Ramanan Raghavendran

John Kim

 It was a busy and productive year at Amasia! Here are some of the 2022 highlights for our firm and our portfolio.

Investments

2022 Year in Review

Last week we concluded our second cohort of AxBC.


Programs

Reflections on AxBC

Amasia is a single bottom-line investor. However, our investment theses—first global expansion and best practices and now climate and sustainability—lend themselves to backing companies that drive positive impact on our world. We recognized this impact potential in our investments, but our focus on climate led us to conclude we needed to assess that impact, climate impact in particular, in a more robust way. 


Impact in Early-Stage VCs: Amasia’s Impact Assessment Framework

Two months ago Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. The world continues to watch in horror as cities are bombed into oblivion and millions of people are forcibly displaced from their homes. 

Deep Dives

Deep Dive: War, Environment, and Climate

On Tuesday, we completed the fourth and last teaching module of AxBC, our cohort-based course on behavior change for founders in the climate and sustainability spheres.

AxBC: Reflections After Our First Cohort

Some time ago, in the context of our investment in Clarity, I wrote briefly about air pollution. Thanks in part to our involvement with Clarity, I’ve learned a great deal more about air pollution. It has served only to increase my sense of urgency.

Climate

Getting Local: Air Pollution

TL;DR: The most recent IPCC report is comprehensive, impressive, frightening, and a monument to both the scientific endeavor and humanity’s own ability to analyze and interpret what our planet is telling us. But it is not perfect, and here we want to touch on four key questions that arose as we read through it.

The IPCC Report: Four Critiques

Amasia invested in Finch's pre-seed round in May. Finch decodes products’ environmental impacts through a browser extension and provides digestible content on how people can reduce their environmental footprint. This represents our third investment in environmental data (“R1” in our framework), following our investments in Clarity and Joro.

Amasia’s Investment in Finch

Amasia co-led Pipeline’s seed round in April, continuing our focus on remote learning. We look forward to working with co-founders Stephen Eliis (aka Snoopeh) and David Steinberg (aka StoneMountain64). Here I provide a bit more on why we are enthused about the company.

Amasia’s Investment in Pipeline

Amasia   invested in   Super’s   Series B round in April. The   $28m round   was led by Softbank Ventures Asia. We led the Series A last year, and my partner John Kim serves on the company’s board of directors. Here I want to provide a bit more context for our involvement.

Amasia’s Investment in Super

Amasia invested in Corrily’s seed round in March (as part of the YCombinator Demo Day process). This aligns with our continued interest in the remote services space. We are excited to work with CEO Abel Riboulot and co-founder & CTO Andrej Žukov Gregorič.

Amasia’s Investment in Corrily

Amasia invested in Living Food’s seed round in December, and my partner John Kim joined the board. This represents our first investment in an Indian company and the second in the food sector. We’re excited to work with the team, and here I want to explain why. 

Amasia's Investment in Living Food

Part I: How We Got Here   In 1905, Albert Einstein stated that the speed of light was fixed for all time and space.  The equations of special relativity — verified endlessly since  his landmark paper  was published 115 years ago — imply that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This fa

Amasia Foundations

In Our Hands: How We Got Here and How We Change

Earlier this year Amasia invested in Joro’s seed round. CEO Sanchali Pal has written eloquently about the investment; interviews with her can be found here (TechCrunch) and here (FastCompany). The company is also hiring, if you want to participate in the great battle (and opportunity) of our times.

Here I want to explain why we are so enthused about the company.

Amasia’s Investment in Joro

Amasia led the seed investment round in Scrimba in September. Scrimba is an online platform delivering programming education via interactive screencasts. The company is based in Oslo, and we met them through Y-Combinator (YC S20).
This represents our fifth investment in online learning (the others are Skillshare, Freckle, GO1 and Platzi) — but our first, after all these years, in coding education. Here I write about how and why we invested.

Amasia's Investment in Scrimba

The text below is the overview section of a longer internal report that elaborates on our thesis statement from 2019. 

 Amasia: Investing To Make The World Safer

Amasia led the seed investment round in Treedots last year. Treedots is a food surplus marketplace for Southeast Asia. My partner John Kim serves on the board (and has made a great video about food waste and Treedots, which you can watch here).

Amasia's Investment in Treedots

Amasia made a seed investment in Focusmate last year. The pandemic has brought wide attention to a number of remote work applications, including Focusmate, and so I thought I’d lay out our investment thesis. 
I also want to introduce the company to many of you who may be struggling to find a way to “get things done” while under lockdown.

Amasia’s Investment in Focusmate

We’ve been thinking about bubbles for a long time here at Amasia and recently Amasia Fellow Daniel Tan and I had the chance to get a bit more structured and precise, spurred by the piece we wrote recently on the cleantech debacle. There is a reading list at the end.

On Bubbles in Venture Capital

DescriptionLast week Amasia co-led a Series A investment in Clarity Movement. Marc Tarpenning and I have joined the board of the company. Marc, a co-founder of Tesla, is a venture partner at Spero Ventures, our co-lead. 

Amasia’s Investment in Clarity Movement

The cleantech investment boom was the ur-wave of investing in climate and sustainability. It didn’t go well, to put it mildly. Amasia Fellow  Daniel Tan  and I took a tour through the history and extracted a few lessons. We have a short reading list at the end.

Lessons From The Cleantech Debacle

Third and last in my series of “factoid” posts about climate denial. As I said in the first one, these are not intended for actual climate deniers. These are for people who are “climate-aware” — to provide useful Information that might clarify things in your own mind. As usual many thanks to Alina Goh.

Insights