We dive deep into our sectors. Our research drives our insights and thesis-driven approach.

A few months back, we wrote about the initial progress Leap had been making coming out of the pandemic as we announced their long undisclosed Series A. Today, we’re excited to announce that Leap has raised $50m led by BAM Elevate to power the future of retail. As we noted in our past post, Covid was not kind to the retail world. When we entered April of 2020, GMV on the Leap platform was down effectively 100%. The company was resilient, however, and finished 2020 up close to 100%. While 2021 continued to present Covid challenges, the story for Leap has been very different, growing from 13 to 47 stores and increasing in revenue by 4.3x.

One of the most exciting things about building a company is the opportunity to bring incredible people together for a shared purpose. As a startup ourselves, we believe talent is the lifeblood of our business and that every hire represents an opportunity to strengthen that shared purpose. With that, we’re excited to announce the addition of Liz Hart to our team.

We have high ambitions for 2022 and one of the things we’re most excited about is the team we are assembling at Equal Ventures. We believe strongly in our core values and are fortunate to work alongside individuals who not only exude incredible performance and integrity, but the epitome of these values. Seeing the growth of our team, as a whole and the individuals within, is one of the most rewarding parts of building a company, and we’ve been fortunate to see the incredible growth of our team members over the last year.

2021 was a big one for Equal Ventures. We started to see our earliest companies achieve breakthrough velocity and are excited about the progress of both our portfolio and the broader firm. We’ve now had 6 of our first 7 investments raise their Series B from top firms and feel that the best days are yet to come for many of these companies. One of those earliest investments was ThreeFlow, a SaaS-enabled marketplace in the benefits industry that recently announced a $45m round from Accel. The story with ThreeFlow takes us back nearly 3 years and warrants some reflection given how far our fledgling firm has come during that time.

The attention span of today’s investor is incredibly finite. It seems that every other week a new sector is razor “hot,” leading to a spree of founding companies in the category and an equally rampant sprint of investors going after those companies. For better or worse, our little firm is likely to get priced out of these categories if a category and team are consensus “hot,” so our only real choice is to ignore the noise of “heat” and focus on categories we are going to love over the next twenty years.