Announcing $50+ million for more “Software Beyond the Screen”

We are excited to announce the closing of Ubiquity Ventures II, a $50+ million seed fund to continue investing in “software beyond the screen”.

This is all made possible by the Ubiquity family which is stronger than ever:

• 25 Ubiquity portfolio companies that each aim to transform a real-world physical problem into a software problem where it can be solved with smart hardware or machine learning.
• 50 members of the Ubiquity Extended Team (aka our “nerd crew”) that provide technical input as well as support to existing portfolio companies.
• Institutional limited partners who share the belief that investing in software beyond the screen can generate a fantastic return.

Thank you to the Ubiquity family as we use this new $50+ million to back great entrepreneurs. Below is our press release with more details.

Ubiquity Ventures Closes $50+ Million Fund 2 to Enable “Software Beyond the Screen” Seed-Stage Companies to Grow and Scale

Latest fund will further empower innovative companies using ubiquitous software to solve real-world physical problems

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 23, 2021 — Ubiquity Ventures, a seed-stage institutional venture capital firm that invests in “software beyond the screen” startups, announced the closing of the firm’s second fund.

Based on Ubiquity’s industry-leading performance in its 2017 debut fund, delivering a 91% seed-to-Series A graduation rate, the firm will continue to back “software beyond the screen” companies that utilize smart hardware and machine learning to solve business problems outside the domain of computers and smartphones.

Sunil Nagaraj is the founding Partner at Ubiquity Ventures with close to $100 million of assets under management and 25 portfolio companies. As an investor, Sunil has an extensive and successful track record in venture capital with $14 billion of exits earlier this year, including the sale of Auth0 to Okta for $6.5 billion. Sunil was Auth0’s first VC investor while a Principal at Bessemer Venture Partners. He led the company’s seed round, was their first board member, and eventually led Auth0’s Series A.

Software Beyond the Screen: a unique strategy

“Software Beyond the Screen” startups solve real-world physical problems by utilizing smart hardware or machine learning to provide their enterprise customers with solutions that are more effective, easier to adopt, and offer more rapid payback. Now that software can run anywhere — from training self-driving cars with synthetic data (Parallel Domain) to powering the rise of kiosks and smart dedicated devices (Esper) — software’s advantages of rich analytics and over-the-air updates are being used to tune and improve the real physical world. Not only does this ubiquitous approach create a myriad of opportunities for software to impact and accelerate more of our world, but it also creates massive economic opportunities for entrepreneurs and VCs.

“At Esper, we accelerate this trend of software permeating the physical world with our DevOps for Devices platform,” said Esper CEO/co-founder Yadhu Gopalan. “Our solution powers enterprise devices across retail, restaurants, logistics, hospitality, and more. Sunil backed us the day we were incorporated, and his hands-on approach is unmatched as we’ve grown from 2 co-founders to over 100 employees and more than $40 million in VC funding.”

Software continues to move beyond the screen of computers and smartphones to other areas including:

• Dairy farms (with Halter’s smart cow collars and “cowgorithms” to help dairy farmers digitally shepherd cows around a farm)
• Warehouses and manufacturing (with ThruWave to see inside closed boxes or Elementary’s cameras to monitor manufacturing defects)
• Weather (with Windborne’s smart weather balloons)
• Space (with Loft Orbital’s AWS-like services for taking payloads to space)
• Hospitals (with Diligent Robotics autonomous robots)

The use cases are unlimited and often tap into historically untouched, greenfield markets.

Ubiquity founding partner Sunil Nagaraj commented, “In my ten years of venture capital with almost $20 billion of exits, I have never seen a more exciting and lucrative trend than “software beyond the screen”. This landscape is incredibly ripe for opportunity with many future multi-billion-dollar companies still at the seed stage or perhaps not even yet formed. Ubiquity’s fund 2 is backed by a forward-thinking institutional investor base, with all large backers from fund 1 increasing their commitments as well as the addition of new similarly-minded universities and endowments.”

About Ubiquity Ventures

Ubiquity Ventures is a seed-stage institutional venture capital firm that invests in “software beyond the screen” startups. This includes companies using smart hardware and machine intelligence to move real world physical problems into the domain of software where they can be solved much more effectively. Leveraging a decade of institutional venture capital experience, Sunil Nagaraj leads Ubiquity Ventures along with an extended team of 50 experts with a range of technical and marketing expertise. See more details on the Ubiquity Ventures website at https://www.ubiquity.vc.

Originally published at https://ubiquityvc.substack.com.