It has been a few weeks since publishing this ranking, as I have switched from a weekly to a monthly cadence. I love creating these and want to ensure that I am only highlighting the highest quality and most interesting five companies that recently announced a Seed round.
For those who are new to my Seeds to Track update, here’s a little background. At Headline, we use a proprietary technology called Searchlight to scan millions of websites and identify high-growth companies to meet and potentially invest in. Each month, I keep close tabs on Seed company investments from across the ecosystem and cross-reference them with the data we have in Searchlight. In this series, I’ll bring you the highest-growth Seed companies based on data from Searchlight.
After scanning through the most recent 900 Seed announcements from February, here is this month’s list of the top five “Seeds to Track” below.
Dreamscape's homepage
Headline's Searchlight Growth Index for Dreamscape
Product:
Ed-tech game publisher of literacy reading games for grades 3 to 8
Lead Investor:
BDC Ventures
Total Funding:
$3M+
Comparables:
Boddle Learning
Our Thoughts:
We all understand how important education is, and I am incredibly bullish that ed-tech games can make learning as engaging for kids as Fortnite. With 5M+ users and their web-traffic exploding, it looks like Dreamscape is well on their way to doing this.
Quipli's homepage
Headline's Searchlight Growth Index for Quipli
Product:
SaaS solution for industrial asset owners to manage their equipment rentals, repairs, and maintenance
Lead Investor:
Boundless Ventures
Total Funding:
$4M
Comparables:
Rentle.io, EZRentOut, Booqable
Our Thoughts:
There is so much industrial asset value that is still leveraged via pen and paper. Quipli could create a wedge here to manage these assets in a more streamlined manner and, once at scale, aggregate the inventory to build out a rental marketplace for this industrial equipment, creating an even larger market opportunity with network effects.
Descope's homepage
Searchlight Growth Index:
No external sources showing growth
Product:
Developer-friendly passwordless authentication and user management solution
Lead Investor:
Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital
Total Funding:
$53M
Comparables:
Auth0, Okta
Our Thoughts:
Started by the founding team of the enterprise security platform Demisto, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $560M in 2019. The market opportunity is massive, with plenty of large incumbents, but the team has the experience and capital to make it happen.
Wally's homepage
Headline's Searchlight Growth Index for Wally
Product:
NYC-based, all-you-can-eat dental cleaning plan starting at $199 per year
Lead Investor:
Bling Capital
Total Funding:
$17M
Comparables:
Smile Direct Club
Our Thoughts:
If you are a young, affluent New Yorker who cares about your smile, this is a no-brainer offer to subscribe to. I wonder how the unit economics work out here. I imagine Wally is able to drive customer acquisition and strong repeat behavior for dental offices, which allows them to charge better prices, especially if Wally customers just book vacant slots in the practitioner's calendar.
Thatch's homepage
Searchlight Growth Index:
No external sources showing growth
Product:
Fintech solution that sits on top of an employee's existing healthcare solution and provides a debit card for healthcare expenses, a digital interface for their health saving account, and a text-based interface to upload/validate healthcare receipts
Lead Investor:
Google Ventures, Andressen Horowitz
Total Funding:
$6M
Comparables:
Trinet, Rippling
Our Thoughts:
Thatch looks to provide quite a magical end-user experience that should be eaten up by any tech-forward HR team. I wonder about the platform dependencies for Thatch and if there is a way for them to build a symbiotic relationship with the benefits providers instead of competing with them.