A Year in Review: January Ventures looks back on 2023 and shares predictions for 2024.
2023 in Review:
As we wrap up an action-packed 2023, we’ve got a lot to celebrate! We’ve worked hard this year towards our mission of making venture more transparent, open and accessible. Despite a tumultuous market over the past couple years, we’ve stuck to our strategy of investing in promising early-stage startups. We’ve backed founders who are used to doing more with less, and we are seeing their discipline pay off as our portfolio continues to thrive and perform. We wanted to celebrate wins from our portfolio and the broader January community:
💰 We made seven new investments, adding Ariglad, M7 Health, Fabric Health, Metronome, Treefera, Quarter20, and Helios to the January Ventures family.
🎊 Our portfolio companies closed $68M across 11 new rounds of capital. Congrats to The Grand, Pano AI, Ariglad, CC Hero, Unitary and many others!
📝 We received over 4,000 cold pitches, and we reviewed and responded to each and every one.
❤️ Our portfolio is one of the most diverse in venture, with 90% female founders, 58% founders of color, and 40% immigrant founders!
📰 We published our 5th annual early-stage founder sentiment report with coverage in Techcrunch and an NBC broadcast segment.
🎤 We launched season two of our podcast Beyond the Cap Table with a fantastic run of conversations including Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures, Sonia Kastner of Pano AI, Claude Grunitzky of The Equity Alliance, and Roxanne Petraeus from Ethena.
Top news stories of 2023:
Unitary raised $15M Series A in a round led by Creadum. Unitary uses machine learning to understand if online photo or video contains explicit or offensive content, even in nuanced cases, essentially making the internet a safer place. Currently, Unitary can analyze around three billion images a day, or 25,000 frames of video per second.
Pano added $17M in Series A funding to fuel their mission of early detection of wildfires from the first wisps of smoke using an actionable intelligence AI platform. The company also added three new members to its executive team who came from Amazon, Apple, and Doordash to lead on engineering, finance, and talent.
Pano CEO Sonia Kastner named to BBC’s 100 Women list for 2023, in a roster of names that also included Gloria Steinem, Michelle Obama, and Bianca Williams among other notable women!
Turing Biosystems, an interpretable AI platform that combines clinical and biological data to assess patient responses to treatment and enhance development of new therapies, was named one of 11 drug discovery startups to watch by Sifted.
Bank of America has committed equity to more than 150 funds, including January Ventures, which have invested in 1,000+ companies across 40 states. These companies are led by 1,500 diverse entrepreneurs and employ over 21,000 people, catalyzing change, driving economic opportunities and supporting communities across the country.
Firm News:
In 2023, the January Ventures team spoke at high-profile events to further the mission of January, meet founders, and grow our community. Some highlights include TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, London Tech Week, SuperVenture in Berlin, Sifted Summit in London, RAISE in San Francisco, SOCAP in San Francisco and Women Who Empower Summit in Boston.
News about January Ventures:
We were quoted in Techcrunch about how to raise a series A in today’s market.
We were interviewed about our investment thesis and recent investments in forest tech.
We unpacked the Q2 State of Private Markets with Carta.
We were repeated guests on the Venture Daily podcast (listen here and here).
We were quoted in Techcrunch’s top predictions for 2024.
Predictions for 2024:
Maren Bannon spoke with leading VC, LPs and other industry experts for their perspectives on what’s to come in venture in 2024. Here are some of the predictions from her article in Forbes:
▶ The hype around LLMs won’t last
▶ We will see a drop in bridge rounds, meaning more cash for new startups
▶ 2024 will be a banner year for tech M&A
▶ VC secondaries will increase; so will a re-setting of price expectations
▶ 2024 will be the year of the hyper-specialist VC
And much more! You can read the full article with 14 predictions for 2024 here.
Thank you so much for being a valued part of the January Ventures community. We’re looking forward to the year ahead!!