Las Olas Venture Capital Invests in Leverage

Las Olas Venture Capital (LOVC) led a $5 million seed financing round into Leverage.ai, its third Fund II investment, according to a Thursday (Feb. 10) press release.

The round also saw participation from Mark Cuban, Gaingels, Great Oaks, Tensility VC, Social Impact Capital, Hyphen Capital, Remarkable Ventures, Jett McCandless and Sanish Mondkar.

Leverage is a supply chain and logistics tech company. Based in New York, it offers an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven vendor relationship management platform, streamlining communication, collaboration, reporting, insights and more on one platform.

Additionally, it automates and consolidates critical functions in supply chain management, allowing businesses to boost their efficiency. Per the announcement, the investment will give the company more room to accelerate product development and boost its engineering, marketing and sales teams.

The release notes that the company’s co-founders, Andrew Stroup and Nadav Ullman, worked together on Project N95, trying to address supply chain visibility.

The issue, they posited, was that supply chain teams use manual and fragmented workflows like spreadsheets, phone calls and emails to manage purchase orders and communication.

That can lead to bad visibility and out of stock issues, scaling challenges and more overhead. As such, the idea behind Leverage was to integrate all the info into one centralized and AI-powered cloud platform, giving businesses more control.

Mark Volchek, founding partner at LOVC, said the firm was glad to partner with Leverage and that they “believe that their platform provides an end-to-end solution that will transform an industry in dire need of technological disruption.”

PYMNTS reported that venture capital funding for U.S. FinTechs almost doubled in 2021, both in transaction value and volume, according to a report from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

See also: Report: VC Funding to U.S. FinTechs Doubled in 2021

The jump in transaction value was surprising, though analysts say 2022 might not have the same effect. The report says 2021’s massive surge in funding will simply be a “tough act to follow.”

With declining valuations in the public equity markets and possible interest rate hikes, things might get rough eventually. Per the report, private capital was plentiful in January, and investors plan to keep watch for a slowdown.