Premoney List 4

Hi everyone!

Exciting news this week. Toucan (a language-learning Chrome extension), was featured in the Premoney List 2 and just announced a seed raise of $3M from GSV, Amplifyher Ventures, Wonder and others. Congrats to the team & buena suerte! I’ve been using Toucan for a few weeks, and have 3X’d my Spanish vocab…give it a try and let me know what you think.

Welcome new subscribers!

We have a bunch of new subscribers this week, and I have to say - they’ve been quite savage about feedback. Keep it coming - it won’t hurt my feelings & it makes the list better! For the newbies: The Premoney list is very simple. The goal is to provide founders, tech lovers, angels and fiery sales people like yourselves with a list of fresh up-in-coming companies that are at the beginning stages.

On to this weeks’ list:

• 10 Companies

• 80% Female or BIPOC founders

• 2 with pre-seed funding

• 4 unique takes on monetization

Asks:

• If you want to contact any of these companies directly, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with the founders.

Highlights:

4 companies highlighted this week approach monetizing your business, current assets, or passions in new ways. The passion economy has driven much of this type of innovation, and we should expect to see many more unique approaches to monetizing your current assets or lifestyles in the coming months / years.

• LaMoat: LaMoat, built by Matt Lock, enables shoe lovers (right now focused on street shoes), to officially “Bank” their shoes, and receive loans based on the value of their shoes. If you’re a shoe collector, and could use some extra cash (or just want to put your shoes to use without wearing them out) - check out LaMoat. As they put it “We help you access the value of your collection in cash, without ever having to sell your shoes. Keep it DS.”

• Ditto: Ditto, by Javaughn Lawrence from On Deck, was built Ditto to help the passion economy (comedians, artists, artisans & athletic instructors) to monetize their courses and create better experiences for users.

• Strata: Hailey Swartz built Strata to create a more profitable & powerful way to leverage your existing relationships. They integrate with Gmail, Clearbit (obvi), newsreaders and their own homegrown tech to suggest when to reach out to an old client, contact or friend based on your business needs. Their goal is to increase the volume of successful sales & client interactions.

• WithFriends: Martha Hipley and her team built WithFriends to combine two industry staples: Subscription models & SMBs. WithFriends builds subscription models for SMB’s to help increase MRR, predictable revenue, and ultimately become more financially secure.

That’s all! Please share, and provide feedback. Talk to you all next week.

Jake