In Q2, Ridgeline held the first close on Ridgeline Venture Fund I. We are excited to reach this milestone and continue to see great demand for our investment strategy.
Additionally, we spent the past quarter closing a number of deals and one follow-on investment.
Those, plus a few portfolio highlights, outlined below.
One Big Thing
Loft Orbital successfully launched the first of many satellites into orbit, starting what we think will be a trend in the market commoditizing satellite busses and operations. The YAM-3 satellite rode on the SpaceX Transporter 2 mission.
YAM-3 will host a variety of payloads — including a demonstration for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Blackjack satellite constellation program, and an Internet of Things telecom payload for Eutelsat.
We are beyond excited to see Loft get to this stage of their journey and we are very bullish about the company going forward. Congrats to the whole team at Loft!
New Investments
Cape Privacy. Cape Privacy allows for machine learning work on encrypted data and models. The New York based company raised a $20M Series A from Evolution Equity in April 2021. Ridgeline participated with Tiger Global and alongside existing investors Boldstart, Haystack and Radical Ventures.
Satellite Vu. Satellite Vu is a British developer of thermal imaging satellites. Ridgeline participated in the $5M million seed round led by Seraphim Capital.
Altana. Altana provides new insights into supply chain vulnerabilities and illuminates risks across multiple tiers. Ridgeline made an investment in Altana in May.
Machine Metrics. Machine Metrics is creating the operating system for the factory floor and driving a revolution in CNC manufacturing. The company closed a $20M Series B funding round in June 2021 led by Teradyne, in which Ridgeline Ventures participated.
PlanetWatchers. PlanetWatchers was founded by a group of ex-military intelligence officers who are seeking to revolutionize crop monitoring, insurance, and disaster response. PlanetWatchers raised $3.5M in a pre-series A funding round in June 2021. Ridgeline participated alongside Creative Ventures and Seraphim Capital.
Gilmour Space. Gilmour Space is a dual phase rocket company aiming to reliably deliver small payloads across multiple orbital planes. The company raised nearly $46M in a Series C round that closed in June 2021. Ridgeline participated in the round, led by Fine Structure Ventures, a fund affiliated with Fidelity Investments.
Follow-on Investments
Replicated. Replicated raised a $50M Series C from Owl Rock Capital, with participation from Ridgeline and existing investors. Replicated will use the funding to keep growing the team, expand globally, accelerate the pursuit of a multi-prem future and continue revolutionizing how enterprise software is delivered & managed.
Portfolio Updates
See above for Loft Orbital launch of YAM-3
Agolo partnered with Microsoft on sector solutions for Financial Services and Healthcare with marquee clients lined up for both. These solutions not only include Agolo’s pioneering query-based summarization, but also their newly released semantic similarity algorithm, that is utilized for client specific query expansion.
In March, Altana announced the launch of new features that can help federal agencies and government contractors map their supply chain networks and identify risks using artificial intelligence.
Satellite Vu was selected to participate in the first AWS Space Accelerator class. Werner Vogels wrote a blog highlighting the program and selected companies, which were chosen from over 190 applicants.
Government Wins
Wallaroo won a Phase III award with LevelUP in order to continue to develop the Unified Platform data fabric.
GridRaster won a Direct to Phase II in the last cycle to provide a scalable high precision augmented reality (AR) toolset for CV 22 nacelle wiring harness installation.
Loft Orbital won a Phase II award with the U.S. Air Force.
Impossible Objects won two Phase II awards through the SBIR and STTR programs.
Interesting Stuff
Portfolio company, Auxon, launched a demo using their product, Modality, to quickly find, fix, and prevent a critical flaw in an autonomous drone stack. Collapsing a manual, multi-day debugging process into a 20 minute session.
This should be a must read paper for any organization stepping into AI/ML. Data work is difficult (and less exciting) but necessary to ensure success in building functional models and more efficient AI/ML practices.
Interesting analysis of emerging fund managers compared to established VCs. Of course, the outcome leans towards the EMs. ;)
A great read from Sarah Wang and Martin Casado at a16z discussing the tipping point of cloud costs for larger software companies and the move away from the public cloud.