📝 10 new VC memos this week

"Large companies such as automakers were already investing heavily, but most small and medium businesses simply couldn’t afford the months—and hundreds of thousands of Euros—required to implement automated systems. In fact, less than 10% of SMBs have any automation in place at all. We hadn’t found a company that could make robotics more widely accessible—until Robco."

"The company has added global brands like BBC and Uber to its roster of enterprise clients, and has helped companies make critical progress on key talent initiatives – seeing increases to employee tenure of 2.5x, over 20% more diversity candidates that companies are able to hire and retain, and a 50% reduction in hiring and retention cost."

"The traction so far is impressive. Partly has standardised and labelled 30% of car parts and 99% of the world’s vehicles to enable matching, making it a truly global parts database. This progress enabled the team to build software for sellers that enables them to manage their inventories and APIs for marketplaces like eBay who can then tell end users not just what parts are available but which will actually fit their car."

"Partly is activating the nascent trillion-dollar global parts industry and directing it online. Many dealerships, wreckers, manufacturers, and other stakeholders in the global parts marketplace still operate and transact offline, for the most part. In our view, this gives Partly a rare category-creating opportunity to be the “n of 1” company powering auto parts marketplaces."

"At scale, Mombak can remove 1M tCO2 a year. In addition to carbon removal, Mombak creates job opportunities in local communities, promotes biodiversity, and ensures that those regenerated forests will be permanently preserved. Mombak’s first project is a $100M fund to reforest the Amazon that has received significant commitments from world-class investors."

  A full two-thirds of mean time to repair [a system disruption] is spent simply identifying causes. It’s a painful situation for any growing company, especially given the continued adoption of microservices and the scale of complexity that comes with it... But now, CtrlStack [is] closing this time-consuming gap between cause and effect—with a dependency graph that tracks connections and relationships between services... 

"Today, Infinity’s datasets and data generators span fitness, robotics, and smart facilities. Their data marketplace is the world’s largest open-source collection of synthetic datasets (1M free frames and more added every month)... Infinity’s customers have generated over 5M synthetic data frames using their API in just 6 months. Most importantly, they’ve shipped production models in half the time and for a tenth of the cost!"

"...FairSupply [is] a SaaS platform that provides objective data and insights to help companies understand and manage their exposure to ESG risks across their supply chain. The platform combines proprietary algorithms with data from public sources to help companies map out their exposure to risks including Modern Slavery, Carbon Emissions, and Biodiversity."

"Almost all blockchains today are fully transparent... This allows anyone to verify the correctness of the blockchain, but compromises user privacy and constrains the set of possible applications developers can build. ... We believe encryption and privacy will be essential for blockchains to gain widespread adoption, and coordinate people, capital, and societies as the next era of the internet."

"The key driver of the platform’s success, and one of the company’s competitive advantages, is its independent vehicle database. AutoGrab has extensive auto market coverage with the largest independent database in Australia covering vehicle-specific data for all vehicles listed for sale online, and market-wide data, updated every second."