# David King

> David King is a seed investor at Highlighter (Atlanta) backing Internet and Mobile. See 14 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [Highlighter](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/highlighter)
- Location: Atlanta, United States
- Total investments: 14
- Last investment: Dec 2024
- Lead investor: 0%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-king/0/772/1ba
- X (Twitter): http://twitter.com/deekay
- Website: https://x.com/dksf

David King is a Founder of Highlighter. He attended University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for Computer Engineering.

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Seed | $1.2M–$4M |
| Series A | $10M–$14M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Internet | 5 | 36% |
| Mobile | 4 | 29% |
| Financial Services | 4 | 29% |
| Software | 3 | 21% |
| Blockchain | 3 | 21% |

34 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 9 | 64% |
| Series A | 4 | 29% |
| Funding Round | 1 | 7% |

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 12 | 86% |
| France | 1 | 7% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Lava | Lava is a Bitcoin lending platform. | $10M | Series A | Dec 09, 2024 |  |
| DIRT Protocol | DIRT is a protocol for decentralized information curation that uses token staking to incentivize honesty. DIRT is not a Token Curated Registry (TCR). DIRT is a protocol to build TCRs. Similar to Wikipedia, DIRT allows anyone to contribute information. DIRT maintains accuracy at scale because every contributor needs to deposit tokens to writedata. If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts. Their protocol and platform makes it economically irrational for misinformation to persist in a data set. | $3M | Seed | Jul 11, 2018 |  |
| Manufactured | Manufactured is a product sourcing platform that provides access for entrepreneurs to manufacturing companies to find the perfect product and help build and operate digital manufacturing supply chains. | $2M | Seed | Jun 10, 2018 |  |
| TruStory | TruStory is a social network that enables productive debate. To make progress on any issue, we need to learn from different perspectives, find common ground, and have the humility to change our minds. Our mission is to make the Internet more open-minded by incentivizing people to hear all sides of a debate. | $3M | Seed | May 23, 2018 |  |
| dYdX | dYdX is a leading decentralized exchange built by developers on a mission to build open, secure, and powerful financial products. dYdX runs on audited smart contracts on Ethereum, which eliminates the need to trust a central exchange while trading. We combine the security and transparency of a decentralized exchange, with the speed and usability ofa centralized exchange.Founded back in 2017 from ex-Coinbase and Uber engineer, Antonio Juliano, dYdX is a leading decentralized exchange offering Perpetual, Margin, & Spot trading, as well as borrow / lend pools on Ethereum. Users can earn interest or take loans for a nominal fee as well as trade on margin with custom leverage.Trade your crypto, the safe and secure way, with dYdX | $2M | Seed | Dec 19, 2017 |  |
| Bitwise | Bitwise is a crypto-specialist asset manager for individuals, investment managers, and institutions navigating cryptocurrency. The company offers a suite of 32 investment solutions, including yield and alpha strategies, multi-strategy solutions, separately managed accounts, onchain staking, index funds, bitcoin ETPs, and more. By serving as aspecialist partner, it enables clients to access the opportunities that meet their objectives. | $4M | Seed | Dec 12, 2017 |  |
| Juvo | Juvo was founded with an overarching vision: to establish financial identities for the billions of people worldwide who are creditworthy, yet financially excluded. In partnership with mobile network operators, Juvo’s proprietary Identity Scoring technology uses data science, machine learning and game mechanics to create an identity-basedrelationship with anonymous prepaid users, opening up access to otherwise unattainable mobile financial services. Juvo is a privately held company backed by global business leaders and luminaries in the world of tech, mobile and finance. Its executive team comprises accomplished industry leaders across the data science, consumer internet, financial services and mobile telecom fields. | $14M | Series A | Sep 09, 2016 |  |
| Penny | Penny is a personal finance app that helps you track your income and spending. Penny accesses your statement history—with your permission—and uses that information to help you manage your finances. Whenever you open the app, she’ll chat with you about your finances: letting you know how you’re doing this month, forecasting where you’ll be nextmonth, giving you a heads up about upcoming bills, or even helping you cancel services you don’t use.Penny makes finances less intimidating and stressful. Many apps have lots of useful features, but they’re often hard to use and time-consuming. Penny automatically organizes your finances, explains them simply and clearly, and tells you what you need to know, when you need to know it. | $1.2M | Seed | May 23, 2016 |  |
| Triplebyte | Triplebyte is a recruiting and technical screening platform for tech companies. They believe the current technical hiring process doesn't do enough to help engineers show their strengths. They're dedicated to building a better process. You can read more about their views on hiring in their manifesto. | $3M |  | Sep 28, 2015 |  |
| Triplebyte | Triplebyte is a recruiting and technical screening platform for tech companies. They believe the current technical hiring process doesn't do enough to help engineers show their strengths. They're dedicated to building a better process. You can read more about their views on hiring in their manifesto. | $3M | Seed | Sep 28, 2015 |  |

10 of 14 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Caffeinated Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/caffeinated-capital) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [SV Angel](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/sv-angel) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [Initialized Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/initialized-capital) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Khosla Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/khosla-ventures) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Abstract](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/a-list-ventures) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [Collaborative Fund](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/collaborative-fund) — VC Fund, 2 deals together

## About Highlighter

VC Fund · Seattle, United States

Highlighter aims to dramatically reduce the cost of textbooks while dramatically increasing student engagement on any online content. Highlighter's HTML5 reader allows professors/teachers to publish PDF and ePUB documents for free, accessible on any device, with unprecedented engagement by highlighting, annotating, commenting, sharing andsaving over snippets of text.

4 contacts available at Highlighter.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| David King | Founder | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/david-king-5 |
| John Holdcroft | VP of BizDev | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/john-holdcroft |
| Matt Blancarte | Co-Founder | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/matt-blancarte |
| Nate Whitehill | Co-Founder | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/nate-whitehill |

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## FAQ

### What does David King invest in?

David King invests primarily in Internet, Mobile and Financial Services startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 14 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### What is David King's check size?

David King typically joins rounds of $1.2M–$4M at Seed and $10M–$14M at Series A. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds David King participates in.

### When did David King last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for David King closed in Dec 2024. Shizune tracks 14 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.

### Is Shizune's investor data accurate?

Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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