ve processed several million dollars and hundreds of thousands of orders for merchants and are in close to 100 locations across Asia.
😇 The Ask:
Closing a USD$6M Seed, currently oversubscribed and closing soon with a small allocation available via Playbook Angel Network.
The Folio:
Each issue I’ll share some recent funding announcements from the previous month (Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list)
Fintech Shaype raises $33M Series C (Startup Daily)
Victoria’s Alice Anderson fund backs female-focused crowdfunding platform Lift Women (Startup Daily)
Airwallex holds its valuation in raising another $160M for latest Series E extension (Startup Daily)
Malcolm Turnbull and Atlassian, Tesla and Canva bosses back solar startup in $21M Series B (Startup Daily)
Adtech startup TRENDii raises $2.9M in Seed round (Startup Daily)
Dietary needs app Foodini raises $700,000 pre-Seed round to go national (Startup Daily)
Real estate investment startup PropHero raises $8M Seed round (Startup Daily)
Wellbeing startup Sonder raises $35M Series B led by Blackbird Ventures (AFR)
HealthMatch raises $10M Series C led by Folklore Ventures (AFR)
Artesian makes first investment from its new female-led investment fund, deploying $3M into a clinical trials software company Evrima (AFR)
Former cricketer Kumar Sangakkara has secured seed funding for Behaviol, raising $US2.5M ($3.7M) to create a sporting metaverse (AFR)
Australia’s largest semiconductor maker, Morse Micro, has raised a $140M Series B funding round (AFR)
Kiwi employee experience platform Excellent raises $2M in Pre-Seed round (Startup Daily)
Medtech Nutromics lands $20.5M for wearable diagnostic device (Startup Daily)
Agtech startup Lleaf raises $3.5M to grow better plants (Startup Daily)
Customer data integration platform Dataweavers raises $5M led by OIF Ventures (AFR)
Proptech CIM raises $10M Series A (Startup Daily)
Marketing tech startup Livewire bags $4.7M Series A (Startup Daily)
Accounting software startup Thriday raises $6M led by NAB Ventures (AFR)
Online shopping start-up Checkmate raises US$5M (AFR)
Adelaide agtech Optomni raises $200,000 in Seed round to tackle food waste (Startup Daily)
Melbourne-based regtech startup 6clicks raises $10M to expand its worldwide customer base (SmartCompany)
The Stash:
Each edition I’ll share a few resources that I found useful.
📰 VC news:
Female VC leaders appointed as investments fall alarmingly (AFR)
OIF Ventures raises new $100m fund in 24 hours (AFR)
Telstra Ventures close $500m third fund (AFR)
VC investment falls off a cliff - for a second time (AFR)
New VC fund plans to help Aussie women founders access money for their businesses (SmartCompany)
Main Sequence Ventures is raising $300M for its third fund (AFR)
Former consultants team up to raise $30M for Azcende VC (AFR)
🎧 Podcasts:
Listen to my interview with Jax Vullinghs (Partner – AirTree) on valuations, IC and moats (Link)
📝 Blogs:
Interesting article on the 4 Signs of Founder-Market Fit (link)
Twitter thread on 10 resources that are useful for getting up to speed on VC and investing (Link)
And that’s time on Issue #3! Thanks so much for reading The Playbook Deal Flow and for making it all the way to the end.
I would love to hear from you to see how I can make this newsletter more valuable for you:
👂I would love to hear feedback on what you loved, what you wanted to see change/improve and what you would like to see in future issues of The Playbook Deal Flow. If you have a spare 3mins, I would appreciate it if you could fill out this brief survey.
👋 Feel free to reach out if you want to connect. You can find me at rohit@startupplaybook.co or on Twitter & LinkedIn
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See you soon for the next issue!
Cheers,
Rohit Bhargava, Playbook Deal Flow