Better Tomorrow Ventures

We had Jason Gardner, Founder of Marqeta, as our special guest at The Mint 🍃 His story is both inspiring and unconventional. It took almost seven years for the company to hit its stride, and at one point, it nearly ran out of money. Eventually, Marqeta went public with a $15B valuation. Jason shared valuable insights about starting and growing Marqeta. Here are some key takeaways: 1. Don’t be too proud to pivot.  2. In the early days, everything should focus on finding Product-Market-Fit. 3. Maintain a laser-like focus on building the business. 4. Truly understand your customer’s problems. 5. Weld yourself to your customers. 6. Feedback, in any form, is a gift. More below! https://lnkd.in/ehf8WEfB

We are honoured to announce our seed round. Permanent is resourced for our next chapter of growth. We’re proud to be backed by Better Tomorrow Ventures, Progression, Atman Capital, Sugar Mountain, The Autopilot Fund, Gaingels, Matt Zebert along with our pre-seed investors Ryan Breslow, Phenomenal Ventures, Slope, Misha Talavera, Cohen Circle, Will Canine, Jetstream, Dangerous Ventures, and Koen van Seijen. Thank you for believing in our mission and supporting Permanent over the long-haul! Permanent Agriculture is a public benefit company dedicated to making markets for regenerative agriculture. We enable success for family farmers and optimize food cost, quality, and impact for our customers by growing and distributing better foods at better prices.

I’m thrilled to announce Better Tomorrow Ventures' investment in Permanent! Today, the biggest challenge for farmers is selling more. Above all, they need to find buyers for their products. Most smaller farms lack the resources for transportation or logistics, which limits their ability to work with mid-sized + larger buyers. They need an intermediary to aggregate supply + manage interactions with these buyers. On the other hand, buyers want simple things: access to the best ingredients, at the best price, delivered when + where they need them. However, the supply chain still poses significant challenges, especially in terms of visibility & the movement of goods. Permanent is tackling these problems by building a wholesale managed marketplace that reduces the friction b/w food suppliers & buyers. For suppliers, Permanent connects local farmers w/ buyers they wouldn’t typically reach, boosting their sales. Their tech brings offline supply online, by syncing farmer communications & offline inventory data into a real-time marketplace. This includes creating farmer profiles, managing inventory, & automating payments. On the buyer's side, Permanent streamlines the purchasing process by improving supply chain visibility, offering access to higher-quality food at better prices, & enabling online ordering through curated catalogs. We’re excited to back Founder and CEO, Wiley Webb. Wiley was the Design Lead at Even, the on-demand pay platform that moved $2B a year of employee wages & sold to Walmart. In 2021, Webb left his career to marry his interests — agriculture & large financial flows — in pursuit of transforming the food economy for the better. Wiley embodies the mission of Permanent and truly walks the walk. Before launching the company, he visited over 70 farms of all sizes across the U.S. & spoke w/ large enterprise buyers about their supply chain difficulties. After a year of research, Wiley started his own small farm to gain firsthand experience in agriculture before founding Permanent to drive scalable, global change in the wholesale food system. Since its launch in June 2023, Permanent’s marketplace has cut distribution costs by up to 50% compared to traditional warehouse-based wholesalers. Their just-in-time model optimizes local and national supply for each customer. By leveraging AI to support communication, pricing, & logistics, Permanent offers one of the fastest-growing food catalogs in the U.S., with 200+ items available for daily distribution in NorCal, & 50+ items for large-volume contracts. Additionally, Permanent ensures accuracy & reliability by allowing farmers to update marketplace listings via email, text, & WhatsApp, in both English & Spanish — providing both convenience & reliability for buyers and suppliers alike. Learn more about Permanent here: https://www.permanent.ag/. Also, they're hiring! https://lnkd.in/eqQsmxNh

I am very happy to share that we’ve just secured an additional $3.3M in funding, with huge thanks to our investors DN Capital and Fontes, managed by QED Investors This brings our total funding to $7.8M and sets the stage for our Series A in 2025. Our mission to empower banks, lenders, and fintechs to offer customer-centric digital banking experiences continues to gain momentum, and I couldn’t be prouder of the team for making this possible. We’re just getting started! Nihar Bobba Sheel Mohnot Amias Gerety Yusuf Ozdalga Jonathan Userovici Anthony Danon Sia Houchangnia Guy Ward Thomas Rasmus Areskoug

We are continuing to build Better Tomorrow Ventures into something special - come work with us!!

We’re hiring a new investor at BTV! We are small and collaborative team, so you’ll get exposure to nearly every aspect of being a VC. We’ll expect you to play a critical role in sourcing new investments, conducting due diligence, and supporting portfolio companies. We're looking for someone who is curious and ambitious, builds relationships easily, has a passion for working with founders, operates in a high sense of urgency by default, and maintains high standards of excellence in their work. Bonus points for startup or technology company operating experience and a passion for fintech. We absolutely love our work and hope you have the same level of passion for it as we do. We’re looking for someone early in their career (~4-6 years in) in the Bay Area or willing to move. If the above sounds interesting to you, you can learn more and apply by following the link below! https://lnkd.in/gRzvcuP4

It was a real treat to have Sean Harper, Founder and CEO of Kin Insurance, as our special guest at The Mint 🍃. He led a great fireside conversation, reflecting on the journey of building and scaling Kin. Here are five of his 🔑 insights and learnings: 1. Find an underserved segment of the market. Going straight up the gut of the incumbent is rarely a good idea. But you also have to deeply understand why that segment is underserved, and why you are able to serve that segment profitably while the incumbents cannot. Kin specialized in insuring quality houses and homeowners in areas with higher weather volatility. When they started the company, and still today, that is a very large and growing segment they were able to serve better than the incumbents — because of their technology and business model. Make sure you thoroughly understand: - why the niche you target is underserved, and - what capabilities you have that enable you to serve that niche successfully. Importantly, on that note: be realistic about the size of your niche. 2. Innovation isn't always primarily about product features. Kin's homeowner’s insurance largely had the same features customers were familiar with, but it innovated on how the product was manufactured and distributed. That enabled them to give the customer a better value and preserve very high margins for themselves. 3. Figure out your differentiators and double down. Sean and his team made sure to quickly learn what they were good at relative to their competition. Then they doubled down on differentiating in those areas: finding and converting customers, and quantifying and pricing risk using advanced data science. 4. Don’t scale until you understand your unit economics. Sean urged the founders to master their unit economics and business equation before trying to scale the business. If you scale a model where CAC > LTV…things will not end well. 5. Don’t underestimate your resilience. Sean shared that there were many times when it seemed like the business would fail, including a critical moment when they overdrew their bank account and drew down their venture debt line. But they powered through and figured out a way forward, proving to themselves how dedicated, creative, and resilient they really were. Resilience is a muscle anyone can grow. When the going gets tough, push yourself to get tougher.

The experience of going from an agreement to a signature to payment fulfillment is painful. Agree.com makes it easy. Agreement revisions > E-sign > Payment invoicing are each painful steps that collapse into one seamless & collaborative flow with Agree Marty and Will are awesome builders; they built v1 of the product before we even invested so that we could sign our docs to lead the pre-seed on Agree! We're already using it for our docs at BTV; sign up and use their free e-sig today!

We're excited to finally announce our $3M pre-seed round led by Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures with participation from 8-Bit Capital, Trust Fund, Hustle Fund, Everywhere Ventures, Expedite Ventures, Firsthand Alliance, Singh Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) Angel Fund.

Today we're announcing Wallets. Wallets are the third account type on Unit, in addition to deposit accounts and credit accounts. Like other account types, they: - Carry a balance (example: $50) - Contain transactions (example: two ACH credits of +$25 each) Why do companies open wallets for their end-customers, instead of bank accounts? 1. Depending on the use case, wallets can be faster and easier to set up, with streamlined onboarding flows (subject to bank approval).  2. They can be a good fit for end-customers who don’t need the full suite of services that come with a traditional bank account. 3. They can be a good fit for use cases that limit how and where the money can be spent (e.g., closed-loop payments, FSA accounts). All Wallets use cases and onboarding requirements are subject to approval by your bank partner. How do Wallets work? Historically, banks partnered with companies by letting them manage a single FBO (For Benefit Of) account and requiring them to build a large number of processes / tools to manage it well. Including: ledgering, reconciliation, security, limits, statements, terms, oversight and more. These are very complex tasks that are achieved differently by every partner the bank works with. Unit’s implementation of wallets introduces standards that reduce the complexity. Wallets already include a lot of the important controls and features (example: wallets have a balance and transactions through one ledger, each wallet has associated limits and terms, and the bank has real-time access & oversight of all activities). This design benefits both sides. It helps companies work with safer and more intuitive entities like wallets, payments, transactions and cards. It helps the bank be in full control and have real-time oversight into every activity, across any program, in ONE place, with audit logs and permissions. You can find the links to guide + docs in our announcement: https://lnkd.in/eWXQ3gpv