Kering Ventures

Anthos is a generalist venture capital firm with over $3B of assets under management. Venture capital is what fuels new and innovative businesses, and – since our founding in 2007 – we’ve had the privilege of investing in and working with the founders of Guayaki, Gopuff, Olaplex, Trunk Club, ApplyBoard, VRChat, and dozens of other category-leading start-ups to build their businesses. We purposely maintain a low profile, in keeping with our general ethos of humility and heads-down work ethic. The background of our diverse team possesses a good balance across finance – Goldman Sachs, Luxor, Ares, Summit – and consumer tech – Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Apple, Venmo, and more.

Red Sea Ventures is a leading NY-based, pre-seed and seed stage venture firm investing in tech-enabled, user-centric consumer and B2B startups. In our first fund, we invested in category leading companies across sectors including Allbirds, Convoy, Nest, Eargo, Prose, Genies, Joor, and Sweetgreen. We are looking to partner with mission driven founders seeking to transform the economy and the lives of their teams and users. We are an entrepreneurial firm that values friendliness, humility, camaraderie, collaboration, determination, independence, and hustle with a commitment to performance. We are building RSV as a platform for community; bringing together our visionary founders, LPs, and relationships at large to support the companies we choose to partner with.

We believe that by investing in the brands and technologies that consumers want and use, we can help shape a brighter future, not only for consumers but also for the planet. Our vision is to empower the next generation of consumer-focused disruptors by providing them with the resources and support they need to transform the way consumers live and work. Investing in startups at the earliest stages, and then helping them innovate and scale through XRC’s unique and disruptive capital and service platform, will allow us to deliver the highest value to our entrepreneurs, strategic partners and limited partners. Who We Are XRC Ventures is a venture capital firm and startup accelerator for the next generation of disruptors in the retail technology, consumer healthtech, and consumer goods sectors. With support from our world-class retailer and eco-system partners, XRC Ventures has become the first design-centric retail innovation ecosystem of its kind. Our Funds Accelerator Fund. Invests in pre-Seed to Series A companies in retail technology, consumer goods and the consumer healthtech. Brand Capital Fund. Invests Seed to Series A consumer product companies in beauty, personal care, home goods, and health and wellness categories. Opportunity Fund. Invests in post-Seed to Series A companies in the next generation of retail technology and consumer goods. We co-invest alongside top venture capital funds and provide follow-on capital to select XRC Ventures alumni scaling their companies beyond product market fit and achieving exponential growth. Investment POV At XRC, we look for visionary founders who are leveraging technology to positively change how humans live their lives as consumers. The need for technology in consumer serving businesses, combined with the breathtakingly rapid advancement of AI and other technologies, makes the consumer tech space one of the most dynamic areas for early stage investing. We are excited to be well-connected and right in the middle of this exciting industry. We articulate on our investment thesis in our Investment POV, which in turn drives our focus on the following four core innovation areas: Commerce Enablement. Startups fueling the digital transformation of retail. We're focusing on areas such as AI automation, distributed commerce platforms, consumer fintech, loyalty tech, and the evolution of commerce supply chains. These ventures will help redefine commerce and create a seamless buying experience. Emergent Channels and Revenue. Companies reshaping how consumers discover, engage with, and purchase products/services, inventing entirely new paths to customers, and classes of revenue. This includes shoppable content, product-as-a-channel, loyalty commerce, service retailing, trans-channel experiential retailing, and AI bot-mediated commerce. Consumer Healthtech. Ventures making personalized health outcomes more accessible and efficient. This includes technology platforms for consumer health, remote health services, subscription wellness, health outcomes-as-a-service, and aging-in-place & assured living solutions. Sustainable Commerce. Businesses driving the shift towards a more sustainable and circular economy. This includes on-demand local manufacturing, alternatives to ownership, alternative materials, subscription retail, and sustainable consumer finance.

We are committed to opening doors and creating partnerships. With a deep network, nimble capital, and passion for the consumer experience, we deliver high-impact partnerships for exceptional founders. When G9 partners with you, we are on your team.

Sixth Sense has a formidable founding team and a strong Centre of Excellence Board. Our core team has a cumulative experience of over 70 years in the wider consumer domain. We believe that the next big wave of dysfunctional growth will be led by entrepreneurs driven by completely different skill sets and capabilities and not necessarily capital. We aim to invest in the Consumer of Tomorrow…Today! We like to back “first generation” entrepreneurs and are flexible regards the stage and size of investments as long as the business addresses the consumer needs “more efficiently”, be it products, services, distribution, analytics etc. At Sixth Sense, we too strongly believe in our intuition and hence our name. Our experience of foreseeing a trend together with deep insights provides us a clear vision of what is needed and how to achieve it – perceiving the value of an idea is now second nature to us. The fundamental values and aim of our business model extend to our logo as well. While the Roman VI represents a global outlook and investments that drive the company, the ‘matra’ identifies with our focus on Indian start-ups that go on to carve a niche for themselves. Our vision “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, to spend the rest of your life like most people can’t!“ We believe that the next big wave of dysfunctional growth will be led by players who are going to be driven by completely different capabilities and not necessarily capital. At Sixth Sense we hope to fill a gap or find some gap for ourselves to actualize that. We would want to back ourselves in identifying a ‘smart ass’ team with a ‘kick ass’ product in a ‘big ass’ market! Our vision is to create an organization that gets recognized as the de-facto medium for investments (angel/ venture/ private/ listed) in consumer centric businesses in India. We take pride in our ability to catch trends and take calculated risks that enable us to create value – both for our investors and investee companies. The businesses we fund can fast track their growth by leveraging the ecosystem we provide, which includes – our strong consumer-centric research and investment analysis, along with access to our Centre of Excellence Board for strategic and operational inputs.

FIGR’s mission was born out of the co-founders’ mutual passion for consumer products – from fashion and beauty to food and beverages – and concern for environmental and social issues worldwide, in some cases being exacerbated by the consumer sector. Idealists picture a world where consumers reduce their purchases to the bare minimum. This purist thinking has driven many consumer businesses to sit at the extreme ends of the spectrum, with a feeling that they must choose between staying as a small kitchen-table business or scaling and becoming inherently “bad”. Story It all started with artisans. Fiona and Ellie met at lifestyle media house Hearst UK. Tasked with creating the Small Business Partnerships team to monetise opportunities for artisans across e-commerce, events and media space, they started to think about what high-potential small consumer businesses really need to grow, and what this growth could look like if businesses and investors considered people, planet and profit. Around the same time, Fiona was beginning to develop the philanthropic strategy for the family office, and had started to explore how philanthropy and investment could combine to maximise social and environmental impact. Mission We back the founders redefining life’s everyday choices. FIGR invests in early-stage startups with the potential to shape consumer behaviour. We take a two-pronged approach to impact, by backing responsible for-profit organisations via FIGR and supporting non-profit organisations via the Harrington Foundation. We invest in three types of changemaker: Switchers: Switchers disrupt the consumer sector with exciting alternatives to existing goods. Responsible products people want to use. Enablers: Enablers support consumers and businesses to make responsible choices. Tools and resources enabling everyone to do better. Solvers: Solvers create solutions to unsolved issues affecting consumers’ lives. Tackling real problems for real people. Approach We won’t redefine life’s everyday choices overnight. We don’t work to typical venture capital timelines, because we believe driving real change takes time. We also believe bringing investors on board is about much more than funding - we want to be the first investor our founders call if they need support or have exciting news to share! We provide a non-judgemental thinking partnership, expertise from our team and advisors, and introductions to our wider network. We typically invest up to £300k of patient capital at pre-seed and seed stage. We invest in businesses… Shaping the consumer sector as a switcher, enabler or solver With a responsible social and environmental approach Based in the UK or Europe Generating revenue (although we’re open to investing in pre-revenue businesses in rare circumstances) With innovative and passionate founders at the helm who we believe will scale the business effectively Confident that funding from FIGR will help to achieve their goals (investment isn’t right for everyone!) ValuesWe make a difference: We’re here to drive positive environmental and social change, so we look at all prospective investments through the lens of their impact. We also partner with The Harrington Foundation as we believe combining philanthropic grants and investing for impact is the best way to make a difference. We do the right thing: FIGR has a strong moral compass. Although we want our investments to make a great return, we will not compromise on our commitment to make a difference. We act with integrity, compassion and respect. We take risks: We have the confidence to be brave, as we know this is the only way to make a change. We prioritise potential over experience and take chances on great people. We’re open to leading rounds, investing before institutional funders and funding first-time founders. We say what we mean: In an industry rife with complicated jargon and lengthy processes, we choose clarity. We want everyone we work with to know exactly where they stand. We’re transparent and straightforward, and we communicate our decisions quickly – founders are too busy to be left in the lurch!