For and About Founders

Alumni Ventures has served as a value-add partner for all 1,200+ companies we’ve invested in, whether they’re seeking their first checks or laying the groundwork for an IPO. Read about the impact we are having on our seed and pre-seed portfolio companies in their own words. In many cases, we’ve leveraged the expertise of Alumni Ventures’ ~50 investing professionals and our network of more than 600,000 community members to help them scale into promising, later-stage companies. We have since been invited by some of them to invest in additional financing rounds.

Alumni Ventures’ Blockchain Fund team1 has developed strong relationships with innovative companies. We strive to go beyond providing capital and serve as a trusted partner to entrepreneurs as they navigate their startup journey. Alumni Ventures and our Blockchain Fund team bring an extensive ecosystem network, our 600K+ community members, and our experience and expertise to help entrepreneurs and our portfolio companies grow faster. Below are quotes from Blockchain Fund portfolio companies discussing the benefits of their relationship with AV and our team.2

Alumni Ventures portfolio company Jadu has created an augmented reality (AR) Web3 gaming world called “the Mirrorverse.” Jadu’s platform is built around virtual items owned by its community and allows players to bring avatars to life with mobile devices in their own real-world space.

At Alumni Ventures, we live and breathe continuous improvement.

Expanding mobile services in Africa presents an enormous opportunity, with 800 million potential users still without mobile devices or connectivity. Younger users who do have smartphones want to do two things: play mobile games and interact with friends — just like their peers on every other continent.

Winning an election is a rewarding and exciting accomplishment. However, the work doesn’t end there for elected officials. They also have to maintain a positive and healthy relationship with their constituents. Additionally, individual voters communicate through digital channels more than ever before, resulting in a higher expectation of receiving fast and personal responses.

For those living with neurological disorders, routine tasks can often become insurmountable obstacles. Seemingly straightforward activities — such as checking email, texting a family member, or managing personal finances — become difficult endeavors. Some patients can ultimately regain their cognitive abilities through months and sometimes years of rehabilitation, but these treatments don’t always lead to recovery. While experimental implants exist, they are often prohibitively invasive, requiring major brain surgery to utilize.

Healthcare organizations have become frequent targets for hackers. However, unlike typical cybersecurity attacks that promote the theft of data or finances, the threat in healthcare is more dangerous as complications such as data encryption and ambulance diversions impact patient safety. In addition, hackers can target medical devices (such as pacemakers or surgical robots), causing them to malfunction and potentially endanger patients’ lives.

Over 8 million Americans go to the ER each year for chest pain, making it the second-largest cause of emergency visits. Though very few of these visits result in life-threatening situations, all patients must undergo lengthy observation and testing at a considerable expense to clinicians and hospitals. Beyond the waste of resources, testing low-risk patients can even lead to needless risks and unnecessary care costs with little value.

If there’s one constant in the world of connected technology, it’s that change is inevitable. Hardware and software protocols are drafted and retired; manufacturers strive to keep pace with demand from retail consumers, corporations, and governments; and the envelope for speed and reliability is constantly pushed. Today’s leading-edge devices can become little more than a paperweight in five years’ time.

Between 2019 and 2020, approximately 21% of adults (over 50 million Americans) experienced a form of mental illness — and over half did not receive treatment. Similarly, 93.5% of adults with a substance use disorder did not receive treatment in the past year. Those statistics help explain why a majority of Americans believe that reducing healthcare costs and dealing with drug addiction are top priorities the nation should address.

An estimated one billion people worldwide struggle with a neurological condition such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. Unfortunately, contemporary neurotechnology treatments pose many health risks. Current implants are inflexible, increasing the chances of probe breaking, migrating beyond desired brain location, causing inflammation, and recruiting fewer brain cells.