Ludlow operates differently because we’re a different kind of VC. We believe in VC without ego. We wear our hearts on our sleeves, avoiding the puffery and posturing that has given venture capital a bad name. We fund the dreams of entrepreneurs and startups, becoming close friends with the teams we invest in. We invest with insane conviction and love backing the right teams when others think it's too early.
Truly great companies are built on trust and friendship (and rainbows and luck). VC is a customer service business. Whether it's testing product, leveraging our network, or forcing people to download your app, we're here to help. You make our dream jobs possible and we're forever thankful for that. Check out some of our other projects - www.carpool.vc and www.computer.show
This is VC done right.
Our Family
Companies we're proudly invested in.
Founders
Wag! A mobile application to find trusted, certified dog walkers instantly on your phone. Wag features include GPS tracking, pup reports, photos & EZ-pay.
Founders
A professional eSports organization competing in League of Legends, Fortnite and Clash Royale.
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Parag Chordia
Hooked is redefining fiction for the Snapchat generation. Hooked features bite-sized stories told in the form of chat conversations, and delivered one message at a time.
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Scentbird is about the fun and magic of fragrance. Scentbird is for the pickiest girl- or boy- and lets you date luxury perfumes before marrying them. Get access to a 30-day supply of hundreds of top designer fragrances, including Dolce & Gabbana and Marc Jacobs delivered to your door for just $14.95/month.
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A simple API to integrate print & mail solutions into your applications, Lob is a suite of printing, fulfillment, and logistics API’s for developers. Their first product is a cloud printing API. Described as the Amazon Web Services for printing, Lob automates the printing & mailing of any type of physical collateral like posters, mugs, postcards, letters, photos, checks and more. Lob gives companies access to commercial print infrastructure and the ability to print on-demand.
Founders
Jason Brown
Jasper Platz
Credit card companies love taking your money. Get it back with Tally.
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Density is a device about the size of a deck of cards. When you plug it in to an outlet, it will immediately count the number of people in a room. The longer it listens, the better its data becomes: measuring visitor count, new v. loyal customers, visitor duration, etc.
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Lumi provides packaging supplies to online brands, from small businesses to companies shipping millions of orders per month.
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Flywheel started in 2012 with a simple mission – to improve the lives of the millions of web designers & developers worldwide that build sites on the WordPress platform. Thousands of designers from every corner of the globe use Flywheel each and every day to launch beautiful WordPress sites for their clients. From tiny blogs to sites getting millions of visitors each month, they’ve got ‘em. Flywheel empowers designers and developers to focus on what they do best — build beautiful, functional sites for their clients. They do this with their combination of software, friendly expert support, and rock-solid infrastructure.
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Product Hunt surfaces the best new products, every day. It's a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations.
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A game studio focused on creating spectator-friendly, stream-first, competitive games for tablets and smartphones.
SBM's first product is Armajet, an accessible, free-to-play multiplayer game designed for mobile that pits teams of players against each other in fast-paced jetpack combat.
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Empowering creators to collect & share earnings.
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Ambassador is a social referral platform for any business. Easily, track & manage referral / partner / affiliate programs that seamlessly integrate into your website or app. Ambassador enables any website to build a Dropbox or Fab style referral program to reward their customers for promoting their products online.
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Gather is the leading event management software for restaurants and venues. Gather enables
hospitality companies of all sizes to manage and grow successful events businesses.
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Knock Knock is a developer of chat-native games and technologies. A passionate team of developers that believe messaging platforms can create new ways to connect friends and play games.
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Customer success. Made simple. Catalyst helps you reduce churn, drive product adoption and grow your business by building customer relationships that scale.
Founders
Varun Khona
Vikram Jit Singh
Suren Sultania
Headout makes travel more fun and convenient. They combine the convenience of mobile, curated tours, best prices and paperless ticketing to deliver a delightful experience to users. No more tour brochures, walk-ins, crummy guides or cumbersome payments.
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Boulevard is reimagining the way you shop and pay for luxury services. The right technology can transform businesses and the clients they serve.
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Paperspace is a full computer you can access from any web browser. Paperspace can run the most demanding applications. Its performance is suited for 3D CAD, rendering, simulations and photo & video editing.
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Cleanly is the easiest way to get laundry done. The mobile app provides an easy to use, on demand laundry & dry-cleaning delivery experience.
A Cleanly Valet comes to you, weighs your laundry, then takes it to our cleaning facilities to be professionally cleaned, and returned back at the time requested in the app. Cleanly provides affordable convenience and more free time to busy people everywhere.
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Powering the real estate industry, Nestio is NYC's most accurate residential listings database. Think MLS for rentals. Nestio offers landlords, brokers, and renters the ability to manage and communicate information in real-time about rental listings.
Founders
Noah Shutty
Scott Stephenson
DeepGram uses artificial intelligence to recognize speech, search for moments, and categorize audio and video. Try it on calls, meetings, podcasts, video clips, lectures—and get actionable insights from an easy to use API.
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Try.com is the most personal shopping service you've ever had. Connect to your own personal shopper in 20 seconds, and our drivers collect all your returns in-person.
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Timber aggregates and processes logs, augmenting them with invaluable context that helps you understand exactly how your app is performing.
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Sam Hui, PhD
Canvs is the first social entertainment insights platform that immediately tells you how audiences reacted to content at scale. The platform, provides solutions for marketing, ad sales, and production by empowering decisions based on qualitative insights.
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uBeam uses patented ultrasound technology to wirelessly and safely charge gadgets such as laptops and smartphones without plugging them into wall outlets or other energy sources. The company is enabling a world where device charging is a seamless and untethered experience. Think Wi-Fi of energy.
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Comparably provides the most accurate and comprehensive compensation and culture data, to understand employees' true value and needs to make work better.
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The road travel market is huge. In fact, it makes up 78% of total travel & tourism spent in the US. Roadtrippers is the first complete road travel planner. Roadtrippers goes beyond basic driving directions and inspires people on where to go and what to do along the way. Roadtrippers launched in July 2012 and is the fastest growing, stickiest US travel site.
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Giftcard Zen saves consumers money at all national brands with instant discounts at checkout. $20 Billion in gift cards are unused every year after being bought. They languish in wallets and kitchen drawers. Giftcard Zen buys these gift cards then sells them at a discount to consumers who'll use them.
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Hand-crafted dinners sourced from the best ingredients, delivered to your table. Sprig provides healthy food on-demand. Anytime you are hungry, you can order a locally-sourced, healthy dinner option directly from your smartphone. Once you order, it takes 20 minutes to get to your door. All meals are cooked by a team led by Executive Chef Nate Keller, who was executive chef at Google.
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Instantly deploy, test and personalize native new user experiences that maximize your marketing conversion rates.
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Navdy is a Head-Up Display (HUD) for your car that let's you use all the apps you love while keeping your eyes on the road. You can think of it as Google Glass for your car but without the Glasses. Navdy works in the car you already have, simply place it on your dash and connect wirelessly to your smartphone.
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Beauty By Design is the easiest and most accurate way to buy the exact right skincare products.
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Hang live with your friends! Tribe is your go to group video messenger. Hang live with up to 8 friends any time, anywhere.
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Artificial Intelligence that you communicate with via text in natural language.
Founders
Kevin McCullough
Pain relief without compromise. Wearable neuromodulation for daily use.
Founders
Sean Lavine
Mirror is akin to a 21st century clearinghouse with a core mission to provide trustworthy settlement of assets. Their goal is to eliminate counterparty risk and use blockchain technology to reflect a more transparent financial ecosystem with a far more global reach. With offices in Palo Alto and New York, they serve as a trusted institutional counterparty for bitcoin traders, businesses, and global third-party vendors. They're working to build the first robust financial application on top of blockchain technology, combining the best of traditional institutional finance with emerging crypto finance.
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Scan has created web and mobile tools which enable both companies and consumers to benefit from mobile transaction technologies (QR codes, beacon, and more). These benefits include mobile commerce, social media, lead generation, analytics, networking, and more. (ex. "Scan to Follow", "Scan to Like", "Scan to Buy").
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Creative Market is a platform for handcrafted, mousemade design content from independent creatives around the world. They're passionate about making beautiful design simple and accessible to everyone. Acquired by Autodesk
Founders
Chris Upjohn
Ray Wu
Jason Kraft
MagicBus provides long-distance commuters a stress-free way to get to work. We are reducing traffic congestion and giving people their lives back, one rider at a time.
Founders
Send a webpage to a friend instantly with a keystroke. Highlight the best parts of articles. Easily retrieve links, comments, and highlights.
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Cucumbertown is the world’s largest food blogging platform.
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Datapad is an agile data visualization workflow for the modern era: prepare, explore, analyze, share. Datapad was launched by the creators of Pandas, Wes McKinney and Chang She, leaders in the data science community.
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LaunchKey enables secure user authentication on websites, applications, and other computer systems
without the need for passwords. Launchkey utilizes the power of your smart phone or tablet for
strong out-of-band authentication (OOBA) via the free LaunchKey mobile app. Anytime a user
authenticates, a launch request is sent to their physical device for authorization. Launchkey has
recently received Veracode’s highest security rating.
Founders
Final is a credit card, a mobile app, a better credit experience, a consumer advocate, and a way to protect your account from fraud, breaches, and card cancellation.
Founders
Geoffrey Mayo
Competition for reader attention has never been more intense. And now people are spending less time on computers and more time on their phones. Publishers have had to find an effective way to cram all of their content and advertising onto tiny little screens. And it’s not working. And everyone knows it’s not working. But what’s the alternative? SpokenLayer is transforming the way publishers think about mobile engagement. They let readers experience stories in a format perfectly designed for mobile consumption: audio. The SpokenLayer platform was built from the ground up with a specific mission: to give publishers of all sizes a fully integrated audio solution at speeds never before imaginable.
Founders
Sqwiggle is designed to bring your team closer with seamless communication and constant connection.
Sqwiggle is an always-on, online workplace for remote teams to work together throughout the day.
Founders
Self-storage made easy. Boxbee brings mobile technology to the world of storage. Their backend platform navigates the intricate logistics of box transport, sorting, and inventorying. Boxbee is storage that comes to you by the box. Think on-demand mini-storage. Customers can manage their boxes online and can retrieve them any time. With a push of a button boxes arrive. When the customer packs them up, Boxbee retrieves and stores them. Perfect for anyone living in dense urban cities.
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WorkLife is a web and mobile app that helps you run highly productive, engaging meetings.
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Roximity manufactures wireless iBeacons to place in physical locations and deliver personalized content to customers as they walk in the door and move throughout a venue.
Founders
Amanda Eilian
Since 2007, Videolicious has been a leading provider of automatic video creation solutions, with more than 1,000,000 users in over 100 countries. Their video editing technology has powered the creation of millions of videos for social media marketers, Fortune 500 companies, real estate agents, local businesses, and anyone else who wants to benefit from video’s power to sell and inform.
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Quikly is all about speed. It's simple. Amazing brands text you secret links for special rewards. The faster you click, the more you earn.
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Ubooly is an educational Smart Toy® that is powered by mobile devices. Ubooly talks and listens to kids while encouraging creative and active play.
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Founders
Carbon Ads is an ad tech company behind a new kind of advertising network. Carbon connects advertisers to highly-relevant users through targeted verticals we call Circles. These circles are made up of influential publishers who lead or are engaged within their industries. To their audiences, Carbon brings well-designed, value-focused ads, displayed one per page above the fold, for quality brands, products and services that readers actually need and want. Acquired by BuySell Ads.
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Graphicly renders all images for fixed-format EPUB in high-resolution with color-correction. Your content will look beautiful across all screens and be 100% compatible with any reading system. Graphicly creates the most beautiful and readable EPUBs. Acquired by Blurb.
Founders
Circa saves news readers precious time by delivering comprehensive yet to-the-point coverage in a format tailored for mobile lifestyles. Over 55% of U.S. smartphone owners are consuming news while mobile, but they’re reading content that was created for web & print. Instead of attempting to shoehorn long form news into an ill fitting environment, Circa delivers news in a format native to mobile lifestyles with an experience built for a world in motion.
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Founders
Hipster is creating a real-time, visual public record of the world’s locations. Using their iPhones and Android devices, people share where they are and what they are doing by sending their friends a photographic postcard. The postcards become permanently attached to the locations they were sent from, and are forever accessible to all those who come later. Acquired by AOL.
Founders
Life goes beyond meetings and appointments. Your calendar should too. UpTo gives you a more complete view of everything coming up that matters to you – without the clutter. Discover important events ahead of time and plan accordingly. It’s your calendar, but better. A new dimension of the calendar. Your UpTo calendar has two layers. The front layer is your existing calendar. The back layer includes calendars you follow based on your likes and interests. Expand your calendar to reveal the back layer of events with just a pinch or tap.
Founders
Shop now. Buy later. Wantworthy lets you save the products you want from any site as you're shopping online and gives you a place to organize, compare and get feedback from friends.
Our Team
The supporting cast that helps our family succeed.
Jonathon Triest
Founder and Managing Partner
Jonathon is the founder and managing partner of Ludlow Ventures and Sandwich Fund. Prior to launching Ludlow, Jonathon worked as creative director for New York’s Discovery Productions. He founded and operated Triest Group, a design firm with a deep UI/UX focus. In addition to his role at Ludlow, Jonathon is a Kauffman Fellow and a mentor at numerous technology accelerators. He is board member of The Trico Foundation and Venture for America. In addition to his venture work, Jonathon is a producer of the web-series Computer Show (www.computer.show).
Brett deMarrais
Partner
Prior to joining Ludlow, Brett founded Wedit, a crowd sourced wedding video platform that reduced the cost of wedding videos and made them social. Within the first year of launching the company Wedit had won the top industry awards for customer satisfaction (Brides Choice 2012 and Best of The Knot 2012). Previously, Brett worked at Out of the Blue Entertainment. Brett is a Michigan Venture Fellow.
Gwen Castleberry
Executive Assistant
Gwen has a background in higher education teaching, retail management and a general love of organization. Gwen spends most of her free time with her husband, her daughter, and their dog: Gus. She strongly believes that with enough coffee, anything is possible.