Blog

By Brent MacDonald – Principal at Rising Tide Twelve, formerly Opus 12, headquartered in Berkeley, California, has developed a device that recycles carbon dioxide (CO2) into cost-competitive chemicals and fuels. The company’s technology bolts onto any source of CO2 emissions, and with only water and electricity as inputs, transforms that CO2 into some of the world’s […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal at Rising Tide Medical imaging for all — it’s a clarion call for change that grows louder every day. It comes from patients seeking greater access to imaging that will help them live healthier lives. It comes from families seeking answers as to why their children are sick. It comes […]

*|MC:SUBJECT|* *|MC_PREVIEW_TEXT|* Dear Esteemed Partners and Friends, It’s been a wonderful quarter – as innovative, exciting, and progressive as one would hope. Brilliant entrepreneurs we seed-financed in the last four years are leading 70+ companies in promising, innovative verticals including Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Deep Technology, and Healthcare. The overwhelming majority are on a fast track, […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Quanergy Systems’ mission is to create intelligent, efficient, and affordable LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) solutions for automotive and IoT applications to enhance people’s experience and safety. The company has developed the only 100% solid CMOS LiDAR sensor, built over the past number of years using […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Precision NanoSystems (PNI) is a global leader in technologies and solutions for the development of genetic medicines, including mRNA vaccines and therapeutics. Danaher Corporation is best known for producing technology to develop and manufacture genetics medicines that deliver RNA or DNA directly into cells to treat […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide Eridan Communications is developing a next-generation software-defined radio amplifier technology. The Company’s transmitter technology enables industry leading single radio capabilities and allows for multiple radios to work in combination to extend bandwidth or power. By combining advanced gallium nitride devices, radical amplifier circuit design, and novel system […]

Tribal Credit Notches $34.3 Million Series A for Expansion into Mexico By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide   The startup economy is booming in emerging markets but the banking infrastructure that should support it is broken. A huge gap exists between the financial services offered and what startups really need. Approximately 200 million […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Molecular Assemblies announced that it closed an oversubscribed $24 million Series A financing. Proceeds of the financing will be used to advance the company’s proprietary enzymatic DNA synthesis technology toward early commercialization efforts. Molecular Assemblies also announced the company’s participation in a new project with a multidisciplinary […]

The company behind the NBA’s NFT trading cards raises over $300 million in its latest round By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Dapper Labs, the blockchain company behind the NBA’s collectibles marketplace ‘Top Shot’, closed a major round of funding toward its goal: NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) for all. The company announced this […]

Rising Tide Newsletter Welcome to the Rising Tide 1st Quarter 2021 Newsletter that highlights updates from our 70+ companies whose stories will inspire you. We hope you’ll enjoy and as always, send us your suggestions info@rtf.vc We look forward to your feedback and everlasting cooperation. CEO SPOTLIGHT Andrew Butt, the Co-founder & CEO of Enable, a […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC As biology pervades many aspects of life, advanced automation tools are in demand. Volta Labs is an MIT Media Lab spin-off company that makes programmable fluidic chips for biological automation. To build this next generation automation tool, the Volta Labs team combines principles of computing with material […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Unnatural Products mission is solving the problem of ‘undruggable’ proteins—the roughly 80% to 90% of proteins in the body that have eluded drug makers. Some proteins are inaccessible because they lack a binding “pocket” where drugs can dock. What is more, traditional drug development approaches are […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal at Rising Tide VC Precision Nanosystems Inc’s (PNI) mission is to accelerate the creation of transformative medicine that significantly impacts human well being. The Company creates end-to-end solutions that empower researchers to harness powerful nanotechnology to transform our understanding and treatment of rare diseases, cancer, and infectious diseases. Leading academic institutions, […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Despite cheap, abundant genetics tools and information, many aspects of healthcare research remain constrained and complex. For example, while the cost of DNA sequencing has declined dramatically, innovations in personalized medicine, drug research, and early-stage pharmaceutical discovery and development have not kept up due to constraints […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC George Church, Ph.D., renowned professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School, recently declared for decades, bacteria have been used as the workhorses of the biotech industry in the production of blockbuster therapeutics, and we can dramatically expand their utility by recoding their genomes.[1] Protein therapeutics are often […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Ayar Labs was founded in 2015 and based on 10-years of research and collaboration between MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Colorado Boulder, and funding from DARPA. The Company’s patented approach uses industry standard silicon processing techniques to develop high speed, high density, low power […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Millions of people worldwide are visually impaired due to cataracts – loss of vision due to lens clouding. The two current treatment options, the standard intraocular lens (IOL) and multi-focal IOL, force patients to choose between focusing ability and clear vision. Current treatment options have limitations […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Molecular Assemblies began more than 30 years ago when Bill Efcavitch and Curt Becker, then early founders at the pioneering biotech company Applied Biosystems, commercialized the first practical method of synthesizing DNA. Known as phosphoramidite synthesis[1], this chemical-based method was a significant breakthrough and remains the […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Enable was born out of DCS Group, the largest distributor of health, beauty, and household products in the UK. DCS wanted a smart, efficient way to manage its many complex trading agreements with suppliers and customers. But it could not find a single solution that met […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Medical imaging for all — it’s a clarion call for change that grows louder every day. It comes from patients seeking greater access to imaging that will help them live healthier lives. It comes from families seeking answers as to why their children are sick. It comes from […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Precision Nanosystems Inc’s (PNI) mission is to accelerate the creation of transformative medicine that significantly impacts human well being. The Company creates end-to-end solutions that empower researchers to harness powerful nanotechnology to transform our understanding and treatment of rare diseases, cancer, and infectious diseases. Leading academic institutions, pharmaceutical […]

Small Satellite Startup Raises $40 Million in Equity Financing and A Debt Facility Up to $50 Million By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Four billion people still have no reliable broadband Internet access. Astranis is here to change that. Today, global bandwidth demand continues to grow, spurring terrestrial and submarine cable network operators to […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC At Evonetix they are reimagining biology by developing a radically different approach to gene synthesis – a highly parallel desktop platform to synthesize DNA at unprecedented accuracy, scale and speed. The company’s platform will place DNA synthesis, the biological process by which a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Aspect Biosystems is a Vancouver-based biotechnology platform company that pioneered a platform using microfluidics and 3D bioprinting to create living, human tissues with control, flexibility, and precision. The Company’s proprietary technology has the potential to shape every aspect of human health by enabling the creation of human tissues […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC A surgeon’s decision-making abilities during a procedure are indubitably seconded by none. However, certain steps in any surgery–even in standard surgical procedures–require surgeons to make decisions based on not only what they can see, but what they cannot see as well. Regularly, surgeons are forced to make […]

By Brent MacDonald – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Senso.ai is an “Analytics-as-a-Service” platform that can deliver high-confidence predictive notifications to financial institutions to service, price and obtain consumer loans, and to adapt to market conditions with no technical barrier. Its cloud-based infrastructure generates predictive insights about consumer portfolios which continuously improves over time. The Company’s […]

I read this NYT Piece this week and it got me thinking that the world of fintech and financial inclusion are definitely something which is coming of age. Just to address the piece, though – I think the author has chosen a few choice examples to contradict accepted wisdom, though it doesn’t (to me) really […]

Disintermediation – in all industries – is moving forward at breakneck speeds. Take my own industry – finance – and you don’t have to look far. We’re moving away from active traded funds, away from stock trading, away from brokers, away, away, away. There are already a plethora of startups working on tackling issues like […]

We’ve spent this entire week in Mexico meeting with major family offices, and seeing as I started last year’s blog post series with a post on LatAm and the Emerging Markets it seemed fitting to revisit that theme this time around. There’s a lot going on in the region. Technology holds the promise to uplift […]

The headlines have been blowing up with venture capitalist’s ominous warnings about the need for profitability. It’s a little bit ironic to me, since after all the point of a business is to make money. Nobody invests in a business for it to forever lose money. According to financial theory – all investment is predicated […]

I recently read The Lean Startup, which is a crucial read for anyone interested in building or investing in early-stage companies (in my opinion). If you haven’t read it, read it. At the core of the book is this concept of building lean, testing quickly (A/B testing all solutions), not batching updates but rolling them […]

Here at Rising Tide we are launching a new “Interviews” series, which may eventually make their way to a Podcast format. The basic idea is this; we want to produce interesting research and thought commentary for the community, and we also want to empower and highlight amazing founders. Be it portfolio companies or not, there […]

By Arie van Gemeren , CFA – Principal @ Rising Tide VC As a former public equities guy, I have always found the focus by most venture capitalists on valuation (especially early, early stage companies) puzzling. What does it matter if you invest @ a $10 million post money valuation, or even a $20 million post? After […]

By Arie van Gemeren , CFA – Principal @ Rising Tide VC Why lead this article off with a picture of the great Julius Caesar (or feel free to sub any historical figure of import or infamy – Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Augustus Caesar, and many others)? It is because humanity (and by conjunction […]

By Arie van Gemeren , CFA – Principal @ Rising Tide VC As a former public-stock market “guy”, it’s been interesting to make the transition to venture capital and observe connections between what happens with the “big boy/girl” stocks and the early-stage world. After all, what happens with interest rates and real estate and EXXON […]

By Arie van Gemeren , CFA – Principal @ Rising Tide VC In November 1790 the great English Statesman Edmund Burke published a pamphlet entitled “Reflections on the Revolution in France”. Known to this day for such quotes as “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”, Edmund […]

By Arie van Gemeren I’ve been really intrigued by this notion of “Open Banking” over the last few weeks. Everybody is getting in on the discussion. The Economist ran a great series on “Tech’s Raid on the Banks” which I thoroughly enjoyed, and went into detail on Asia and the UK – two markets where barriers […]

By Arie van Gemeren The world of venture capital is dominated by the likes of John Doerr, Tom Perkins, Bruce Dunlevie, and other great names who built the world in which we live now. If you read any of their memoirs – I had the pleasure of finishing Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins […]

By Arie van Gemeren We just returned from a week-long trip to Mexico City to celebrate and attend the Google Launchpad opening week, and what an amazing week it was. We’ve been spending a lot of time in Mexico (Ciudad de Mexico, or CDMX, to locals). A core question we heard again and again on […]

    Automobiles are Becoming Increasingly Intelligent By 2019, one in five cars on the road will be self-aware and able to discern and share information on their mechanical health, global position, and status of their surroundings. (Gartner) The rollout of 4G LTE, and subsequently 5G networks, will further increase the capabilities of the connected […]

    Empowering Machines to Understand the World Through Their Own Experience Cogitai is dedicated to building the brains, i.e., the continual-learning AI software, that will let everyday things that sense and act get smarter with experience Established in 2015, the Cogitai team which includes 16 Ph.D’s, has designed and built a robust general-purpose platform […]

  Welcoming Activ Surgical to the Rising Tide Portfolio! Surgical robots are entering the operating theatre The sub-group of surgical robotics is the fastest growing area of robotic and automation adoption in the healthcare industry. The top three areas of healthcare currently being impacted the most are laboratory automation, pharmaceuticals and surgery. Robots have been […]

    THE OCEAN – Fast and secure Ethereum and ERC20 token trading Envisions a world where financial assets can be traded and transferred with minimal cost, risk, and time, leveraging blockchain technology. They offer a regulated decentralized exchange (DEX) that aims to serve the institutional crypto trading market and can also be used by […]

  Welcoming Bioelectronica to the Rising Tide Portfolio! Digitalizing drug discovery and diagnostics Bioelectronica is a research-stage biotechnology company building intelligent, digital tools for drug discovery, diagnostics and cell sorting Bioelectronica is a seasoned team of world-class technical talent in the areas of systems engineering, cell biology, and wet-chemistry, with a long history of working together […]