Welcome to the Portfolio: Wordly - Language on Demand

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Portfolio Exit: ON24 Starts Trading As One Of The Oldest VC-Backed IPOs Of The Year

Our 16th Band IPO is ON24, Inc., called “News Direct” when we invested (June 1998 Dinner).

Shares of webcasting and virtual events platform ON24 began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, with its stock closing at $70.45, or nearly 41 percent above its IPO price. ON24 isn’t like many of the VC-backed companies going public nowadays: it’s been around for more than 20 years. The company was founded in 1998 and raised its Series A, which was led by Canaan Partners, in August 1999. Read the TechCrunch article

Welcome to the Portfolio: C. Light Technologies raises $2.5M seed round to commercialize first ever retinal eye-tracking device for neurodegenerative disease

C. Light Technologies, a Berkeley-based neurotech company pioneering the next generation of neurological health assessment tools using the first ever 10-second retinal eye-tracking scan for neurological disease, today announced the closing of their $2.5 million seed round. Their proprietary tracking technology, paired with advanced analytics, is poised to redefine the neurodegenerative space - providing new hope for millions of people worldwide. Read the press release

Happy New Year from Band of Angels

2020 Band of Angels Investments

2020 was a challenging year for everyone. We are so pleased that through it all the Band has remained a source of constancy and comfort. We continued to meet weekly in our SiGs and monthly at our dinners, invested in many new startups, supported our existing portfolio companies, and collaborated convivially with one another. 

We start the year celebrating our 15th Band IPO. Airbnb went public on December 10th at $68/share and closed the day at $144. As of press time, it is trading at $170 and a market cap in excess of $100B. We got Airbnb shares by investing in Localmind, a location-based Q&A platform, in 2011. The company was acquired by Airbnb in 2012.

During 2020 we made 17 investments: 14 initial investments from the Band Deal Dinner and 3 follow-ons from the Second Look portfolio update. The Software category leads in the number of deals funded with seven (41%), followed by Life Sciences/MedTech with five (29%), HardTech with two (12%), Other with two (12%), and AgFoodHealthspan with one (6%). New funded deals include: RoboTire and Xpan Medical (January 2020 Dinner), Perceive (February 2020 Dinner), EternaTear (April 2020 Dinner), Butlr (May 2020 Dinner), Inhalon Bio and MilkRun (June 2020 Dinner), Journey (July 2020 Dinner), C. Light Technologies and Virtanza (August 2020 Dinner), CapConnect+, Champions Round, and Lingrove (September 2020 Dinner), and OpsCruise (October 2020 Dinner). Second Look portfolio follow-on investments were: Strategikon Pharma (January 2020 Second Look), VisgenX (June 2020 Second Look), and IrriGreen (September 2020 Second Look).

2020 set a low bar to exceed but we hope that 2021 is the best year yet for all of us. Happy new year!

New Digital Media & Entertainment SiG

Band members Dan Schwartz and Daniel Gould are starting a Digital Media & Entertainment Special Interest Group (SiG) to fund the next generation of digital media/entertainment deals. Dan founded the world’s first digital media delivery platform for print publications, Qiosk.com, which ignited the first generation of digital print delivery. Daniel has twenty years experience in digital media and entertainment. He is an active angel and residential real estate investor. The inaugural meeting will be on January 28th, 2021. If you’d like to participate in the SiG, please contact BandHQ@bandangels.com.