Syndicate Spotlight → Engineering Leaders Community Angels

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In the trailing 4 weeks, Deal Sheet subscribers received 15 startup investment opportunities. Below are the 5 deals that went out via Deal Sheet last Monday (new deals coming tomorrow!):

  • Deal #1 → Series A company building the Plaid for point of sale (POS) transactions

  • Deal #2 → Pre-IPO revolutionary cybersecurity and data management company achieving more than $1.5B in Revenues and backed by Lightspeed, Greylock, Khosla, Bain Capital and others

  • Deal #3 → A Unicorn Beverage company that achieved $263m in revenues last year (special 0% carry for subscribers for this deal)

  • Deal #4 → Enterprise technology company building the AWS for Restaurants backed by a confidential top tier fund

  • Deal ex. #5 → A luxury Gin company co-founded by a major Celebrity with 75M followers across social

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Welcome to our First Last Money In Syndicate Spotlight! 

LMI will be featuring unique syndicates that are also Deal Sheet partners where they will be sharing some of their best deals with our Deal Sheet subscribers. 

Our first Syndicate Spotlight → Engineering Leaders Community Angels, led by Roger Luo & Jerry Li.

Syndicate Name:

Engineering Leaders Community Angels

Syndicate General Partners

GP Backgrounds: 

Roger Luo is an operator turned investor. He co-founded two AI SaaS startups – one exit to AWS and the other raised $14M from top tier VCs. Roger has led machine learning and data science teams at prominent tech companies like Niantic, Snap, and Yahoo! Research. Holding a PhD in Machine Learning, he has published over 40 AI/ML papers in leading conferences and journals and holds 6 U.S. patents in AI. As an active angel investor and venture scout/partner, Roger has invested in over 40+ startups since 2017, three portfolio companies at pre-seed/seed stage became unicorns: Near Protocol, Plus.ai, and WeRide.ai. Previously, Roger served as a Venture Partner at China Growth Capital between 2016 and 2019, and as a scout for Sequoia Capital China between 2022 and 2023.  

Jerry Li is the Co-founder & CEO of Gradual, a next-gen community platform that helps enterprises bring all their community activity - events, intros, blogs, videos, forums and more under one roof. Prior to Gradual, Jerry founded ELC, a community dedicated to engineering leaders (CTO, VP of Engineering, Directors, etc), and scaled it to over 10,000 members globally. Fun fact - Gradual was initially created as an internal tool to support the ELC community. Prior to ELC, Jerry was the Director of Engineering at Groupon, responsible for its global payment infrastructure.

Syndicate Overview:

Engineering Leaders Community Angels is an inclusive community of engineering leaders investing in early-stage technology startups founded by engineering and product leaders. The group is managed by a group of Engineering Leaders Community (ELC) members who are also experienced angel investors and operators. We focus on investing in engineering-driven startups with disruptive market opportunities, solid traction, technology advantage, and making a positive impact on society, whether they are in enterprise, consumer, or deep tech. ELC is a curated community for engineering leaders in Silicon Valley, with close to 10,000 leaders (from CTO/VP to frontline managers) from over 3,000+ companies. ELC's mission is to empower engineering leaders and help evolve the way leadership is implemented in the tech industry.

Investment Focus:

DevTools, AI, SaaS

Deal Stage:

Seed - Series A

Example Portfolio Companies:

Last Money In readers…

Keep your eye out for more deals to come from Roger & Jerry’s Engineering Leaders Community Angels!

"How Emerging Managers Can Maximize Returns by Harnessing SPVs" — Upcoming Sydecar Event:

Excited to share an upcoming webinar hosted by @Sydecar: "How Emerging Managers Can Maximize Returns by Harnessing SPVs" on March 27th, 11AM PT/2P ET. Cindy Bi of CapitalX and Chris Shen of Revere will share their thoughts and best practices for SPVs in today’s market, including considerations for warehousing, co-investment, and pro rata opportunities. Perfect for emerging managers looking to operate with agility in a tricky market. Register your spot: https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:7171636111130120193

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✍️ Written by Zachary and Alex