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Advance Venture Partners

About

Advance Venture Partners ("AVP") combines the disciplined approach of an institutional venture and growth equity investor with the strategic insights, access, and impact made possible by a high-value strategic partner. Our initial investments in businesses range from $5 million to $30 million, and we have a broad investment mandate across software and consumer verticals, including digital health and insurtech.

AVP is affiliated with Advance, the private, family-held holding company focused on fostering long-term growth and innovation across a diversified portfolio in media, technology, entertainment, education, communications, and other growth sectors. Advance’s portfolio includes Conde Nast, Advance Local, The IRONMAN Group, American City Business Journals, Turnitin, 1010data and is among the largest shareholders in reddit, Charter Communications, and Discovery.

Our investment thesis

  • We are theme or sector-driven and are comfortable investing in companies serving either enterprise or consumer end markets.
  • We work tirelessly to support exceptional founders and operators building disruptive, landscape-changing businesses.
  • We write $10 to $25 million first checks into businesses with product in market, evidence of product-market-fit, sound fundamentals, compelling growth, and large end markets.
  • Our evergreen fund structure allows us to be patient capital and long-term strategic partners to our portfolio companies.
  • AVP is built in partnership with Advance, a family-owned multi-genera­tional holding company that owns and operates enduring media and technology companies.
  • We concentrate our time in industries and verticals where we have built conviction around evolving market trends and the opportu­nities created for emerging platforms. We are actively pursuing investments in verticals including digital health, data platforms, insurance technology, and financial technology.

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SV

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What we’re looking for We invest across three thesis areas: Thesis 1: we invest and partner in the ‘Insurers of the Future’: tech-driven underwriting companies (MGAs, carriers) that offer multiple points of digital and business model differentiation across P&C and L&H. We provide direct access to SCOR expertise and our global network to help portfolio companies scale and/or access (re)insurance capacity. With a proven track record of supporting innovative underwriting propositions across multiple lines of business, we understand product development, program structuring, underwriting, pricing and distribution and thus have the capabilities to optimise partnerships between insurtechs and business partners. We predominantly invest at late Seed / Series A. We are class of business agnostic and have partnered with companies across a broad variety of personal and specialty lines. Thesis 2: we invest and partner in software solutions that benefit SCOR and/or our clients. We provide a broad understanding of the interests and pain points of insurers across the world, and the potential to connect companies with insurers through SCOR’s client services initiatives. We predominantly invest later stage vs. Thesis 1 (typically Series A-B) but have occasional appetite for Seed. We prioritise companies: developing data, tools, and methods for obtaining, understanding, pricing and transferring large portfolios of pre-aggregated risks, high-value individual risks such as energy facilities and construction mega-projects, and MGA/coverholder business delivering economically valuable additional services offering a visible outcome which can be used to boost client management or reduce risks. Focus areas include front-end (e.g., underwriting & pricing) policy administration, modelling, risk analytics, and claims developing platforms where insurance has not previously been embedded / distributed, but where SCOR Ventures sees substantial opportunities to close the global protection gap – e.g., marketplaces, “super apps”, b2b fintech, employee benefits working to solve climate and ESG challenges to support the net zero transition and cut emissions for SCOR and SCOR clients. Focus areas include ESG reporting, climate risk analysis and data, carbon offsetting as a solution, circular economy, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tech, and supply chain transparency. We also see several opportunities in the green insurance product space including solar production or maintenance guarantees, wind input parametric products, solar physical asset damage, cat-bond / ILS and insuring carbon credit projects. Thesis 3: We invest at the intersection of health and technology and partner with companies that help people live healthier lives, deliver in-force or claims outcome improvements, develop new business or add to SCOR’s Knowledge Center capabilities, and assist our clients to transform their offerings. We predominantly invest at late Seed / Series A and are interested in a broad range of B2B and B2B2C solutions across MedTech, wellness, wearables, data platforms, and software / AI platforms. How we operateIntegrated in the wider SCOR business: Direct access to the entirety of SCOR’s capabilities brings unique added value to our portfolio companies. SCOR’s core business has experts in nearly every country, line of business, and functional area, while SCOR Partners bring a broad range of client services, marketing and product development expertise. Mandate: focused on key markets in North America, EMEA and LATAM, with selective deployment in APAC and Africa. 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DV

Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures

We are looking for entrepreneurs and their brilliant ideas. We want to be there when technologies call entire industries into question. Since 2014, we have seen this as both an opportunity and a challenge. Today, DvH Ventures is one of the most active early-stage investors in Europe managing various venture capital funds from its offices in Cologne and Vienna. Our story began with our first venture capital fund and the significant backing of publisher Dieter von Holtzbrinck. We focused our early stage investments on publishing-related, digital business models and supported startups from then on not only with funding, but also with an enormous media reach of the publishing groups Handelsblatt, Tagesspiegel and DIE ZEIT. This fund was soon followed by a dedicated investment fund with a focus on Fintechs and InsurTechs and fund investors from the banking and insurance industries. Thanks to the business-related media, we were able to build up one of the most successful FinTech portfolios with such stars as LIQID, Compeon or Nect. Both funds are now disinvesting. Today, we operate two independent and very active early-stage investment funds. With DvH Ventures Fund III, our Digital Tech Fund, we have been investing primarily in deep tech and education startups since 2017. This enabled us to attract the founders and potential of companies such as LiveEO, StudySmarter, Masterplan or buynomics at an early stage. In August 2020, DvH Ventures launched a new €60 million Digital Health Fund in the first closing, which invests in technologies across Europe that solve future healthcare challenges. OUR APPROACH As an independent venture capital fund, we invest in early investment rounds with initial tickets between € 500k and € 2m, often acting as lead investor. In addition to financial resources, we support our portfolio companies with management expertise and an international investor network. An exclusive media-for-equity program also offers access to strong brands such as Handelsblatt, WirtschaftsWoche, DIE ZEIT and Apotheken Umschau, and thus an enormous reach into the respective target groups. INVESTMENT FOCUS We invest in ideas whose success we believe in. We are building successful investment clusters including but not limited to the fields of digital health, education or financial services and will stay hungry for more digital innovations. These can be ideas in artificial intelligence, enterprise software, Internet of Things and Big Data. The same applies to mobility, energy or the future of work. On the other hand, some of our most successful startups are those with ideas that we hadn't even thought of yet. So, if you want to pitch convincing ideas that don't come from the areas mentioned above – we'd ❤️ to hear about them.

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GoHub Ventures

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Contour Venture Partners

Contour Venture Partners invests in companies focused on information technology, and the application of innovative software solutions into the enterprise SaaS, vertical B2B SaaS and financial services sectors. The principals at Contour have a long and successful track record, having directly supported over 95 companies through numerous market cycles. We take great pride in the strong bonds we form with management teams, as this is a crucial ingredient to achieving long term milestones while also making the process engaging and enjoyable. We recognize it is the details and pursuit of flawless execution combined with the right long-term vision that makes a company great. We have the experience, intuition, judgment and industry expertise to ensure that the foundation is in place for management to build a great business with a sustainable competitive advantage. We have a deep understanding of how difficult it is to transform even the best ideas into successful enterprises. As a result, we take an active role and bring a team oriented approach to our portfolio companies – providing the operational assistance, transactional expertise, capital, network and overall judgment to maximize the potential for success and profitability. Investment Criteria We seek to work with exceptional entrepreneurs who are highly motivated and experienced leaders, with differentiated, defensible and scaleable products. We look for the long term potential to transform industry segments, the potential to achieve significant market share in large and growing markets and to grow independent of market conditions. Stage: Contour invests in seed and early stage companies that exhibit a clear path to profitability. The professionals at Contour have been active in all stages of venture capital and operations throughout their careers and understand the unique set of challenges facing management teams at each phase as our portfolio companies mature. Industry Focus: We invest in companies that provide innovative technology solutions into Northeast industry hubs where we have a deep understanding of the targeted markets, including financial services, enterprise software, vertical B2B software and digital media. Geography: Based in New York City, we take advantage of the depth of companies, managers and entrepreneurship within the major industry sectors located in the Northeast portion of the United States. Board Representation: The principals at Contour play an active role in the leadership of our portfolio companies. This includes taking a seat on the board of directors where we assist management with recruiting, sales, growth strategies, general operations, business development, finance and exit strategy. We look for opportunities where there is a mutual interest in entering into a deep long-term partnership with management to jointly build successful and sustainable businesses. Management Team DNA: Great entrepreneurs and management teams are critical determinants of success. We look for qualities in our management teams that include deep industry/sector expertise, solid judgment, strong leadership skills, managerial experience and intuition, long term commitment, high level of integrity and passion for their business. Investment Size: Contour invests between $500,000 and $1.5 million per round. We prefer to act as the lead or co-lead investor as well as represent the first institutional capital in the company. Exit: Contour typically invests between $500,000 and $1.5 million in the seed round and supports its companies through additional investment in future rounds. We are prepared to support our portfolio companies for many years.

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Blume Ventures

Bold. Brave. Brilliant. Brazen. The founders we back are all this, and more. They are unreasonable, they are crazy ambitious, obsessed with solving hard, gnarly problems. Problems whose solutions transform lives and impact society. And, it takes a revolutionary founder, and a transformational company to solve these problems, and effect change. We back these transformational companies, and their revolutionary founders early, and remain lifelong partners. How does Blume evaluate early stage startups? In our framework, we look at three criteria to evaluate startups – size of market or opportunity, team quality and finally, investability or probability of the next round of capital. Our approximate weightage for Opportunity : Team : Investability is 40 : 40 : 20. Let us double click on these three criteria. Market size or opportunity: Pick too small a market and even the best team can’t build a large scalable business. The best founders know how to reshape a market opportunity and build solutions to fit the largest of the market opportunities. That said, one has to begin with the aggregate opportunity being very large. For example, are Ola and Uber a ride hailing app or a large scale urban transportation business? The market size expands 5-10x when the latter is applied. At Blume, we try to find a portfolio balance between founders who can chase a large market opportunity domestically or build a tech-led differentiated product for global markets (which increase Founding teams: These are the most important variables for us or even most VCs at our stage. In every decision, once the other two factors are seen as a go, the clincher element in a yes/no decision boils down to the founding team – their expertise in solving for this space, as well as the integrity, mission, passion and persistence that one can gauge at this early stage of business. Investability or probability of next rounds of capital: The reality of how the later stage funding market is shaped to take risky bets in the ecosystem is important to consider while funding, especially in young and concentrated ecosystems like India, and that’s why we attribute 20% weightage to this element in India. We force ourselves to evaluate how much capital may be required to build to exitable scale and how challenging it is to raise that capital. As the funding ecosystem matures, we may shrink weightage of this in the future. Great founders overcome all of this but if we can select such that we have better odds at the starting point, why not? The above framework helps us shortlist but finally, it is a (increasingly improving) trained gut call that ends up building out the portfolio. What is Blume's investment criteria? Blume prefers ventures that have achieved some degree of customer validation, where the product is already launched in market and we are getting customer signups and feedback. We do make exceptions on the above for seasoned operators and second-time founders, but typically with first-time founders, we do not do idea stage or pre-MVP investments. If you are a B2B startup or an ecommerce / consumer transaction play, an annualised revenue rate (or revenues) of $375k (₹3cr) and above is a good milestone to reach out to us. If you are a marketplace startup, then reach out to us when you are nearing or have crossed a monthly GMV of ₹50 lacs a month. If you are a consumer app that isn't monetising yet, then ping us when you near or cross MAUs of 25k / DAUs of 5k. The above are broad guidelines, and not hard rules. We do make exceptions. If in doubt, reach out! How much does Blume invest? We are a seed / pre-Series A fund. While we are fairly flexible on the investment quantum, typically we have seen our investments range across from $1.5 to $3m (₹12 to 24 crs). We do optimise however for a stake of anywhere from 12 to 20%. These stake requirements reflect the depth and extent of support we provide to the startup – from fundraising and hiring to business development etc. We also anticipate the rounds of dilution that every successful startup will undergo, and the desired holding that we need to hold at the point of exit. Does Blume invest in international startups? We invest in startups that are Indian at heart or origin, but are willing to conquer the world market if needed to build scale. About a third of our portfolio is of this nature – taking Indian engineering skills to build products for global markets. Unfortunately, We DO NOT invest in startups that are international and have NO strong Indian connection / founders. We are also strong believers that to invest as a ‘generalist tech VC’ as we are, we need to be more and more focussed on a particular geography. We need to see as much of the available annual pipeline to know that we’ve truly picked 10 great founders / startups to invest in. We have no such advantage when we are looking outside the country; which is why we stay away from the temptation of looking at pipeline from international markets. What kind of sectors does Blume invest in? With our new Fund, our fourth since inception, we are looking to invest about 60-65% of the new fund in domestic-heavy sectors such as healthcare, financial services, commerce and brands, jobs and education, and digital media and gaming. The other 35-40% of the fund will focus on SaaS, and DeepTech (including CleanTech, manufacturing, blockchain) companies, typically in B2B, that can innovate and engineer with local talent pools, and yet scale globally. Does Blume have a preference between B2B and B2C? We like both. India is a consumer market that is poised to explode, as people move to the digital economy to spend an increasingly larger share of their wallet’s purchasing power. That makes it attractive to build a strong consumer proposition in India. And thus our B2C portfolio. We are also now very good at taking our science and engineering skills in software and other areas, and building commercial applications at scale, often for the global market. These constitute the majority of B2B ideas in our portfolio and we like this space a lot. Where do I send my pitch? How do I reach out to Blume? We get anywhere between 4,000 to 5,000 ideas pitched to us annually, across the team, across all formats. This includes referrals, cold mails, DMs on social channels etc. We have given up counting :) We invest in about 10-12 of these per year. As Blume has grown, we've looked at the empirical data and discovered that the vast majority of our investments were referrals from our contacts in the ecosystem. You can count the exceptions to this rule with one hand in every cycle, and still have a few fingers to spare! These referrals come from our own founders we have backed, other founders who know that we will do right by their angel investments and our extensive set of friends, investors and well wishers in the ecosystem. The exceptions, while not impossible, are indeed rare. Ceteris paribus (all things considered), you are better off reaching us through a trusted common friend. In a highly networked startup ecosystem, it is not that hard to reach us through the strongest possible mutual connection. But if that is not possible, do reach out to us cold. Your email will certainly be read, even if it is not always responded to. We have ensured that our internal systems catch every pitch - cold or warm or hot. When writing in cold, a considered and researched mail (much like a quality college application) is the only way to attempt such a reach out. Please check out the team page, find the best person in the Investment team who has invested in and / or covers the sector you're building in. Do check out their social profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter) to access their contact info. Our email ids are not hard to guess as well! Preferably write to one person at a time, in the firm. The above are good principles for you irrespective of which firm you approach / pitch to. Nothing works better than a warm, referred introduction - it always gets the rightful attention. Please note that we have done away with a pitch form, or a common email id. From our experience, we found that the volume of inbound traffic was indeed high, but not always relevant, and thus almost impossible to assign a resource to just monitor these inbound gates.