Nurx
For all the promise of digital technologies, medical care today is still largely provided in the same unstructured manner as it always has been. When you need to see a doctor, there are typically 5 or...
View ArticleSharing Holiday Specials from the USV Network
USV network companies: Let us know if you’d like us to include your holiday offer in this list! The potential of digital network effects has been crucial to our investment thesis from day one. As an...
View ArticleNumerai
Part of the genius of the Internet is its ability to coordinate the actions of many disparate and geographically diverse people by eliminating the marginal cost of sharing information. In the last few...
View ArticleBlockstack Funding
Walter Isaacson from the Aspen Institute (and author of the Steve Jobs biography) recently wrote a post titled "The internet is broken. Starting from scratch, here's how I'd fix it." His core...
View ArticleDigital Currency for Virtual Worlds
In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, Snow Crash, we were introduced to the concept of a Metaverse, the 3d mixed reality heir to the Internet marked by a convergence of the physical and virtual worlds....
View ArticleShippo and the Power of Abstraction: Introducing USPS ePostage
Our portfolio company Shippo today announced that it is now providing all customers with access to the United States Postal Service ePostage program. Shippo is the first company to have received such a...
View ArticleTucows
Union Square Ventures has made a substantial investment in Tucows, a 23 year old company company that has been publicly traded for over 15 years. Since we have never before invested in a public...
View ArticleTop Hat
Even back when I was in graduate school, I found the price of textbooks to be high and their quality to vary widely. Now that I have children taking college courses, I was shocked to find textbooks...
View ArticleCall for Genomics and Software-driven Biology Startups
Everyone knows the big Web 2.0 companies use hundreds of data points to determine which ad we might prefer. And yet — in the deathmatch against disease, we reduce human health to single variables....
View ArticleUSV Session: Building the Healthcare Stack
The USV portfolio network consists of 67 active companies with over 7,000 employees across the US, Canada and Europe. We believe in using the power of networks to help our portfolio companies build...
View ArticleUpgrade
In July 2011, we were fortunate to lead the Series D financing round in Lending Club, founded in 2006 by Renaud Laplanche. Along with Zopa (UK company) and Prosper, Lending Club was a pioneer of the...
View ArticlegoTenna
Disruptive innovations often start out as worse versions of something that already exists. Worse along all dimensions except for one, but one that turns out to really matter because it unlocks a new...
View ArticleProtocol Labs
Protocol Labs made a series of announcements earlier today including that Union Square Ventures made an equity investment in the company late last year. We are thrilled to be working with Juan Benet...
View ArticleBlockstack Browser and Token
Today Muneeb and Ryan from Blockstack delivered the morning keynote at the Consensus 2017 conference here in New York. They made two important announcements: first the availability of the developer...
View ArticleFlip
A Google search for “apartment lease” returns 86 million results. Which makes sense. One of the constants in life is finding a place to live, and signing a long-term contract for that living place....
View ArticleThe Unknown Path to a Decentralized Future
Some companies with currently centralized services have been criticized for issuing tokens and raising money in ICOs. There are even allegations that venture investors are pushing companies to do so as...
View Article6 Ways Great Companies Use Board Decks to Their Advantage
This past summer at Union Square Ventures, Max Heald joined us as our summer intern. During his 10 weeks at USV, he helped us better aggregate insights shared across our portfolio companies through...
View ArticleNew Adventures: Joining Union Square Ventures in NYC
I am excited to share that I am joining the Union Square Ventures partnership alongside Albert, Andy, Fred, John, Brad, and the rest of the fantastic USV team. What struck me first about each of my...
View ArticleThe USV Portfolio Network: Now 70 Companies Strong
At Union Square Ventures, we spend a lot of time thinking about networks. Financial networks, social networks, data networks, and yes, even decentralized networks. But the most “meta” version of this...
View ArticleQuantitative Investing in Shampoo
Can a machine help you invest in shampoo? Coffee? Another consumer product? Last week, the USV portfolio company CircleUp announced the closing and launch of CircleUp Growth Partners - a $125 million...
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