Ridgeline Quarterly Update
Updates on deals, portfolio news, and interesting things in our world
For awareness: Ridgeline announced the close of Fund I. We had a short profile of the firm and fund published in TechCrunch. Check it out here.
Two weeks ago, the Ridgeline team wrapped its first in-person event. We welcomed founders, limited partners, and friends of Ridgeline to Memphis, Tennessee for a day and a half of conversations, community building, and to showcase a place where we’ve established a big presence. We are very grateful to our network for making the trip and participating so fully in the event.
Ridgeline works to bring the corporate and government worlds closer to that of emerging technology and venture capital. Serving that part of our mission, we put our founders on stage with corporate and government executives discussing important, high-level topics impacting both of these worlds. In most cases, our portfolio founders are building companies to solve the challenges our corporate partners are faced with on a day-to-day basis.
We scoped a keynote discussion around the new era of globalization we find ourselves in with corporate and defense leadership. Another panel discussed how emerging technology would help drive decarbonization goals within the Global 2000 and what macro-challenges all parties faced in meeting those goals. We closed out day one with a conversation on the reshaping of the global supply chain and the ways in which technology would improve transparency, resilience, and security.
On day two, our guests had the opportunity to visit one of three Memphis landmarks: FedEx Forum, The National Civil Rights Museum, and The Stax Museum of American Soul Music. These offsite activities were certainly a highlight for many. Later that morning, we held a discussion on the future of commerce with two iconic American companies. Appropriately, we closed out the summit with Memphis’ own Central BBQ.
Overall, we were extremely pleased with the event, the content, and how it showcased Memphis. We also know that whatever we do next year needs to evolve, create more value for our portfolio, and demonstrate where we are as a firm and how we will continue to get better.
One Big Thing
A few weeks back, RKVST announced a $7.5m Series A with Ridgeline as the lead investor. This is the first Series A we’ve led and we were joined by Acadia Woods, Cyber Mentor Fund and Long Run Capital. Ryan Clinton joins Kevin Compton, co-founder at Radar Partners, and Nick Sturiale on the RKVST board of directors.
RKVST enables organizations to build verifiable digital supply chains. Whether you’re tracking nuclear waste, relying on data from connected devices, or using software bills of materials (SBOMs), RKVST gets you the data you need from anywhere in your supply chain without the frustration, time, and uncertainty of manual data verification.
Supply chain resilience is broadly needed for all types of physical and digital assets. The team that Rusty Cumpston and Jon Geater have put together is an exceptional one with a proven track record, having built multiple successful start-ups, and they are ideally suited to capture the market.
New Investments
Tread. Ridgeline invested in Tread, a Toronto-based construction transportation management company. The funding will be used to accelerate go to market within key materials markets and geographies.
Matta. Ridgeline invested in Matta, a Nigerian startup building an end-to-end B2B marketplace for chemicals, materials, ingredients, and commodities critical to the development of the Nigerian and broader African economies.
RKVST. As mentioned above, Ridgeline led the $7.5m Series A with participation from Acadia Woods, Cyber Mentor Fund and Long Run Capital.
Follow-on Investments
Cornelis. Cornelis Networks raised a $30m Series B-1 led by IAG Capital with participation from existing investors. Cornelis delivers high-performance fabrics for High Performance Computing, Data Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence.
PlanetWatchers. PlanetWatchers raised an $11m Series A led by Creative Ventures and Seraphim Space. PlanetWatchers is using synthetic aperture radar-based data analytics to improve agriculture and food security.
Eclypsium. Eclypsium raised a $25m Series B led by TenEleven Ventures. Eclypsium provides a cloud platform that provides protection against device hardware, firmware, and software exploits in corporate environments and public sector environments.
Altana. Altana raised a $100m Series B led by Activate Capital. Altana connects and learns from the world’s public and non-public data to provide a dynamic, intelligent model of the supply chain.
Portfolio Updates
Harbinger, developer of two EV platforms that are optimized for medium-duty trucks, came out of stealth at the Detroit Auto Show. Ridgeline participated in the Seed round of the company in 2021 with Tiger Global and Schematic Ventures.
Cornelis Networks announced the hire of Matt Jacobs as Chief Commercial Officer responsible for all go-to-market elements of the company. Matt was formerly at Penguin Computing as its Chief Strategy Officer.
Altana hired Ian Cadieu as its Chief Technology Officer. Ian was formerly at Bridgewater Associates where he was head of trading technology. We are thrilled about this hire and it comes at a key time for the company given the demand for the product and new funding.
Wallaroo launched its product on the Azure Marketplace, which allows Azure customers to directly leverage the Wallaroo Enterprise Edition directly from the cloud platform.
Q-CTRL launched Black Opal, its purpose built quantum computing education platform. The product will be used to broaden the adoption of quantum and grow the size of the market for its core products.
Neural Magic sparsity ranked at the top of a benchmark for AI performance. It was ranked alongside Nvidia's Hopper and Alibaba's network. In all, the benchmarks received 5,300 submissions by the chip makers and partners, and startups.
Interesting Stuff
We were encouraged by thought pieces that show why emerging managers can prove to be good sources of alpha in high volatility periods and, if past is truly prologue, why now is a great time to enter the venture market.
We are also reading a lot of content from investors who have been through downturns before and how best to manage during this period and avoid straight line thinking.
Venture is still producing exciting anecdotes with one company scaling from $0 to $100m in 18 months, “defining a new kind of company” according to IVP, and a once in a generation $20b private market acquisition.
One indicator of rapid and sustained growth that we look for is net dollar retention (NDR) or simply: how much has ARR grown or shrunk in a year. This article discussing 200% NDR (for reference, 130% is known to be best in class) shows how a high NDR can be massive for scale and capital efficiency.
We also found these two reports on the state of the cloud from HashiCorp and a survey on the developer community from GitLab highly valuable.