One Way Ventures: Year 2024 in Review

Q4-24 and FY-24 investment note

Dear Friends of One Way,

As we reflect on 2024, the economic landscape is showing signs of renewed energy, driven by improving macroeconomic conditions and developments across key areas like venture capital investments, IPOs, and M&A activity.

2024 marked the best year for U.S. initial public offering (IPO) activity since 2021. With over $41 billion raised, according to Dealogic, the IPO market has outperformed the prior two years ($24 billion in 2023 and $22 billion in 2022). Still far from the $317 billion peak in 2021, the numbers indicate a rebound trend and improving equity market conditions.

In early-stage VC, funding remains strong, with a focus on sectors like AI, climate tech, and healthcare. As we look ahead, we continue to be bullish on the application of AI across consumer and business use cases, increasing commercialization of the autonomy stack, and regulatory tailwinds for fintech.

We expect to see foundation models move towards commoditization (e.g. Chinese models are 10x cheaper and 90% as good ), and this is driving insight behind our Fund II investments in Nim (see video above), which is democratizing the latest open source video models, and Locaal (putting AI models on edge devices at scale). With Nvidia stock movement driven by the latest news on Deepseek R1, we feel fairly bullish on how we've positioned One Way’s portfolio and expect a year of increasing momentum for our companies and funds.

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New Investments in Q4

Locaal.ai | AI

Locaal.ai is revolutionizing AI by bringing it on-device – so offline, private and with no cloud latency. This enables companies to slash cloud costs while ensuring privacy and reliability.

The platform provides ready-to-deploy AI models and empowers businesses to optimize their own for seamless performance across devices, networks, and hardware configurations. Trusted by industry leaders like Amazon, Corsair, and others, their platform is already helping companies save millions on cloud AI expenses.

Locaal.ai was Founded by Roy Shilkrot, an Israeli immigrant with a PhD from MIT in Human-Computer Interaction, and Saul Lustgarten, a Venezuelan immigrant with an MBA from MIT Sloan. Roy was previously the Chief Scientist at Tulip Interfaces and contributed to open-source projects with over 1M users. Saul was the Chief Product Officer at Metrika and a Product Manager at Tulip Interfaces, and has over a decade of experience building and scaling technology products.

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Portfolio Highlights

🖥️ Brelyon unveils Visual Engine, a new generative screen augmentation architecture powered by NVIDIA NIM. This AI-driven platform enables real-time interface adaptation, enhancing user experience and immersion across applications and gaming. Visual Engine will launch as standalone software in 2025. [Globe Newswire]

📊 Tabs raised an oversubscribed $25M Series A in Q4 that closed in October. General Catalyst led the round, with ongoing support from Primary Ventures and Lightspeed. This funding came less than six months after Tabs' seed round. [Fintech Global]

📦 Corvus Robotics launched Corvus One in 2024, the first fully autonomous warehouse inventory drone, delivering 10x the speed at lower costs compared to manual processes. Corvus also added major Fortune 500 customers and now has over 150 devices deployed. [The Robot Report]

🏦 Ribbon has partnered with First City Credit Union to launch the first-ever online inheritance portal for credit union members. Traditionally a complex and lengthy process, inheritance claims can now be initiated entirely online, eliminating the need for branch visits or long wait times. [First City Credit Union]

🏥 Impilo, a digital health platform revolutionizing at-home care, has raised an $11.5 million Series A led by Construct Capital, with participation from One Way, alongside 2048 Ventures and others. Impilo’s tech integrates logistics, connected devices, and real-time monitoring, making high-quality healthcare accessible anytime, anywhere. [PR Newswire]

🚚 Tive, a leading provider of supply chain and logistics visibility technology, has raised $40 million in a Series C funding round to accelerate its mission of delivering real-time shipment tracking and monitoring solutions. [Supply Chain Digital Magazine]

☕ Compound Foods has launched a beanless instant oat milk latte packed with L-theanine, pea protein, and calibrated caffeine to support women's wellness. The sustainable formula cuts carbon emissions by 86% while offering a smooth, jitter-free energy boost. [Green Queen]

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Pathfinder Collective Highlight

Our Pathfinder Collective is a network of unicorn founders, dedicated to helping portfolio companies as they scale.

Cal Henderson, CTO and Co-Founder of Slack.

As Co-founder and CTO, Cal built Slack into a leading team communication platform. Previously, he led engineering at Flickr and co-authored Building Scalable Websites. A pioneer in web APIs, he contributed to OAuth and oEmbed. Recognized as a Fortune 40 Under 40 honoree, he holds an honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University.

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One Way Ventures in the News

• Backing Immigrant Tech Entrepreneurs Amid H-1B Revisions. (Bloomberg)

  

• Trump's immigration plan could help Boston. But some are skeptical. (NBC)

• Robots with feeling: How tactile AI could transform human-robot relationships (Unite.ai)

• Meet the Jewish MIT alum supporting immigrant founders (The Times Of Israel)

• I run a $100M VC fund for immigrants—here’s why they’re often better than those born here (Fortune)

• What counting cards can teach you about VC investing (Fast Company)

• What’s an Entrepreneur-in-Residence and how can one help your startup? (Inc. Magazine)

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Events

We thoroughly enjoyed meeting many of our friends and supporters - and making new ones - at some top industry events around the world this year.

Eugene co-hosted the Uncharted Summit during Web Summit in Portugal, drawing over 500 attendees. Masha co-hosted a standout event during Slush Helsinki, and served on the jury for a demo day of tech startups supported by Snap.

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Of 900 GPs, just 24 were selected to showcase their fund at RAISE Global, one of the best GP-LP events of the year.

Leo Arango presented One Way Ventures to a group of investors at RAISE Global Summit 2024.

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Featured Jobs

Interested in working for a venture-backed startup? Explore some of our handpicked selections below or visit our careers page to learn more:

Senior Full-Stack Engineer at Drumkit (📍 Remote, East Coast)

Head of Game Design at Buddy.ai (📍 Remote)

Enterprise Sales Executive at RaySecur (📍 Remote)

Account Executive at Retrocausal (📍Chicago, IL, USA)

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