Dove Dispatch #41 (Alex Rawitz - DIMO)
Helium as an inspiration, mobility-focused funds, and much more
GM and welcome to Dove Dispatch #41!
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DIMO is building a user-owned IoT platform that allows drivers to collect and share their vehicle data. Drawing inspiration from 5G-network Helium, DIMO will rely on a token to incentivize initial growth and govern the DIMO network.
They recently announced a $9M Seed round led by CoinFund, Variant Fund, Slow Ventures, Table Management, Wonder Ventures, Streamr, Stratos Technologies, and angels. Lattice, who maintains Dove Metrics, is excited to be participating in the round as well.
Co-founder and CEO Alex Rawitz dropped a ton of knowledge about his experience with fundraising.
You guys have recently raised a $9M funding round, led by CoinFund, Variant, Slow Ventures, and several prominent angel investors - given your business model, why was it that strategic to have Amir Haleem (CEO of Helium) in the round?
Helium was very much an inspiration to us at DIMO as they were the first project to really prove the potential to use web3 tools and principles - like an ecosystem coordinated around a token - to create value in the real, physical world by building a user-owned IoT network. We were involved in mining Helium in the early days and were familiar with the network and some of the players, so we jumped at the chance to meet Amir
Amir gave us some good advice early on in our fundraising and development process, so it made a ton of sense to bring him on as an Angel. But the value of Helium in DIMO goes well beyond Amir. We continue to work with teams at Helium and DeWi on several projects that we think could help improve the security of DIMO and Helium, and we’re talking with hotspot manufacturers and distributors about joining the DIMO ecosystem too.Â
Most of the funds you decided to onboard are Web3 native rather than mobility-focused traditional funds - what was the reasoning behind it?
We have several prominent angels from the mobility space including the former CEO of GM Rick Wagoner, Ro Gupta the CEO of Carmera, and Mark Joseph, the former CEO of North America for Transdev, On top of them, we have other angels that are in sectors where we expect to have more overlap in the future, like the utility sector, where we have Kiran Bhatraju from Arcadia.
Web3 is somewhat uncharted territory for mobility-focused funds, so they’re still coming around to our approach. However, since the announcement of our fundraise, something really interesting happened: we’ve had a ton of inbound interest from companies in the automotive and mobility space from both a funding and app partnership perspective.
It’s pretty amazing. Even just a few years ago, getting a real, serious meeting with someone at a major enterprise about a blockchain project like DIMO would have been near impossible. But the adoption of crypto has led to evangelists in high places. The timing could not be better to capitalize on changing perspectives around the industry.Â
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As mentioned in the fundraising announcement, you plan to use part of the funds to open-source your core software platform and release an SDK for developers to build applications using DIMO hardware - is launching an ecosystem fund part of the long-term vision?
We’re still evaluating the best framework, but we definitely want to support developers building next-generation mobility applications on DIMO both technically and financially. We take this approach in our own fundraising, but partners who just bring money to the table are the least compelling type of funder, so we hope to lead by example when we’re ready to start blowing out the DIMO ecosystem.Â
Since launching your application in December of 2021, you have seen tremendous traction: over 17,000 vehicles added, demand from over 700 fleets, and dozens of mobility services companies have begun to build on the platform - how did that help you raise this round?
Traction is always a big help when raising, but we were also aided by the strong background of our founders and the unique vision in what we’re doing.Â
Helium has designed the playbook for incentivizing a new market where an immense amount of VC capital would be required to acquire supply in a 2-sided marketplace - with more evident demand-side opportunities, do you think DIMO can leverage that existing successful model and do without a massive amount of external capital?
We certainly hope so! The reality is that automakers and many adjacent companies have been pouring tens of billions of dollars into developing connected vehicle ecosystems from the top-down, with little success. It’s rumored that Ford spent about $2B developing their connected car app, FordPass, and we know from personal experience it’s buggy and not very useful. Most other carmakers have probably spent similarly huge sums to develop their own apps and they’re all trying to build services they think drivers want.
Top-down doesn’t work. We believe that drivers will get a connected vehicle experience they actually want for a fraction of the cost with a nimble and neutral third party like DIMO building the connectivity and opening up the data and ecosystem. We believe we can deliver on the promise of connected vehicle platforms across all vehicles with our approach in a way that the automakers never could.Â
However, with all that said, the automakers will never be relegated from the system. These are incredible companies with amazing expertise, and we have plans for how they can play a part in the DIMO ecosystem and help us build the best future possible.
Many thanks to Alex for sharing such insightful insights.
Last week 30 projects announced fundraising rounds:
Karmaverse ($6M) | A GameFi project, created by SLG top game developers — with participation from A&T Capital, Foresight Ventures, Polygon Studios, Cao Zhen, OKX, NFX, Mindfulness Capital, GSR Ventures, Hashkey Capital, Fundamental Labs, y2z Ventures, L2Y, and Altonomy.
Ramper | Making web3 friendly to onramp the next billion users — with participation from Hashed, Terra, Polygon, Goodwater Capital, SamsungNext, Golden Ventures, R7 Capital, 500 Global, and Maple Ventures.
ArDrive ($17.2M) | The app that lets you pay once to securely save your files forever on the Arweave Permaweb — with participation from Arweave, Blockchain Capital, Sino Global Capital, SevenX Ventures, Momentum 6, LongHash Ventures, OFR Fund, Hypersphere Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Dorm Room Fund, Compute Ventures, and Cipholio Ventures.
Ucollex ($10M) | A Hong Kong-based non-fungible token (NFT) platform focused on art and pop culture collectibles — with participation from Animoca Brands, and MCP Asset Management.
Cradles ($5M) | The first prehistoric blockchain game, which introduces the time and entropy system, making the real-world time and space rules born in the game for the first time — with participation from Huobi Capital, Mirana Ventures, Folius Ventures, Everse Capital, Meteorite Labs, Spark Digital Capital, Foresight Ventures, D1 Ventures, YouBi Capital, AMPL Capital, Old Fasion, Aussie Capital, Avocado Guild, DUX, PathDAO, Infinity Force, Good Games Guild, PIF DAO, and Unix.
DeSyn Protocol ($5M) | A DeFi protocol that allows users to create and trade pools-based assets such as ETFs/Portfolios, levered assets, and more via smart contract — with participation from TPS Capital, LD Capital, Spark Digital Capital, Mentha Partners, Kosmos Ventures, Asymmetries Technologies, PAKA, Outliers Fund, CoinSummer, Consensus Lab, Azdag, LucidBlue Ventures, Westlabs, Chiron Partners, Zonff Partners, TGE Capital, JDAC Capital, Ticker Capital, CatcherVC, Everest Ventures, TKX Capital, Lancer Capital, TokenInsight, A+ Capital, OKX, MEXC Exchange, Mirana Ventures, BitMart, Cipholio Ventures, Bibox Exchange, TRON Foundation, NEO EcoFund, Joseph Eagan, and Jeff Pan.
Atem Network ($3M) | Decentralized community and social trades in a multi-chain Web3 group space — with participation from INCE Capital, GSR Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Mask Network, A&T Capital, Atlas Capital, Foresight Ventures, Zonff Partners, and Michael Zhang.
Matrix World ($5.5M) | An exciting, next-generation, multichain metaverse where users can create, connect, explore and play like never before — with participation from Tess Ventures, Everest Ventures, Sky9 Capital, Dapper Labs, Animoca Brands, SevenX Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, PANONY, y2z Ventures, Com2uS, Hash Global, ArkStream Capital, SecondLive, Moon Capital, Lucid Blue Ventures, and Matcha.
bitsCrunch ($3.6M) | Providing AI-enabled secure services that protect the blockchain ecosystem integrity, with a team of experts backed by the leaders in the industry — with participation from Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, Polygon Studios, Borderless Capital, Mapleblock Capital, Morningstar Ventures, Bison Fund, Shima Capital, GravityX Capital, DWeb3 Capital, Yuen Wong, Tykhe Block Ventures, Infinity Labs, Synaps, StarTerra, LVT Capital, Ahmed Al-Balaghi, Ravindra Kumar, and SRK.
Squads ($5M) | A user-friendly DAO generator on Solana, which combines a treasury, on-chain voting, and a chat all in one interface — with participation from Multicoin Capital, Collab+Currency, Jump Capital, Delphi Digital, Seed Club Ventures, Volt Capital, DavinciDAO, Reciprocal Ventures, and Reverie.
InfStones ($33M) | Decentralized blockchain infrastructure on one integrated platform — with participation from Susquehanna International Group, Dragonfly Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, DHVC, A&T Capital, and Value Internet Fund.
Aptos ($200M) | Building the safest and most scalable Layer 1 blockchain.
Slope Finance ($8M) | Building the world’s best mobile decentralized exchange and wallet on Solana — with participation from Solana Ventures, Jump Capital, Circle, Sequoia Capital, Alameda Research, Spartan Group, Fenbushi Capital, CMS Holdings, Rarestone Capital, NGC Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Huobi Capital, Krypital Group, Fundamental Labs, SkyVision Capital, Gate.io, OKX, Solar Eco Fund, Spark Digital Capital, and MC Ventures.
Aligned ($34M) | Building a suite of products and services aimed to empower the growing decentralized financial movement spanning high-performance computing, mining, staking, and liquidity provisioning while supporting decentralization with immutable, full-stack infrastructure for DeFi — with participation from GSR, Altium Capital, Cavalry Asset Management, and Ninja4.
Worldspark Studios ($3M) | A passion-driven, independent game development studio dedicated to pushing ideas and gaming as a whole forward — with participation from Animoca Brands, Shima Capital, Alameda Research, Jump Capital, AAG Ventures, Sfermion, and YGGSEA.
Fast Break Labs ($6M) | The first web3 basketball manager game and the next evolution in sports gaming — with participation from Patron, Pantera Capital, Collab+Currency, Solana Ventures, South Park Commons, Blue Pool Capital, Aneel Ranadive, Marc Merrill, Ryan Spoon, John Robinson, Thomas Vu, Jason Choi, and Wengie Huang.
Pact ($2.1M) | Algorand's most user-friendly AMM — with participation from Borderless Capital, CMS Holdings, Meld Ventures, Orthogonal Trading, MEXC Exchange, DAO Jones, Ellipti, Algorand Foundation, Daovergence, 0x Ventures, Valhalla Capital, Elves Long Term Capital, Parea Capital, and Algopulse.
Zebec ($15M) | A revolutionary DeFi technology that empowers real-time, frictionless, and continuous streams of payments — with participation from Solana Ventures, Distributed Global, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Circle, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Marginfi ($3M) | Decentralized portfolio margining on Solana — with participation from Multicoin Capital, Pantera Capital, Sino Global Capital, and Solana Ventures.
Bware ($6M) | Providing an interface between Blockchain APIs consumers and node providers with integrated payment options and verified reliability, all embedded within our platform and protocol service — with participation from Hypersphere Ventures, Blizzard Fund, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Woodstock Fund, Figment Capital, Axia8 Ventures, CoinGecko Ventures, Nexo, Connext, Kosmos Ventures, Impossible Finance, Nabais Capital, AVentures DAO, Subsquid, 3 Chaps Capital, StakeBorg, Spartan Group, GBV Capital, Ascensive Assets, Morningstar Ventures, Ganesh Swami, Erik Ashdown, Derek Yoo, Aurel Iancu, Delroy Bosco, Alex Smirnov, Batu, Michael Chen, Etienne, and Danish Chaudhry.
Catalog ($7.5M) | A cross-chain marketplace built on RenVM using the first-ever boundless liquidity mechanism — with participation from Amber Group, Multicoin Capital, Blocktower Capital, Cumberland, GBV Capital, Chiron Partners, Fisher8 Capital, LedgerPrime, Bixin Ventures, and Petrock Capital.
Abrakadabra Games ($150k) | Develops game technologies focused on Metaverse, with its platform called Vieverse — with participation from Güneri Invest.
Teller Finance ($6.9M) | An algorithmic credit risk protocol, for decentralized lending— with participation from Toyota Ventures, Upstart, Signum Capital, Blockchain Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Franklin Templeton Investments, Maven 11 Capital, ParaFi Capital, Framework Ventures, and Creative Destruction Lab.
Positive Earth | NFT fundraising platform for impact startups.
tZERO | The premier marketplace to trade digital private securities — with participation from Medici Ventures, Overstock, and Intercontinental Exchange.
Satoshi Block Dojo ($100k) | Provides best-in-class with cutting-edge technology to educate, develop, and elevate start-up entrepreneurs — with participation from Ayre Group.
Brahma ($4.2M) | A decentralized yield protocol that lowers the complexity of generating a yield on numerous cross-chain DeFi primitives — with participation from Framework Ventures, Zee Prime Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dialectic Capital, Maven 11 Capital, Cherry Ventures, LedgerPrime, The LAO, Daedalus Angel Syndicate, DegenScore, Santiago R. Santos, Jason Choi, DCFGod, ivangbi, and Igor Igamberdiev.
Luna Foundation Guard ($1B) | A nonprofit organization focused on Terra and dedicated to creating and providing greater economic sovereignty, security, and sustainability of open-source software and applications — with participation from Jump Capital, Three Arrows Capital, DeFiance Capital, Republic, GSR Ventures, and Tribe Capital.
Foxbit ($21M) | A cryptocurrency exchange operating in Brazil — with participation from OK Group.
AeroBased ($500k) | A global investment manager, a premium partner on innovative businesses with institutions, intermediaries, and individuals across the planet to meet their goals, fulfill their ambitions, and prepare for the future.
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