Betaworks is a start-up platform founded in New York. We build, run accelerators, make investments and we recently opened a new Club for Builders in New York.
A decade of sustained building.
In 2016 we ran our first Camp - thematic accelerators for startups. Camp allows us to focus and batch companies building in frontier technologies like Bots, AI, Verbal Computing and Augmented Reality.
For the last ten years we have invested in early stage start-ups related to areas we are building in. Previous investments include: Tumblr, Kickstarter, Medium and Gimlet. We continue to do so through our $50m fund.
We have built products for the social web since 2007. Recent successes include GIPHY; the search engine for gifs, Dots; the beautiful mobile gaming franchise and Poncho; the popular weatherbot.
Some of our earlier products included Bitly, Chartbeat, and Tweetdeck, which was sold to Twitter. In 2012 we also acquired and relaunched Digg and Instapaper, which was sold to Pinterest in 2016.
Our current focus is in conversational interfaces; in other words, bots, verbal computing and Augmented Reality. In the summer of 2016 we launched and raised money for Dexter, an elegant platform for building bots for brands and services. In 2017 Poncho the weatherbot was a winning app on Apple's Planet of the Apps, securing over $2m in funding.
We make seed and early stage investments in great people and companies at the intersection of media and technology. We look for companies that fit our thesis and will make our network stronger.
Typically our seed investments are $250k and we are among the first to invest. For example, we were one of the earliest investors in Tumblr, Kickstarter, and Tweetdeck. More recent investments include Product Hunt, Gimlet Media, Shine and Remote Year. We have made a number of investments in the Bot, Chat and Voice s space through our first accelerator camps: Botcamp and Voicecamp.
As the name betaworks suggests, we like betas. If you have something great we'd love to speak with you. Contact the ventures team here.
Camp combines betaworks' building and investing experience into thematic accelerator programs for startups in frontier technology. Camp themes reflect the areas on which we are most focused and evolve along with our investment theses.
Each camp consists of 11 weeks in-residence at betaworks to help early stage companies with product development, platform strategy, data science, branding, and fundraising. Entrepreneurs have access to betaworks teams and to a carefully curated group of industry leaders to assist with both general company-building needs and with topics specific to each theme. Each camp company receives pre-seed funding of $200k.
We are currently running Vision Camp, focusing on mixed reality, computer vision, and camera first applications and services - everything that becomes possible when the camera knows what it's viewing.