AV 2025 Holiday Gift Guide

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November 23, 2025

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5 min

Give innovation.

We’re pleased to present our community with a selection of innovative products and services from some of our 1,000+ portfolio companies. We hope you and your loved ones enjoy a wonderful holiday season.

Scroll down to browse our gift ideas, or jump to a category that interests you: apparel, beverage, beauty, education, entertainment, food, fitness, home, health, kids, lifestyle, pets, travel, or vehicles

Apparel

Featured Portfolio Company: Rhone

Rhone designs and develops high-performance activewear. The company engineers clothing for men and women in technical fabrics and styles that are also office-appropriate, letting them transition smoothly from work to workout.

Rhone

AV lead investor: Blue Ivy Venture

Quince is a direct-to-consumer retailer that partners directly with manufacturers, allowing it to offer high-quality essentials like apparel and home goods at prices significantly lower than traditional luxury brands.

Quince

The brand keeps prices low by cutting out the supply-chain middlemen, while partnering only with factories that meet or exceed global guidelines for workplace safety and equitable wages.

AV lead investor: N/A

Pair Eyewear is a personalized eyewear brand that gives its customers the ability to easily and affordably customize their glasses.

Pair Eyewear

Its first-of-its-kind, two-part design is comprised of a “base frame”resembling traditional glasses and a variety of easily attachable and interchangeable “top frames” that users select to match different moods and outfits.

AV lead investor: Blue Ivy Venture

Unspun has developed a 3D-weaving technology that is versatile and fast.

Unspun

The company has created the 3D printer of textiles that can weave clothing at more than four times the rate of current methods, and it works with a variety of material inputs.

AV lead investor: Bascom Venture

Thousand Fell is a sustainably sourced line of sneakers that are designed to be both recyclable and biodegradable.

Thousand Fell

The company offer sneakers for both men and women that are stylish, environmentally friendly, and comfortable to wear, with a breathable liner.

AV lead investor: Nassau Street Ventures

Beverage

Featured Portfolio Company: Heywell

Heywell makes low-sugar, adaptogen-infused sparkling waters that support energy, focus, hydration, immunity, and stress relief using clean, plant-based ingredients. Designed for health-conscious Gen Z and millennial consumers, each can delivers daily wellness benefits through a blend of adaptogens, antioxidants, herbs, minerals, and organic caffeine.

Heywell

AV lead investor: N/A

MUD\WTR produces and sells an organic coffee-alternative beverage that offers health and performance benefits.

MUD\WTR

Its beverage consists of organic ingredients that help support health and well-being, providing the same focus and energy boosts as coffee but with much less caffeine.

AV lead investor: Congress Ave Ventures

Heaven’s Door is a collection of handcrafted American whiskeys co-created with Bob Dylan.

Heaven’s door

The collection includes premium aged double-barreled whiskey, straight bourbon whiskey, and straight rye whiskey.

AV lead investor: N/A

Beam Organics offers an innovative line of CBD products for wellness, rest, and athletic recovery.

Beam Organics

Its THC-free cannabidiol products include tincture, salve, and oil droppers.

AV lead investor: N/A

Beauty

Featured Portfolio Company: Crown Affair

Crown Affair is a beauty brand on a mission to make hair care an everyday ritual. The company offers innovative products online, enabling customers to restore and maintain their hair at home.

Crown Affair

AV lead investor: N/A

Discount code expires 12/31/2025.

Promo Code: ALUMNIHOLIDAY20

Madison Reed offers women hair-coloring products and service at home and in salons.

Madison Reed

The brand offers customers, technology, personalized service, and salon results whether they color their hair at home or in one of its 60+ Hair Color Bars.

AV lead investor: Green D Ventures

Unlike anti-aging skin care products with pre-mixed ingredients that degrade rapidly, Exponent Beauty’s skincare line achieves peak results because its lets consumers custom mix ingredients at the time of application.

Exponent Beauty

A patented self-activator system dispenses a precise dose of active powder and a “Quadruple Hyaluronic Acid Hydrator” to create a freshly whipped serum with a light gel-cream texture.

AV lead investor: FFBC1221

Droplette's patented, hand-held facial skincare device generates a powerful, yet gentle nano-mist to infuse scientifically proven active ingredients deep into the skin--delivering 10x the outcomes of topical creams and serums.

Droplette

Droplette is using its platform technology to operate a successful direct-to-consumer facial skincare business model. It sells its micro-infuser device up front, plus tiered subscription options for infusion capsules which contain the active skincare ingredients.

AV lead investor: Yard Ventures

Womaness offers innovative menopause products with accessible, safe, and chic solutions in skin and body care, feminine care, sexual health, and supplements.

Womaness

Its products are formulated alongside a panel of menopausal experts who specialize in menopause, women’s health, nutrition, and skincare

AV lead investor: Bascom Venture

Education

Featured Portfolio Company: Rally Reader LLC

Rally Reader offers an AI-enhanced e-reading platform for elementary and middle schoolers to improve their reading and literacy skills, while engaging educators and parents with detailed progress dashboards. Rally Reader’s technology acts as a personal reading coach for each student, pinpointing reading mistakes in real time and ensuring word-for-word accuracy for on-the-spot corrections, thereby greatly enhancing literacy skill development.

Rally Reader LLC

AV lead investor: Green D Ventures

Synthesis School is an online program created at SpaceX that is now available to kids all over to encourage creative problem solving and team work.

Synthesis School

Its one-hour online learning experience brings together students (aged 6-14) from around the world and allows them to make sense of the complexity of its original simulations.

AV lead investor: N/A

Numerade, a video-based learning platform focused on expanding access to high quality STEM education for students worldwide.

Numerade

Numerade’s subscription service boasts a database of over 1.2 million videos covering content for middle school, high school and college-level STEM courses, all made by its certified tutors.

AV lead investor: Ring Ventures

Entertainment

Featured Portfolio Company: Gametime

Gametime is a ticketing platform for mobile users, selling last-minute tickets to the most popular events in sports, music, and theater in cities across the U.S. and Canada. With a mobile-first platform, industry-leading NPS, and strong appeal and stickiness with the younger demographic, Gametime examines as many as 10,000 potential seats to present the 50 best values. After purchase, it delivers tickets directly to users’ phones. If plans change, users can sell their tickets with the push of a butto

Gametime

AV lead investor: Green D Ventures

Gametime is a marketplace that helps fans find great values on verified tickets for live events including sports, concerts and more

Use code HOLIDAY20 for $20 off your first purchase. Terms apply.

Mythical is a game-technology platform for the buying, trading, and selling of in-game digital assets.

Mythical Games

Major games like Fortnite, League of Legends, and Counterstrike can leverage this platform to control in-game customization, earn value from player-made digital assets, and empower player-owned economies that enhance the gaming experience.

AV lead investor: N/A

Snappr is a platform that connects pre-vetted pro photographers with consumers and businesses.

Snappr

Its Safety Suite enables users to observe, monitor, and predict jobsite risks in areas of project safety, productivity, and quality.

AV lead investor: Green D Venture

Opus Clip leverages GenAI technology to streamline video editing, transforming lengthy videos into engaging short clips with ease, reducing editing time by tenfold.

Opus Clip

Catering to a broad audience — from individual consumers to large entities like the NFL and top YouTube channels — the platform offers cost-effective subscriptions for rapid content creation.

AV lead investor: Strawberry Creek Ventures

The Realest is an authentication platform and marketplace that sources items directly from artists and athletes, enabling collectors and fans to own the most trusted entertainment memorabilia.

The realest

Its authentication platform uses witness-based verification, hologram stickers, and hidden markings to essentially give an item a fingerprint to protect its value.

AV lead investor: N/A

Food

Featured Portfolio Company: Thistle

Thistle offers healthy, plant-based prepared meals, juices, and sides to consumers as a subscription service. Customers can select from a rotating weekly menu of gluten- and dairy-free options, and adjust their plan at any time.

Thistle

AV lead investor: Yard Ventures

The promo code is valid through December 31, 2025. The discount auto-applies when clicking the link.

The promo code: ALUMNIVENTURES50. Offers 50% off the first week.

Thistle offers healthy, plant-based prepared meals, juices, and sides to consumers as a subscription service.

Gooder Foods

Customers can select from a rotating weekly menu of gluten- and dairy-free options, and adjust their plan at any time.

AV lead investor: Purple Arch Ventures

Mythical is a game-technology platform for the buyOshi (fomerly Plantish) crafts whole-cut salmon products made of plants and created through 3D bioprinting.ing, trading, and selling of in-game digital assets.

Oshi

The product has the same nutritional value, taste, texture, and structure of traditional salmon without harmful mercury, microplastics, or other pollutants.

AV lead investor: Purple Arch Ventures

50CUT by Joyn Foods is a food-tech platform that blends mushroom mycelium with ground meat to boost flavor, nutrition, and sustainability — without sacrificing taste or function.

50cut

Using a proprietary upcycling fermentation process, it delivers a scalable, cost-saving solution for chefs and foodservice operators in the $298B U.S. meat market.

AV lead investor: Seed Ventures

Available for in-shop pickup, online delivery & national shipping!

Smitten Ice Cream

Limited-Edition Seasonal Styles — cozy & gift-ready!

AV lead investor: N/A

Fitness

Featured Portfolio Company: Hydrow

Hydrow is a fitness platform focused around a tech-enabled rowing machine. It provides an immersive screen experience and maximum muscle engagement for the user, as well as computer-controlled resistance.

Hydrow

AV lead investor: Yard Ventures

OnWater is a personalized app for anglers and paddlers that turns fragmented data into trusted, real-time U.S. water maps to plan and navigate trips.

Onwater

It covers 430,000+ waters with access points, land boundaries, live flows and weather, personalized alerts, offline maps, AI fish-measuring, and an American Rivers conservation layer.

AV lead investor: N/A

SIQ Basketball integrates advanced sensor technology into basketballs to provide detailed shooting analytics, revolutionizing training with immediate feedback for improvement.

SIQ Basketball

The SIQ Smart Basketball uses patented ML technology, paired with a smartphone, with the potential to be applied to other popular sports such as soccer, volleyball, and football.

AV lead investor: N/A

Dance Church has developed a dance fitness platform that offers subscribers access to live dance fitness classes and its library of on-demand dance classes and workouts.

Dance Church

Dance Church Go’s streaming service provides at-home workouts, with improvisational dance classes led by professional dancers

AV lead investor: Spike Ventures

Home

Featured Portfolio Company: Rosy

Rosy Soil makes biochar-based potting soils that replace peat and are carbon-negative, offering high performance with a much smaller footprint. Proven in 1,000+ plant trials, its mixes grow stronger roots and richer microbes while using less water — giving consumers and growers a better, sustainable alternative.

Rosy

AV lead investor: N/A

Promo Code: alumniventures

Quilt reimagines home heating and cooling with a vertically integrated heat-pump system that combines advanced hardware, proprietary sensors, simple controls, and on-device AI.

Quilt

Its “Physical AI” uses mmWave radar and predictive modeling to optimize comfort in real time while cutting energy use by up to 73% vs. traditional systems.

AV lead investor: Strawberry Creek Ventures

Rinse is building the first national brand in clothing care with its door-to-door service of pick-up, cleaning, and delivery of dry cleaning and laundry.

Rinse

Partnering with the best local cleaners, Rinse provides them with tools and training to help them grow their business and deliver a consistent, high-quality experience.

AV lead investor: Green D Ventures

Deako is an IoT company that develops hardware and software products for smart homes.

Deako

Through the Deako app and voice control, users can easily manage their home from anywhere.

AV lead investor: Green D Ventures

Opal (fka Opal Camera) is transforming AI interaction with next generation, voice-driven consumer hardware, starting with a sophisticated desktop device that enables seamless communication with Large Language Models at the press of a button.

Opal

By harnessing advanced voice technology and a fast-paced, iterative development process, Opal is leading the shift toward voice as the primary interface for ambient AI, offering users a more intuitive, natural way to interact with AI in everyday life.

AV lead investor: Blue Ivy Ventures

Health

Featured Portfolio Company: Oura

Oura’s smart ring delivers personalized health data, insights, and daily guidance. The ring tracks all stages of sleep and recovery and accounts for daily activity to provide practical steps for long-term improvement.

Oura

AV lead investor: Blue Ivy Venture

Pendulum Therapeutics develops microbiome-focused therapies, including probiotics and proprietary bacterial strains, focused on metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and other relevant applications

Pendulum Therapeutics

With a science-first approach and proprietary probiotics, Pendulum aims to develop innovative treatments that restore microbial balance in the gut to improve metabolic health.

AV lead investor: Blue Ivy Venture

Aescape is a robotics-enabled massage platform offering a customizable experience that mimics human touch.

Aescape

The company automates soft tissue treatment and brings actionable measurement to massage therapy using a system of sensing, AI, and robotics.

AV lead investor: N/A

August is a period-care brand offering 100% organic cotton tampons and pads — more absorbent than the leading natural brand regular pads and designed for comfort and sustainability.

August

With products available online and in 400+ Target stores, August empowers Gen Z consumers by destigmatizing menstruation and messaging commitments to climate and plastic neutrality.

AV lead investor: Yard Ventures

Kids

Featured Portfolio Company: TenLittle

Ten Little is the go-to personalized marketplace for curated kids’ essentials at every stage of growth. It offers vetted, sustainable, and safe items children need for healthy mind and body development, as well as expert guidance and recommendations to support parents.

TenLittle

AV lead investor: BCMP

Kudos is a direct-to-consumer retail company specializing in providing clean, non-toxic, and eco-friendly baby products.

Kudos

The company’s disposable diapers, lined with 100% doctor-recommended sustainable cotton and featuring two absorption layers, provide superior protection and care for a baby’s sensitive skin.

AV lead investor: N/A

Promo Code: SUB25

Yumi is a direct-to-consumer provider of meals, snacks and vitamins for babies and children developed by nutritionists, pediatricians, metabolic health experts and chefs.

Yumi

It offers over 50 flavors of freshly made organic baby food that can be delivered right to consumers’ doorsteps on a weekly basis.

AV lead investor: Nassau Street Ventures

Promo Code: SUB25

Willow is the developer of a hands-free, wearable breast pump for multitasking parents that is 100% spill-proof, with 360-degree mobility.

Willow

The Willow Pump features an all-in-one, in-bra design with no external cords, tubes, or bottles — to give moms unprecedented freedom.

AV lead investor: Purple Arch Ventures

Zigazoo is the world’s largest social network for kids. Zigazoo's content is safe, developmentally sound, values-oriented, moderated, and often brand-sponsored.

Zigazoo

The company supports two separate platforms, one for children ages 3-12 and the other for ages 13 and up.

AV lead investor: Yard Ventures

Lifestyle

Featured Portfolio Company: Summer

Summer enables second-home ownership. It removes the friction from buying and owning a vacation or investment home, creating “a home that pays for itself” through rental income. Summer helps its customers identify, design/furnish, finance, and yield on these second homes.

Summer

AV lead investor: Yard Ventures

Remento (formerly Heirloom) makes it easier for families to record, preserve, and share their stories.

Remento

The platform provides a training module and question bank to help users prepare for conversations, an online video interviewing platform, professional editing help from Remento, and a shareable gallery.

AV lead investor: Yard Ventures

More info here.

Promo Code: AV20

Moby aims to surpass leading stock research sites like Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha by offering a trusted go-to source for retail investors that provides relevant, up-to-date insights in easily digestible formats.

Moby

Moby’s platform includes a concise, readable, actionable newsletter; expert investment advice; and a user-friendly app interface.

AV lead investor: Lakeshore Ventures

Hallow is a faithtech business creating software and media for Christian consumers, communities, and churches, offering a growing library of audiovisual content for emotional and spiritual growth.

Hallow

It’s now the #1 Catholic app globally, downloaded 14 million times and used for over 400 million prayers in 150-plus countries.

AV lead investor: N/A

Promo Code: AV20

Pap! is an automated service that scans users’ email receipts to claim refunds, compensations, and settlements they might miss, recovering a portion of the $70 billion in unclaimed funds each year.

Pap!

With proven success in retail refunds, Pap! is expanding into airline refunds and class-action settlements, offering a hands-off solution that maximizes returns across multiple industries.

AV lead investor: Strawberry Creek Ventures

Optery is a privacy-focused SaaS platform that enables individuals and businesses to remove and control personal data across hundreds of data broker sites.

Optery

Its automated tools protect users from identity theft and doxing, with standout features like advanced search, visual reporting, broad broker coverage, and API integrations.

AV lead investor: Seed Ventures

Pets

Featured Portfolio Company: Ollie

Ollie develops fresh dog food made from human-grade ingredients and sold to consumers via direct to consumer subscription models. Meal plans are tailored to each dog and sourced from family-run farms, without any artificial flavors or preservatives.

Ollie

AV lead investor: Blue Ivy Venture

BistroCat has developed the world's first automated wet cat food feeder that doesn't require ice packs or refrigeration, providing healthier meals without the mess.

BistroCat

The patented technology ensures cats receive healthy, wet meals on their schedule, reducing health risks and enhancing care with comprehensive tracking and analysis tools.

AV lead investor: Towerview Ventures

Small Door provides customer-centric veterinary services.

Small Door Veterinary

Its membership model delivers priority access to the best board-certified veterinarians and specialists.

AV lead investor: Blue Ivy Venture

KetoNatural is a healthy pet food delivery service, with an emphasis on low-carb and higher animal protein.

KetoNatural Pet Foods

It offers specialty dog food and treats through their website via a subscription service and personalized feeding plans.

AV lead investor: Purple Arch Ventures

Travel

Featured Portfolio Company: Wander

Wander is verticalizing the 100B+ short-term rental industry. It owns 100% of its homes to consistently deliver high-quality smart technology and inspiring locations for guests. Wander’s fully verticalized STR platform is oriented to the top of the market. It owns the homes, property management, and technology. Wander’s guest data enables it to iterate the guest experience toward perfection and to fully realize adjacent branding and other market opportunities.

Wander

AV lead investor: Triphammer Venture

AvantStay’s booking service specializes in six-guest-plus group bookings at 1,000+ vacation rental homes the company manages in some 100 U.S. cities.

AvantStay

AvantStay delivers a highly-curated experience using a proprietary tech suite to power bookings, operationalize in-field and remote management, and activate elevated consumer touchpoints.

AV lead investor: Blue Ivy Ventures

Cruisebound is aiming to transform the booking process for the cruise line industry, which remains heavily reliant on the use of travel agents.

Cruisebound

Cruisebound offers a digital-first, simplified online platform that empowers customers to book their cruises via a self-service process.

AV lead investor: FSV

The Villa Life offers exclusive, curated experiences at luxury villas in sought-after Caribbean destinations.

The Villa Life

It also offers investors the opportunity to hold fractional ownership in income-generating luxury villas that are rented out to high-end guests.

AV lead investor: FFGL3

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Alumni Ventures

Alumni Ventures is a network-powered VC firm that helps accredited individuals invest in venture capital.

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Give Innovation This Season

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Apparel

Featured Portfolio Company: Rhone

Beverage

Featured Portfolio Company: Heywell

Beauty

Featured Portfolio Company: Crown Affair

Education

Featured Portfolio Company: Rally Reader LLC

Entertainment

Featured Portfolio Company: Gametime

Food

Featured Portfolio Company: Thistle

Fitness

Featured Portfolio Company: Hydrow

Home

Featured Portfolio Company: Rosy

Health

Featured Portfolio Company: Oura

Kids

Featured Portfolio Company: TenLittle

Lifestyle

Featured Portfolio Company: Summer

Pets

Featured Portfolio Company: Ollie

Travel

Featured Portfolio Company: Wander

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