Thursday, February 8, 2018
Moonshots Capital Ramps Investment Pace With Lead On Two Investments
Los Angeles- and Austin-based Moonshots Capital, the venture capital fund led by serial entrepreneur Kelly Perdew, is ramping its investment pace, with the first two formal investments out of its new fund. The two investments, both announced in January, were cyber-defense firm Threatcare, and bot detection developer New Knowledge. Threatcare says it provides breach and attack simulation, antivirus assessment, credit card exfiltration, and many other simulations to help organizations evaluate cybersecurity software--to see how effective those tools are, before an actual breach. Moonshots led the $1.4M seed funding in that firm. The second firm, New Knowledge, develops software to uncover the farms of "bots" which are being used to influence social networking sites--and in fact, was the company which uncovered the large-scale Russian efforts to influence the U.S. presidential elections in 2016. Moonshots also led the investment in New Knowledge. The interest in cybersecurity is no surprise, given Perdew's background in the U.S. Army in Military Intelligence; Perdew has been an angel investor for years in Los Angeles companies, but only recently formally announced the Moonshots Capital.