A WNBA Star Turned VC | $100 Million For Offline Ventures | Edtech For Seniors

Subscribers receive our newsletter in full. Here, you'll get a taste of what you're missing this week. Sign up and join us below.

She found strong alignment with the team at Atlanta-based Valor Ventures which focuses on financial inclusion and investing in underrepresented founders. “[Valor] is already doing the work, I just need to add momentum,” Montgomery tells Midas Touch. “Being inclusive, leaning into women and leaning into minorities, that is what I was already talking about.” She joined Valor as a general partner this month. This makes Montgomery one of, if not the first, former professional athletes to join an existing venture firm in that role. 

The potential power of a career in venture started to click for Montgomery after her first angel investment into Fan Controlled Football (FCF), a sports league that lets fans make all the decisions, from team logos to draft picks. Getting a seat at the decision table, as fans get at FCF and as investors do with their companies, showed her a new way to implement change in an organization. “When you look at sports teams, people want more Black head coaches. Well why aren’t there more? What is the problem of hiring more Black coaches? It’s who is making the decisions,” she says. “This is the clout and power of investing. You get to make decisions that can really shift the culture.” Montgomery already applies this mentality to make changes within the Atlanta Dream organization, she says, and plans to bring it to startups too...

You're seeing this message because your free trial of this newsletter has expired. To read the rest of this story and more original reporting, data and analysis, please subscribe.

GetSetup provides a digital hub for seniors with more than 300 class offerings that range from staying fit to learning tech skills or hobbies. “We realized that there was no real place for our parents to hang out online,” says Neil Dsouza, cofounder and CEO of GetSetup. Buoyed by Facebook virality and opportune timing — it launched one month before the U.S. went on pandemic lockdown — the part-edtech, part-social-network has amassed 4 million users, 80% of whom are women over the age of 60. The classes are taught by seniors as well, former professors or professionals who are paid to teach their craft. The website has caught on internationally, and less than half of users are based in the U.S. “We have Americans who get on in the middle of the night to take classes with somebody in [Australia’s] Bondi Beach doing yoga on the beach,” Dsouza says.

The round: The Midvale, Utah-based startup raised $10 million in “simple agreement for future equity” (SAFE) warrants led by Lee’s Cowboy Ventures and LightShed Ventures. Angel investors include Udemy cofounder Gagan Biyani and serial entrepreneur John Danner, who founded charter school network Rocketship Education and took public web advertising firm NetGravity in the 1990s. This follows an $11 million seed round last October led by edtech investing firm Rethink Education. Other investors on the previous round include Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures and the family office of Zynga founder Mark Pincus...

You're seeing this message because your free trial of this newsletter has expired. To read the rest of this story and more original reporting, data and analysis, please subscribe.