Lumos Capital Group

GSV Ventures is a multi-stage venture capital firm investing in the most important founders and leaders across the global “Pre-K to Gray” digital learning and workforce skills landscape. Investments include ClassDojo, Clever (exited), Coursera, Degreed, Gradescope (exited), Guild, Learneo (formerly Course Hero), Nearpod (exited), PhotoMath (exited), Physicswallah and QuillBot (exited) amongst other notable investments in education technology leaders positioned to achieve disproportionate gains. GSV Ventures manages over $1.0bn in assets across three funds and several SPVs, and partners include Michael Cohn, Adam Freed, Jason Horne, Michael Moe, Luben Pampoulov, Deborah Quazzo and Tiffany Taylor. Critical platforms for GSV Ventures’ investing activity also include the All Eyes on India Summit and the world-renowned ASU+GSV Summit, drawing some of the globe’s most prominent speakers including Tencent Co-founder and Yidan Prize founder, Charles Chen; Stanford Dean, Dan Schwartz, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, Sal Khan, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Arne Duncan, Bari Weiss, Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, Sheryl Lee Ralph, amongst many, many others.

Inclusive Investing™ is a market-backed discipline that allows us to cast a targeted, yet wide net when sourcing companies, while keeping outsized returns and impact front and center in our investment decisions. There’s a lot of talk about demographics and a lack of diversity in venture capital. Inclusive investing is a strategy that proactively addresses this problem. While we’re pioneering this strategy, the data supporting our thesis is on our side: diverse fund managers earn better returns, and companies with diverse leadership outperform their peers. Inclusive Investing™ goes beyond diversity - it’s a new investment discipline that can transform the way we source, invest in, and scale businesses, and in doing so, create new pathways to prosperity for individuals, businesses, and communities at scale. Inclusive Investing™ levels the playing field so the best businesses and most talented teams succeed. A Five-Pronged ApproachImplemented cohesively, these five areas of practice yield an Inclusive Investing™ discipline Zeal is spearheading in the venture world across private markets.Diverse Fund Managers: Fund managers and the broader team are diverse with complementary backgrounds and skill sets. Diverse Management Teams: Companies proactively source diverse management teams with complementary skill sets and backgrounds that help portfolio companies outperform. Geographic Inclusivity: Funds source from a wide range of geographies across the U.S., not just traditional geographic VC “hotbeds”. Investment Focus: Investment allocation is directed to sectors where fund managers expect continued innovation and opportunity for disruption. Impact Lens: Investments seek to achieve top tier financial and social returns that impact low-wealth communities and small businesses.

Arieli Capital is a multifaceted investment firm that is focused on being an active investor in the next generation of technology companies. Arieli Capital operates four core businesses: Arieli Family Office, Arieli Innovation, Arieli Advisory and Arieli Innovation Fund. The Arieli team is primarily based in Israel with offices in New York and London. Arieli is a recognized global leader in innovation with deep governmental, academic, and corporate relationships and partnerships. Our unique holistic approach and global network enables our partners to build sustainable economic and social growth engines in the form of innovation centers, incubator programs, accelerator programs, bootcamps, technology transfer platforms, educational impact and job creation platforms.

As capital becomes a commodity with more early-stage investors flocking to Africa, what will make us stand out will be our networks, relationships, and reputations. What we look forLarge Markets: A clear market opportunity that is massive and growing, captured through a scalable business model. We aim at reaching sustainable impact across a large audience by addressing deep markets, or investing in market-creating innovations. Scalable Economics: Tech-enabled businesses with proven, highly leverageable and defensible revenues, coupled with the ability to improve unit economics through cost and capital efficiency are able to achieve top-trend growth more easily than less efficient business structures. We are disciplined in ensuring the unit economics of the business we invest in are sustainable and attractive. Strong Agile Teams: We are looking for founders that combine strategic vision and executional capacity. Strong teams tend to be bound by a cohesive, inclusive, all-hands-on deck culture. We are seeking founders and teams guided by a clear value proposition and differentiated position in the market. Repeatable Growth: Solutions with highly replicable growth models and transferable problem-solution sets can most benefit from our growth investment and market expansion facilitation. As African markets are not uniform, we carefully model and test solution-market fit. How much funding will you get? If you are an African founder of a tech enabled startup that is solving a significant African development challenge please apply here. If you have little or no revenues, we will refer you to our Angel Fund for $10k to $100k funding consideration. If you have meaningful revenues with high growth potential, we may invest $50k-$250k.

Investing in Ambitious Start-ups Changing the future of work. Whether providing access to work opportunities, improving career development, enhancing diversity and inclusion, providing financial stability, supporting wellbeing, or fostering flexibility, worker-centric transformation is possible. Our portfolio companies provide solutions that add up to a positive impact on workers and improve value for employers. Our Approach. High-Conviction, Hands-On Investors to Early-Stage Companies We establish relationships throughout the venture lifecycle and, depending on the stage of the business, apply different investment strategies and support. We encourage shared learning and synergies across our portfolio, and provide relevant advice and hands-on value-add in the following areas: Team development & leadership alignment Go-to-market & sales process build Governance & business process development Commercial strategy Product & technology strategy Our Values. Our Values Guide Our Culture Across NoBa and our portfolio, it’s essential we embody our values, practice what we preach and create an example for the venture ecosystem to walk the talk. Honesty: Pragmatic honesty enables trust. Collaborative: Demanding collective excellence. Difference Makers: Prideful risk-taking for impact. Agile: Logic-driven speed creates efficiency. Disruptive: Challenging the status quo.

Cocoon Capital is a leading, early-stage venture capital firm investing in Southeast Asian enterprise and deep tech startups. We engage deeply with our portfolio companies, acting as trusted advisors. We strive to give founders the necessary resources to accelerate their businesses and personal growth in a holistic environment. How do we work with you? As an active, early-stage investor, we allocate substantial time to each new company post-investment by only doing 6 new deals each year. We act as your trusted advisors supporting you in all aspects of running a business. To help you grow, we put special emphasis on your and your co-founders’ personal development. We enjoy that you are proactive and clearly state what you need from us; in return we will work relentlessly to deliver. We always seek to build long-term partnerships so that we can support you in both good and bad times. How do we source deals? Always on the lookout for the best founders in Southeast Asia, you can find us at events, conferences, demo days and at our monthly mentoring sessions that we do around Southeast Asia. We look for resilient and focused founders who are not afraid to fail forward. Our own founding experience has taught us that a seed-stage startup is a work in progress, so we are more interested in where you are going than where you are at right now. What are we looking for?Strong teams: The best teams have the right mix of deep knowledge & the ability to hustle their way through.And they enjoy working together, understand that success takes time, and can manage risk and stress. Real commitment: We are relaxed and informal but we can also be pretty straight shooters if required. As hands-on investors, we enjoy working committed teams who are ready to listen, learn and test. Exit potential: We generally invest in companies where we believe an exit could happen in 6 to 8 years. This means your market size has to be large enough and that there has to be potential buyers of your business. Scalability: Whether a copycat or an original idea, your business needs to be scalable in a sufficiently large market and be able to reach critical mass within the next 5 years. Enterprise focus: We believe investors do a better job if they stay focused. Therefore, we primarily target enterprise & deep tech companies. We believe these verticals have the largest chance of success in the current market environment. Singapore holding: While we invest in startups across Southeast Asia, companies have to agree to incorporating a holding company in Singapore before we close the deal. How does it work?Apply: We only consider applicants that have gone through our online registration system. Investment amount: We typically invest from S$500k to S$1m, depending on how much your company needs for an 18-month runway. Time frame: If your pitch deck interests us, you’ll be contacted for a follow-up meeting. We will then do due diligence on all the information provided and if everything goes well, we will sign a term sheet. The process then typically takes 8 to 10 weeks until the investment is completed. Keeping it confidential: We commit to keeping your application and all information shared with us confidential. However, we only sign non-disclosure terms as part of our term sheet and will not sign a separate NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) prior to that. This is standard practice across most institutional investors. What are the terms? Ownership stake: We don’t have any strict ownership requirements but we usually target to own more than 20% of the business after the first round of investment. Leading the round: We invest in a limited number of start-ups each year with a high degree of involvement in leading and coaching the teams. We therefore prefer to lead the seed rounds we participate in. Board seat: We always require at least one board seat for all our seed investments. However, we still find that most of our work with our portfolio companies happens outside the board room.