Andy and I created Founders Co-op to serve entrepreneurs throughout the Pacific Northwest — from Portland, OR through our home base of Seattle and across the border to Vancouver, BC.
We love our Portland-based portfolio companies Urban Airship and AppFog, but hadn’t really given Vancouver our full attention until this year, when I attended GrowConf at the urging of our friend and regular co-investor Boriz Wertz.
As I wrote then:
“From the beginning, we thought of Vancouver as ‘in bounds’ for our investment activity, but after three years and more than 25 investments we still haven’t placed a bet north of the border.”
Until today.
We’re delighted to announce our investment in Unbounce — a company I first got to know on that August trip (thanks to Ian Bell and Brent Holliday for making the introduction over post-conference beers).
Unbounce is a great example of the kind of company that grows up here in the rainy Northwest: quietly excellent, intensely customer-focused, solving a real business problem and unafraid to actually charge customers money for the value they deliver.
Unbounce helps enterprise marketing professionals execute quantitative market tests without IT support by making it drop-dead-simple to build, publish, manage and measure results from web-based landing pages. When I met them, they had already built a fantastic product and business with the help of a few local angel investors, but they saw a much larger opportunity that they could only address with additional capital and support.
We weren’t the only ones to notice what Rick and his team had built. Mark MacLeod of Montreal’s Real Ventures and Dave McClure of 500 Startups fame signed on early, and as the round came together several more excellent early stage investors joined the syndicate as well.
We’re incredibly excited to be a part of the new investor team supporting Unbounce. Not only do we get to play a small role in the company’s continued success, we also have a good excuse to spend even more time north of the border.
Congrats Rick + team — welcome to the Founders Co-op family!