Join us! Sip and learn with Vinebase & The SMB Syndicate
+ team news, industry news and more!
👋🏾 Welcome Back!
Happy New Year to all of our amazing subscribers! We’re so excited to welcome you back to the SMB Syndicate for 2022. To kick things off we’re pumped to share more about our first event featuring Rachel Woods, founder of Vinebase. Register here!
📜 What's New With the Crew?
Congrats Tessa on reaching her first close for Capitalize VC! She’s now looking to make the fund’s first investments with a focus on SMB in fintech, adtech, future of work and CPG. If you know of any amazing Black or Latinx founders please send them her way by filling out the Capitalize VC company submission form.
Sydney spoke at the Carta Equity Summit where she touched on trends in Fintech. Many of which overlap with SMB tech trends.
Congrats to Jen and the whole Bonfire VC team on the announcement of their portfolio company, Figment, reaching unicorn status!
📰 SMB News Roundup
The U.S. government is launching the State Small Business Credit Initiative, which will allocate $10B to boost small businesses
Fundbox, a fintech company offering loans and financial products to SMBs, reached unicorn status after a successful $100M Series D fundraise
Novo, the Miami-based neobank for small businesses, just announced its $90M Series B. This puts the company at a $700M valuation.
Headless commerce platform Swell, which better enables customization and growth for small and mid-market e-commerce companies, secured $20M in their recently announced Series A funding
Boulevard, the client experience platform powering the next generation of salons and spas, marked its best year ever in 2021 after seeing 188% revenue growth
✍🏾Deep Diligence
Introducing our next event in February (by Sydney)
I have learned so much by being an investor in Vinebase. I’ve been introduced to some new wineries that I adore (I just signed up for Cruess’ wine club because of Vinebase actually!) and have learned a lot from Rachel on what it means to be a true end-to-end platform for SMBs. I’m excited to share some of these learnings with the SMB Syndicate by featuring her at our next event: “How to Beat Shopify at it’s Own Game: How verticalized end-to-end experiences can give you an edge with SMBs”.
At our event, I am excited to have Rachel focus on the key ingredient at Vinebase: creating an end-to-end service for the wine owners. That edge has given Vinebase an incredible advantage over players like Shopify. When you have a deep relationship with a specific vertical of customers (like Vinebase does with wine owners), you are able to create meaningful value for them. Instead of trying to build everything for everyone, you can focus and build specific value that can’t be replicated.
Now, I didn’t say this was easy. After chatting with Rachel in preparation for this event, I am even more convinced that this takes time, dedication, and commitment to SMB owners. This is why I am even more grateful to have her at the event so we can all learn from her about what that looks like in practice.
REGISTER HERE.
We hope to see you there!
Sydney, Jen & Tessa