Red & Blue Ventures

Great to see the continued progress from Rajat Bhageria and his awesome team!

We’re excited to announce that NeuroFlow has acquired Owl, the leading measurement-based care company for behavioral health providers and health plans. This deal creates the largest end-to-end platform for identifying and managing behavioral health needs across the entire healthcare continuum. By merging with Owl, NeuroFlow now offers the most expansive suite of solutions for delivering measurement-based and feedback-informed care. The platform supports health systems, health plans, the federal government, and now behavioral health providers. “Owl provides a comprehensive solution for monitoring patients who need a higher level of care, giving providers the tools to track and measure outcomes over time and ensure quality and consistency throughout the care journey,” says Christopher Molaro “This is just the beginning; we intend to build on this foundation to improve access and engagement.” Read the complete press release here: https://lnkd.in/ecN2kcxs #acquisition #behavioralhealth #mentalhealth #measurementbasedcare

This is BIG. Bored Cow is: 🛒 Expanding into 2000+ new stores 🇺🇸 Now available in all 50 states 🥛 Launching 11 oz Original 4️⃣ Introducing 4-packs We're so proud of this product -- for people, for animals, and the planet. And we can't wait to share it with more people around the country. Go get some now at Albertsons, Safeway, Sprouts, Fresh Thyme, Central Market, Shaws, and many many more stores. We're just getting started!

Hopscotch has grown like crazy in the last few months. In May, we will have added as much revenue as we did June through December last year. It’s not just revenue that’s growing either. We’ve grown new accounts 37% MoM and transaction volume by 73% MoM over the last 6 months. In fact, we’ve processed more volume in the last two months than we did in all of 2023. I thought it’d be interesting to share what led to this inflection point in the business. 1/ We shipped something businesses need Early on in Hopscotch’s life, we recognized we had a unique opportunity to modernize an industry that has remained relatively untouched by tech: factoring. I’ll spare you the history lesson, but those who are familiar with factoring know the experience isn't great (more here: https://shorturl.at/YQEom). To test our thesis about an alternative to traditional factoring, we launched an alpha version of Flow and made it available to a small subset of our invoicing / bill pay customers (<25). Within weeks, we saw there was a clear market need, but there was still a lot of work to do on our invoicing / bill pay product so we pushed Flow to the side. That was a mistake. During our 2023 annual review, we realized the unit economics for Flow were extremely compelling: enterprise SaaS-like LTVs, high retention, etc. Once we saw the numbers, we moved quickly to build a beta version of Flow that more of our customers would be able to access. In May, we launched Flow 2.0. Even though Flow is still only available to <100 businesses out of the 7k+ on Hopscotch, we’ve been able to grow revenue like crazy. The expansion opportunity is compelling and we’re working hard to get it in the hands of more of our users. 2/ We identified a major GTM unlock It’s no secret that SMBs are often difficult to acquire, monetize, and retain over long periods of time. To make the Hopscotch model work, we focused on building a product that is inherently viral. If we acquire one business, we need to be able to organically acquire their clients and vendors. In other words, we set out to build a negative-CAC product with the potential to achieve exponential growth. While the above remains true to this day (we convert 10% of all businesses that receive an invoice or bill from one of our users to the platform), we identified a major GTM unlock in late March that has enabled us to grow like wildfire. I’m not going to share the specifics on LinkedIn (yet), but we’ve been able to build a niche channel partner network that consistently drives new accounts and revenue to our platform. At first, this network started as an experiment with a single partner, but once we saw traction we quickly formalized a process to identify, onboard, and manage new parters. Today, we know how much each new partner will drive in volume and revenue on a monthly basis. There are tens of thousands of these partners out there and we’re onboarding about 3-5 per month.

I’m excited to finally announce that Shinkei has raised $6m in seed funding led by Cantos, with participation from 8VC, Impatient Ventures, Ravelin, Susa Ventures/Humba Ventures, Carya Venture Partners, Red & Blue Ventures, Dorm Room Fund, Ratio, Undeterred Capital, Spacecadet, LMNT Ventures and others joining existing investors. Press Release: https://lnkd.in/dziQYHe8 Shinkei is automating the fishing industry. 3 billion people rely on fish as a primary source of protein (UN), but as little as 1 in 3 fish actually make it to a plate in America (Guardian). Waste from spoilage and bycatch contributes to the pressure on high volume fishing with tight margins across the chain. While the US is a leader in policy and sustainability, the reality is the frameworks of seafood, relative to other supply chains, still have catching up to do. The integration of robotics into seafood is lagging relative to agriculture and terrestrial animals —  seafood needs a shake up. Shinkei is building the nervous system for the next generation of meat processing. Our robots have unlocked exponential improvements in unit economics for our partners across the supply chain. Our software-defined platform combines the elegance of mechanism design and controls with vanguard perception models and internal research to unlock a scale to processes previously thought impossible. Partners with 10-figure revenue faced problems that "could never be solved"  and see solutions come to life through early implementation. We believe in sustainability, deliciousness and beauty — for all. Our phenomenal team of ex-SpaceX and early Anduril engineers are leading our charge. If you're interested in fortifying one of America's core industries — reach out. Come join us: https://lnkd.in/dSuVJffQ It takes a village and I'm extremely thankful for our passionate team, extraordinary investors and the generous mentors who continue to help us along the way. From fish sommeliers to farm operators to fishermen to the chefs themselves, the support from the industry continues to be remarkable. More to come, but for now: back to building.

Great coverage of our portfolio company Exyn Technologies in the Inquirer today

Excited to be a part of this and to work with Marc Lore again!

Congrats to Shanel Fields and the MD Ally | 911 Network Navigation team!

Excited to see our portfolio company Overplay on Shark Tank on Friday!

Chef Robotics's AI-enabled robots just achieved a major milestone as of January 2024: more than 10M meals in production! As far as we know, this is more meals in production than any other intelligent food robotics company today! Chef had its first production runs at customer sites in June 2022 and it took Chef 314 days to get to 1M meals in production. But growth is continuing to accelerate; it took 100 additional days to reach 2M, an additional 21 days to get to 3M, 18 additional days to get to 4M, and now a bit over 2 weeks to get each additional 1M meals. This compounding is critical since for Chef, there's no AI training data that one can download from the internet (as if to train a LLM). The training data has to be created from real-world data at customer sites. Overtime, this becomes a flywheel where we can continually manipulate more and more ingredients, adding and more value to our customers. At Chef we believe that AI’s biggest impact will be on the physical world, representing 90% of Global GDP. In the food industry, for example, in 2023 there were 1,137,000 jobs unfilled in food preparation and service (Bureau for Labor Statistics). These growing labor shortages are forcing food companies to leave millions of dollars on the table every year in unmet demand. As this pain becomes more acute, food companies are more aggressively seeking out alternatives, including off-shoring more and more parts of the food supply chain to other countries where there is more labor available; this of course comes with its own significant risks for the US. Chef is deploying AI-enabled robotics to help food companies overcome the labor shortage while helping keep the American food supply chain on-shore. If you’re interested in real-world deployments of AI, we’d love to chat! https://lnkd.in/df8SifTG