Rise of the Rest, the initiative aimed at providing more funding and entrepreneurial resources to emerging tech hubs, might've only closed its first $150 million venture fund in December, but the team has already invested in a diverse list of nine startups from across the country.
The new portfolio startups are headquartered in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Austin and other tech hubs across the country. Since 2014, Rise of the Rest has been visiting tech hubs outside of Boston, New York City and San Francisco to invest in new startups. In the past four years, the team — which includes Case, "Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. Vance and now former Google exec Mary Grove — has visited 33 cities and counting.
In its first fund, Rise of the Rest counts some of the U.S.'s top entrepreneurs and business minds as investors. Jeff Bezos, the Kochs and Tony Burch are all among the investors' ranks. As of today, Michael Bloomberg, Roger Ferguson, Reid Hoffman and Megan Smith are also a part of the fund.
Among the startups in the Greater Washington region, only Baltimore's Catalyte received an investment from the new fund. The announcement does not detail how much of the $150 million fund the investment accounts for. Catalyte is an artificial intelligence-enabled platform designed to help identify people who could become great software developers. The startup has raised a total of $38.7 million since its founding in 2000, according to its Crunchbase profile.
With the new investments and fund, the Rise of the Rest team will also prepare for its next bus tour. In the spring, the initiative will visit Birmingham, Alabama; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Dallas, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee.
Here is the full list of Rise of the Rest's new portfolio companies, with descriptions provided by Revolution:
- AppHarvest (Pikeville, KY) is building and operating large-scale, high-tech greenhouse farms to cut distance from the produce supply chain.
- Catalyte (Baltimore, MD) uses artificial intelligence to identify anyone who has the aptitude to become a great software developer, regardless of background.
- Cotopaxi (Salt Lake City, UT) designs and produces ENGAGE Talent (Charleston, SC) develops AI recruiting technology for companies to identify and engage with passive candidates.
- Losant (Cincinnati, OH) is an IoT enterprise platform that makes creating end-to-end experiences easy.
- SafeChain Inc. (Columbus, OH) is creating a 30-second property transaction using blockchain technology.
- SEEVA (Seattle, WA) creates visibility systems for vehicle mobility with applications for autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems for passenger and trucking vehicles.
- ZenBusiness (Austin, TX) makes it free for anyone to start a business as a LLC or Corporation and ensure it’s easy and affordable to manage it year-round.
- Zylo (Indianapolis, IN) is a SaaS optimization platform that enables companies to discover, manage, measure, and optimize cloud subscriptions across the enterprise.
