Unshacked Ventures

Unshackled Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund established in 2014, specifically designed to support immigrant-founded startups. Based in California, the firm focuses on helping foreign-born entrepreneurs transform their innovative ideas into successful businesses. Unshackled Ventures not only invests in these founders but also assists them with visa and green card sponsorship, allowing them to dedicate their full attention to building their companies. The fund is backed by notable investors and has made over a dozen investments in nearly 30 founders across six continents. Recent investment areas include autonomous technology, space technology, climate change solutions, healthcare technology, food innovation, and applied AI. By fostering a diverse entrepreneurial ecosystem, Unshackled Ventures aims to address significant challenges in the U.S. and enhance the quality of life for all.

E’mani Davis

Analyst

Sarah Holmes

Associate

Manan Mehta

Founding Partner

Nitin Pachisia

Founding Partner

Maria Salamanca

Partner

81 past transactions

Career Karma

Series A in 2020
Career Karma is the easiest way to find a job training program online. Over 1 million workers navigate their careers every month through advice and coaching. By offering free coaching and peer mentorship, Career Karma has grown to over 150,000 members from every background and profession. Through its directory of 9,000 boot camps and trade schools, career switchers discover training programs by comparing courses and reading student reviews. The Career Karma mobile app makes your decision even easier. In the app, you can connect with current students and alumni to find your ideal program and get prepared for admission.

Plantible Foods

Seed Round in 2020
Plantible Foods, Inc. develops and produces plant-based protein. The company extracts the grassy flavor from lemna and develops alternative protein from aquatic plants. The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Bay Harbor Islands, Florida.

Career Karma

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Career Karma is the easiest way to find a job training program online. Over 1 million workers navigate their careers every month through advice and coaching. By offering free coaching and peer mentorship, Career Karma has grown to over 150,000 members from every background and profession. Through its directory of 9,000 boot camps and trade schools, career switchers discover training programs by comparing courses and reading student reviews. The Career Karma mobile app makes your decision even easier. In the app, you can connect with current students and alumni to find your ideal program and get prepared for admission.

ARISE

Pre Seed Round in 2018
Arise Technology Inc. develops technology that connects hotels and the OTAs/TMCs that sell their rooms online. It develops a direct booking platform where through OTAs/TMCs that book directly with hotel. The company was incorporated in 2017 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Pngme

Series A in 2021
Pngme is an all-inclusive mobile finance platform with mobile payments, savings, and a digital-footprint-based credit score giving MSME's (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises) and un/underbanked consumers access to finance.

Grid Raster

Pre Seed Round in 2015
GridRaster provides the underlying compute and network stack to power high-end VR/AR experiences on mobile platforms by leveraging the edge cloud. The solution provides high-performance graphics at ultra low latency, while improving the overall performance by 10x. Our vision is to drive the mass adoption of VR/AR by dramatically improving the reach of exciting content and bringing breathtaking immersive experiences to users.

Starsky Robotics

Seed Round in 2017
Trucking is the backbone of the American economy, moving 70% of all freight. Truck drivers risk their lives spending months away from their family to keep the American economy moving. They working to make trucks autonomous on the highway and remote controlled by drivers for the first and last mile. Their trucks will make roads safer while giving drivers meaningful work close to their homes and families.

Arithos

Pre Seed Round in 2020
Copilot is built to empower sales reps with the information they need, in real-time, when on a live call. Think of the hardest questions or objections you might struggle to answer when on a videoconference with a prospect - questions about product, regulations, competitive objections, or case studies. Copilot surfaces voice-activated cue cards, based on the conversation, that empowers reps to answer questions and address objections.

Luminai

Pre Seed Round in 2020
DigitalBrain operates as a superhuman to provide IT customer support services. It helps customer support agents get through tickets twice as fast by automating the user interface. The company is based in Palo Alto, California.

OXIO

Seed Round in 2019
OXIO is a carrier-as-a-service platform designed for brands and enterprises. The company has built the modern overlay network entirely as a 100% cloud-based solution, blending the wireless connectivity of many providers. OXIO's B2B SaaS solution unlocks the full and uncompromising control of the wireless experience for brands, including actionable intelligence that drives clear value and results. OXIO was founded in 2018 and based in New York City, New York.

Plantible Foods

Pre Seed Round in 2018
Plantible Foods, Inc. develops and produces plant-based protein. The company extracts the grassy flavor from lemna and develops alternative protein from aquatic plants. The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Bay Harbor Islands, Florida.

Prismpop

Pre Seed Round in 2020
PrismPop, Inc. operates a social commerce platform that enables the discovery of beauty products on mobile. Its platform enables users to participate in the content and third-party manufacturers to offer their products and services. The company was founded in 2018 and is based in Pasadena, California.

CatalyzeX

Pre Seed Round in 2018
Profillic, Inc. develops an online portal for searching machine intelligence models, papers, and code implementations. The company allows the users to discover artificial intelligence (AI) models and codes for projects through an online portal, CatalyzeX. It offers a collection of object recognition, recommendation systems, image-to-image translation, information extraction, topic modeling, time series analysis, text classification, and sentiment analysis machine intelligence solutions. The company was incorporated in 2017 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Lynk Global

Seed Round in 2018
Lynk is a mobile connectivity company that allows to partner with mobile network operators to connect existing mobile phone customers to each other, anywhere on the planet. It aims to provide broadband connectivity directly to ordinary mobile phones. Lynk was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia.

Plutoshift

Pre Seed Round in 2016
Plutoshift is an operational data platform to monitor physical infrastructure. It leverages existing data collection systems to automate data workflows and provide a unified view of performance. It was founded in 2017 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Bluefield

Seed Round in 2017
Bluefield Technologies Inc. develops microsatellite sensors for monitoring of emissions of methane. It provides artificial intelligence imaging and analysis for methane tracking. The company’s sensors enables tracking climate change, catching leaks at oil and gas facilities, and indicating the size of cattle and cow herds in an area. It serves oil and gas, emission regulation, hedge fund, environmental, and intelligence industries. Bluefield Technologies Inc. was incorporated in 2017 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

SenseiHub

Angel Round in 2015
SenseiHub is an educational technology startup that offers a platform which enables companies to find and employ current students for short-term internship projects. SenseiHub was founded by Sameep Sheth and Aditya Sudhakar in February 2014 and is based in Palo Alto, California.

Brite Health

Seed Round in 2016
Brite Health Co. develops artificial platform for brain health and clinical trials. The company was incorporated in 2015 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

Faeth

Seed Round in 2020
Faeth Therapeutics is a data-driven, evidence-based company that specializes in mechanistic understanding of the way that dietary nutrients influence tumor growth and cancer treatment. It fully focuses on matching specific diets with tumor genotypes and treatment regimens to improve the outcomes of cancer therapy. The company was founded to translate breakthrough discoveries, made by cancer research laboratories, into clinical practice. Its founding team includes some of the industry’s preeminent researchers and clinicians.

Tailored Industry

Pre Seed Round in 2018
Tailored Industry is re-engineering the fashion supply chain with on-demand manufacturing and 3D knitting.

Livedocs

Pre Seed Round in 2019
document editor

Potion

Pre Seed Round in 2020
Potion provides a video prospecting tool designed for sales professionals. The platform eliminates the need to record multiple videos for each prospect by using its innovative dynamic video feature. The company was founded in 2020 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Inspirit

Pre Seed Round in 2019
At Inspirit, we are building the next generation of teaching tools for instructors: immersive labs and 3D simulations that replace the 'digital whiteboard'. Our tools are incredibly easy to customize, integrate assessments, and share across the web, mobile, and XR platforms.

GraphLI

Pre Seed Round in 2016
With more than 90% of consumers expecting product delivery to fit their busy schedule, continuous and flexible delivery management is the critical missing link needed for customer satisfaction and retention in modern supply chains. With GraphLI's automated delivery management software, Transportation companies deliver more goods with the existing fleet, cut fuel and labor costs, and keep customer expectations met and happy. GraphLi's monitoring and performance measurement tools turn location-centric field data into real-time insights to enable continuous improvements in delivery services. The SaaS platform is simple to understand, Plug-N-Play, stores the data securely, automates repetitive processes where needed, and generates intelligence for proactive planning and execution.

Maximus

Seed Round in 2021
Operator of a consumer health company intended to provide men with content, community, and clinical support to optimize them in mind and body. The company provides at-home lab tests and treatment, online group health coaching for nutrition, exercise, sleep, and focus, and also provides state-of-the-art telemedicine and mail-order pharmacy services, helping men to optimize their hormones and health.

Formally

Pre Seed Round in 2022
Formally is a legal collaboration company seeking to use intelligent technology and accessible design to simplify legal processes and increase access to justice.

Kwant

Pre Seed Round in 2015
Kwant.ai brings profitability and predictability to construction projects like automotive manufacturing.

Prismpop

Seed Round in 2022
PrismPop, Inc. operates a social commerce platform that enables the discovery of beauty products on mobile. Its platform enables users to participate in the content and third-party manufacturers to offer their products and services. The company was founded in 2018 and is based in Pasadena, California.

Plantible Foods

Series A in 2021
Plantible Foods, Inc. develops and produces plant-based protein. The company extracts the grassy flavor from lemna and develops alternative protein from aquatic plants. The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Bay Harbor Islands, Florida.

Masa

Pre Seed Round in 2022
Masa is the identity infrastructure for developers building web3 communities. Developers can acquire, retain, and verify users, using SBTs and NFTs as primitives to represent credentials, reputation and affiliations.

Pngme

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Pngme is an all-inclusive mobile finance platform with mobile payments, savings, and a digital-footprint-based credit score giving MSME's (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises) and un/underbanked consumers access to finance.

Lily AI

Series A in 2020
Lily AI is the leader in predictive psychographics for retail e-commerce. Consumer spending online for apparel now accounts for over 27% of all clothing sales. Retailers need to understand each consumer’s emotional context while they are actively shopping. Lily AI combines deep product tagging with deep, real-time psychographic analysis to determine the active state of mind of each shopper, and turns that into precise and timely recommendations. These recommendations are proven to lead to higher conversions and lower return rates. Lily AI (lilystyle.ai) was founded by two women who believe clothes to reflect how they feel about themselves. The company is venture-backed and headquartered in Mountain View, CA.

Grid Raster

Seed Round in 2017
GridRaster provides the underlying compute and network stack to power high-end VR/AR experiences on mobile platforms by leveraging the edge cloud. The solution provides high-performance graphics at ultra low latency, while improving the overall performance by 10x. Our vision is to drive the mass adoption of VR/AR by dramatically improving the reach of exciting content and bringing breathtaking immersive experiences to users.

Lily AI

Series A in 2020
Lily AI is the leader in predictive psychographics for retail e-commerce. Consumer spending online for apparel now accounts for over 27% of all clothing sales. Retailers need to understand each consumer’s emotional context while they are actively shopping. Lily AI combines deep product tagging with deep, real-time psychographic analysis to determine the active state of mind of each shopper, and turns that into precise and timely recommendations. These recommendations are proven to lead to higher conversions and lower return rates. Lily AI (lilystyle.ai) was founded by two women who believe clothes to reflect how they feel about themselves. The company is venture-backed and headquartered in Mountain View, CA.

Plutoshift

Series A in 2019
Plutoshift is an operational data platform to monitor physical infrastructure. It leverages existing data collection systems to automate data workflows and provide a unified view of performance. It was founded in 2017 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Hairtelligence

Pre Seed Round in 2020
Hairtelligence develops a computer vision-powered solution designed for customizing hair products for African American women. Its platform will take all the measurements through a snap photo and provides custom styles with extensive texture variety. By infusing technology into the customer experience, the company helps women understand the best protective hairstyles for every phase of life, learning and growing with its customers along the way. The company was co-founded by Isoken Igbinedion and Ifueko Igbinedion.

Lily AI

Seed Round in 2017
Lily AI is the leader in predictive psychographics for retail e-commerce. Consumer spending online for apparel now accounts for over 27% of all clothing sales. Retailers need to understand each consumer’s emotional context while they are actively shopping. Lily AI combines deep product tagging with deep, real-time psychographic analysis to determine the active state of mind of each shopper, and turns that into precise and timely recommendations. These recommendations are proven to lead to higher conversions and lower return rates. Lily AI (lilystyle.ai) was founded by two women who believe clothes to reflect how they feel about themselves. The company is venture-backed and headquartered in Mountain View, CA.

SOTE

Convertible Note in 2018
Sote is building the digital logistics infrastructure for Africa. Their mission is to grow the GDP of the continent by facilitating the growth of trade. They aim to provide a combination of ERP solutions, underwriting models, and software-driven supply chain services across the continent. They are the first to market with a licensed digital customs clearing and forwarding solution, introducing visibility and transparency to industrial importers and exporters in Africa. “Sote” is Swahili for “all of us”.

GrowthPlug

Pre Seed Round in 2019
GrowthPlug is a practice growth and optimization SaaS that is focused on helping healthcare practices to accelerate new patient acquisition, manage online reputation, automate front desk operations, and elevate the patient experience. Launched in 2017, GrowthPlug works with hundreds of healthcare practices across the country.

Pod Foods Co

Seed Round in 2019
Pod Foods Co. develops a software for distribution of food for local retailers and suppliers. It offers products in various categories, including fruits and vegetables, beverages, snacks and branded food. Pod Foods Co. was founded in 2017 and is based in San Francisco, California.

BounceTown

Pre Seed Round in 2019
BounceTown develops an application designed to make music production simple. It provides social graphs for creators to set up immediate feedback loops. It also helps creators build a reputation for their music skills. It helps them build a community, a following, and a fan base.

SOTE

Convertible Note in 2019
Sote is building the digital logistics infrastructure for Africa. Their mission is to grow the GDP of the continent by facilitating the growth of trade. They aim to provide a combination of ERP solutions, underwriting models, and software-driven supply chain services across the continent. They are the first to market with a licensed digital customs clearing and forwarding solution, introducing visibility and transparency to industrial importers and exporters in Africa. “Sote” is Swahili for “all of us”.

Bluefield

Pre Seed Round in 2017
Bluefield Technologies Inc. develops microsatellite sensors for monitoring of emissions of methane. It provides artificial intelligence imaging and analysis for methane tracking. The company’s sensors enables tracking climate change, catching leaks at oil and gas facilities, and indicating the size of cattle and cow herds in an area. It serves oil and gas, emission regulation, hedge fund, environmental, and intelligence industries. Bluefield Technologies Inc. was incorporated in 2017 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Passbird Research

Pre Seed Round in 2020
Multi Factor Authentication that actually works.

HireClub

Pre Seed Round in 2019
HireClub.com, Inc. operates a platform that helps find a job, get professional career coaching, and show off projects in the United States. The company was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Aavia

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Aavia was born from a shared passion for solving problems in healthcare and improving female health and wellness. They chose Aavia because it evokes an image of a bird - powerful and free to soar. The company was founded in 2017 and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Starsky Robotics

Pre Seed Round in 2016
Trucking is the backbone of the American economy, moving 70% of all freight. Truck drivers risk their lives spending months away from their family to keep the American economy moving. They working to make trucks autonomous on the highway and remote controlled by drivers for the first and last mile. Their trucks will make roads safer while giving drivers meaningful work close to their homes and families.

Dispo

Seed Round in 2020
Dispo operates as a social network. Dispo compels its fans to wait until the next morning for their photos to develop, digitally re-creating the delightful nostalgia and delayed gratification of waiting for film's development.

Luminai

Seed Round in 2020
DigitalBrain operates as a superhuman to provide IT customer support services. It helps customer support agents get through tickets twice as fast by automating the user interface. The company is based in Palo Alto, California.

Simulon

Pre Seed Round in 2021
Beamm democratises CGI (computer generated imagery) and VFX (visual effects), giving millions of independent content creators the ability the ability to create high quality, photorealistic, VFX for their projects in moments, at low cost and with technical ease At its core, beamm is a video production app. The app and its proprietary algorithm allow users to quickly and easily place their choice of 3D objects into their videos, live or pre-shot, while the app performs all the necessary calculations in the background that produce physically accurate results, so the 3D objects appear to be truly in the scene.

Skritswap

Pre Seed Round in 2018
Skritswap designs and develops an artificial intelligence technology which enables users to replace jargon with everyday language. The technology allows swapping words. Skritswap was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada.

Immediately

Seed Round in 2015
Immediately is mobile sales enablement, designed for the always-on workforce. Sales can no longer be a 9-5 job; over 70% of lost deals are due to slow reaction time. Immediately brings the full sales workflow into one mobile app designed to enable capturing opportunities and closing deals in real time. From getting intelligence on leads, to sending instrumented emails, to making and logging phone calls and updating opportunity status. Immediately is the sales rep’s best weapon. We plug into Google Apps and Salesforce to integrate seamlessly with existing workflows. We believe the future of sales is not CRM, but a beautiful data-driven, highly automated, and platform-agnostic integrated sales experience. Creating it is our passion. Our customer is the closer - and we believe that in sales, everyone should be a closer.

Plutoshift

Seed Round in 2017
Plutoshift is an operational data platform to monitor physical infrastructure. It leverages existing data collection systems to automate data workflows and provide a unified view of performance. It was founded in 2017 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Lily AI

Pre Seed Round in 2016
Lily AI is the leader in predictive psychographics for retail e-commerce. Consumer spending online for apparel now accounts for over 27% of all clothing sales. Retailers need to understand each consumer’s emotional context while they are actively shopping. Lily AI combines deep product tagging with deep, real-time psychographic analysis to determine the active state of mind of each shopper, and turns that into precise and timely recommendations. These recommendations are proven to lead to higher conversions and lower return rates. Lily AI (lilystyle.ai) was founded by two women who believe clothes to reflect how they feel about themselves. The company is venture-backed and headquartered in Mountain View, CA.

Career Karma

Seed Round in 2019
Career Karma is the easiest way to find a job training program online. Over 1 million workers navigate their careers every month through advice and coaching. By offering free coaching and peer mentorship, Career Karma has grown to over 150,000 members from every background and profession. Through its directory of 9,000 boot camps and trade schools, career switchers discover training programs by comparing courses and reading student reviews. The Career Karma mobile app makes your decision even easier. In the app, you can connect with current students and alumni to find your ideal program and get prepared for admission.

Togg

Pre Seed Round in 2016
Togg develops a device which gets integrated in to the infrastructure of the new home. The device can follow simple commands, including to turn the lights on and off, giving a weather report, and tell jokes. Togg was founded in 2016 and is based in Palo Alto, California.

Kwant

Pre Seed Round in 2017
Kwant.ai brings profitability and predictability to construction projects like automotive manufacturing.

21labs

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Autonomous testing for mobile applications

Below the Fold

Pre Seed Round in 2019
At acciyo, we’re empowering consumers to understand the news. Reading the news today is like opening a book at Chapter 3 of the story - you're missing the story development to understand why that part of the narrative is relevant today. Our product uses artificial intelligence to automatically surface the previous "chapters"​ of the news story, helping active news readers avoid a rabbit hole of Google searches just to understand what's happening in the world - or worse, stop reading.

Aavia

Seed Round in 2020
Aavia was born from a shared passion for solving problems in healthcare and improving female health and wellness. They chose Aavia because it evokes an image of a bird - powerful and free to soar. The company was founded in 2017 and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

DIG labs

Pre Seed Round in 2020
DIG labs is re-imagining personalized pet wellness. We believe that our pets are the family members who love us unconditionally. The best way to love them back is by proactively caring for their health and wellness, especially because they can’t tell us what’s wrong. Our Mission: Delivering custom insights and solutions that are convenient, accessible, and continuously advancing, enabled by the power of technology and science. We strive to give our pets a voice and create a two-way dialogue of insights +actions,so they can live healthy, beautiful lives. A female-founded, NY-based venture-backed startup, DIG labs is developing patent-pending, tech-enabled insights and personalized products, including supplements. Founded by former CPG R&D, brand management execs and pet lovers whose vision is to translate the benefits of personalized human healthcare to our pets, DIG labs is actively launching its proprietary real-time health platform, powered by patent-pending computer vision & machine learning. The B2C platform includes a personalized supplements business, and the B2B services platform will service categories across the petcare ecosystem.

Parfait

Seed Round in 2022
Parfait is a brand-new wig customization platform aimed at disrupting the category by integrating facial recognition and artificial intelligence to provide buyers with customizable wig products.

Lynk Global

Seed Round in 2018
Lynk is a mobile connectivity company that allows to partner with mobile network operators to connect existing mobile phone customers to each other, anywhere on the planet. It aims to provide broadband connectivity directly to ordinary mobile phones. Lynk was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia.

CatalyzeX

Seed Round in 2021
Profillic, Inc. develops an online portal for searching machine intelligence models, papers, and code implementations. The company allows the users to discover artificial intelligence (AI) models and codes for projects through an online portal, CatalyzeX. It offers a collection of object recognition, recommendation systems, image-to-image translation, information extraction, topic modeling, time series analysis, text classification, and sentiment analysis machine intelligence solutions. The company was incorporated in 2017 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Masa

Pre Seed Round in 2022
Masa is the identity infrastructure for developers building web3 communities. Developers can acquire, retain, and verify users, using SBTs and NFTs as primitives to represent credentials, reputation and affiliations.

Pod Foods Co

Series A in 2021
Pod Foods Co. develops a software for distribution of food for local retailers and suppliers. It offers products in various categories, including fruits and vegetables, beverages, snacks and branded food. Pod Foods Co. was founded in 2017 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Maximus

Series A in 2022
Operator of a consumer health company intended to provide men with content, community, and clinical support to optimize them in mind and body. The company provides at-home lab tests and treatment, online group health coaching for nutrition, exercise, sleep, and focus, and also provides state-of-the-art telemedicine and mail-order pharmacy services, helping men to optimize their hormones and health.

Masa

Seed Round in 2024
Masa is the identity infrastructure for developers building web3 communities. Developers can acquire, retain, and verify users, using SBTs and NFTs as primitives to represent credentials, reputation and affiliations.