Similarly, he says that Expa helped the digital freight network Convoy (now valued in the billions of dollars) at its most nascent stages, even buying a company for Convoy founder Dan Lewis, and giving him the domain name as a loan. We didn’t start the company ourselves but we were a partner.” But she was starting from day one, so we helped her a little bit in getting the branding and with products and fundraising advice. “We met over dinner through friends, and we hit it off, and I knew she’d be successful. Mos founder Amira Yahyaoui “had the idea,” Camp says, but not much else.
#Metabase 30m series partners series#
One example is Mos, a Series B-stage startup that serves as as kind of financial aid advisor for students. While it invests in its own ideas - Mix.com is an example, as is a Aero, a luxury jet business that Camp sees as a huge opportunity - it also prides itself on working closely with founders with ideas it likes and wants to help along.
It’s easy to imagine a lot of demand should Expa move in that direction. Indeed, while Expa doesn’t take pension fund money or count any universities as limited partners, that could change down the road, says Camp. It could grow from here, given Camp’s personal resources - not to mention his track record. Its newest partner is Yuri Namikawa, who joined the firm as a principal from Norwest Venture Partners. Its sole managing partner is Roberto Sanabria, who oversees the company’s day-to-day operations and first worked for Camp back at StumbleUpon, after logging a handful of years at Google. (Beacon raised $50 million in Series B funding last fall.Another recent Europe-based Expa deal is Wingcopter, an autonomous drone delivery company.)Īltogether, in addition to Camp, Expa is now run by five partners. Shriram, who wrote one of the first checks to Google and remains on the board of Alphabet, is among them.Įxpa - which already had offices in San Francisco, L.A., and New York – also just opened an office in London headed up by David Clark, who headed up external affairs at Uber for two years and more recently worked for the Expa-backed company Beacon, a London-based digital supply chain and freight platform founded by two other former Uber execs. The rest is coming from multifamily offices like Iconiq and Epiq, individual family offices, and wealth investor friends. For starters, while it originally launched with $50 million to invest, then put together another $100 million in 2016, it is today taking the wraps off a new $200 million fund, more than half of which is Camp’s own capital. Several startups with ties to Expa have also been acquired, including Cmd ( to Elastic), Kit (to Ro), and Reserve ( to Resy, which was itself acquired by Amex).
Thankfully for him, he has a venture studio to turn those ideas a reality - one that seems to be ticking along quite nicely.Įxpa, established in 2013, has already worked with founders to launch companies like the challenger banking service Current (valued last year at $2.2 billion) a back-office platform for the self-employed called Collective (it closed a $20 million Series A round last year) and an open-source business intelligence tool called Metabase (it raised $30 million in Series B funding last year). Saying he recently realized he had “like, 3,500 notes” relating to company building in his iCloud account, he adds that “10% of those are ideas for new things - not all of them - but a solid 10” that could. He can’t help himself, he suggests in a Zoom chat. Nearly all the while, Camp, a Calgary native who now lives primarily in Los Angeles, has churned out fresh company ideas. Around that same time, in 2009, Camp formed the idea for an on-demand car service that famously became Uber and which made Camp, who still owned 4% of it when Uber went public in 2019, a multibillionaire.
Within two years, Camp had bought back StumbleUpon with a syndicate of investors (he later folded the outfit into a newer discovery app called Mix). Seed funded with $1.5 million by storied angel Ram Shriram among others, StumbleUpon would go on to be acquired several months later by eBay for $75 million. When I first met Garrett Camp in March 2007 on a reporting assignment, it was at the San Francisco-based offices of StumbleUpon, a web-discovery tool that had registered more than 2 million users and drawn attention to Camp, the startup’s twenty-something-year-old founder.
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