Welcome to the 43rd edition of the Geeks Of The Valley (GOTV) Newsletter, where we curate exciting insights on VC investment + interesting early-stage/pre-funded companies per week. If you enjoy and want to keep abreast with insights and interesting early-stage startups before they go big, subscribe to this newsletter ✌️.

Geeks of the week

Startup name: Baskit

One-liner: One-stop solution for wholesalers and distributors to operate and grow their business.

Founder(s) background: Chief of Staff / Head of BD @ Circles.Life (backed by Sequoia India, Warburg Pincus, Founders Fund), Corp. Dev. @ London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), Director of Strategy / GM @ AB InBev (leading multinational drink and brewing company), HR exec @ Lanvin Group (leading global luxury fashion group).

Raised $$ / backed by: Fundraising.

Startup name: inypay (website NA)

One-liner: Customer experience platform to help financial institutions to revaluation the way money works.

Founder(s) background: CTO @ Tonik (SEA-based neobank; Raised $175m, including from Sequoia India, Point72 Ventures and Prosus Ventures).

Raised $$ / backed by:

Raising seed round.
Successfully raised $1m as part of seed round within last few weeks.
Raising another $4m within next 45 days.
If interested to invest / learn more, please reach out to arivuvel.ramu@inypay.com

Into the 🐰🕳️

In this edition of “Into The Rabbithole,” we’ll feature an interesting investment memo made by a VC firm.

Investing in Superblocks

(This article was initially written by Yasmin Razavi from Spark Capital)

We are delighted to announce our investment in Superblocks, a developer-centric platform that is quickly becoming “the AWS for building internal applications”.

At Spark, we’ve long been backers of consequential fintech companies such as Affirm, Coinbase, Rapyd, Plaid, and Marqeta and have borne witness to the complex behind-the-scenes operations that bring their products to life. Yet building internal tooling takes scarce developer resources away from core products, is tediously repetitive — as tool after tool relies on the buildout of common UI components from scratch — and is hard to scale and monitor due to the lack of sophisticated observability, often yielding subpar user experiences. While packaged software reliably solves for the most common needs across organizations (HR, Project Management, etc., etc.) the area under the curve of the long tail of internal tooling needs is indeed very large and extends far beyond fintech to every sector — from healthcare to retail to consumer to insurance, etc.

Superblocks is built by developers for developers. Superblocks is not a low-code, no-code product promising to remove developers from the process of building internal applications. Our belief at Spark is that these no-code approaches often make undesirable UI and technical tradeoffs — in order to onboard non-developer builders — that limit the complexity, extensibility and customizability of what can be built.

Instead of no-code, Superblocks is a highly programmable platform that empowers developers to rapidly build internal facing applications and workflows with the confidence and security to roll them out wall-to-wall to users across an organization. Brad (CEO) and Ran (CTO) have poured years of experience from working at Datadog and Confluent into building Superblocks. Superblocks is exactly the platform they wished they had had at their prior jobs…

End-to-end platform for building, securing, shipping and monitoring internal apps and tools

Powerful and extensive library of UI components to 10x development speed

Permeation of software into every business process will only increase the demand for developers, who are already a company’s most scarce resource. We believe improving developer output and efficiency will be one of the most profound trends of the next decade. And we couldn’t be more excited to partner with the entire Superblocks team on their journey alongside our friends at Kleiner, Meritech and Greenoaks. Welcome!

Geeks Of The Valley Newsletter

(22nd September) Ex Sequoia-backed executives…