A Marin venture capital firm has selected a Mill Valley artificial intelligence startup for its final investment.
Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures, which launched in April 2020, raised $6.6 million from 62 local investors. The investment in 1mind is the 13th investment, said Zachary Kushel, the firm’s founder and managing partner.
Kushel called 1mind, which works with other businesses to help them add AI to their systems, “a trailblazing AI company rapidly accelerating go-to-market operations for B2B businesses.”
Amanda Kahlow, 1mind founder and chief executive, said she is enthusiastic about the possibility of combining her love of Marin’s outdoors with running a business locally.
“My goal is to open a go-to-market office here in Marin,” Kahlow said. “It’s a big reason why I’m excited to partner with MSIV and its mission to build a local startup community and create more local startup jobs.”
Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures organizes 24 to 28 networking events annually with startup founders and potential investors. Its largest event, North Bay Next, will be held 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 20 at Angelico Hall at Dominican University of California in San Rafael. More than 330 attendees are expected, Kushel said.
“What we’re doing is building a startup community for Marin and Sonoma counties,” said Kushel, a Corte Madera resident. “Historically, if you were a Marin-based entrepreneur, and you wanted to build what’s called the next great North Bay company, such as build the next BioMarin, Glassdoor, AutoDesk or Restoration Hardware, one of those iconic companies that employs hundreds of thousands of people, there wasn’t really an organization you could tap into locally to help you.”
Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures seeks to fill that gap as the first regional venture capital firm for Marin and Sonoma county startups, according to its website, msivfund.com.
The firm has invested about $300,000 to $400,000 for each of its 13 startups in the fund, Kushel said. The goal is to have the companies grow, employ lots of local workers and ideally reap a healthy “exit” — defined as selling the company at a nice profit — within 10 years, Kushel said.
While he declined to say anything about a possible second MSIV fund, citing federal Security and Exchange Commission guidelines, he said “we’re not going anywhere.”
“We’re doing really well,” Kushel said. “The model is working.”
Kushel, who grew up in New Jersey, came to the Bay Area in 2011, living in San Francisco. In 2015, he began working for Glassdoor, the job search and employment matching firm that ran locally from about 2008 to 2018. Kushel and his family moved to Corte Madera in 2016.
Glassdoor, which started in Mill Valley but later moved to San Francisco, began as a startup. Within about 10 years, it employed more than 500 people locally before executing a $1.2 billion “exit” when it was bought by a company in Japan, Kushel said.
“Our long-term vision is, we want to put 10 high-growth startup companies in downtown San Rafael, and have that kickstart a job creation run,” Kushel said.
“That’s why we’re doing this,” he added. “We’re trying to change the economic future of this community for the better by creating the types of jobs that young people actually want, and that they’d actually move back to this community to go do.”
