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Expanding Capital is a growth-stage venture capital fund that invested in breakthrough companies like Coinbase, Clover Health, Astra Rockets, Classpass, Bolt, Cameo, Roofstock, mParticle, EasyPost and many other unicorns. We're sector-agnostic and seek investments across any sector. That's because we have the conviction that the best companies emerge at the intersection of multiple technologies being utilized to attack persistent challenges. We're strongest in B2B/Saas, consumer tech, and eCommerce enablers. One of our competitive advantages is our international scope and presence. Expanding Capital is backed by institutional capital and titans of industry from Brazil and South America. To help portfolio companies, we provide strategic assets, introductions and help our portfolio grow in the emerging LatAm region.

Blue Lion is a multi-stage investment firm focused on high growth technology companies, predominantly across the US and Europe. The partners have invested $400m over the last 10 years into transformational companies, such as Aetion Health, Blockchain.com, Builder.ai, Casafari, Even Healthcare, Figure, Forward Health, Glovo, Maker Studios, Omio, Opendoor, Pipe, Revolut, SoFI, Taulia, as well as many other early stage companies.

CCV Capital is a global venture capital firm with a Silicon Valley pedigree, specializing in early-stage investments while inheriting the legacy of KPCB. Founded by Wei Zhou, the former managing partner of KPCB China, together with the original technology investment team, we seamlessly blend Silicon Valley DNA with unparalleled global reach and deep Asia resources. Drawing from extensive entrepreneurial experience, our founding team has proven exceptional in identifying and nurturing high-potential startups, achieving a 35% unicorn formation rate within our first decade. We have taken the lead in 80% of Series A funding rounds, guiding many to become sector pioneers in going public. What sets CCV Capital apart is our global approach. As globalization evolves, CCV Capital embraces Globalization 2.0 principles, supporting a decentralized, multi-centric approach to global expansion. We enable startups to establish a global presence through strategic regional offices, localized market involvement, and intelligent use of international resources.We empower startups on their strong competitive advantage, fast business growth, international footprint expansion by leveraging the synergies, such as supply chain, talent resource, and proven business model, among East Asia, Southeast Asia and America. Our globally diversified portfolio exemplifies our collaboration with visionary founders propelling innovations across industries. It spans the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania, featuring prominent enterprises like Perfect Corp. (NYSE: PERF), MetaApp, Multiway Robots, U Power, Newrizon, Palmpay, Realchar, Aventurier, Pebble, as well as sector leaders including JD.com (NASDAQ:JD), VenusTech (002439), CreditEase (NYSE:YRD), Rong360 (NYSE:JT), Arrail Dental (HKSE:06639), KJY water (301372), TanTan (acquired by NASDAQ:MOMO), Ximalaya FM, and Shukun Technology, underscoring our steadfast commitment to nurturing transformative global leaders.

We were founded on the belief that technology would transform every industry in the world - and that brilliant, ambitious founders would sit at the heart of this change. We're squarely focused on helping these founders succeed. How we helpInvestment: First and foremost, we invest in people, and focus on building relationships with empathy and alignment. We partner with remarkable founders and work to ensure they've got the strategic insights and help they need across multiple rounds. Talent: Our founders tell us that scaling teams is the most challenging part of leading high-growth companies. We have a dedicated team that can help diagnose, design and build the foundations of each startup's talent engine, tailored each time. Community: You're not alone in your founder journey. Building a business is made easier with friends and well-connected allies - a resource we have plenty of. Join a peer group who will be kind, honest and interested in your journey. Frequently asked questions Whether you're curious about our terms or timeframes, below is a good overview of how we do things. What's the 101 on Square Peg? Square Peg is a global investment firm on a mission to empower exceptional founders. With investing teams in Sydney, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, and Singapore, Square Peg invests in emerging technology companies across the internet economy. Square Peg today manages US$3 billion in assets across its venture capital, opportunities and global listed equities funds and in addition has delivered material realised returns of US$0.6 billion. Since 2012 we have invested in over 50 companies including Fiverr, Canva, Rokt, FinAccel, Tomorrow and Airwallex. Through our venture, opportunities and listed equity funds, we invest in tech companies from the pre-seed stage to the post-IPO stage. What stage do you invest in? Globally, our sweet spot for a new investment is Seed-Series A. We have always been an early-stage investor, and were seed investors in companies such as Canva, Zeller and Tomorrow. If you’re wondering if you’re ‘too early’ for Square Peg, the answer is you’re not - as an example, we met and invested in Ben and Dom from Zeller just weeks after they founded the company. What's the investment process? The investment process is designed to help us understand your business, learn about your vision and give you the time to get to know us. If we have a long-standing relationship or you’re at the very early stages, it can take just a few meetings to reach an investment decision. If you’re raising a large round and we haven’t met before, it can take longer. While we like to make swift investment decisions, we encourage founders to take their time getting to know investors - it’s a decade-long decision, so a few additional weeks of diligence is likely well-spent. This is how you’ll experience an investment process with us: We’re often introduced to founders via email. This email hopefully includes a compelling deck that explores their idea. When reviewing the materials the founder sent, we look for a few things: a unique insight about an important problem in a big market, a bright vision, and a world-class team with the ambition to go after it. At this stage, we’ll determine whether the business fits our investment philosophy and ensure it’s not directly competitive with any of our existing investments. The first meeting will be 45 minutes to an hour and may happen online or in person. We encourage the founder to do most of the talking and hope we spend the time exploring the insights of their team and specifics of their business. We may meet a few more times to explore any remaining concepts and give the founder plenty of time to ask questions about how we partner with founders and ensure they’re comfortable. You may meet other members of the investment team at this stage. To receive a term-sheet, you’ll meet the global investment team for a one-hour conversation. The team will have already read a detailed briefing note on your business and be prepared with questions they hope you’ll answer. Though high-stakes, this meeting is friendly and conversational. Once the meeting ends, the investment team will vote whether to approve the investment - this means two ‘yes’ votes from the partnership. The Investor you’ve worked closely with will be in touch that evening to discuss next steps. In anonymous feedback from our founders, we’ve been told we run a quick, transparent and collaborative investment process. Founders have often remarked that the investment process helped them to deepen their understanding of their business. For all founders who meet the team, we aim to ensure this is your experience, too. Do you invest globally? We invest in companies founded in Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia and Israel. Most of our portfolio companies expand from the regions in which they were founded to grow in markets overseas. Examples from the portfolio which have taken this journey include Canva, Fiverr, Airwallex and Rokt. Our funds are structured so that we have complete flexibility to invest between these regions. What do you invest in? First and foremost, we invest in people. We believe that founders with a compelling vision who surround themselves with talented and mission-driven people can change the world. We’ve seen founders such as Mel from Canva, Micha from Fiverr and Jack from Airwallex build extraordinary companies, and we could never have predicted that design, digital services or borderless finance would be some of the most important problems to solve this decade. We founded Square Peg on the belief that technology would transform every industry in the world - and that we can’t predict the future of creativity, industry or ingenuity. So, we’re comfortable being a generalist technology investor, with founders at the centre of our universe. Historically, we have invested heavily into fintech, consumer internet, SaaS, edtech and healthtech, with significant and notable exceptions outside of these themes. Take a look at our portfolio to learn more about the kinds of companies we invest in. How much do you invest in a new company? The smallest first cheque we’ve written was USD$100k, and our largest first cheque was USD$35m. Usually, most first-cheques are $5-$10m, but we’re happy and able to go smaller or bigger. Do you have strict ownership requirements? As a general rule, somewhere between 10-20% ownership is the most common outcome of a venture investment partnership. In practice, we approach all fundraises with a long-term mindset, which means we’re willing and able to lead and participate in rounds where the fundraising dynamics are different to this standard. What’s important to us is ensuring that the founders and our team are deeply aligned and that the company is well-positioned to go after the mission that drives their team. One of our core values is anchor to optimism - optimism that the company and founders will be successful - which means we are far more focused on long-term outcomes and options than short-term percentage holdings. Who are your Limited Partners? Our investors, or 'LPs' as we call them, are a diverse group of superannuation funds, high-net-worth individuals, team members and family offices. We’re grateful to include world-leading industry pension funds such as HostPlus and AustralianSuper as long-term investors. We are fortunate to have investors whose approach to venture capital investing is aligned with our own: ambitious, committed and long-term. How do I approach the team about an investment? Most founders who we’ve invested in connected with us via someone in our network: our portfolio founders, angel investors and VCs we've co-invested with, our LPs, and community leaders in each ecosystem. On occasion, we have also invested in founders who emailed us cold (Mike from ZeroCo, we’re looking at you).

F2 Venture Capital is a Tel Aviv-based VC firm that invests in early-stage technology companies on the cutting edge. Our team members have been investors, operators, and engineers in startups and multinational giants that changed the game over the last twenty years. With $500 million assets under management, F2 powers visionary founders on their bold missions with personalized support. F2 also operates The Junction, Israel's most active pre-seed investment platform, to back founders with guidance, network, and capital from day zero. What does F2 stand for? F2 stands for “Power to Founders”. Our team is here to augment and support your team with the guidance, network and capital to hit your milestones and realize your vision. What are our core values? Our core values are trust, boldness and efficiency. All of our team members share these values that are inspired by the values that Israel’s special forces use to accomplish daring missions against all odds. When was F2 established? We launched our first fund in 2017. Our founders spun out of Genesis Partners, one of Israel’s most established and respected VC funds over the last 25 years. We are currently investing out of our second fund raised in 2019. Which notable companies have we backed? Our partners have previously backed Bizzabo, Click Software (Acquired by Salesforce), Crossrider (FTSE IPO), eToro, FundTech (NASDAQ IPO), Innovid, Kidaro (Acquired by Microsoft), Monday.com, Neebula (Acquired by ServiceNow), ObserveIT (Acquired by Proofpoint), Optimove, PrimeSense (Acquired by Apple), R2Net (Acquired by Signet) and Simplex, among many others from seed stage to exit. Who backs F2? We are backed by institutions and family offices on every continent except Antarctica. Many of our investors are successful founders themselves and routinely help our portfolio companies with advice and support on the ground. F2 is also supported by InnovFin Equity, with the financial backing of the European Union under Horizon 2020 Financial Instruments. Where do we focus? We back deep technology companies at the junction of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Connectivity. These are B2B or B2B2C enterprise software companies with R&D in Israel. Do we focus on particular industries? We believe technology will disrupt every market, so our approach is industry agnostic. We back companies in cyber security, digital health, financial services, HR, insurance, media, real estate, retail and software infrastructure, among other areas. We do not invest in hardware or biotech. At which stage do we invest? It is never too early to get in touch with our team. We love sharing ideas and tailor our approach to support founders at the concept, pre-seed and seed stages. How much do we invest? F2 typically leads seed rounds with checks of up to $4M. We reserve additional funds for follow on rounds in high growth companies. What do we look for in a startup? In order to take our investment decisions, we evaluate the team, market, value proposition, technology and commercial validation. The team is by far the most important factor for us. What do we look for in the team? We are looking for authentic entrepreneurs – women and men who could not imagine doing anything except their venture and have a large vision for their company. Founders should also complement each other in terms of technical and commercial skills. We also love to back “first timers”. What do we look for in the market? We are interested in game changing startups targeting large, existing markets like financial services and healthcare, or small but rapidly growing markets like artificial intelligence. What do we mean by value proposition? We are looking for compelling concepts with a clear business model and a unique approach to solving big problems. Timing is also critical; we ask, “why now?" What do we mean by technology? We look for startups whose technology can provide a moat or barrier to entry for competition and support a great product and user experience. What do we mean by commercial traction? We look for evidence of product-market fit. At the early stage, this usually comes in the form a small but passionate set of customers who view your service as “mission critical”. What is our investment process? Our investment process generally follows five steps: First meeting with our team. In advance of our first meeting, we will review any materials you want to share. This will help us ask the right questions to ensure there is a fit. Our first meeting (or call) will be 45 minutes to cover the basics and feedback. Follow up meetings with our team. Most of our “passes” happen after the first meeting. Follow up meetings mean we are genuinely interested in your startup and want to learn more. You will meet additional team members to address questions and concerns. It’s also our chance to share more about F2 and how we can help. Meetings with outside experts. Over the last 25 years, we have had the privilege to work with founders across every sector. We will match you with domain experts from our network who help us to build conviction and respond efficiently. Meeting with our Investment Committee. Our general partners comprise the investment committee of the fund. We meet every Monday and will invite you back to share the entire story and address the questions that arise in our process. Final Decision. We take all investment decisions as a team by unanimous vote of the general partners. Our goal is to give you a final decision within 24 hours following the meeting with our Investment Committee. How long does our process take? While we follow the same steps for every company, the timing of our process varies based on the investment criteria and our level of conviction. It can range from two weeks to two months but generally we strive to complete a thorough process as fast as possible. Is there a fast track? The Junction is our fast track to investment. The program is designed for strong founding teams that are still developing one of or more parts of their business plan. We can move as fast as one week to provide pre-seed funding in these situations. Does F2 only back companies from The Junction? No. F2 invests in the seed stage in companies from The Junction as well as directly into companies that do not start at The Junction. We harness the network of founders and partners around The Junction to support all of our companies. What is The Junction? Established in 2011 at Genesis Partners, The Junction is our pre-seed investment program to help founders achieve technological, product and business targets in an accelerated time frame. What are some notable companies from The Junction? The Junction has launched more than 200 companies including AppsFlyer, HoneyBook, Simplee, ClarityRay, HouseParty, CyberX, Mobilize and many others that have raised close to $1 billion from top VC funds and realized multiple exits to tech giants. What value does The Junction provide? Over a 6 month period, startups in the program receive tailor made support in strategy development, positioning, sales & marketing and recruitment, among other critical areas. The Junction provides 5 layers of support to founders: Guidance. Expert guidance from investors, alumni and industry experts. Network. Access to multinational partners for commercial pilots and investment. Capital. Pre-seed funding from F2 on founder-friendly terms. Operations. Support in positioning, business development and HR from industry experts. Perks. Free workspace, credits and discounts for cloud hosting and additional services. What are the terms of the program? The terms of the program are simple. F2 invests on a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) that converts into your seed round at a discount with no cap on the valuation. In addition, F2 has the right to participate in your seed round, on the terms of the round. How do you apply to The Junction? Contact us with your background and vision and we will follow up with you within 48 hours. If your focus fits our areas of focus, we will invite you for a meeting and give you a decision within 7 to 14 days. Does F2 continue to invest in companies from The Junction? Yes. We can lead or join the seed investment round in companies from The Junction. In fact, this is why we run the program – to get to know you, add value and give you the opportunity to get to know us – to build a strong and successful partnership with you for the long term. How much do we invest in a company? F2 typically leads seed rounds with checks of up to $4M. We reserve additional funds for follow on rounds in high growth companies. Will F2 join a round with another VC? Yes. We often partner with other top funds, multinationals and strategic angels from our network and yours to build the best possible team and support your growth. What makes F2 different? F2 is a specialized fund with a clear mandate to back seed stage, deep technology companies in Israel. We are totally aligned to help you reach your milestones and bring additional top global funds for your round. In addition to our team of investment and HR professionals and portfolio companies, The Junction community with hundreds of founders and partners pay it forward to support you with collective wisdom and partnership. How do you support your companies? The companies we have previously backed have raised billions of dollars in follow-on capital. We leverage our experience and relationships – built over decades – to help you build the right pitch and connect with your ideal partner. As market conditions shift and Series A pools shrink, this kind of resource becomes a serious advantage to our founders. Will F2 support you in future rounds? On day one we set milestones together and help you achieve them. We want to be your first call when you hit an obstacle so there are no surprises, and we continue to invest in your Series A round and beyond as you execute on plan or pivot with the market. How does F2 help you with HR? Our Head of People is dedicated to help you connect and screen top talent to build your team. As a trained psychologist, she also coaches our founders through inevitable tensions and challenges in order to perform at your best, as individuals and as a team. Does F2 take board seats? F2 takes a board seat in companies when we invest at the seed stage and are most active helping you build your company in the first years. Outside of the board, we prefer to meet one-on-one to help you navigate challenges and opportunities on your growth trajectory.

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.