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Q3, 2019 Update

Announcing Unshackled's East Coast University Tour, Fellows Class, 6 new investments, and strong portfolio growth.

Portfolio Stats:

PORTFOLIO HIGHLIGHTS

We continue our focus on being the first investor for immigrant-founded companies. Nothing is too early for us. Learn more about what we invest in our post here. 

NEW INVESTMENTS

21 automates testing for mobile apps by analyzing coverage, auto generating tests based on actual user flows, and connecting testing to production.
  • Shani Shoham (CEO), has extensive experience in the software testing space. He was most recently the President of Testim.io, a Lightspeed and Heavybit backed AI test automation startup that he grew from 5 customers to over 100 customers. Prior to Testim.io, Shani was responsible for business development at web and mobile testing company Perfecto. Shani attended Stanford Graduate School of Business.
  • Royi Haddad (CTO), has vast experience with NLP and algorithms. He has been CTO of 3 prior startups building contextual engines for conversational agents, a gaming company and a Yelp-like small business marketplace.
Shoutout to TechCrunch whose piece on Unshackled Fund II had the team reach out!
Hireclub is a career coach in your pocket. It helps people rocket their careers by matching them with a career coach they can talk with daily. The community has grown organically to 30k+ members.
  • Ketan Anjaria (CEO) was an early consultant at Twitter and Yammer (when each was under 30 employees). He has started 3 companies before. His last startup CardFlick won TechCrunch Audience choice.
  • Lisa Maria (Co-founder) received both her BSEE and MBA from The University of Texas at Austin and had worked at Oracle and Dell. Lisa is proud to call herself a double-immigrant. Her family originally left China to settle in Indonesia and decades later, she left Indonesia for the US.
Ketan has been a friend of Unshackled since building our first website back in 2015!
Inspirit uses the power of virtual reality for immersive educational experiences.
  • Aditya Vishwanath (CEO), is an inaugural Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University and a Ph.D. student in Education working at the Stanford VR lab. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and has previously worked at Google Education.
  • Amrutha Vasan (COO) completed her B.S. in Industrial Systems and Engineering from Georgia Tech and later worked at Procter & Gamble as a Supply Network Operations Manager. She has prior experience in consulting and data analytics across India and the US.
Shoutout to Konstantine Buhler at Meritech Capital Partners for introducing us to Aditya!
Oxio's offers a connectivity-as-a-service platform (similar to Amazon Web Services, but for wireless connectivity). It empowers any enterprise to achieve the unprecedented: Offer the best smartphone service under their brand. 
  • Nicolas Girard (CEO) was the previous founder and CTO at Aquto (acquired by Maverin) and founder at Attila (acquired by IDCC). He also spent time at France's NSA as a security expert. Nicolas has authored more than 20 telecom patents.
  • Pierre Steckmeyer (CTO) previously worked at Amazon and was VP of trading support at both Credit Suisse and JPMorgan Chase. He studied computer science and has a master's in Information Systems. 
  • Jason Evans (COO) was previously VP and Head of Ad Platforms at Fastly. He was also the founder and CEO at StackPop. Jason was VP of Ops at MediaMath and PantherExpress (acquired by China Net Center). 
Thank you Dan Conner at Ascend Venture Capital for referring the team to us!
Pngme is an alternative lending platform for financial institutions in emerging markets who serves micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises. Pngme’s lending platform digitizes the lenders’ credit scoring and capital procurement process, allowing lenders to lower their risk, access more capital, and scale their lending business. Pngme’s mission is to close the $5.2 trillion finance gap affecting 200M micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises globally. 
  • Brendan Playford (CEO) studied Physics at University College London in the UK and focuses his time on the technical design and architecture of Pngme. He forged a career in the blockchain space after founding Constellation Labs, a highly technical 3rd generation Directed Acyclic Graph. With a deep knowledge of the cryptocurrency space, he moved on from Constellation in July 2018 to focus his attention on the consumer adoption of blockchain thus, Pngme was born.
  • Cate Rung (COO) has spent her career driving growth in both B2C businesses and two-sided marketplaces. Cate led offline driver acquisition at Uber. Before that, she was Chief of Staff at Constellation Labs. She has deep expertise in marketing and was Manager for Direct Marketing at North American Power. Previous to that she spent over 3 years at Coach.
Shoutout to media coverage for this direct reach out!
Prime Discoveries is the microbiome discovery platform that accelerates biome discovery using its advanced sequencing technology. Prime is developing the first clinically actionable microbiome tests, beginning with autoimmune diseases.
  • Dr. Arun Manoharan (Founder & CSO) has more than a decade of experience in bioinformatics, human genetics, and genomics with a focus on autoimmune disease and reproductive health. Prior to founding Prime, he was leading product research and development at Cooper Genomics building novel clinical tests in the fertility space. His Ph.D. research at the University of Michigan resulted in the discovery of a new mechanism of gene regulation across multiple organisms which was published in Science.
  • Eugene Joseph (CEO) has held leadership roles at several computational genomics companies focused on developing and scaling novel, first-in-class products. He led new ventures for Recombine, a cutting-edge genomics company that was acquired by Cooper Genomics. He previously worked for an early-stage venture fund called NYC Seed, sell-side M&A and was a consultant at PwC. He is a graduate of New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Thank you Rayyan Islam for connecting us to the team!

UNSHACKLED NEWS

ANNOUNCING: UNSHACKLED UNIVERSITY FELLOWS
We believe the university system is our generation’s Ellis Island and that it's our responsibility to go where entrepreneurs are. With this in mind, we are excited to announce our inaugural Class of 2019 Fellows based in the Midwest and Southeast ecosystem. Get to know them here.
[Crunchbase] VCs May Often Offer More Than Capital, But Only Few Address Immigration Services 
“Immigration support is a critical part of our product,” said Mehta. “It is something that has allowed us to file 100 immigration filings in the past four years.” Unshackled provides full immigration support from work authorization visas to the Permanent Resident Card (also known as the green card). Unshackled works with 11 different visa immigration types. Read more on Crunchbase News
[Fast Company] With the U.S. startup visa on hold, immigrant entrepreneurs get creative
With its investment, Unshackled Ventures helps startups land a visa and build their businesses. “Sixty percent of our commitments were made before the company was even incorporated, largely because these are founders who are working other daytime jobs who are on visas. They can’t leave their jobs until they have sponsorship.” Read more on Fast Company
[Pitchbook] 6 ways the VC ecosystem is helping US immigrants 
What do Uber, Slack, Zoom, and CrowdStrike have in common, apart from representing a weighty slice of the VC-backed exit boom in 2019? All of them have at least one immigrant co-founder. Read more on Pitchbook
[Podcasts] Our partner Nitin Pachisia was featured in 2 podcasts:
  • Mission Daily: Investing in Adversity with Nitin Pachisia [Listen Here]
  • StitchCrew: Unshackling the Next Generation of Venture Capitalists [Listen Here]

Unshackled is doing an East Coast University Tour (Oct 15 - 25th)

Following our Midwest Tour in Spring 2019 and the launch of our university fellowship program, we have finalized the schedule for our fourth University tour. Over the course of 7 days, we will be hosting events at 12 universities to reach 4,000+ entrepreneurs, sharing strategies available for international students to start their companies while in the U.S. As universities represent our generation's Ellis Island, we are excited for the level of engagement and interest from the university ecosystem. 

Our partner, Manan Mehta is excited to spend time alongside ecosystem leaders and entrepreneurs from these universities. If you would like to join one of the events being held on various campuses, check out the itinerary here. 

Thank you to our sponsors Brex and First Republic Bank 
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