Ah, April 1st — the first day of the new quarter. 2021 definitely kicked off with a bang, while the team at StandUp is starting to get used to (dare I say, enjoying?) this whole remote investing thing. It was a pretty busy start to the year!

Our family of exceptional women-led ventures has grown by 3 this quarter, with the addition of legal tech, a platform for the creator economy, and an innovation in polymer research to our portfolio.

We also took part in some exciting follow-on’s. Tealbook raised an 18M Series A led by RTP Global, to grow and cement their position as the global leader in procurement data. And MiMS raised an additional 5M in Seed financing to scale their innovative machine-learning-powered computational biology platform.

And if all that couldn’t possibly be any more exciting — Marie Chevrier, the incredible founder of Sampler, spent the the last 9 months building what we believe is the most difficult thing to build on earth — a human!

StandUp offers our congratulations to Marie and her growing family.

Alright, let’s dig a bit deeper into some of the action this quarter!

Arteria AI — Data-Driven Contracting that Brings Forward Revenue

Contracts lay at the foundation of every modern business relationship. They are especially important for financial institutions, as they are the key to monetizing clients and recognizing revenue — but they often involve a manual, time-consuming process, have long cycle times, and are riddled with errors and forgotten deadlines.

Arteria AI is an end-to-end contracting solution, reducing contract cycle time from 70 to 35 days, while intelligently utilizing data to improve position on a negotiation. What does this mean for a big bank customer? Less time to signature means clients are monetized more quickly, bringing revenue forward in a material way.

Arteria is the first legal technology to be added to StandUp’s portfolio, but we can’t overstate how excited we are about this investment. The team, led by Shelby Austin (previous Deloitte executive and AI leader), consists of an accomplished group of serial entrepreneurs with experience scaling and exiting businesses, as law firm partners, technical leaders, and as operational experts.

Arteria’s oversubscribed $13.7M Series A was co-led by Information Venture Partners and Illuminate Financial, with participation from StandUp and Golden Ventures.

Amacathera — Changing the Game for Post-Operative Pain Management

Effectively managing pain after surgery is a complex task. An example treatment plan often involves administrating a local anesthetic injection that provides 7–12 hours of pain relief, along with follow-on prescriptions for oral opioids to sustain pain relief over several days.

With treatment often being insufficient to eliminate pain, patients may need to stay longer at the hospital and/or return after being discharged, putting a large burden on healthcare systems.

But beyond the cost to hospitals, not managing post-operative pain optimally can be extremely costly to society. The opioid epidemic currently taking place in North America is largely attributable to non-necessary opioid prescription. There remains an extremely pressing need to find alternatives to opioids for post-operative pain management.

Enter, AMACA gel. This innovation in polymers was developed by Dr. Molly Shoichet, the most recent recipient of the prestigious Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science & Engineering, and is a product of research from Molly’s lab at The University of Toronto.

The gel acts as a delivery vessel for drugs, including post-operative analgesics. AMACA gel allows for localized and sustained drug delivery and release over days, potentially reducing/eliminating the need for opioid prescriptions, enabling faster discharge from the hospital, and reducing the risk of patients returning.

Although StandUp doesn’t typically play in the deep life sciences, AMACA gel is unique in that the materials have individually already been approved for use in humans, greatly accelerating the approval process. An existing competitor achieved over $400M in 2019 revenue, despite only being able to provide a fraction of the length of sustained pain relief. There is enormous opportunity for AMACA gel to disrupt the current disrupter on the market — further cementing our thesis behind this investment.

The 10.3M round was led by Lumira, a fund with a focus in therapeutics, with participation from Sprout Bio Ventures, Grey Sky, Inveready, MBX Capital, BDC Capital Women In Technology (WIT) Fund, MaRS IAF, and of course, StandUp.

Disco — Trailblazing the Future of Work for the Creator Economy

If it seems like suddenly everyone is becoming a creator, you’re sort of right. The ‘creator economy’ is growing rapidly, and with this comes a blossoming opportunity to build technology for the unique nature of creators’ work.

Creators work intimately within their often niche communities, spending much of their time and energy actively engaging with and nurturing them. To a creator entrepreneur, community is truly everything. But existing platforms don’t afford them the kind of ownership they crave over their audiences, and ultimately livelihoods, leaving many of them frustrated and feeling as if they are working for someone else.

Because of this, we see a growing number of creators building digital learning experiences to more effectively and consistently monetize and engage their audiences. Current tools just don’t do the job. Most creators have to juggle many platforms and tools in order to build and sell just one simple course.

As a “business-in-a-box” for creators, Disco was built on the insight that learning experiences by creators must reflect the authenticity and sociability that enabled their communities to grow and thrive in the first place. With a growing world of creators, and a greater proportion of them turning to course creation, we see Disco as the next critical tool for the future of creators’ work.

With the experienced entrepreneurs Candice Faktor (previously WattPad) and Chris Suknoryk (founder of Chango), Disco has a first-class team, and is building a category-defining rocketship.

We were excited to be part of Disco’s 6M over-subscribed Seed round led by Quiet Capital, with some partners including Golden Ventures, Inovia, and GSV (investors in Masterclass, Coursera).

That’s it for now! We already have some exciting stuff in the works for Q2.

See you then.