![]() Her number of exits is light, which is to be expected for an investor so green. Some of her far-out bets include Impossible Foods, a plant-based meat company that was previously in talks to raise money at a $7 billion valuation Zipline, a drone-maker focused on delivering medical supplies that was last valued at $2.75 billion and Wave, a $1.7 billion fintech company bringing mobile payments to Africa. "I love seeing what interesting companies founders are creating," she said. Wemimo Abbey, a cofounder and the co-CEO of Esusu, poses for a photo with one of his investors, Serena Williams.Īnd where some investors dodge the unfamiliar, Williams embraces it. Of those, 16 went on to become unicorns with valuations of more than $1 billion. Her portfolio of angel and fund investments includes 90 companies she invested in early. ![]() It's another reason I love investing - to close that gap." "I also know what it looks like to be incredibly talented and not given the exposure because of the color of your skin. So when it came to venture and founders, it wasn't hard to apply it," Williams told Insider in an email. "Coming from a sports background and a sport that was an individual one, I've developed a habit of trusting my gut. Her firm is set apart from traditional investors with its focus on overlooked founders women founded more than half of its portfolio companies, and 47% of its founders are Black. She is the most famous female athlete in the world, and yet, Williams began her career in venture capital the same way she did in tennis: as an underdog. Both lists were compiled with data from Tribe Capital. Now, she's risen to the top echelon of seed-investors, ranking fourth on Insider's Seed 30 list of top female investors and coming in at No. Last spring, she closed an $111 million debut fund for her firm, Serena Ventures. In the same piece, she revealed where she would be focusing her time: on family and, surprisingly, on venture capital.Ī decade ago, the tennis star started writing personal checks to startups, and with her network, resources, and luck, built a portfolio that's the envy of Silicon Valley. Last August, Williams broke the news she was "evolving away from tennis" in a candid essay for Vogue. This is really cool,'" Abbey, whose company, Esusu, allows immigrants and minorities to boost their credit scores by reporting their rent payments to major credit bureaus, said. "I'm like, 'Wait, Serena Williams is thinking about Esusu at 4 in the morning. It was still dark outside when Wemimo Abbey, a cofounder of the fintech startup Esusu, woke up to a text about the business from one of its investors, Serena Williams. Read: The Seed 100: The best early-stage investors of 2023 and Seed 30: The best women early-stage investors of 2023.Founders close to her have said Williams uses her network and status to open doors for them.Serena Williams has quickly vaulted to the top ranks of early-stage investors.Applications can be hosted on decentralized platforms such as IPFS and Arweave, and access read-only disposable API keys, eliminating the need to manage servers or hardware.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Sort can be used as a complete backend as a service for decentralized applications, with no additional infrastructure needed. The platform also plans to leverage ChatGPT and LLMs to formulate SQL queries for populating UIs. ![]() Using Sort, users can query real-time contract transactions, logs, events, function results, and NFT data. All data is served in real-time, including push notifications for any contract event. Users can start with a contract address and get access to a complete developer toolkit for that contract, or cut and paste HTML/Javascript code directly into their front end application to see live blockchain data. Led by Jason Zucchetto, Sort provides a user-centric development platform for Web3 UI components, which allows developers to integrate data from smart contracts directly into their decentralized application with a few lines of code. The company intends to use the funds to expand the team, advance the platform’s product suite, and expedite the launch of ‘Sort applications’, the full-stack for writing a UI for a blockchain contract. The round was co-led by Lemniscap and The General Partnership, with participation from Alliance DAO, Punk DAO, Orange DAO, Blizzard Fund, Parasol, Red Rooster Ventures, and a number of angels from Coinbase, Gemini, and Snyk. Sort, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a platform simplifying Web3 app development, raised $3.5m USD in seed funding.
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