Issue #6 - Two launches, one acquisition + new deals!
Hello 👋 and welcome to Issue #6 of Playbook Deal Flow!
Firstly apologies on my side for the long stretch in between issues. As many of you know, I’m juggling multiple hats and the last few months have been intense, but there has been A LOT happening that I can’t wait to share. It’s been especially busy for Playbook Angel Network portfolio companies. In the past few months alone:
We had our first acquisition! Steppen was our first investment last year and they just got acquired by US company Alta (The Australian)
Kismet launched and announced their $4M pre-seed round led by AirTree with other investors including Daniel Petre (AFR)
One Future Football (1FF) launched, completed season 1 and is about to launch into season 2 (going live tomorrow!). There has been a lot of press from some great publishers including TechCrunch and The Athletic, and It was also great to see the company featured as one of Australia’s top 100 most innovative companies by The Australian
We brought together a number of our portfolio founders and Melbourne based investors for our first two Playbook Angel Network dinners
We just launched our 7th deal to our angel investors (sneak peak in the memo section below 👀)
If you want to see/get first access to the deals I’m personally investing in, and invest into early stage startups alongside an incredible community of founders, operators and investors, you can apply to join the Playbook Angel Network below:
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 #6 of Playbook Deal Flow!
The Deal Room
A quick note on this section: Unless explicitly stated, I haven’t invested personally or through 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 #6 👇
Deeligence
Deeligence is an AI-powered platform for legal due diligence with the mission to be used by all M&A professionals from data room to close on every $10m+ deal globally.
🤔 The Problem: Due diligence is expensive, time consuming and manual. 39% of M&A lawyers agree it’s the most tedious part of their job.
🙌 The Solution: AI-powered platform that automates the due diligence process, allowing lawyers and clients to focus on getting the deal done quickly with less risk.
🔑 Key Team members:
Justin Hansky (Co-founder & CEO) - ex-M&A lawyer & MBA, Global Customer Success Team Lead (Law Firms) & APAC GM at legaltech scale-up.
Elena Tsalanidis (Co-founder & COO) - ex-litigator, Senior Operations and legal process / product expert at UK legaltech.
Luke Lewandowski (CTO) - 15+ years dev experience and 2x founder with AI experience, does technical DD for VCs.
🚀 Traction: The platform has gone live with 5 pilots including a high volume M&A firm and four large national / international firms.
😇 The Ask: Closing their pre-seed round with over 75% of the round already committed.
Brownee
Brownee is a platform that helps small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) become more successful by becoming more sustainable. Brownee flips the narrative and focuses on profit first, and reporting later.
🤔 The Problem: SMEs do not act on sustainability as they are focused on their core business and their bottom line. But if SMEs don’t act on ESG, they risk going out of business by being cut from large domestic and global supply chains, changing societal expectations and consumer behaviour.
🙌 The Solution: Brownee suggests material focus areas to SMEs for where to start, and provides automated recommendations for the best E, S and G action to take to increase both their profitability and their sustainability impact.
🔑 Key Team members:
Guido Toepfer (CEO) - 20+yrs building SMEs - with a sustainability mindset
Renate Crollini (CSO) - Envi. engineer with 8+yrs in sustainability consulting
Dr. Jill Rathborne (CTO/CPO) - Astrophysicist with 15+yrs in data/AI/tech
🚀 Traction: Beta testing the platform with 40 SMEs across three cohorts to iterate to an MLP. Aim to launch early 2024. Signed a contract with a lead partner to distribute Brownee to their network of about 65,000 SMEs
😇 The Ask: Raising a pre-seed/seed round to build out the product and team
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 👀.
Our favourite kind of deals are when you match an exceptional and experienced founding team with a large, audacious opportunity and our next deal hits both those criteria!
Through apps like Calm, the rise of personal tracking and wearable devices (projected 13.60% CAGR from 2023-2032) and increased popularity for podcasts like Andrew Huberman (now the #3 most consumed podcast by consumers in the US), there has been a significant shift in society as we focus more and more on health and well being.
The last 60 years of medicine has been about improving the Length of Life, the next 60 years will be about improving Quality of Life and we believe that this company will be the Preventative Health Platform at the centre of this change by democratising the health protocols and diagnostics currently only accessible to millionaires and pro athletes.
Not only is this an audacious opportunity to go after, but they are an exceptional founding team with a track record of building consumer companies with multiple exits including prior +$500m AUD exit.
On top of this, they launched their beta product and generated $50k revenue within 2 weeks and had to turn off sales to focus on delivering for early customers and to finalise their fundraise.
In short, we've been impressed by the whole founding team, the massive opportunity that they're going after and early signals of their operational expertise.
A European fund is leading this highly competitive first round. The team had to turn down several term sheets from VCs to keep this round to their limit and we’re delighted to have won allocation in their pre-seed round alongside some other great investors.
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)
Manufacturing design collaboration software startup pockets $3.8 million Seed raise (Startup Daily)
Recruitment marketing startup The Martec bags $8 million (Startup Daily)
Drone-based power line installation startup Infravision lands $36 million Series A (Startup Daily)
Eden Brew raises $24.4 million to bring animal-free dairy products to market (SmartCompany)
Battery recycling startup Renewable Metals charges up on $8 million Seed round (Startup Daily)
Angel syndicate backs Brisbane ESG retail platform (AFR)
Choir of angels lands on small business cybersecurity startup Apollo Secure in $600,000 pre-Seed raise (Startup Daily)
Grok Ventures backs renewable energy startup gridmo in $500,000 Seed raise (Startup Daily)
Aconex cofounder and Bluescope back $1.5 million Seed round for proptech software (Startup Daily)
Start-up that knows what your used car’s worth lands $7m (AFR)
Air traffic management platform lands $120 million (Startup Daily)
The Stash:
Each edition I’ll share a few resources that I found useful.
📰 VC news:
Cut Through Quarterly 3Q 2023 - Australian venture capital funding report (Link)
Aliavia closes $13.5 million fund for women-led startups in Australia and US (SmartCompany)
And that’s time on Issue #6! 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. 1302084) of GXE Fund Services Pty Ltd (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 GXE 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).