December '22 - m]x[v Capital Newsletter

It has to begin somewhere.

and

Dec 30, 2022

It has to begin somewhere and we’re starting today. This is m]x[v Capital’s first monthly newsletter. We’re excited to have this platform where we can share our thoughts and look forward to you joining us along our journey.

Happy holidays, we hope you are all looking forward to what the new year has to bring.

- m]x[v Capital

*(left to right)* - Sumedh Nadendla *(Venture Fellow)*, Issac Hoschander *(Analyst)*, Mark Ghermezian *(General Partner)*, Jay Estefani Castillo *(Principal)*, Vic Lee *(Community & Operations Manager)*

Learnings from Year I

This past year, m]x[v has focused on fundraising, building foundational fund operations, sourcing strong deal flow, and supporting our portfolio companies. As a team, we have learned a lot on how to differentiate ourselves amongst the sea of venture capital funds with the intent to bring REAL value to the next generation of cloud leaders.

Founder First

We are focused on helping our founders position their companies to dominate the market. The earliest days of building a business are the hardest and when most VCs are hands off (so our founders tell us), we lean in. Our investment team meets with our founders monthly, conducts working sessions, performs competitor/market landscape analysis, helps with fundraising strategy, and acts as an extension of the team. Our founders attest to our commitment to helping them through the founder journey and our ability to provide value add to their businesses.

Keen Eye. Steady head

In late 2021 and early 2022, it was difficult to ignore the influx of deals coming across the table. With the speed the market was deploying capital, we felt the pressure to do as well and Q1 ‘22 was the most capital deployed from our fund to date. We are excited about the companies we invested in earlier this year, but are now focused on strengthening our due diligence process to ensure we are thorough and deliberate in our investments. We need to have strong jurisdiction in our investments’ teams, go-to-market strategy, technology, and lean heavily on our own knowledge base, expert network, and research database to ensure we’re investing in the best of the best.

Founding Team Make-Up

Founding team DNA is one of the most important considerations in early-stage investing. Determining if a founding team has the right balance of experiences spanning technical, product, and business operations is a large focus when assessing a potential investment. Imbalances on the team can risk the inability to thoughtfully execute against the vision and build and scale a sustainable business. Another key element that we’re looking for in our founders is their ability to listen to feedback, make quick iterations, and to be open-minded when building out their product.

Focused Approach

With the private markets settling, we are seeing valuations stabilize and are focused on increasing our check sizes and respective ownership on our investments to double-down on the companies we’re excited about. As investors, we are refocusing on finding investment opportunities that have:

Strong products are being built that solve core business pain points
A clear road to profitability
A focused strategy to identify product-market-fit (PMF) & a target ideal customer profile (ICP) outlined
Teams that are organized behind a clear product roadmap and run lean and efficiently

m]x[v Portfolio

As we close our first full year with m]x[v Capital, we’re excited to highlight the portfolio companies that we have invested in thus far:

Gynger - Helping SMBs save money, extend runway, and improve cash flow by financing their software and infrastructure spend.
Novu - Open-source notification infrastructure
PackageX - Digitizing and connecting inventory, fulfillment, shipping, delivery, and receiving operations on a unified platform to simplify logistics
Conduit - No-code data analytics for digital marketing and operations
Epoch - Software for companies to enable employee experiences
Alembic - The first marketing event conversion and correlation engine for enterprise marketing teams
Spiky.AI - Enhancing engagement using video sentiment analytics
Diagram - Automation tools for designers
Talkbase - Community operations platform designed for team collaboration, program management, and member tracking
Mailmodo - Create and send interactive emails to maximize conversions and reinvent your user journey
DevRev - The world’s first Dev CRM platform
Cuvama - Creating a better B2B buying and selling experience by connecting value
Focal Point - All-in-one procurement platform
ServiceBell - Add live human connection to any website
Stealth Marketing Start-up - Will be announced at a later time

2022 was a big year for us and 2023 will be even bigger. Here’s where we’ll be investing in 2023:

Founders who are…

Knowledgeable in building foundation tech infrastructure
Knowledgeable in building and expanding a concept
Driven to dominate a market and take market share from incumbents
Obsessed with product orientation

Companies that are…

Pre-seed, Seed
B2B cloud-focused, disrupting the market and defining the future of cloud
Building disruptive enterprise technology solutions
Defining a clear market fit with strong product roadmaps

Does this sound like your company or a founder you know? Contact us.

Featured Jobs of the Month

SALES

Account Executive - Epoch (Toronto, Vancouver, KW)
Account Executive - Gynger (Hybrid - NYC)

PRODUCT

Lead Product Designer - Novu (Remote)
Senior Product Designer - Postscript (Remote)

TECH

Software Engineer - Diagram (Remote)
Tech Lead (Full Stack) - Apploi (NYC)

More of our open roles HERE

Tweet of the Month

Andrew Gazdecki @agazdecki

Not being able to raise that next round of venture capital will probably end up being the best thing to ever happen to 1000s of startups.

Andrew Gazdecki @agazdecki

Why? More equity for founders. More focus on paying customers. More focus on creating value. More exit opportunities available. More focus on what's working. Less throwing money at problems. Less focus on what's not working. Just to name a few.

Portfolio in the News

Congratulations to Gynger (m]x[v incubated company) for coming out of stealth and announcing their $21.7MM seed round.

News that Caught our Eye

]12.5.22[ Twelve Labs lands $12M for AI that understand the context of videos - As a fund we’ve seen multiple companies leveraging the capabilities of AI to facilitate and drive design. There is so much innovation happening in this space and as a fund, we are excited to continue to explore the innovation happening in this space. m]x[v’s portfolio company, Diagram is building the next AI design assistant helping designers automate a lot of the design process, allowing them to focus on how to best design their content.

]12.6.22[ Cacheflow doubles valuation - m]x[v Capital’s Gynger is ready to take the market by storm as a direct competitor to Cacheflow. The market continues to prove out Gynger’s positioning.

]12.12.22[ Large language model expands natural language understanding, moves beyond English - AI/NLP is driving a lot of innovation and SaaS companies across the board are finding ways to leverage it to power their offerings. With the advancements of NLP going multilingual, the barrier to create cross-border products are becoming easier and easier.

Event Spotlight

11.16 - m]x[v Capital AGM

We hosted a full day of programming starting with a live fund update to our investors and finished off the night with a celebration for all our founders, friends of the fund, and investors to celebrate our first year as a fund.

12.6 - m]x[v Capital<>DevRev Founders Day

In partnership with our portfolio company, DevRev’s CEO Dheeraj Pandey (former CEO/founder of Nutanix, Board of Adobe) we hosted an event aimed on empowering early-stage founders to leverage product-led-growth (PLG) to grow their business. The day started off with a fireside chat with our General Partner, Mark Ghermezian and Dheeraj discussing their experience building a product-led organization, a workshop on how to do so, and a pitching session after.