NVP Update

It’s been a busy few months at NVP, complete with new investments, exciting raises and some great team news.

Last month we proudly announced the addition of two new Venture Partners to our team. Today, we are proud to congratulate Allison Williams on her promotion.  Allison, who successfully built out and runs our pre-seed investment arm, is now an NVP Principal with a deepened role on our investment committee. 

We’ve also welcomed several new founders to the NVP family.  Our recent investments, which continue to expand our portfolio in FinTech, Supply Chain, and HealthTech include:

For more than a century, property and casualty insurance products have been designed for major life moments like buying a car or a home, getting engaged, or starting a small business. Today, consumers in their 20s and 30s are delaying or altogether forgoing these moments in favor of a lifestyle defined by renting, sharing, borrowing, and freelancing. Surround Insurance designs insurance products that cover these needs. Surround starter packs are simple, affordable, and personalized for asset-lite consumers. Surround works exclusively with independent agents and brokers who control $350 billion of industry premium. Surround provides agents with the digital tools and innovative new products they need to compete in a changing world.

The NVP Take: We believe that there is a large market opportunity for more modern insurance offerings, and we have validated that traditional insurance carriers are often unmotivated to explore alternative product offerings. With no competition in the market, this leaves an opportunity for an insurtech player to disrupt the status quo and establish themselves as the market leader. We also feel that there is no better team than the team at Surround to take on this opportunity. CEO Jay Grayson spent over 12 years at Liberty Mutual in roles spanning corporate finance, strategy, and customer experience. COO Kate Terry has 15 years of product management and operations expertise, most recently as a Senior Vice President at Liberty Mutual. This complementary and experienced team proved to NVP that they have a laser understanding of how to build, deploy and scale this opportunity.

Soft Ledger is a cloud-native accounting software designed for connectivity and flexibility.  Whether you're upgrading the current tech stack, integrating acquired companies, or launching a new product, Soft Ledger helps organizations get data quicker by providing accounting structure for the internet.  It eliminates the time normally wasted gathering, verifying, and fixing data. Their full suite of accounting functionality can be used on its own or easily connect to other applications and ERPs to speed up the process of getting data. 

The NVP Take: It’s all about saving time. We’ve been closely following the trend of companies to use tech-first solutions in everything from payments to project management to issue tracking. People are looking to automate operations wherever they can in an effort to save time and resources and create stronger operational efficiencies. Soft Ledger takes accounting software to the next level by increasing automation capability and accuracy while cutting back on time needed to do it.  Founders Ben Taylor and Geoff Ostrega have strong backgrounds in finance and tech, and already have a proven track record for growth. 

‍FreightFlows uses proprietary algorithms to consolidate and analyze global commodities trade data to predict when and where vessels will be available and viable to move cargo for shippers. Currently, access to these critical forecast numbers are difficult to construct and impossible to trust. FreightFlows allows shippers to more accurately price cargo and fleets to optimize routes. This transparency will decrease transportation costs, increase utilization and create a cleaner, more efficient global transportation system.

The NVP Take: NVP’s thesis on the Supply Chain market can be simply stated:  The interconnected and complex movement of goods to 7.6 billion people across the planet, and the enterprises that supply them, is in desperate need of new technologies that provide transparency, connectivity and digitization. FreightFlows is a perfect fit for us and a promising solution for the bulk shipping trade market. Founder Matt Morgan comes from a family of merchant marine captains and has put in time at global logistics organizations, as well as within successful startups.

Kiira is a virtual women’s clinic revolutionizing women’s health starting with young women in colleges and universities. Kiira operates as a telehealth, subscription-based platform.  Once a school is signed on, female identifying students are able to connect to trusted clinicians including: Primary care providers, OBGYN’s, Nurse Practitioners, mental health experts and more via phone, video and chat.

The NVP Take: TeleHealth is becoming a standard channel for care, accelerated by COVID-19. Kiira is unique in its aim to tackle women’s health, an area where services tend to be particularly personal in nature and often require an added level of privacy and sensitivity. We have seen similar success with HealthTech players focused specifically on the male market and we think Kiira founders, Crystal Evuleocha and Dr. Candice Fraser have the experience, brand and go-to-market strategy to change the way universities and colleges address the health needs of their female students.

With more than 80M uninsured and underinsured individuals in the U.S., mira is providing a new type of health insurance, available to individuals and businesses.  Mira offers its members access to on-demand, essential healthcare services (like urgent care centers, direct primary care practices, pharmacies, lab services etc.) by building a network of participating providers.  Members pay a monthly fee for access to the network's transparent, pre-negotiated prices and flat co-pays. The model eliminates high out-of-pocket costs and unpredictable pricing structures often faced by those without adequate insurance, and gets them access to basic care when they need it. 

The NVP Take: We’ve been executing on what we believe is a long-term shift in the healthcare space to value-based care models that will require better digital tools and care coordination among current healthcare stakeholders. Mira's solution empowers its members to engage in healthcare in a way that fits their lifestyles, their budgets and their needs. It addresses a massive market in an innovative way that makes sense for providers and patient to take part in.  Founder Khang Vuong has a record of success in healthcare administration, and previously worked with Bon Secours Health, a $11B health system. We invested in mira’s Seed Round, alongside Flybridge Partners.

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If you are interested in learning more about any of these companies, or NVP’s investment criteria, email Info@Newark.VC.