Recent news from our
‍portfolio and fund

We loved seeing all the new faces at our AI Boulder meetup! 100s signed up, 80+ attendees! There is a ton of AI happening in Colorado and we're thrilled to host events to help the community make connections. Thanks to all the presenters and attendees. The monthly meetups will continue.

During Chicago Tech Week, Ryan Broshar participated in a panel that shared a lot of great tactical advice for founders building a company in the Midwest.

This week we hosted our Matchstick Campfire (founder retreat) in Minnesota! It was such an amazing and inspiring 24 hours with our incredible founders. We covered topics to improve negotiations, decision making, personal trajectory, and getting the most from a board. Of course we had a great founder story with the Sports Engine team and dinner at a classic Minnesota lake front supper club.

We have a great startup community but it could use a bit more organization...Each month we’ll send around an email with the following:

Events ← to help connect people

Colorado startup news ← to highlight cool stuff happening

New local startups launching and getting funding ← to build awareness for local companies

Insightful reading ← to help us all grow and be better

Hopefully, this helps bring our community together and allows us to support and help each other on a larger scale.

We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund III has completed an investment in Freedev.ai. Freedev.ai is building an AI agent platform for software teams that automates many common development tasks, including maintaining code documentation, managing technical debt, identifying and eliminating PII leakage problems, flagging and fixing SLA compliance issues, and resolving code vulnerability issues.

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We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund III has completed an investment in Tab Commerce. Tab Commerce is an intelligent expense control software designed to maximize restaurant profitability.

Two Boxes, the best way for brands and 3PLs to process returns and capture critical data from the return process, emerged from stealth today with $4.5 million in seed funding. We are so excited for this team, and the chance to participate in this round (and their prior round) with Vinyl Capital and Range Ventures.

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See more here:

Two Boxes Raises $4.5M In Seed Funding (FinSMEs)

Denver logistics startup exits stealth with $4.5M raise (Colorado Inno)

Zed Industries, the maker of a high-performance, multiplayer code editor, today announced it raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing total investment in the company to $12.5 million. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures (Matchstick was a Seed round investor). The company is also launching Zed, its code editor built from scratch to treat collaboration as a first-class concern, into beta after a successful alpha development phase. We are super excited for this launch and to bring on great partners at Redpoint. Check out this great video overview from Redpoint.

Tilt, a human-resources technology platform that helps companies and employees navigate the leave process, has raised $10 million in new investment capital. Congratulations to the Tilt team, and keep up the good work!

The founders of Intelligems first met while working at the ridesharing company Via Transportation in New York, where they ran the company's pricing strategies. They set out on their own in 2020 to introduce those strategies to e-commerce brands. Keep up the great work, Intelligems team!

We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund III has completed an investment in Frate. Frate is a returns solution for ecommerce retailers and consumers that decreases costs and emissions associated with each return.

We're so excited about the progress Treet has made and excited to bring First Round Capital onto the team. Since our their last round in June 2021, they went from 2 co-founders to a 15-person all-star team, from 5 brands to 65+, and increased GMV by over 600%. Congrats to the Treet team on this round of new funding!

Fulcrum, a Minneapolis-based software-as-a-service firm focused on modernizing manufacturing, has exited stealth mode to announce it has raised $18.8 million in Series A financing. This funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, and we participated along with Bread & Butter Ventures, Motivate Venture Capital, Battery Ventures, Social Starts, and Schematic Ventures. We're so excited to be along on this journey with the Fulcrum team!

We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund III has completed an investment in Presta. Presta is an end-to-end lending platform that helps financial institutions streamline the lending process so they can spend more time with borrowers and less time on manual, tedious back-end tasks. See their press release or read our blog post below.

Matchstick Ventures hosted our first (of many to come) “Matchstick Campfire” at the A-Lodge in Boulder, CO from October 4-5.  This event was held as a retreat for founders within the Matchstick portfolio to step away from the day-to-day for 24 hours to focus on community building, personal growth and leadership evolution.. We had an incredible time connecting with founders through several workshops, some time outside, and, of course, music by a roaring campfire to end the night.

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Some things founders shared with us that they enjoyed about the Campfire included: the chance to step away from computers and focus on personal and professional growth, being in nature, getting to know other founders in the portfolio, great content in the sessions, open attitudes, the intimate group size, and, of course, good food.

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All around, this was an amazing event and we hope to host events similar to this for groups of portfolio founders 2-3 times per year in the years to come!