The Movac Digest #1

Hey there!

Welcome to the first edition of the Movac Digest – a regular newsletter to fill you in on fund news, where you can find us in the community, and reading fodder our team is enjoying.

Movac Fund 5 is live! The fund is $250m and is investing in technology companies from their first acceleration round to the last.

Our new website which has more details on what we are looking for and how we like to work with portfolio companies. Grab the lowdown on our thinking on the first Fund 5 investments below.

As we pull into Christmas, we reflect on a unique and big 2020. Fund 4 invested in TracPlus and Revolution Fibres.  Aroa Biosurgery (Fund 3) listed on the ASX and Unleashed (Fund 4) was acquired by Access Group. We added a bunch of top people to the wider Movac team: Lisa Nelson, Fady Mishriki, Randy Komisar, Rachel Taulelei and David Teece to our Advisory Board; Kirsty Traill, Andrew Tokeley, Alia Bojilova, Ben Anderson, Rob Shaddock and Serge van Dam to our Operating Partner team; and Jeremy Ginsberg as CTO in Residence. And opened an Auckland office!

We wish you a sunny and safe festive season.

What’s Happening At Movac

Five in Five – Andrew (Tokes) Tokeley

Each month we spend five minutes extracting five interesting pieces of information from a founder, thought leader or member of the wider Movac team. This month, we caught up with Movac Operating Partner Tokes.

Investment Notes #1 – Yabble

Welcome to Movac Fund 5. We are particularly excited about this fund - it’s got a broader mandate than our previous fund, allowing us to complete pre-Series A investments. Over the life of the fund we expect to invest around $20 million into these early-stage deals (ideally co-leading/co-investing), and have reserved plenty of dry powder to follow the investments through to Series A/D.

Investment Notes #2 – Portainer

We are excited to announce our seed investment in Portainer.io. Portainer provides an operational toolset to simplify the use of container orchestration systems. While containerisation is a big thing in the enterprise, it still takes a pretty skilled engineer to set up and manage containerised infrastructure. Portainer makes that much easier (kind of like putting Windows over DOS) so it's no wonder that the Portainer software has had over 2b pulls and that 500k developers and IT Ops engineers using it each month (and growing).

Investment Notes #3 – Solve

We are excited to announce our seed investment in Solve. Solve provides enterprises with a real-time data warehousing and management solution which can be hosted in the customer's own cloud.

Job Board

Live roles in our portfolio companies that may suit you or your network:

What We Are Reading

  • SaaS Capital and OpenView released their annual SaaS benchmarking reports, perfect for building financial models and tracking progress against the market.
  • Bessemer Venture Partners released their internal investment memos for a dozen of their well known investments. The common thread: the best investment decisions centred on people.
  • For anyone interested in NLP, here is a good laypersons guide to the latest and greatest NLP algorithm called GTP-3.
  • Hiring in start-ups is high stakes. Here are FirstRound’s list of interview questions that aren’t easily answered by the STAR method formula, and instead require deep introspection and quick thinking from candidates.
  • For the fintech fans, a dive into strategy and valuation for Square’s Cash App.

Thanks for tuning in!