Immigrant Founders Fund 2020 Update
Published on Mar 24, 2020
Overview
All of the investments we did out of this fund were in this past year, and most of them are still very early-stage. It is too soon to provide the unrealized value of the fund, but we commit to sharing the unrealized returns as soon as we have data.
Detailed Breakdown
Blair completed YC's summer 2019 program. At the end of 2019, Blair had their 1st three students graduated and are set to begin their repayments within the next 2 months. They’ve closed and launched their 1st two partnerships with a Data Science Bootcamp and a Nursing School. They’ve launched an internal file tool to increase efficiency and security and built a partnership page.
Clubhouse
They shut down their business and returned all of the funds after the program ended.
Epoch has had 40% month over month revenue growth (~$140K ARR) with customers like Slack and Postmates. At the end of 2019, they closed out their pre-seed round with Charles Hudson from Precursor Ventures leading the round. Their team also added two engineers.
Homer
They shut down their business and will return most of the funds.
Jarvis increased gross merchandise volume by 351K last fall and decreased their customer acquisition cost from $52 to $32, which is a 42% decrease. They’ve also expanded their operations to Adelaide. They successfully launched in-platform credit system to allow cleaners to withdraw earned fees whenever, which led to increase in supply retention. Currently the team is working to develop scheduling and communication tools. The scheduling tool will allow workers to request changes in visiting times and incorporate personal schedules. The communication tool will be a multi-channel direct communication tool for cleaners to manage all their clients on one platform. At the end of 2019, Jarvis completed their fundraising round.
In response to the global outbreak of Coronavirus, KangarooHealth developed an AI-powered remote patient monitoring platform, enabling any companies, agencies, and organizations to remotely monitor health changes of people who might be exposed to coronavirus or under quarantine. It tracks each person’s vitals and symptoms daily and automatically flags people with warning signs. It enables one person to monitor hundreds of thousands of people with ease, without overhead and risks of cross contamination. KangarooHealth welcomes organizations both public and private to collaborate to control the outbreak of coronavirus. You can contact Dr. Xiaoxu Kang, [email protected] if you want to learn more.
Maisie
Work on Maisie has been put on pause at this time and the team is now working on a new idea.
Wonder Hoodie
Wonder Hoodie added two more factory locations in Los Angeles and joint-hired eight employees per factory to work on production. She hired and fired the first sales/marketing executive to direct the new commercial arm, BulletDefense. Gross margins have improved by 65% from R&D efforts. At this time, Wonder Hoodie is two months and thirty samples away from receiving NIJ certification which is necessary to sell to the military and government in bulk. At the end of 2019, the company gained $1.3M in revenue with minimal marketing spend. She is currently working with three video influencers now to promote for free in May 2020.