Recent news from our
‍portfolio and fund

The recent news of discontinuing the original Techstars Boulder accelerator location and Foundry planning to stop making new investments after its current fund has rippled through the Colorado tech community.

While the changes happening with these key players may evoke a sense of nostalgia and sadness, it's important to acknowledge their immense contributions to shaping Colorado’s tech landscape during their 15+ years in our ecosystem and highlight the strength of our startup environment.

Our thoughts on the state of Colorado's Tech Ecosystem and why it's in a great spot.

‍

We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund III has completed an investment in Maggie’s Refuel. Maggie’s Refuel is a high-end convenience store brand planning to modernize and innovate the current gas station experience.

Business Insider recognized Natty as one of the "30 most successful early-stage startup investors in the world." We are honored to be recognized globally.

We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund III has completed an investment in Keel Technologies. Keel helps the healthcare workforce achieve its fullest potential through professional development coaching and upskilling.

ALLCITY recently announced their $9.4M Series A led by Mosaic and Andre Iguodala. We're bringing on fantastic experience, connections and network to many athletes and teams to help in our vision of making it more fun to be a sports fan. Congrats to Brandon, Ryan and the ALLCITY team! We're grateful to be a part of your journey. You can read our intiial investment memo here or the fundraise announcement below.

We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund III has completed an investment in Freeplay. Freeplay helps product teams ship better products with LLMs, by giving people the power to prototype faster, test with confidence, and optimize features for customers.

Warmly announced an $11 million Series A, led by Felicis, to keep building on their idea of providing warm leads for sales departments by pushing data about people who are in active buy mode on a website as the time to connect to sales prospects is highly influential in closing a deal. We're excited to welcome Felicis to the team as the lead investors in this round. Congrats to the whole Warmly team!

‍

NVNGIA, one of our key partners out of Wisconsin, recently published an interview with Natty, Ryan and Shannon.

We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund III has completed an investment in PreFix. PreFix is a data-driven operating system that puts home maintenance on autopilot.

This week we hosted our Matchstick Campfire (founder retreat) in Boulder! We spent an inspiring and connecting 36 hours with our incredible founders. We covered topics to identify areas of improvemens within the company without increasing costs, leadership styles and how to get the most out of our teams, and board member dynamics. Of course we had a great time outside in the beautiful Colorado fall weather and meals where our founders built bonds with each other.

We're very excited to announce a project to make it easier for startups in Colorado to connect with investors, PitchColorado.com. Startups can now submit a single pitch and reach 15 amazing local investors. Our hope is this platform increases access to capital for startups, and access to great founders for investors. We plan to expand this project to more investors and more geographies. A big shout out to Mat Vogels, a Matchstick founder and currently with Julian Capital for leading this project with us.

Environmental, social and governance technology startup Optera released that it has closed on a $12 million Series A round led by Next Frontier Capital to grow its enterprise-focused ESG and carbon management platform. Congratulations to the Optera team!

We're looking forward to Denver Startup Week September 18-22 this year! We're helping organize and lead the "VC Day" activities to help startups succeed at raising capital. We've put together a huge meet and greet for investors and startups along side six panel sessions. Check out the schedule of events available now.

Congratulations to Fulcrum on the announcement of their Series A2 round of funding!

We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund III has completed an investment in Liminal. Liminal delivers horizontal security for all generative AI, enabling CIOs and CISOs to take back complete control over AI data privacy, security, and sovereignty.