August 2023 Newsletter
The latest from Garuda Ventures, news from our portfolio, new investments, and a few tidbits!
Welcome to the Garuda Ventures newsletter, where we share the latest from us, news from our portfolio, new investments, and a few tidbits.
New Investments: We partnered with one new founding team this past quarter, building Machine Intelligence Software for FP&A teams 🧠. This investment is still unannounced, so you’ll just have to wait to hear more!
Garuda Community: The beginnings of summer meant more time outdoors with the Garuda community. With events in San Francisco, Boston, and our annual Founder Summer Putt-Putt event, we were glad to connect with so many friends old and new!
Garuda Founder Putt-Putt this past June What Most People Get Wrong: This past quarter we kicked off a new content series titled “What Most People Get Wrong.” We will be interviewing experts in their field with the goal of answering a few core questions: What do most people get wrong about your area of expertise? Why? Our first interviews cover streaming and career design
Founder Resources: We are big proponents of companies setting up a structured Design Partner Program to help arrive at feedback-driven answers to some of these more important questions. With the help and input from a few founders, we have come up with a collection of a few tips, tricks, and best practices to help navigate early product development through a design partner program. You can find our guide to Running a Successful Design Partner Program here
On Stage: Arpan spoke at Passio’s Developer Day about investing in AI, and Rishi spoke on the realities of raising a fund in this climate at the Emerging Horizons conference. Rishi was also featured in a webinar hosted by Carta on the value of systems and tools to an emerging fund
Portfolio News
Dashworks, your company's knowledge assistant, announced the launch of their new AI-assistant product to further streamline internal knowledge for enterprises. They also announced their $5M fundraise led by Point72 Ventures
Leap, the platform for monetizing distributed energy resources, recently announced the launch of grid services in New England. Through its partners, Leap will bring new value to tens of thousands of electric vehicle, energy storage, and smart building customers in New England, all while simplifying the backend onboarding. The company also raised a $12M round led by Standard Investments to expand its virtual power plant software solution
Honey Homes, the all-in-one handyman service, expanded its service and now covers both the Bay Area and Dallas. In the last two years, the company added 500 members, completed over 20,000 tasks on behalf of homeowners, and grew revenue 8X in 2022. They also recently announced its Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures.
Noyo, the connections gateway for modern insurance, announced a new integration system for ben-admins, turning a previously convoluted process into a single, standard format for all carriers and lines of coverage
WoFlow, on a mission to structure the world's unstructured data, acquired XtremeAI, a leading document digitization and data structuring platform based out of Spain. Through this acquisition, WoFlow expands their customer reach, and further bolsters their AI capabilities
To see a complete list of founders and companies we’ve partnered with, visit garuda.vc/companies
Hiring Across the Portfolio
There are close to 100 jobs available across the Garuda Ventures portfolio! If you’re in the market for an exciting new role at an early-stage business, head to jobs.garuda.vc or click the button below to discover opportunities across our network of companies.
Garuda’s Bookshelf
In a world of bite-sized, easily consumable content, we love asking and getting the question, “Have you read any good books lately?” In this month’s bookshelf:
Non-fiction: The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change by Ellen Ruppel Shell
![The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change by [Ellen Ruppel Shell]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LsDN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbbe0820e-89e7-4ecc-ba90-26c9879ec317_331x500.jpeg "The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change by [Ellen Ruppel Shell]")
The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change is a fascinating take on the future of work by The Atlantic correspondent. She explores why we work, the history of ‘jobs’, and the impact the changing nature of work will have on society. It’s a refreshing take on a theme that typically ends with a fairly standard set of doomsday scenarios - jobs will be lost to overseas competition, automation, and robots. Shell transforms these into a compelling narrative that rejects a number of the commonly held beliefs about why work is changing and what the coming years hold.
Fiction: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow tells the tale of two childhood best friends that go on to start a gaming company together. A wonderfully written story, it is probably one of the best reads on the power of co-founders and how a team can push each other to heights impossible to reach on one’s own.
Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused, pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.
Loved catching up on Garuda’s latest updates and community highlights from August — exciting to see how your portfolio and events continue to build momentum and connection across founders and supporters! 🙌
If Garuda is all about enabling growth and simplifying journeys for founders, there’s a similar energy at InstaService — we help professionals and businesses power seamless, reliable home services with speed and trust, so entrepreneurs and customers can focus on what truly matters.