We’ve been busy since first launching 4Degrees back in July: Techstars, market validation, customer discovery, product design/engineering, and a surfeit of red pandas. It’s been an absolute blur.
While we still have a long way to go to realize our vision of bridging the network gap, we wanted to take a moment to step back and announce a couple of major milestones we’ve crossed in the past few months.
Our Pre-seed Round
We have closed $1M in pre-seed funding. Our investors include Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Portfolia, Techstars, R41 Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, and a group of angel investors. We’re thrilled with the collective caliber of our investor group and are humbled that they’ve placed their trust in us and our mission to improve how professionals build their relationships.
Our intent behind raising this venture round was to show there is demand for a technology solution to help professionals build stronger relationships and that the market is excited about our approach:
- Authenticity leads to stronger and more valuable relationships
- Proactive intelligence drives better relationship outcomes than individuals can achieve unassisted
- Ubiquity in existing workflows allows for greater adoption than an isolated solution
As another Chicago entrepreneur recently said: while champagne is all well and good, it’s time to start pouring the coffee. We’re excited about what this round means for us, but venture capital isn’t progress on its own. The faith of our investors makes us all the more determined to fundamentally change how technology can assist relationship development.
Our Team
We (that is, Ablorde and David) aren’t on our own anymore! We’ve been joined by Tatyana, Kathryne, Heather, and Darryl.
An accomplished entrepreneur in her own right, Tatyana (Technical Product Manager) is leading our cross-platform development efforts.
Kathryne (Front-End Engineer) implements the design vision and ensures that 4Degrees can be powerful for as diverse a user base as possible.
As a nationally-recognized designer, Heather (Lead UX Architect) is helping make our relationship-building tools practical and delightful for everyone
Darryl (Infrastructure Senior Advisor) helps us work securely and efficiently with large piles of data
There’s no way we could’ve achieved the astronomical progress we’ve seen over the last 6 months without this incredible team. We couldn’t ask for a better foundation for the 4Degrees culture 🙂
We’re always looking for talented, terrific people to join us! Reach out to us if you’re interested. Specifically, we’re looking for a back-end engineer who gets excited about wrangling data into actionable insights.
Our Product
Thanks to the tireless efforts of our team and the generosity of time and ideas from our early co-development partners, we’re excited to announce that we’ve launched our first commercial module!
This first module is special-tailored to the needs of the Venture Capital and Private Equity industries. While we continue to build out the intelligence and functionality of the core 4Degrees platform, the VC/PE module brings world-first capabilities to some of the world’s most relationship-reliant professionals.
Our first VC and PE customers are already on the platform building stronger relationships. If you work in the PE or VC industries, please reach out to learn more about what we can do for you.
The coming months will be focused on delivering as much value as possible in this initial market segment. We will also begin building out the Recruiting module, with plans to release it commercially around the summer. If you’re in the recruiting field and passionate about relationship management, we’d love to hear from you.
Recruiting
We wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of those who have been invaluable in our progress to-date. Logan, Sonia, Samara, Shay, Dylan, Marquis, the PGVC team, Peter, Yelena, Renuka, Christian, Dev, Binoy, Cody, Emily, Clayton, James, Matene, Ashu (and many, many more!) — we couldn’t have gotten this far without all of you.
