It’s been a busy and exciting year for Alberts Impact Ventures in 2022. We have added six new start-ups into our portfolio, bringing our total to 15 companies. They are Abby Health, Throughline, Baymatob, Conserving Beauty, RapidAIM and Verve Super, with two more very near closing. In addition, we participated in five follow-on investments (Muso, Like Family, Amber, Tixel, ULUU).
Alberts is proud to have added the two equality themed companies into the Alberts Impact Ventures portfolio. Baymatob was founded by Sarah McDonald – Sydney medical PhD, engineer and mother of four who has dedicated the past nine years of her life to developing Oli, a game-changing world-first wearable medical device tackling the leading cause of preventable maternal death, postpartum haemorrhage (PPH). Alberts Impact Ventures was a founding investor in Baymatob, believing the positive values it embodies – from a mental health, equality and diversity point of view – align perfectly with ours. From one founder, Sarah, Baymatob has quickly expanded into a team of 22 female-dominated, diverse, talented and passionate individuals collectively driven to radically reduce the shamefully high rate of PPH, with plenty more trailblazing maternal and foetal health outcomes to come, all through one device. In November, Sarah McDonald, was named one of 2022’s 20 Fiercest Women in Life Sciences.
Verve Super is our other new equality themed company, a super fund and investment app that aims to lead the movement of women building financial power while investing in a more equitable and sustainable future. Verve is designed to help close the gap between women’s and men’s superannuation through financial education, advocacy, community, and empowerment.
RapidAIM is reimagining agriculture. Current practices of mass broad spectrum insecticide spraying are unsustainable and have damaged the biodiversity and soil quality, having a lasting impact on our environment. RapidAIM creates an insect forecast using AI to detect the “dance” and shape of different bugs so that precision agriculture (spraying specific insecticides when needed) can be adopted at scale. Alberts Head of Strategy Glenn Bartlett has been working closely with RapidAIM to accelerate their go-to-market and help bring forward their impact.
Alberts led the seed round in Abby Health, impressed with the tenacity and energy of the founder, Charlie Veitch. Abby is developing a working NLP (natural language processing) app that enables cancer patients to journal their symptoms to enable doctors to give them the best treatment possible. This prevents against symptoms and side-effects being missed in follow-up consults and can transform the way chronic conditions are treated.
Here is Abby Health celebrating a well-earned break after a very big year with the Alberts Impact Ventures team.
Executive directors Kirsty and Emily Albert visited the ULUU site in Perth earlier this year. ULUU’s mission is to replace the world’s plastic with a unique ocean material derived from seaweed. The company recently completed its seed raise which Alberts Impact Ventures was part of, alongside other well-known individuals Tame Impala and Karlie Kloss and investors Main Sequence and others. We invested early with ULUU last year, impressed by their founders and mission.
This year Alberts has co-hosted various events that aim to shift the dial on specific problems in the equality space. The first was the Positive Pregnancy panel in September, a collaboration with PWC and Scale investors (a female focused angel investing network) and was a call to action for funders to be more supportive of founders planning parenthood, a necessary conversation to level the playing field. The event brought together a dynamic panel of founders, funders and changemakers, with Alberts investment manager Lisa Fedorenko hosting the event and panel speakers including founder Jenna Leo from our portfolio company Like Family (offering the pregnant founder perspective), founder Dan Adams from Amber (offering the male perspective) and Elicia McDonald from Airtree (offering the funder and mother perspective). The event was well received and continues to be referenced in the venture community.
A women in sport workshop was held in October with two objectives – to identify the challenges to achieving equality for women’s sport and women in sport; and identify opportunities for private investment to accelerate the women’s sport equality agenda. Around 20 participants attended including athletes, funders and members of the sports media .
Lisa Fedorenko participated in the Climate Salad trade mission in San Francisco using the time to attend the Verge Climate conference as well as the R42 longevity conference. This expanded our knowledge of two key impact themes and also provided valuable connections to other funds in the US.
And last of all, we are thrilled that Lisa Fedorenko was nominated by the community as one of the best climate tech investors – those who go above and beyond just investing capital to take the time to grow and nurture the climate tech community. This is a great acknowledgement of our leadership in the venture capital space, and importantly, the impact investing space.
