Founded@UnionLabs
Getting deeptech founders to the starting line at Union Labs Ventures.
The Union Labs Ventures team is excited to announce Founded@UnionLabs, encompassing our day-zero startup formation efforts spanning co-development, and co-founding with entrepreneurs and EIRs.
Supported by up to $1.5M in funding, Founded@UnionLabs is for founders who are somewhere between a first-draft plan or prototype, and where we at Union Labs Ventures can bring our collective experience and network in deeptech to help them achieve early-stage success.
When I joined the team in January of 2022, we set out to reflect on how the firm engaged with founders who are early on in their process. We took these insights and built the Founded@UnionLabs framework so that we can better support our portfolio companies from the very beginning.
At any one time, we plan to work with a small group of 3–5 founders (or founding teams) and get their companies to the starting line by rolling up our sleeves and supporting them in areas of product development, team building, go to market strategy, and partnerships.
An early example which informed Founded@UnionLabs was when Andrew Krioukov linked back up with classmate Michael Andersen, and his former co-founder at Comfy, Beau Trincia. Andrew and his team approached us to help co-develop a cryptographic infrastructure startup. Combined with a pre-seed investment from us, the team launched Antimatter in mid 2021 and closed a $12M Series A round in March 2022 led by NEA with participation from General Catalyst, Union Labs Ventures, and the founders of Snowflake, Okta, Dropbox, VMware, Segment, and Databricks.
More recently we announced Zerofy, a startup founded by Till Quack and Criss Udam with the mission to simplify a zero-carbon lifestyle for households. Through our network of partners plus our experience in product development we’ve been working closely with them to get to market with a v1 later this year.
Every startup is unique but they all share patterns. As former operators ourselves, we’ve experienced first-hand the challenges in getting a startup team off the ground, what it takes to build and execute on a product, and the hurdles in getting traction. Through Founded@UnionLabs our goal is to serve founders and help them wherever possible as they navigate these early-stage challenges.
If Founded@UnionLabs sounds like something that can help get you to the starting line, then please reach out to us, we’d love to hear from you.
