Issue #5 - New deals, updates & join our angel investor dinner!
Hello 👋 and welcome to Issue #5 of Playbook Deal Flow!
First of all, it’s been a crazy week or so in startup land with the situation unfolding at Silicon Valley Bank. No big analysis from me on the situation - there are plenty of experts with deep dives into this - but there are a few steps that founders and investors are taking given the continued uncertainty around the situation so feel free to reach out and chat if I can help!
Now back to our regular programming and I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone that read our last issue, we were delighted to make some introductions and join the dots between investors and startups featured in the newsletter.
For the Playbook Angel Network we closed an investment (the company we featured in the Memo section last month) and last week launched our latest deal to our Private Angel Network community (some details on this are in this month’s Memo section below).
If you want to see/get first access to the deals I’m personally investing in, 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:
Next week (Tuesday 21st March) we will also be hosting our first Playbook Angel Network Dinner in Melbourne. It’s going to be a private dinner for investors from our network & founders from our portfolio companies, all under one roof over some great food and wine.
We would love to open up a spot or two for members of our Playbook Deal Flow community so if you’re interested in joining us on the night, drop your details here and we’ll be in touch if there’s room left.
And finally 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 #5 of Playbook Deal Flow!
The Deal Room
A quick note on this section: Unless explicitly stated, I haven’t invested personally or through the Playbook Angel Network in these companies, the goal of this section of the newsletter is to share some great companies I’ve come across who are currently raising.
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 #5 👇
Intrigue Media
Intrigue Media is a next-gen media company designed by diplomats that provides expert but irreverent takes on global affairs.
🤔 The Problem: More has changed in the world in the past year than the last 30, and we all need to understand the 'so what' behind our changing world. But decision-makers and investors lack good content that examines global affairs issues at the intersection of tech, geopolitics, and business in an engaging and entertaining way.
🙌 The Solution: Intrigue Media makes geopolitics accessible and informative. We produce B2C and B2B products on global affairs issues at the intersection of tech, business, and geopolitics. There is a US$1.3B addressable market in the US, and US$12.5B addressable market globally.
🔑 Key Team members:
John Fowler (Co-founder & CEO) - ex-Diplomat & lawyer
Helen Zhang (Co-founder & COO) - ex-Diplomat & Googler
Jeremy Dicker (Managing Editor)
The founders are all former diplomats who have been behind the scenes of global affairs - from Washington, Beijing, Tel Aviv, to Mexico City. No other competitors have this deep bench of expertise.
🚀 Traction: 20x growth in the last 12 months in terms of B2C subscriber numbers and advertising revenue.
😇 The Ask: Currently raising a funding round to hire staff to support growth and improve tech stack.
Gold
Gold is a next generation software delivery platform that helps software engineering teams build, test and deploy code to production on-demand in minutes—not hours or weeks.
🤔 The Problem: Shipping is the heartbeat of software companies. The highest performing teams ship on-demand in under 15 minutes. They can try more ideas and features, fix bugs faster, and are proven to have better reliability and stronger security. For more than 80% of companies surveyed (DORA ’22) it takes over a week to deploy new code. When it takes that long to deploy code, issues and workarounds compound to make deploying new code a rare and risky procedure. The market for DevOps/CI/CD tooling is expected to grow from around USD $7 billion (2021) to USD $57 billion by the end of the decade.
🙌 The Solution: Gold combines an intelligent build tool that engineers use on their machines every as part of software development, with a Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment (CI/CD) platform. Instead of brittle script-based pipelines that the industry currently uses, Gold is smart enough to know what work needs to be done, and what can be reused. With a deep understanding of the software deployment workflows, and support for major programming languages, very little to no configuration is needed. We can then run hours of work in minutes, ensuring we can deploy reliably tested code, saving engineers and their teams days to weeks every year.
🔑 Key Team members:
Owen Kelly (Founder) — over a decade of experience in software engineering. He’s built teams, mentored engineers, and led technical and product design. For the last decade he's helped engineering teams from startups to enterprise with projects, cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines and process.
🚀 Traction: Our prototype yarn.build has been installed over 14,500 times, 100% growth year on year. We are in conversation with a few excited companies to secure 3-5 Design Partners to build our MVP of Gold.
😇 The Ask: Raising their pre-seed round to hire two senior engineers to build out the MVP working closely with our Design Partners.
Want to have your startup featured in a future issue of Playbook Deal Flow? Get in touch here
The Memo:
In this section I wanted to give a sneak peak of the next deal we’ve just launched through the Playbook Angel Network 👀.
We were first introduced to the founder (ex-Google) last year and were immediately impressed with his team and progress.
They’re initially going after a $10 billion global market and this startup has a world class team (ex-Google, Luminosity, Uber, Deliveroo & Airtasker) well positioned to execute. But this is just the beginning, capturing this initial market puts them in the perfect position to streamline the rest of the $2.5 trillion p.a larger industry they belong to.
Due to the value add of our network, we’ve been given allocation on their last rounds valuation before they raise their seed round in 2 months time…
If you want more details on this deal, or want to invest through our network, you can apply to join below.
The Folio:
Each issue I’ll share some recent funding announcements from the previous month (Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list)
Canva’s Cameron Adams backs Tasmanian carbon accounting startup Sumday in $2M Seed round (Startup Daily)
Presentations startup Chronicle banks $7.5M from Accel & Square Peg to take the fight up to Canva and Powerpoint (Startup Daily)
Brands collaboration marketplace Partnar banks $200k Seed round from Skalata (Startup Daily)
Investment insights platform NetworksX lands $610k Seed round (Startup Daily)
Queensland job matching startup Getahead raises $1.38M pre-Seed round (Startup Daily)
Kiwi brand tracking startup Tracksuit bags $6.8M Seed round (Startup Daily)
Workplace coaching platform Fingerprint for Success raises $6.5M (Startup Daily)
The Stash:
Each edition I’ll share a few resources that I found useful.
📰 VC news:
The latest on Silicon Valley Bank (TechCrunch)
Blackbird adds three new partners with its $1B fund (AFR)
Sydney VC ignores tech tremors with $100M raise (AFR)
Xero founder and experienced VC unveil new deep tech fund (AFR)
VC fund to back start-ups in ‘critically important national challenges’ (AFR)
And that’s time on Issue #5! 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 at the next issue!
Cheers,
Rohit Bhargava, Playbook Deal Flow
This information is provided by Playbook Ventures Pty Ltd (ACN 661 102 825), Playbook Ventures Pty Ltd is a corporate authorised representative (CAR No 001302084) of Startup Galaxy Financial Services Limited (ACN 162 966 609, AFSL 460870)This information has been prepared by Playbook Ventures Pty Ltd and it is for general information purposes only and is not intended to promote or recommend any particular product or services offered by Startup Galaxy or Playbook Ventures Pty Ltd. This information does not take into account the objectives, financial situation or needs of any investor. Before making an investment decision, investors should read the relevant offer document and (if appropriate) seek professional advice to determine whether the investment is suitable for them. This information is intended only for wholesale clients within the meaning of s761G and s761GA of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth).