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Prime Directive: How Sci-Fi Lessons Map to Investing
Our planet is dying. Or, at least it always is in my favorite books. At its core, science fiction is about founders—pioneers who envision radical futures and take radical action. And just like Kirk, Picard, Janeway, or really anyone in space wearing a yellow shirt, the founders I look for don’t just iterate in the…
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Power to the People: My Investing Focus 2022
You Deserve Two and a half years ago I joined Lightspeed and laid out how my investing focus mapped to communities and sectors I care about. I’ve been so proud to watch it come to life through investments in: Players driving financial inclusion through fintech + retail investing such as Trading TV, Stori, and Flink (including Lightspeed’s first investments in LATAM); Companies shepherding in…
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Meet trading.tv: Livestreamed Trading
[Originally posted Feb 15, 2022] We are excited to announce our investment in trading.tv, a next generation social media platform for retail investing. Trading.tv enables creators to distribute investment content through a livestream-enabled social media platform. By linking creator content to a trading brokerage, trading.tv allows users to instantly invest on ideas they hear about in…
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Meet Everyrealm: Building the Gateway to the Metaverse
[Orignally posted Feb 10, 2022] We’re thrilled to be partnering with Everyrealm as they announce their $60M Series A. Everyrealm is an investor and developer of NFT properties in the virtual world. They launched in April 2021 and built Fantasy Islands and the infamous $650k yacht in Sandbox. The team believes (as do we) that people need places to…
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FCF’s Series A — the web3 league where fans/community call the plays
[Originally posted Jan 12, 2022] Congratulations to FCF (Fan Controlled Football) on your $40M Series A raise led by Animoca Brands and Delphi Digital. We led the seed in mid 2020 and have been continuously floored by the ingenuity, inventiveness, hustle, and performance of the FCF team. We already know Americans love to watch football. The TV…
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The House of LR&C — a house of love, fashion, and sustainability
Congrats on your $7M round [Originally posted Jan 11, 2022] When we first met Ciara, Russell and Christine, we were floored by not just their passion and drive to build a large fashion brand, but their operational capabilities. As a two year old company, they were already doing eight-figures in revenue and had launched two…
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Congratulations Stori on your Series C
Congratulations to Stori on your $125M Series C equity raise led by GGV and GIC! We led the Series B earlier this year and I’ve been thrilled to see Stori perform incredibly well since we invested. The company has more than 10x’d active credit cards and seen over 2M people apply for a card. They also introduced…
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Announcing Lightspeed’s Investment in Hawku, an NFT Marketplace
By Amy Wu and Mercedes Bent NFTs were originally founded in the last crypto rally of 2017 as a cryptographic tool to tokenize digital items and impart ownership to a digital item. Four years later, the world saw the first major NFT rally in 2021, driven by a crypto surge and resulting cultural phenomenon as…
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Meet Flink: México’s Leading Neobroker
By Mercedes Bent and Will Kohler We’re thrilled to announce that Lightspeed is leading the $57M Series B of Flink, the leading neobroker in México. Flink surpassed 1M brokerage accounts earlier this year after launching their brokerage product in the summer of 2020. We first met the Flink team the day before Mercedes’ birthday. It was a Friday…
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“Edtech” VCs
I’m frequently asked by founders which VCs invest in companies focused on learning or career mobility. I say “edtech” VCs as many of these investors are investing preK to gray including consumer, corporate, etc. The “edtech” VCs listed here are either focused on this space full-time or have strong theses about the space / have…
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Mercedes Bent 