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Ghost’s Series A

Co-authored by Rebecca Kaden Excess inventory is one of the worst-kept secrets in ecommerce.  Brands overproduce more than $500B of goods annually.  In categories like cosmetics, less than 50% of inventory is sold within a 12-month window.   Source: Shopify For [...]  Read more

m3ter

A core piece of USV’s thesis has long been around an enablement layer – the idea that horizontal tooling is essential to support growing ecosystems that sit on top. That belief has led to investments like Twilio, Shippo, Sift, Clarifai, [...]  Read more

soona

Co-authored by Hannah Murdoch The language of commerce has always been visual.  Tiffany’s published their Blue Book in 1845, the first direct-mail catalogue in the United States.  The publication distributed pages of the world’s finest jewels to customers who couldn’t reach [...]  Read more

goTenna Series C

We are excited that Founders Fund has led a Series C financing for goTenna. It is a recognition of the tremendous progress the company has made in serving the communication needs of first responders and other professionals. The goTenna Prooffering works with mobile phones [...]  Read more

Code Climate Velocity 2.0

About a year ago Code Climate announced its Velocity offering which provides engineering insights. Today they are taking the wraps off Version 2.0 for everyone. Existing customers have already had access to many of the new features. I am writing about this today [...]  Read more

Velocity by Code Climate

Today our portfolio company Code Climate is launching its new “Velocity” product into public beta. The product provides teams with data driven insights into the speed of their development process. It answers important questions, such as where in the process do engineers have to wait (e.g. long continuous integration times or long wait for code to be reviewed)? Or, how much work in progress is accumulating (and how much risk does that contain)? For more examples of the types of insights provided by Velocity, you can see the product launch page. Read more

Protocol Labs

Protocol Labs made a series of announcements earlier today including that Union Square Ventures made an equity investment in the company late last year. We are thrilled to be working with Juan Benet and his team and excited to be able to share some of our thinking here. Read more

goTenna

Disruptive innovations often start out as worse versions of something that already exists. Worse along all dimensions except for one, but one that turns out to really matter because it unlocks a new use case for which the incumbent does not work at all or is not affordable. The PC was slower, had less memory and less storage than a minicomputer. But it was massively more affordable and could be set up and run without the help of the centralized IT department ... Read more

Tucows

Union Square Ventures has made a substantial investment in Tucows, a 23 year old company company that has been publicly traded for over 15 years. Since we have never before invested in a public company, that requires a bit of an explanation. Read more