Splight, a Chilean startup that received pre-seed funding from New York-based Spacecadet Ventures last year, has raised $2 million from Portugal’s EDP Ventures, according to posts on LinkedIn and Crunchbase.
Spacecadet, co-founded by Canada’s Daniel Eckler and Wisam “Wiz” Abdulla, has positioned itself as “the marketing VC.” Its backers include a16z general partners Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, Clearco co-founder Andrew D’Souza, Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Bain Capital, Google Ventures and Tiger Global. Typically, Spacecadet invests $100,000 to startups at pre-seed stage.
Using artificial intelligence to enhance grid congestion, Splight was co-founded by the trio of Chief Technology Officer Thomas Vadora, Chief Strategy Officer Fernando Llaver and Head of Data Science Carlos Caldart. The company’s LinkedIn page shows its headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., and a phone number in Delaware.
Splight’s backers include Denver, Colo.-based Ascent Energy, San Francisco-based Climate Capital, Mexico’s Savia Ventures, Chile’s Fen Ventures, Argentina’s Draper Cygnus, and
Spain’s Draper B1.
Marketing Smarts
The Chilean startup claims attaining significant milestones, including the development of proprietary technology for AI deployment across assets in an electric grid. Its technology can wring out significant savings — create “artificial energy,” as the company terms it — by easing congestion on grids. Splight also pushes clean energy, cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
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Spacecadet has sought to focus on marketing, saying it is these smarts that can be a key differentiator to a startup’s fortune. Besides investing in early-stage companies, the firm has also been hired by other venture firms to bring its marketing mojo to select portfolio companies. Besides being an entrepreneur, Eckler has consulted with companies like Coca Cola, Facebook, Netflix, Nike, Spotify and TikTok.
“Companies in their earliest stages, especially the ones we like to invest in, they’re looking at things that are like, at the edge of impossible,” Eckler, who previously co-founded three startups, told BetaKit in an interview. “These are big, crazy ideas, moonshots, things that make it really difficult—especially if you’re a founder that doesn’t have a specialty in marketing or story—to tell a really good story around that.”
“In our first 37 companies, we had a lot of great success,” said Abdulla, who previously co-founded two HR-tech startups — Hazel and Rise People. “We had 14 markups and we front-ran [sic] Andreessen, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, GGV, [and] Accel.”
