Announcing Ubiquity Ventures III with $75 Million Focused on "Disciplined Deeptech"
Ubiquity continues its "nerdy and early" strategy of investing in "software beyond the screen" pre-seed/seed startups, but 2024 brings into focus "disciplined deeptech"
This morning, Ubiquity Ventures is announcing its latest fund: our $75 million Ubiquity Ventures Fund III will build on our "nerdy and early" approach to investing in "software beyond the screen". For me, the start of 2024 and this new fund bring into focus one particular word: discipline.
As Ubiquity closes in on $200 million under management and almost 40 portfolio companies, I'd like to reflect on three ways that discipline distinguishes Ubiquity as a VC firm and plays a role in everything we do:
1) Applying discipline in our approach to deeptech investing
Deeptech innovation has always been about questioning the status quo, rethinking how things work, and being “disruptive”. Unfortunately, our thriving deeptech ecosystem is now at risk from an increasingly popular trend – “moonshot culture” – where moonshot companies are throwing away the startup playbook around staging risk and fundraising, instead unlocking excessive amounts of capital upfront with bold but poorly-sequenced plans.
In Ubiquity’s approach to investing in deeptech, we pursue companies and ideas that are “off the beaten path” but not “off the deep end”.
Managing risk while accelerating innovation is a delicate balance, but it’s one we apply to all of our startup investments, especially those attacking some of the world’s most important and hard-to-solve problems
2) Applying discipline to helping early-stage founders
In contrast to the predominant seed VC model of a very large portfolio of investments with a very light touch, Ubiquity takes a hands-on approach, working closely alongside founders and providing industrial-strength help from day one. Even though a third of our investments are made the day a company is incorporated, we still join the board as a full Director, hold monthly board meetings to help build the foundation (eg, recruiting a CTO or Head of Sales, using customer development to prioritize product features, finding the first customer), and eventually help to nail future financing for the business.
From the start, we treat our pre-seed and seed-stage companies like the Series A companies they are trying to become.
3) Sharing the discipline of deeptech best practices with the broader ecosystem
We recently launched Ubiquity University to unlock growth for early-stage deeptech startup leaders by sharing the latest knowledge and advice for pre-seed and seed-stage entrepreneurs. Ubiquity University offers dozens of free, short (5-15 minute), and practical videos, including nailing your first board meeting, understanding the five VC financing documents, managing early customer development, employee compensation, and more.
After noticing that many seed-stage founders required similar guidance, we decided to capture our best advice and share it at scale.
These public videos dive into key concepts, mindset shifts, and tactical advice to help startup leaders grow and develop, with speakers that include the sharpest technical and business experts from the Ubiquity Extended Team and beyond. We even added an “AI Crash Course” series to explain the basics and how some of the latest models work.
On top of this, we also host private Ubiquity CEO-only sessions bi-monthly where one of our CEOs pulls back the curtain on exactly how they nailed their recent fundraise (the emails, the pitch deck slides, the spreadsheets), how they closed a major customer, etc. This sharing of best practices and lessons learned has proven to be an invaluable resource for CEOs in the Ubiquity portfolio.
What’s Next
Our vision for Ubiquity Ventures Fund III is this: deeptech is an incredibly important sector today, and it will benefit not only from capital but also discipline. Read more in this morning's TechCrunch article: Ubiquity Ventures secures $75M for Fund III to invest in ‘software beyond the screen’
Ubiquity Ventures — led by Sunil Nagaraj — is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on startups solving real-world physical problems with "software beyond the screen", often using smart hardware or machine learning.
If your startup fits this description, fill out the 60-second Ubiquity pitch form and you’ll hear back shortly.
Love the 'off the beaten path, but not off the deep-end. ' keep taking those calculated risks!