Announcing NMV's Spring Investments!

We’re excited to announce 4 investments we made this spring, selected through an internal experiment that helped us refine our new continuous investment cycle before launching it last month. We screened and reviewed more than 90 organizations and ultimately funded the projects below. If you’re interested in joining NMV in supporting them, please email NMV Investment Principal Phil Sanders and he’ll be happy to connect you with their leaders.

SomeFriends (for-profit) is a premium podcast-first entertainment company that tells stories by and about people of color, for everybody, with the mission of championing inclusion through diversity. They are a home for original and immersive fiction and non-fiction storytelling, giving underrepresented voices a platform to tell their stories.

How you can help: Invest in the company, or fund an individual show they’re working on and receive producer credit! General intros to investors and to BIPOC writers, actors, and producers are welcome too.

The Undocumented Filmmakers Collective (501c3) is an organization comprised of editors, photographers, videographers, writers, and storytellers who all happen to have the same experience of being silenced as undocumented immigrants. Building upon the media justice organizing of other undocumented leaders, the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective tackles the systemic inequities that undocumented immigrants face in the field of filmmaking, by centering the expertise of undocumented people not only as sources of stories but more importantly as creators, artists, and primary audiences.

How you can help: Support them with a grant or introduce them to a funder! Organizational development funding and multi-year grants for new organizations will be especially helpful.

Bluelink (for-profit) solves a major pain point for movement groups and campaigns: data integration. Their tools create a single view of their customers’ supporters, and maximize their effectiveness by enabling constant and consistent data interconnectivity between their software tools.

How you can help: Invest in the company (they’re currently raising funds) or introduce them to an investor. They’re also looking for other software vendors in the political tech space who they should talk to about them leveraging Bluelink to get integrated.

Luz Collective (for-profit) is a digital media brand and creative agency, for and by Latinas, that seeks to dismantle and disrupt harmful media narratives about Latinas. 

NMV funded them in 2019, and their expansive growth from 2019 to 2020, the launch of their digital content creation platform, and the strength of their subscription model helped us make Luz Collective the first POC-founded media company to receive follow-on funding from NMV.

How you can help: Invest in the company (they’re currently raising funds) or introduce them to an investor. Mission-aligned investors willing to provide non-dilutive capital will be the most impactful.

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As a reminder, if you’re interested in joining NMV in supporting these projects, please email NMV Investment Principal Phil Sanders and he’ll be happy to connect you with their leaders.

If you want to help spread the word about these amazing startups, please send this blog post to your network and share our posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn!

If you’re looking for funding for your startup, send us your information via the Startup Intake Form on our Criteria & FAQ page!

And if you’re interested in funding the next wave of progressive innovation, we’d love to connect. Please reach out to NMV Director of Partnerships Arbour Decker.