Recently I started listening to the All-In podcast where three successful VC investors discuss the news. One of the hosts of the show is David Sacks, who's a partner at Craft Ventures and CEO of new Series A company called Callin. During the course of the podcast Sacks mentioned that his investment firm, Craft Ventures, mostly invests in marketplace companies. I've been thinking a lot about the dynamics of online marketplaces because of the antitrust suits going on and the fact that I'd like to turn Employbl into a functioning talent marketplace one day. To that end I pulled and tagged all of the companies in Craft's portfolio to look a bit deeper at the companies they invest in. In this post we'll look at Craft Ventures portfolio companies to identify trends and opportunities, especially with an eye for helping job seekers and people new to the industry.
How we got the data
I've built Employbl with my cofounder Dipo and set up a data pipeline to load in companies, job listings, company data and financial data from Diffbot's Knowledge Graph. Diffbot uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to scrape and index the entire public internet, just like Google and Microsoft do. They then make this data available to their customers instead of using it to sell ads. The first step then was to query Diffbot for companies that Craft Ventures has invested in. This was a quick query, using the "Diffbot Query Language" I was able to get 128 companies that Craft has invested in.
The next step is to find other companies that Diffbot might have missed. Most Venture Capital companies have "portfolio" pages on their websites where they showcase all of the companies and startups that they have invested in. Craft is no different. Parsing the HTML from their portfolio page I found 134 companies listed. Some big name companies like Facebook, Lyft and Uber are featured on Craft's portfolio page but were not returned by Diffbot. Searching around the public web I did not see information about Craft investing in those companies. Sacks could have invested in these companies through Peter Thiel or in a personal capacity. There's a lot of financial dealings that are not public. Since the companies are listed on the Craft portolio site I added them to the list of companies provided by Diffbot.
Once I had all of Craft's portfolio companies identified (149 in all) I tagged them in Employbl with an "investor" tag. Now when you login to Employbl you can find, filter and sort for startups that are backed by Craft Ventures. Companies that Craft invests in have a higher than average likelihood of success because of solid financial backing and because the people at Craft Ventures know how startups can succeed!
🔥 New startups Craft has invested in
The first thing I took a look at is the most recently founded startups. I sorted the data by founded year to get the most recently founded companies at the top. (This functionality is available through the Employbl dashboard by clicking the "Year Founded" column ;)) According to our data Craft has backed 37 companies that have all been founded since the beginning of 2019. If you're interested in joining an early stage startup check these ones out!
| Company Name | Description | Amount Raised | Founded Year | HQ City |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Callin | Callin operates as a social podcasting app that lets you create, discover, and enjoy live and recorded content all in one place. | $12 million | 2021 | San Francisco, CA |
| Avenue 8 | Avenue 8 is a digital and mobile-first residential real estate brokerage for modern agents, helping them to be more entrepreneurial, to close from anywhere, and to keep substantially more of their income. | $18 million | 2020 | San Francisco, CA |
| SnackMagic | SnackMagic offers personalized snack boxes that are super easy to gift and ridiculously fun to get. | $15 million | 2020 | Long Island City, NY |
| Mozart Data | Mozart Data automates most of the work data engineers and analysts traditionally do to spin up and run a modern data stack. | $4,125,000 | 2020 | San Francisco, CA |
| Goody | Goody makes sending gifts as easy as sending a text. No address needed. It accepts payments only when the gift is received. | $4 million | 2020 | Beaverton, OR |
| CopyAI | Copy.ai is a startup building AI-powered copywriting tools for business customers. | $2.9 million | 2020 | Memphis, TN |
| Simplified | Simplified is the all-in-one design platform where freelancers and entrepreneurs can collaborate, scale, and grow their content— effortlessly and beautifully. | $2.2 million | 2020 | San Francisco, CA |
| Giggl | Giggl provides a secure and fast way for people to connect online through sharing content using virtual browser instances. | $2.2 million | 2020 | West Hollywood, CA |
| Compose.ai | Accelerate your writing time by 40% with AI-powered autocompletion | $2.1 million | 2020 | San Francisco, CA |
| Mote | Mote is an Education Technology company with a mission to make feedback fast and friendly. | $1.9 million | 2020 | San Francisco, CA |
| Rare Edition | Rare Edition is a collectible space for users to buy, sell, grade, and vault consumer's collectibles. | $1.5 million | 2020 | New York, NY |
| Sync Inc | Sync replicates APIs to Postgres databases in real-time so developers can skip API integrations. | 2020 | Venice, CA | |
| Pipe | Pipe provides a subscription financing platform enabling SaaS companies to obtain instant liquidity on their subscription contracts as an alternative to equity financing. | $316 million | 2019 | Los Angeles, CA |
| Waybridge | Waybridge offers a suite of digital tools targeting the fundamental inefficiencies in the raw materials supply chain. | $40 million | 2019 | New York, NY |
| Shef | Shef is a homemade food marketplace that helps local cooks to make a meaningful income from home by selling authentic, homemade dishes to their neighbors. | $28.8 million | 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| CloudTrucks | CloudTrucks develops a virtual trucking carrier application designed to reduce operating costs for truck drivers. | $26.6 million | 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| Verifiable | Verifiable is developing an API that will enable healthcare providers to simplify license authentication by connecting with state and federal databases. | $20 million | 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| River Financial | River Financial is a challenger financial institution specializing in Bitcoin financial services. | $17.7 million | 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| Scratchpad | Scratchpad is a workspace built for sales to update Salesforce and take sales notes and daily todos. | $16.6 million | 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| Plume | Plume is a health tech company for the transgender community. | $14 million | 2019 | Denver, CO |
| Cabana | Cabana opens up the flexibility of travel plans so that travelers can book once and go anywhere. | $13.5 million | 2019 | Seattle, WA |
| Pearl | A computer vision company focused on solving challenging problems in the dental industry. | $11 million | 2019 | West Hollywood, CA |
| Overflow | Overflow is an online donation platform that helps charities accept online donations of publicly-traded stock. | $10 million | 2019 | San Jose, CA |
| Sofar Ocean Technologies | Sofar Ocean Technologies OpenROV Inc. designs and manufactures accessible ocean sensing and exploration tools. | $7 million | 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| Scope | Scope is an Implementation-as-a-Service platform that scales and reduces the cost of implementations. | $5.6 million | 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| Minerva | Minerva is a developer of a process sharing platform used to help capture and share dynamic workflows for any website. | $5.1 million | 2019 | Brooklyn, NY |
| Internal.io | High quality internal tools without lengthy implementation time or engineering work. | $5 million | 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| PocketList | PocketList is a rental platform that shows exclusive info about places to rent months before they go on the market. | $2.8 million | 2019 | Marina del Rey, CA |
| Pair Team | Pair Team provides an end-to-end operations platform to automate clinical operations and provide high-touch patient support. | $2.7 million | 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| Roboflow | Roboflow's developer tools enable teams to build computer vision models faster and more accurately. | $2.2 million | 2019 | Des Moines, IA |
| Viable Fit | Viable Fit develops a structured user platform designed to use historical qualitative data to answer new questions instantly. | $1.9 million | 2019 | Oakland, CA |
| Reflect | Reflect is an automated web testing tool for developers to test their web apps without writing a line of code. | $1.8 million | 2019 | Philadelphia, PA |
| Done | Done is a provider of personalized online treatment for ADHD. They believe everyone should be given access to resources that set them up for success. | 2019 | San Francisco, CA | |
| Alka | Alka is a tool that offers a productive way to manage finances. Alka helps users to be more aware of their finances by sending a notification whenever there is an activity in one of their accounts. | 2019 | San Francisco, CA | |
| Lexria | Lexria makes the bankruptcy intake process simple and easy for lawyers and their clients. | 2019 | Claymont, DE |
🏢 Companies Craft has invested in by Headquarters Location
Since we have HQ location data I wanted to get some totals of where the companies that Craft invests in are based. Most companies are based in San Francisco, with some others in New York and the greater Bay Area. To see all companies we have in a given city head to the Employbl dashboard or to see a sneak peek of all the companies in a city click the link.
| City | Number of Companies |
|---|---|
| San Francisco, CA | 78 |
| New York, NY | 13 |
| Los Angeles, CA | 9 |
| Palo Alto, CA | 7 |
| Seattle, WA | 7 |
| Atlanta, GA | 6 |
| Mountain View, CA | 4 |
| Denver, CO | 4 |
| Salt Lake City, UT | 3 |
| Chicago, IL | 3 |
| Hawthorne, CA | 3 |
| Brooklyn, NY | 3 |
| San Diego, CA | 3 |
| Nashville, TN | 2 |
| Irvine, CA | 2 |
| San Jose, CA | 2 |
| San Mateo, CA | 2 |
| Oakland, CA | 2 |
| Berkeley, CA | 2 |
| Scottsdale, AZ | 2 |
| Las Vegas, NV | 2 |
| Austin, TX | 2 |
🚀 Public companies that Craft has invested in
In our dataset we've identified ten companies that Craft invested in that have gone public, either through an Initial Public Offering (IPO) or through Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). If you're interested in a larger company check these giants out :)
| Company Name | Description | Founded Year | HQ Location | Estimated # of Employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opendoor | Get an offer on your home with the press of a button. | 2014 | San Francisco, CA | 556 |
| Lyft | Grab the wheel and start earning. | 2012 | San Francisco, CA | 9,992 |
| Affirm | Buy with Affirm – and pay off your purchase in easy, fixed monthly payments | 2012 | San Francisco, CA | 598 |
| Uber | Get a ride in minutes. Or become a driver-partner and earn money on your schedule. | 2009 | San Francisco, CA | 33,824 |
| Airbnb | Book unique homes and experiences all over the world. | 2008 | San Francisco, CA | 5,866 |
| Twilio | Connect the world with the leading platform for Voice, SMS, and Video | 2008 | San Francisco, CA | 2,040 |
| Twitter is a global social networking platform that allows its users to send and read 280-character messages known as “tweets”. | 2007 | San Francisco, CA | 4,040 | |
| Eventbrite | Find your next experience | 2006 | San Francisco, CA | 569 |
| Create an account or log into Facebook. Connect with friends, family and other people you know. Share photos and videos, send messages and get updates. | 2004 | Menlo Park, CA | 36,178 | |
| Tesla | Tesla, Inc. is an American automotive and energy company that specializes in electric car manufacturing and, through its SolarCity subsidiary, solar panel manufacturing. | 2003 | Palo Alto, CA | 13,207 |
🌊 That's all for now
In this post we highlighted some early stage startups and public companies that Craft has invested in, shared how we collected the data and looked at where geographically the companies they invested in are located. Going forwards we're looking to build a way for job seekers to view recent fundraising rounds and sort companies by fundraising round. This way you'll be able to filter for say, Series A or Series B companies in San Francisco that Craft has invested in :)