For SMBs and startups denied a successful exit, there awaits a veritable gauntlet of bureaucratic complexities to manage — a maze of confounding, error-prone, mostly manual processes and procedures that, frankly, no one wants to deal with. 

As an investor, I can tell you: THIS SUCKS. The entire thing, from the upsetting death spiral through the stages of grief. Mix a failing company with delusional behavior, bad board, enormous pref stack, or legal disputes and you get a real recipe for ulcers.

Even thinking about failure freaks everyone out. But it shouldn’t. Planning for potential collapse is an important aspect of a director’s fiduciary responsibility. Knowledge of the wind-down process can inform important decisions, decisions that might even lead to creative problem-solving and expanded optionality. Having an insolvency plan is not the same thing as going insolvent. As an industry, we need to de-dramatize talking openly about our companies’ prospects and get real.

Enter SimpleClosure. SimpleClosure was born from a deep understanding of the world of stress and chaos involved in winding down a company’s operations. From our own experience, we saw an incredible opportunity: a ubiquitous problem, a ton of market whitespace, and a potentially category-defining company that had already figured out an end-to-end solution to streamline and automate the thankless process of business shutdown. (You might have read about them in Techcrunch, Fortune, BusinessInsider, NYTimes, Inc Magazine, WSJ, 44 startups to bet your career on in 2024.)

In stark contrast to the myriad solutions dedicated to helping startups get off the ground, there are few comprehensive resources to guide a company through dissolution and closure. This process typically involves numerous filings, notifications and other obligatory procedures. It’s time-consuming, fussy work, often deprioritized by lawyers and accountants who know there’s limited future upside to working with a closed business.

SimpleClosure automates the shutdown process across three key stages: onboarding, dissolution/wind-up and actual shutdown. To do so, the platform leverages a combination of artificial intelligence, fintech and legal tech to guide a client through the shutdown process from start to finish while limiting associated risk exposure. In addition to creating significant cost-efficiencies for the client, the SimpleClosure shutdown process typically wraps in days or weeks, compared to the many months more typical of conventional methods.

How do they do it? As part of onboarding, the SimpleClosure platform prompts users for information to understand the unique variables a company needs to deal with (e.g. cap table, operating agreement, states the company is registered in, and so on). It then augments this data with searches across public state databases to validate and ensure all relevant information is covered. From there, a specific dissolution and closure plan is developed with a navigable checklist of all shutdown-related tasks for the founder or business owner to follow, for example, filing franchise taxes or EIN cancellation. Finally, the platform focuses on any contractual obligations, helping to settle debts and distribute assets. The platform additionally offers users vital guidance throughout the process and even post-closure.

Beyond SimpleClosure’s deeply needed product offering with broad market potential, we also saw in co-founders Dori Yona (CEO) and Nimrod Ram (CTO), a passionate, mission-driven leadership team who understood the importance of speed of execution. Dori brings a wealth of experience as a third-time founder with a successful exit under his belt with the consumer fintech platform, Earny. Dori also served as the GM of Growth at Navan (previously TripActions), leading the company’s PLG and SMB go-to-market strategies. Before SimpleClosure, Nimrod spent a decade at Riskified, where he served as Head of Innovation and was instrumental in growing the company from seed, to unicorn status, to listing on the NYSE.

I firmly believe that shareholders stand to benefit from normalizing insolvency planning as an exercise that can inform key decisions. Equally, I think there is an enormous opportunity here to expose the IP and assets of companies that didn’t quite make it to companies that will. Watch this space…Dori and Nimrod have a very cool roadmap.

Note: Check out the original article on the website of Foxe Capital, a sub-adviser for Anthemis

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When we first invested in Denim (then Axle Payments) back in 2020, on the cusp of a global pandemic and attendant supply crunch, we held the firm conviction that the financial system backstopping global supply chains was ripe for technological improvement.

From underwriting to collections, Denim deployed a 21st-century financial solution to help small logistics companies and larger freight intermediaries alike. In the US, the freight broker market is valued at $134 billion, and the total freight trucking market is valued at $791 billion.

Despite being a brand-new startup, Denim’s nascent 2020 growth indicated to me that they had tapped into an essential market need: working capital bolstered by easy-to-use administrative and workflow management tools. In addition to its Quickpay offering, we believe in Denim’s potential to reduce the average steps per job by 75% through automating invoicing, collections, and payments.

This year, Denim has facilitated nearly 60,000 jobs valued at $130 million. Denim has also more than tripled its headcount to 100 employees, and it’s still actively recruiting for open positions.

Denim grew its revenue 4x in 2021 by connecting more than 7,000 freight brokers, shippers, and carriers on its financial enablement platform. Denim’s unique ability to deliver rapid funding turnaround times and its premier customer service team have earned the company a 4.7 star rating on TrustPilot and a net promoter score over 70, rivaling beloved brands like Apple, Starbucks, and the Ritz Carlton.

I’m also super excited by Denim’s rebrand. I love denim! It’s the best! Trusty and versatile, the fabric revolutionized workwear and fashion. Denim (the company) is poised to revolutionize the logistics industry.

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At best, most employees juggle multiple physical benefit cards and toggle between several different web portals. At worst, they are emailing (dare I say faxing!) receipts, filling out paper forms, and spending valuable time chasing down account balances and reimbursements via phone — all to access money and benefits that they have already earned. The experience isn’t much better for employers and benefit administrators. They strive to deliver a great experience for employees and customers — providing guidance and encouraging utilization — but do so through antiquated systems with a heavy reliance on understaffed call centers.

This is all particularly striking because there’s nothing (else) antiquated about employee benefits today. They are a critical lever of recruitment, retention, and wellbeing. And many companies commit not simply to the best versions of medical, dental, and vision plans, but to a rich array of consumer-directed, ancillary, and voluntary benefits as well. From EPOs and FSAs through to transit, fitness, and fertility options, an employee’s open enrollment experience now feels a lot more like filling a shopping cart than casting a ballot.

This should be a significant and positive change for employees, who have more control over their healthcare dollars and a more useful and responsive overall suite of benefits options. Sadly, innovation in benefits technology has never kept pace with innovation in benefits products. The seamless, intuitive experiences consumers have come to expect are all but nonexistent here. In addition to the impact on satisfaction and costs, we’re all but certain that this has led to significant underutilization of benefits that can make a real difference in employees’ lives.

We’re in the midst of a dramatic shift in benefits offerings from standardized to specific to personalized. We see this evolution as ongoing and enormously promising, from a social and financial perspective. We also think it’s gone about as far as it can without accompanying transformation in the infrastructure of benefits provision.

Many have recognized that the benefits experience was due for a comprehensive overhaul — but it’s the seasoned and ambitious team at Elevate that has done it. With deep industry expertise and a track record of scaling benefits platforms alongside Fortune 1000 companies, Elevate stands alone among the next-generation challengers. Elevate is completely reimagining how employers and employees access, manage, and experience consumer-directed benefits. Anthemis is very proud to lead their latest funding round, which was announced last week.

Elevate is the only API-driven consumer-directed benefits platform built on a modern technology stack, with the ability to support all plan types on a single platform and card. The core product is a platform that allows users to easily create and access benefits plans with intuitive and fully configurable attributes, providing a streamlined experience to employers and employees. Employees can manage their pre-tax benefits from one dashboard (web or mobile!), and use a single payment card to draw from a vast universe of benefits options across health care, education, transportation, lifestyle and more. Claims are processed instantly and reimbursements are remitted within minutes. Meanwhile, employers can use a simple, powerful online platform to build and customize benefits plans that respond to the needs of their workforces.

Brian Cosgray, Brian Strom and the Elevate team have brought a first-rate product to market that is simultaneously superior, cheaper, and more flexible than the competition. From the moment customers are onboarded onto the platform until the second they get reimbursed, Elevate is driving down operational costs while driving up client and customer satisfaction.

The team is as exciting to us as the platform they have built together. Each founding team member brings experience, creativity, integrity, and purpose to their respective roles — from founding an in-house consumer-directed benefits platform to leading multiple successful exits as an entrepreneur. All share a deep passion for solving this stubborn problem at scale.

More than half of insured Americans obtain their benefits through employers. We are overdue for better solutions and building them will have a meaningful impact. Making it easier to manage and utilize benefits will enhance employee satisfaction, reduce employers’ operational costs, and empower employees to invest in their own physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing.

Elevate is on a mission to revolutionize the consumer-directed benefits experience, and we look forward to partnering with them in their journey to becoming the premier technology-centric solution in this market. Over time, we expect them to do more than transform a legacy system: we believe that they’ll become the critical infrastructure for innovative benefits programs that are more responsive, empowering, and useful for the diverse, often distributed workforces of the future. We are thrilled and excited to work with them to realize that vision.

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Last year, I decided I was only going to shop small for Christmas, buying from independent and – where possible – sustainable online brands (honey for my dad, gin for my mum and marshmallows for my granny if you must know…). I was not alone – research conducted by Shopify showed that an average of 50 percent of customers surveyed across a range of 10 countries look for independently owned businesses to support. And, although 62 percent of consumers have purchased from traditional marketplaces since the pandemic began, only 55 percent say they will do so regularly in six months’ time – indicating that there is significant growth to come for these independent brands.

As an industry, retail ecommerce has seen rapid growth over the last few years, with sales worldwide growing from $3.4 trillion in 2019 to $4.9 trillion in 2021, and forecast to reach $5.9 trillion in 2024 (source: Shopify future of ecommerce 2022 report). While there is now a maturing infrastructure to support ecommerce brands in selling their products – Shopify (market cap of c.$138 billion) for selling direct to customers and Faire.com (raised $400 million Series G at a $12.4 billion valuation in November 2021) and Ankostore (raised €250 million Series C at a €1.75 billion valuation in January 2022) for B2B sales to merchants – innovation has been lacking in the less sexy but equally important side: procurement and supply chain.

This needs to change. Supply chain issues became the most talked about issue in the industry during 2021, and continuing COVID-19 restrictions – coupled with staff shortages globally – mean that it is unlikely that these challenges will go away anytime soon. And whilst consumers understand, they still want to receive high quality products that are delivered quickly and on time.

Luckily, we have found the team with the passion and skill to take on this huge problem – Opply. Opply is building an automated supply chain platform and B2B marketplace connecting consumer brands (both online and offline) with suppliers. Starting with the food and beverage industry (think your favourite independent chocolate bar brand or non-alcoholic beer company), the team has built the world’s biggest and highest quality supplier database alongside an automated sourcing and ordering process, meaning that brands save months of time on this previously fragmented process. With all brands orders and suppliers on one platform, Opply will be able to leverage larger purchasing power and dynamic payments.

Before Opply, tackling this issue is no small feat for most small brands, as a lack of supply chain knowledge makes it difficult to find the right suppliers quickly and cheaply. For example, on average, it takes two months to find a supplier and the right contact person, then another two months to align on the product details and order. This becomes especially problematic when you need to replace a supplier who itself is experiencing delays or shortages.

Heading up Opply are co-founders Helen Murphy (CEO) and Martin Postel (CTO). Helen has spent most of her career working with consumer goods brands, with over 10 years experience at P&G and Bain & Co. She also previously founded her own small consumer goods business, and has lived all of these pains first hand. Martin is an expert in applied machine learning and data analysis, with over seven years of experience in supply chains and process optimisation.

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But inflation and high-interest rates mean consumers also have less disposable income, and now they want personalised shopping experiences and flexible payment options that reflect their increasing price sensitivity.
Merchants, meanwhile, have been scrambling to serve this dynamic and multidimensional consumer in a chaotic, post-pandemic landscape. Short-term financing services like buy now, pay later and other split-pay products have soared in popularity (the number of US BNPL users grew 56% YoY in 2022, totaling over USD 85bn in volume). However, concern is growing as the consumer credit-like nature of these products has caused regulators to step up oversight.

Price optimisation remains another issue for struggling retailers looking to maximise profits, increase market share, and enhance the customer experience — with a need for more (and better) data to sufficiently optimise their pricing models in real time.

And in the current economic landscape, excess inventory continues to plague retailers. Unsold merchandise represents a massive financial and environmental issue within the fashion industry, where a staggering 30% of unsold clothes and $600M of luxury merchandise are burned each year. It’s a literal sustainability dumpster fire.
That’s why I couldn’t be more excited about our recent backing of the innovative pricing software company, ergo.

price-sensitive consumers find a brilliant, new way to buy the products they want and stay within budget. It’s a win-win.

To deliver on the promise of more personalised, more sustainable, more flexible online shopping experiences, ergo has built an e-commerce plug-in for merchants which enables consumers to essentially name their price — making a lower offer on a product than listed. Merchants can then accept or reject that offer on the backend.

In the future, ergo will also provide retailers with valuable market pricing data, analytics and consumer insights in the form of a price discovery and optimisation tool based on ergo’s ability to collect true willingness-to-pay data. ergo’s real-time pricing data will allow merchants to price items more efficiently from jump — even before listing online. This kind of optimisation will help decrease inventory holdings attributable to suboptimal pricing.

So ergo allows retailers to optimise pricing, increase conversions and clear inventory sustainably. At the same time, price-sensitive consumers find a brilliant, new way to buy the products they want and stay within budget. It’s a win-win.
ergo is currently in beta as a Shopify app, with plans to develop the product and eventually expand to other online platforms.

Founded just this year in New York, ergo is led by its founder and CEO, Claire Stepanek. Equal parts bright, driven and passionate, Claire combines a maths, economics and neuroscience background with deep pricing knowledge acquired during her tenure at Apple, where she ran supply chain across China, Japan and Korea.

We are thrilled to invest in ergo’s pre-Seed round, alongside Wischoff Ventures, to work closely with Claire as she endeavours to change the future of pricing — bringing intelligent pricing strategies to retailers whilst empowering consumers to get the products they want at sane prices.

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Financial reconciliation remains a well-established headache and dreaded pain point for too many enterprises across Latin America. Siloed and highly fragmented banking data has made invoicing and reporting a time-consuming and convoluted manual chore for finance teams working to maintain a handle on their financial data while remaining compliant.

I’m always looking to back high impact companies designed to fundamentally change the industries they address, which is why I’m particularly excited about our investment in Arkham, the Data and AI platform designed to automate the financial and back-office operations of LATAM enterprises.

With a well-documented nearshoring boom underway in Mexico (80% of the country’s industrial production is destined for the US), and sustained economic growth predicted for LATAM enterprises more generally (the IDB estimates nearshoring in Latin America and the Caribbean will boost global exports by $78b annually), the need for tech innovation in LATAM business operations can’t be overstated.

So, as LATAM enterprises become a new, driving force of commerce in the Americas, Arkham is ready, built to support this very transition. Its platform was designed to tackle the specific data challenges LATAM enterprises face in automating their financial and back-office operations – enabling them to eliminate manual processes and achieve unprecedented productivity.

Currently, LATAM teams still find themselves relying on fragmented data warehouses, BI tools, and manual reporting to create reports and derive insights. It’s a slow, chaotic and needlessly expensive process, generating not nearly enough insight and strategic analysis for the amount of work it requires. Teams working manually are reactive and therefore also limited in their predictive capabilities (to perform an OPEX calculation, a team member must manually export data from their ERP, download all invoicing data, and then manually create spreadsheets to reconcile each transaction.) Closing the books using this kind of manual reconciliation can take companies 15 FTEs as long as 10 days. No bueno.

Source: company presentation

But Arkham is giving LATAM enterprises a new way forward. The Arkham platform automates both the processes of expense management and invoice reconciliation. Its expense management module uses real-time OPEX calculations by connecting to ERPs, electronic invoicing, and bank data and analysis by category (payroll, G&A, maintenance, and so on), while its AI-driven platform ingests financial data, running machine learning models to transform the data into actionable insights through user-friendly reporting and analytics dashboards.

Arkham’s platform also allows for additional predictive, insight-driven action, with a suite of Time-Series forecasting and anomaly detection tools designer to detect changes in recurring invoices. And a forthcoming customized GPT-4 model will give finance teams the opportunity to use natural language queries to derive other business insights from their data.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say, for AR and sales teams used to manual reconciliation, Arkham is an utter game changer.

Co-founders Mau Sepulveda and Hec Monarrez are savvy, nimble executors and second-time founders, with a proven and stellar track record. As previous co-founders of Astro, and both coming off successful key roles at Konfio, Mau and Hec know how to work as a venture-backed company, and they know how to do it together. Their complementary skill sets (Mau previously served as CTO and CPO of Konfio and was Head of BD and GM for LATAM PayPal; Hec directed Engineering at Konfio) have helped them ship products expertly and expeditiously.

It’s still early, but the Arkham team has already signed key customers, and we feel strongly about the overall market opportunity here (there are about 10k+ companies within the initial two markets of enterprises in Mexico and companies in the US with significant Mexican operations). While there are regional complexities around accounting practices and electronic invoicing in LATAM, these problems largely persist across the region and represent logical room for expansion. And though other companies are playing in this general space, very few are attacking the problem in the same way Arkham is. Because of that, as Arkham continues to develop its solution for financial operations automation in LATAM, we see serious opportunity for product expansion – with potential avenues in treasury management, payments operations, FP&A software, and other back-office automations.

We are thrilled to invest in Arkham’s pre-Seed round, helping them build out their initial team, finalize platform and model development, go live with their early customers, and support their ambition of playing a central role in the future of Data, AI and Automation in LATAM.

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Throughout my career as an early stage operator, founder and investor, I’ve spent countless hours pouring over reports, articles, research studies, and data sets, working my way through data rooms or market research, and spinning up investment memos, presentations, business plans, and commentary. While there are parts that are crucial to the investment process and cannot be automated, there are also many parts that leave me pulling my hair out and wishing I could magically pull out the key pieces of information so I can get to the fun part: my analysis. That’s where Fifth Dimension AI steps in to automate the boring parts of jobs in document-heavy industries freeing professionals to generate insights and broadcast their expertise.

Fifth Dimension AI’s first product, AI co-pilot Ellie, is starting with tackling the $3.88tn global real estate market. Why real estate? The document-heavy industry has been waiting on a verticalized AI model suited to their needs as the industry has begun to proactively embrace and adopt new technologies and with early adopters of AI-enabled solutions already seeing returns through implementation of chatbots to handle client communications and HVAC operations.

Ellie solves a key point that has inhibited the adoption of AI into real estate professionals’ day-to-day workflows: Fifth Dimension AI’s Ellie focuses on data security to alleviate concerns around privacy and the ingestion of proprietary documents and data. Ellie is highly trained and finely-tuned to the specific needs of the real estate industry and is poised to supercharge real estate professionals by increasing productivity by 30%.

Now, instead of spending hours combing through a plethora of reports from multiple sources, a team member on the research team can email Ellie with data inputs and questions for specific outputs. Within seconds, Ellie responds back with a summary, tweet, blog post or any other content medium all in the researcher’s firm’s tone of voice.

However, it’s not just real estate where Fifth Dimension AI will make an impact. Ellie is also fine-tuned for finance sectors; Ellie’s integration into email, focus on data security and optimization of data collation and report writing position also make Ellie well-suited for financial applications and finance teams. We’re incredibly excited by the opportunity to watch Fifth Dimension AI and Ellie shape and improve the way analysts work in real estate, finance and any other document-heavy adjacent industry dealing with large amounts of unstructured data.

Heading up Fifth Dimension AI are co-founders Dr. Kate Jarvis (CEO) and Johnny Morris (CPO). This stellar team brings to the table a wealth of experience and expertise across real estate, finance and technology. Dr. Kate Jarvis is a large language model wizard with a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. She’s spent the past 12 years designing Machine Learning-powered products and bringing them to market, in Chief Product and Technology Officer roles in varied sectors. Johnny has more than a decade of real estate experience which includes roles as Chief Operating Officer at Wayhome and Analytics Director at Countrywide.

While much has been written on the positives, the negatives and the unimaginable possibilities of AI, less has been written on the intricacies of what makes up a great early stage team in this space. There has been no shortage of AI businesses in the frenzy of this year, but as a pre-seed investor where team is critical, we knew we were looking for a team with a mixture of massive ambition while also combined with pragmatism; a team with the actual skills and backgrounds to build novel technology; a team that brought real world experiences of the painpoints themselves and in their network; and a team with a track record of early stage company building. Reading it on paper, it seems impossible. But in co-founders, Kate Jarvis and Johnny Morris, we found a team who remarkably checked all these boxes.

We’re thrilled to co-lead Fifth Dimension AI’s pre-seed round and help fund their mission to, in the words of Dr. Kate Jarvis, “redefine the world of work” and “empower knowledge workers to do their best work and lead happier, purposeful, and more fulfilled lives.”

About Anthemis’ Female Innovators Lab Fund:

Anthemis is a specialist asset manager that creates value from driving financial systems change by investing in businesses committed to resiliency, transparency, access, and equity. Launched in 2019, Anthemis’ Female Innovators Lab Fund invests in early-stage startups at the intersection of finance and technology across North America, UK and Europe. Female Innovators Lab’s (FIL) approach is modeled on Anthemis’ embedded finance investment thesis, targeting business models that deploy financial services within a diverse set of industries.

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Most people don’t exactly obsess over their insurance. Realistically, the only times customers actively engage with their insurance providers are when they purchase a policy, renew their policy, file a claim, or cancel their policy. Of these, filing a claim is a highly impactful moment for customer experience, as this is inherently the point in time where the customer comes to collect on the product they’ve been paying for.

Unfortunately though, insureds are often left frustrated, with 68% of complaints from insurance customers having to do with claims. This dissatisfaction can lead to churn for carriers, with Accenture estimating that poor claims experiences could put up to $170bn of global premiums at risk by 2027.

While large carriers may use in-house claims teams for certain lines of business, TPAs (Third-Party Administrators) play a huge role in processing and settling claims for self-insureds and smaller carriers, more complex lines, or in periods of high claims volume. In the US alone, TPAs brought in more than $230bn in revenue in 2022. These organizations tend to run on highly manual processes, deliver pretty poor customer service, and are widely disliked by the industry at large. TPAs have been known to be unresponsive to claimants, leave claims unfinished, incorrectly deny claims, mistakenly settle claims without the authorization of their carriers, and far more. A quick search for public reviews of the largest TPAs results in an impressive number of scathing comments and one star reviews.

Further, these companies often run on tech that was built in-house and while it remains semi-functional, doesn’t actually enable adjusters to be more efficient. The physical process of claims adjudication requires individual adjusters to gather documents to upload to their central claims system, compare claims to policy data to confirm coverage, engage with and manage claimants, create and run their own reports, etc. Today, all of this is done manually, creating a tedious process with the potential for significant human error.

This active disdain for the status quo, coupled with an opportunity to significantly improve upon the unit economics of a TPA, is why we are thrilled to be a part of Reserv’s Series A. Reserv is building a digitally native TPA for the P&C insurance market. Given that a significant amount of the claims adjudication process deals with the intake, summation, and analysis of unstructured data, Reserv has built out unique AI-enabled workflow automations to help maximize adjuster productivity. This includes claims summaries to bring adjusters up to speed, automated bordereau reports, data anomaly detection, automated document retrieval and upload, and much more.

We’ve been incredibly impressed with the Reserv team’s speed of execution thus far and feel very fortunate to support them on their journey. Despite only having launched in November of last year, customers have seen significant reductions in cycle times (1.6x-2.6x improvements), and margins for a tech-enabled service are already quite impressive. With some very exciting stuff in the pipeline, we can’t wait to see what comes next!

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It’s impossible to overstate the transformation of the conversation about climate change. Just to zoom in on venture capital: there were 47 other recorded climate technology transactions in 2007, when we made our first investment in the aptly-named Climate Corporation. And I didn’t even know that “grant” was a deal type in Pitchbook. Last year, climate technology was a $20 billion private markets vertical, 25% of all 2022 venture deals, and climate-focused venture firms now manage roughly $100 billion in funds. Within financial institutions, climate change has meanwhile shifted from a possible CSR focus area to a key risk management component and a thematic element of most if not all business lines.

In that same provocative Heatmap piece on “the end of climate science,” Meyer eventually arrives at a sensible but exciting conclusion. Science is never over, but “gradually, then suddenly, a field once defined by urgent questions and dire warnings has become practical and specialized.”

In this shift, we see a critical need for financial systems change and an enormous opportunity for Embedded Finance: we now know what needs to be done. We have the tools and technologies required to implement the transformation that the climate crisis demands. The missing piece in so many cases is finance — accessible, specialized, and responsive financial services that can empower transformation in large, often idiosyncratic industries.

Regenerative agriculture is a perfect encapsulation of this trajectory. Some regenerative practices like composting and crop rotation date back to the Romans, and others have been central to indigenous farming cultures for hundreds of years. In the past decade, regenerative agriculture has become vastly more salient in the popular and industry consciousness. Mass media has played an important role here — we think narrative tools are vastly underrated drivers of systems change — as has the internet’s democratization of technical knowledge. But the real tipping point was the scientific literature on the carbon sequestration capacity of healthy soil. Agricultural land is 38 percent of the land on earth and, in Europe alone, agriculture soils (in the top 20cm) store an estimated 11 GT of CO2. Healthy soil isn’t only a carbon sink either. It’s more biodiverse, more resistant to erosion, retains water better, and ultimately produces more nutrient-rich food.

Popular salience, accessible tools, a robust evidence base — we now know what needs to be done. That’s where Agreena, our latest portfolio company, comes into the picture. Everyone benefits when farms adopt regenerative agriculture practices, but that transition requires capital expenditure that most farmers simply cannot afford. Agreena fills in the gaps.

Agreena is backed and built by industry experts. Simon, Julie, and Ida, have created a soil-up, end-to-end infrastructure that supports every stage of a farm’s transition to regenerative practices. They provide cutting-edge tools for implementation and monitoring, and also empower farms to create a sustainable revenue stream from the environmental benefits they generate. Agreena embeds with farmers from recruiting and technical assistance through to soil analytics and, importantly, financing via carbon credit sales. Agreena manages the verification, certification, and issuance of high-quality carbon certificates and facilitates the certificate sales to corporations and other institutions seeking to offset or inset carbon emissions.

Since its founding in Copenhagen in 2018, Agreena has grown its presence to 16 European countries, with over 1.5 million acres under management. In 2022 alone, the company grew 10x and developed a robust multi-channel go-to-market, including via its partnerships with institutions such as IPSO Agriculture, Danish Agro, and Balam Agriculture.

The Agreena platform is generating more healthy soil, building more financially healthy farmers, and promoting more rigorous and transparent global carbon markets. We think this is just the first stage of the useful financial tools that they can deliver to strengthen farms and empower regenerative agriculture. Anthemis is honored to contribute to this important work.

We’ve always believed that finance has a pivotal role to play in mitigating climate change. It has never been easier to express that viewpoint practically and we’re excited to engage with entrepreneurs harnessing financial systems to arrest the degradation of the earth.

Our investment in Agreena’s €46m Series B alongside lead investment HV Capital, AENU, and others is another kind of milestone for Anthemis. In addition to continuing to grow our robust early-stage investment infrastructure, we have been developing our later-stage investment team, track record, and portfolio, with over $170m invested in later-stage companies to date. Agreena is the latest investment made by our Growth team, directly following our fall 2022 investment into Grover, a technology subscription company powering a new dimension of the circular economy.

We actually believe that there has never been a better time to invest in growth-stage financial services companies, and we look forward to sharing more of our views on the opportunity in growth markets over the next few months.

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Now almost 10 years later from that pumpkin pie, I am thrilled to be writing this blog to announce Anthemis’ Female Innovators Lab Fund investment into Flyby Robotics.

Flyby is building the first end-to-end automated drone delivery solution, unlocking the labor-saving potential of UAV technology for every merchant, delivering food and small pre-packaged goods to everyday consumers.

Flyby uses lightweight drones composed of off-the-shelf components with custom automation software that processes consumer orders. All flights are autonomous, but are monitored by FAA-certified commercial pilots. Flyby’s lightweight approach and integrated third-party ASTM F3322–18 certified parachutes enable Flyby drones to operate even in urban environments.

And for those ready to place an order, how does it work?

Customers download the Flyby app:

• A restaurant staffer loads the order onto the drone
• Flyby’s Citadel 2 autonomously plans a flight path to the user’s address using its integration with the restaurant’s native order management system
• A pilot from Flyby HQ presses a single button to execute Citadel 2’s flight path, and the drone takes off from the drone pad.
• The drone cruises to the customer’s location, arriving in under 3 minutes
• The drone descends to dropoff altitude, and Flyby’s winch system gently lowers the package to the customer
• he drone returns home and lands autonomously back on the drone pad.

The flyby hardware and software stack can also be seamlessly retrofitted to a wide variety of drone models, and their LTE-enabled tether delivery system can gently deliver 2.5 lbs up to 150 feet. Flyby is currently focused on delivering in areas with high population densities with houses and front yards, like Phoenix, where Flyby is now officially piloting deliveries.
The intersection of mobility and payments has opened up a world where people and goods can be efficiently moved from point A to point B at the click of a button. Payments infrastructure has underpinned a massive embedded finance opportunity across multiple sectors, including the $130bn global online food delivery market, which is expected to grow 14.5% annually between 2023 and 2030. Flyby provides faster fulfillment while reducing costs for merchants and consumers. With a growing need for more efficient, affordable, and eco-friendly delivery options, cities are looking for alternative mobility solutions. Consumers are increasingly expecting fast, seamless delivery of goods and services, and while retailers, restaurants, and grocers have invested in internal infrastructure, many still rely on third-party transportation networks for the very last mile, which results in high costs.

First live merchants include smoothies from Nekter Juice Bar, salad from MAD Greens, sushi from Tokyo Joe’s, and crunchy shiitake mushroom chips from Popadelics. During the live pilot, customers from participating retailers are able to order drone delivery for just three dollars and experience delivery times averaging under 4 minutes.

In the future, Flyby is looking to target densely built cities, which would benefit from reduced traffic and clean tech goals. As fintech and embedded finance investors, we know that climate change is impacting risk management for financial institutions not only in insurance underwriting, but also demonstrated in asset pricing, capital-intensive emission reduction, and revision to overall enterprise risk management frameworks.

Carnegie Mellon study found that drones can deliver small packages like food using 94% less energy and producing 84% lower carbon emissions than other vehicles (Aug 2022). Cornell study found that small electric quadcopter drones are up to 96% more energy-efficient than conventional last-mile delivery (Nov 2021). This RSG study on residential food delivery found that drones generated 26–28X lower carbon emissions than cars (March 2021). At Anthemis, we see solutions to reduce or mitigate climate change impact through mobility, food & agriculture, energy, urban planning, and supply chain & logistics as ways to tackle the upstream impact on financial institutions.

Finally, my favorite part of announcing investments — the team. Co-founders Jason Lu and Cat Orman launched the company out of their work at Yale, and have since recruited a stellar engineering team hailing from NASA, JPL, Google X and Anduril. At our every touchpoint, Jason and Cat have proven themselves not only to be visionaries, but true operators with laser-like focus as evidenced by their infrastructure, capital efficiency, speed and execution mindset. We’ve had the pleasure of witnessing their relentless focus over the past year and are beyond excited for Flyby’s launch and the journey ahead!

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