Building a Community Focused Startup This VC Fund Wants to Talk to You - Android

In July, a Canadian enterprise software startup CryptoNumerics, co-founded by a Pakistani entrepreneur Hassan Bhatti, was acquired in a $7.1… Read More

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In July, a Canadian enterprise software startup CryptoNumerics, co-founded by a Pakistani entrepreneur Hassan Bhatti, was acquired in a $7.1 Million cash as well an undisclosed stock amount deal by world-leading cloud data platform Snowflake which had the biggest IPO in tech history earlier in September.

CryptoNumerics aimed to enable businesses to create privacy-protected datasets with quantifiable privacy risk. In addition, it enabled the building of statistical and machine learning models that protect people’s privacy.

Now, Hassan Bhatti has joined as an investment partner at a VC (Venture Capital) fund that focuses to get money to underrepresented and underestimated founders in various communities. Called ‘The Community Fund’, it’s an early-stage fund that invests in community-driven companies, helping them become unicorns and produce outsized returns.

Being Hassan’s country of origin, Pakistan will get a big focus from the Fund, removing financing barriers for promising local startups.

The Community Fund is backed by Flybridge Capital – a seed-stage venture capital firm – for the first year during which it plans to do tens of deals which they are open to doing internationally. Currently, the Fund is looking at opportunities in Pakistan and GCC.

The Fund’s soft launch took place on Sep 1, 2020, where Lolita Taub – interim head of sales at software engineering company Catalyte, and Jesse Middleton – general partner at Flybridge Capital – sent out an open invitation to join the Fund’s investment team.

“Within the month, we had more than 450 applicants,” shared Taub in an interview with Crunchbase. “Going through the interviews in two waves, we, unfortunately, had to pass on about 90 percent in the first round. We looked for things VCs look for, such as experience, proprietary deal flow, what communities they represented and their reach, as well as how engaged and active they are in the ecosystem,” she added.

After two selection rounds and two calls each with the final candidates, The Community Fund arrived at a team that included three Latinx, three white, four Asian, and three black partners. Hassan Bhatti – a technology entrepreneur with a proven ability to take hard technical ideas and commercializing them – was one of the shortlisted partners.

“All of The Community Fund partners are driven primarily by one thing: to empower hundreds of underestimated founders in our global communities,” shares Hassan Bhatti, who is a member of the Data Marketplace team for Snowflake besides being a partner at the Fund.

“There is a ton of great founders out there who sometimes are unable to launch companies due to a lack of access to the right communities or resources. My hope is that The Community Fund will help such founders build unicorns,” Hassan adds.

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