Legal-tech funding hits $999 million in 2025, despite a global venture slowdown.
Investors are drawn to legal tech's digital transformation amid AI advancements.
Specialized legal-tech tools targeting niche markets are expected to drive future growth.
It's a legal-tech boom, and investors are making their closing arguments in cash.
Funding to companies in the legal and legal-tech industries has tipped $999 million so far this year, new Crunchbase data provided to Business Insider shows. Investment rose to just over $2 billion in 2024, a record haul for the category.
In contrast, the global venture market has slowed over the prospect of tariffs and falling stocks, with April posting one of the lowest funding totals of the past year, according to Crunchbase data.
"In a VC market that's really sleepy for the rest of the world," said Zach Posner, cofounder and managing partner of The Legal Tech Fund, "this has been as hot as you can humanly imagine."
Posner said he's seen scores of traditional software investors poking around legal-tech deals, eager to claim a piece of the legal industry's digital transformation.
In April, Sapphire Ventures led a $60 million round for Supio, a software platform for law firms in personal injury and mass tort. Meanwhile, Bessemer, Masha Bucher's Day One Ventures, and others went in together on a seed round for Marveri, which says it's creating faster and more accurate corporate diligence. Theo Ai, a startup using artificial intelligence to predict case outcomes, tells BI it closed a $4 million seed round this month.
The first-rate investors on their cap tables show the extent to which venture capitalists are warming to legal tech.
Not long ago, selling software to law firms looked like a losing battle for startups. Lawyers worked mostly out of documents that were hard for software to read. They stored those files on physical servers on location for higher security and control over their data.
Then came ChatGPT.
"It was the best demo that has ever existed in the history of software, the internet, et cetera," said Posner, "and that's why it took 60 days to reach a hundred million users when it took Facebook five years. And I think that happened from that point forward is every attorney said, 'Wow, I could see how this could transform us.'"
A short while later, Goldman Sachs dropped a report that said artificial intelligence could automate up to 44% of legal tasks. This forecast "was a shot in the arm to Silicon Valley," Posner said.
Legal tech used to be built by former lawyers solving problems they knew. It became a hotbed for talent, said Posner, attracting engineers eager to apply machine learning to legal work.
Meanwhile, clients started knocking on the doors of law firms, asking how they were using the tech. They'd seen how AI was transforming operations inside their own companies, and they wanted assurance they were getting the best service, at the best rate, from their outside counsel. That pressure has pushed law firms to try to buy more advanced software, providing early and crucial revenue to legal-tech startups.
But with the surge in funding has come a surge in sameness: startups built on slightly different combinations of the same foundation models, chasing the same broad promises. The technical moat is razor-thin, if it exists at all.
The next phase of the boom, said Posner, will reward those who go deeper.
Posner said he's most excited by startups building highly specialized tools aimed at narrow legal use cases. "The moats are all the way down," Posner said, referring to startups tackling precise pain points like commercial real estate lease review or contract drafting for niche industries.
While Microsoft is already deeply embedded in how lawyers work, it's largely stayed horizontal, leaving room for vertical-specific players to thrive. Some startups have even built nine-figure businesses by selling what are essentially souped-up Word plug-ins.
"The only thing that can be good right now," Posner said, "is vertical-specific tech that goes deep β tools that say, 'This is for residential real estate leases, we've seen it all, and we're 100% accurate.'"
Rudina Seseri can spot an "AI-native" company from a mile away.
Before ChatGPT sounded the starting gun on the artificial intelligence revolution, Seseri, the cofounder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, was already writing the first checks to machine-learning startups, arguing that data-hungry algorithms would define the next era of software.
In the current hype cycle, every tech startup is dedicating resources to AI. But that doesn't mean the algorithms are doing the heavy lifting everywhere. Some teams grab an off-the-shelf model, wedge it into an otherwise ordinary software stack, and call it innovation.
AI-native companies follow a fundamentally different blueprint. Their core architecture is designed around machine intelligence from day one.
Founders say that Seseri on a cap table has become code for "the real deal."
"Partnering with Glasswing instantly signals credibility," Philippe Rival, whose risk management platform Enlaye received an investment from the firm, said. "Everyone knows that if Glasswing is involved, it's a real AI-native company."
Seseri has spent the better part of two decades investing and operating at the high-tech frontier. Before venture capital, Seseri was a senior manager in corporate development at Microsoft, where she led several acquisitions.
She's backed fast-rising enterprise-tech plays, including in Reprise, whose interactive demo platform drew a $62 million Series B in 2022; Verusen, a materials intelligence suite that raised $25 million that same year; and Basetwo, which blends physics with AI to tune drug- and chemical-production lines and secured an $11 million Series A this January.
Since 2018, the firm's assets have swelled to over $270 million across two funds. It's going back out for more; an SEC filing shows that Glasswing plans to raise a third fund. Seseri declined to comment on the fundraise.
Seseri has stayed ahead of the curve by being the first to identify founders poised to disrupt enterprises from logistics to Big Pharma. Glasswing said last year that it was the first institutional investor in allof its portfolio companies.
Founders have no shortage of investors to choose from. Seseri said that when a founder has multiple term sheets, she wins deals because of her expertise.
"She is on the bleeding edge of everything with AI," Scott Matthews, the CEO of Verusen, said. Its cloud platform uses advanced data science and AI to clean, unify, and analyze the messy materials data in many manufacturers' enterprise systems.
Fifteen years ago, Seseri was leading deals as a software investor at Fairhaven Capital, an early entrant in Boston's venture scene. One day, she waved Rick Grinnell, her mentor and one of the firm's founders, over to her desk.
She had noticed something new about the companies she was meeting. With the increased availability of big data and ever-more powerful compute, founders were applying deep learning to tackle complex problems for businesses.
"There's something happening and it's not big data," Seseri told Grinnell. "I'm telling you something has changed."
He nudged Seseri to dig deeper.
In 2016, Seseri and Grinnell left Fairhaven to start Glasswing, centered on what she called a "seismic shift" in technology. Forty percent of Fairhaven's limited partners signed on to back their initial fund. In 2022, the firm closed its second, slightly larger fund with $158 million.
Perched on Newbury Street in Boston, Glasswing's offices function as a second home for its founders. Matthews and Verusen's founder, Paul Noble, recently sat with Seseri for two hours in a glass conference room, contemplating the company's architecture and future.
Seseri is in the office five days a week. She spends hours on the phone, working her network to help founders hire, raise a round, or close a customer. That support often arrives before Glasswing even issues a term sheet.
Seseri's track record puts her on speed dial for founders building at the frontier.
"But at the end of the day," Seseri said, "we win deals because of how our founders support us and what they share with other founders."
Three-year-old startup Harvey helped wake up the legal world to what AI could do for lawyers.
Now, it's fighting to defend the turf it helped create.
To keep its edge, Harvey just hired a Stripe veteran and is doubling down on product customization.
Legal tech was long a space that investors ignored. Then came Harvey.
In just three years, the company, which builds software for analyzing and drafting documents using legally tuned large language models, has drawn blue-chip law firms, Silicon Valley investors, and a stampede of rivals hoping to catch its momentum. Harvey has raised over half a billion dollars in capital, sending its valuation soaring to $3 billion.
On a recent Monday afternoon at Harvey's Manhattan office, I met cofounder and chief executive Winston Weinberg in a polished conference room named for Atticus Finch, a beloved character from the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird." I mentioned that since I started covering legal tech a month ago, my inbox has been flooded with pitches from legal-tech startups eager to explain how they're not Harvey.
Weinberg let out a soft chuckle. "I'll take that as a compliment, I guess."
In recent years, more competition has been encroaching on Harvey's territory, and fast. Hebbia, a knowledge-search platform, has made a more focused push into the legal sector, and Legora, which offers an AI-powered workspace where lawyers can draft, edit, and collaborate, is gaining traction with Harvey's core clientele of Big Law firms.
While legal tech was once the domain of ex-lawyers building tools for their peers, now it's attracting classically trained software engineers, eager to compete in a space without a staid market leader.
Harvey may have cracked the market open, but now it faces the classic innovator's dilemma: the very proof of concept it offered to the legal world is fueling a growing list of competitors.
The legal-tech land grab is on. The question is whether Harvey can maintain its first-mover advantage, or if it's simply cleared the path for the next breakout.
Want in? Get in line.
Part of what fueled Harvey's ascent is its go-to-market strategy. Early on, the company bet that winning over the country's most elite law firms would create a ripple effect across the industry.
It gated access to the product using a waitlist, allowing it to tightly tailor the tool to pilot users.
So far, its Big Law wager appears to be paying off. Weinberg said lawyers at eight of the 10 highest-grossing firms in the nation are now using Harvey.
The company tells Business Insider it crossed $70 million in annual recurring revenue last quarter, putting it on pace to smash its goal of $100 million ARR for the year.
"Once a subset of the market standardizes on a solution, it's kind of the solution," said Ilya Fushman, a venture capitalist who led Kleiner Perkins' investment in Harvey in 2023.
Leaning forward in a high-back, caramel-colored leather chair, Weinberg seemed unfazed by the growing competition.
Harvey's edge, he argued, lies in two places its rivals can't easily replicate: top-tier talent and a product strategy built on deep collaboration with its customers.
Harvey employees work during a product meeting.
Harvey
The 260-person startup has lured dozens of trained lawyers off the gilded path to Big Law partnership, offering stock options and a shot at shaping the future of legal practice.
To keep its edge, Harvey just made a key hire. Stripe veteran John Haddock has joined as chief business officer after a decade scaling one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched startups.
Haddock told BI he spoke to dozens of Harvey customers before accepting an offer. His decision boiled down to their love of the product. He called it Weinberg's "No. 1 maniacal focus."
"The best thing we can do is stay focused on: are we building stuff that lawyers really need and need every day?" he said. "Everything else takes care of itself."
Harvey goes multi-model
Harvey has been fighting the competition with one hand tied behind its back. Since its founding, the company has partnered closely with OpenAI to build custom models for lawyers. Its entire product ran on OpenAI's models.
It's a limitation that Harvey's rivals have been quick to point out. They argue their products are superior because they can cherry-pick from the best of Anthropic, Meta, or Google, depending on the task.
Now, Harvey wants to neutralize that criticism. The company tells BI it's going multi-model, starting with Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini.
Weinberg said Harvey didn't avoid other models out of loyalty to OpenAI, but necessity. Until recently, most major law firms would only approve AI tools that ran through Microsoft Azure, which meant models like Claude and Gemini couldn't clear security reviews.
Those constraints are falling away as vendors like Anthropic build the features enterprises demand and gain clout.
The move may also suggest Harvey is adapting to a clientele that's perhaps more opinionated about which models power their tools, especially as rivals pitch flexibility as a selling point.
Harvey's secret sauce
In a market where model performance offers marginal gains, Harvey is betting that its true edge lies in how deeply the product molds to the client.
"What I think is closer to a traditional moat," Weinberg said, "is we are very focused on customization, massively."
Omar Puertas Alvarez, a partner at Cuatrecasas, a global law firm, gives live feedback during a "customer field trip" at Harvey's San Francisco office.
Harvey
The company partners directly with firms to build bespoke legal workflow software. With A&O Shearman, for example, Harvey helped develop a merger control tool that taps the firm's global antitrust bench. For another client focused on private equity, the company built out deal-specific workflows.
Lawyers across those firms are using the tools, and the firms are selling that customized software to clients and other law firms, sharing a cut of the revenue with Harvey.
If customization is the moat, the obvious question becomes: how does it scale? One investor in a Harvey competitor asked at what point the company becomes overrun with service requests and support tickets.
The company's bet is that it can turn workflows from custom projects into reusable building blocks β a sort of Lego kit it can adapt for each new client.
It's a bold strategy, but in a crowded field, Weinberg believes that winning won't come from better answers. It'll come from building a system that grows with the people asking the questions.
"At the end of the day," he said, "what you want to do is build a solution that tracks the evolution of law over time."
Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01.
Courtesy of Ann Miura-Ko, Enke Bashllari, Anne Dwane, Karin Klein, Varsha Rao, Ava Horton/BI
Early-stage investors take some of the biggest β and boldest β swings in venture capital.
Our Seed 40 list, in its fifth year, spotlights the women who have done exactly that: find breakout talent early, and work alongside these founders to shape the future of tech. This year's honorees have placed bets across some of 2025's hottest verticals, from AI to health tech.
Perhaps it's no surprise that these investors are drawn to founders with similar characteristics. Mathilde Collin, one of the new members on this year's Seed 40 and Seed 100, told Business Insider she seeks out "a delicate balance between humility, self-awareness, and self-confidence." "Enough self-confidence to inspire people to be on the journey with them, enough humility to get people to help them, enough self-awareness to work on themselves," she added.
Rippy says that when the world is chaotic, startups are the most nimble, which is why she's excited for this year.
"The pattern of 2025 so far is highly talented teams tackling big opportunities," she told BI.
Based in Boston, Rippy has built a large network of school-related founders and investors. She runs two school-centric funds, Green D at Dartmouth College and Yard Ventures at Harvard, and she's also the managing partner of Alumni Ventures, one of the most active VC firms in the world. Alumni brings VC investing to individual investors' portfolios and manages more than 650,000 members.
Prior to joining Alumni Ventures in 2017, Rippy spent 14 years at the private family office Ripplecreek Partners.
Gandhi's track record shows she gets results for limited partners. In under a decade, the solo capitalist has returned her first $7 million fund at a fivefold multiple, with more companies still waiting to exit. A stream of acquisitions has sped along those distributions, including Simility, a fraud-detection company which sold to PayPal in 2018, just two years after Gandhi invested.
As a one-time startup founder, Gandhi decided to raise a fund in 2016 because she saw a need for more investors who rolled up their sleeves at the seed stage. Her fund, Array Ventures, helps technical founders close early sales and develop their go-to-market sales strategy.
For a career investor like Dwane, AI has represented a generational shift, which is creating an exciting time to evaluate startups and founders for new investment opportunities.
"The last year has been like no other," she told BI. "AI's impact is just beginning to show up in legacy industries, where the gap between what's possible and what exists remains wide."
Dwane added that the industry is also experiencing a revolution when it comes to software development, which she said will allow more people to build companies.
Across Village Global's three funds, Dwane's deals have a cumulative holding value of more than $16 billion. Before Village Global, Dwane cofounded the veteran-focused news site Military.com and later served as the CEO of Zinch, a university-recruitment startup acquired by the edtech company Chegg in 2011.
Demirors has had a busy year launching her new firm, Crucible Capital, which invests in energy, compute, and crypto startups. Crucible ended 2024 with $36 million in committed capital from a $50 million target fund and is now oversubscribed, Demirors told BI. The firm also recently made its third investing hire.
For Demirors, Crucible Capital is the natural extension of her long career as an investor outside the traditional venture capital space. Rather than spinning out of a VC fund, she built investment firms and asset managers in crypto while she was angel investing. Prior to launching Crucible, Demirors was the chief strategy officer at the digital-asset investment company CoinShares.
At Crucible, her LPs are mostly builders, operators, and investors, rather than institutional investors or funds of funds.
"I feel like Crucible is a bit of an anomaly and it can be challenging considering how clubby venture can be sometimes," she said.
5. Mathilde Collin
Mathilde Collin of Front
Mathilde Collin, Courtesy of Front
Cofounder and executive chairperson, Front
Notable Investments: Retool, Mercury, Vanta, Copilot, Meter, Browser Use
City: San Francisco
Colllin cofounded Front, a customer service platform startup, in 2013 after working as a project manager at another startup. She served as Front's CEO until October and is now its executive chairperson. Collin also angel invests in a variety of companies, which include the fintech banking startup Mercury and the tool-building platform Retool.
In founders, Collin looks for "a delicate balance between humility, self awareness and self confidence," she told BI. "Enough self confidence to inspire people to be on the journey with them, enough humility to get people to help them, enough self awareness to work on themselves."
DeWitt has spent her career helping companies build new transformative biotechnologies. She began in VC at the Massachusetts life sciences firm Flagship Pioneering, then moved to Sanofi, where she guided the pharma giant's investments.
She joined The Engine, an MIT spinout, in 2018, two years after its launch. First as The Engine's chief operating officer, then as a general partner, she supported the startup incubator and accelerator's work with "tough tech" companies, offering an array of resources from lab space to capital for startups building in areas like climate and human health.
In 2023, DeWitt stayed on the investing side of the business when The Engine split its startup support operations from its venture arm. She highlighted Engine Ventures' investment in Cellino, which announced in February plans to open a stem cell manufacturing facility on-site at Massachusetts General Hospital in partnership with the top health system Mass General Brigham's Gene and Cell Therapy Institute.
7. Caterina Fake
Caterina Fake is a top seed investor.
Courtesy
Founder, Yes VC
Notable investments: Career Karma, Outschool, Public Goods, Jow, Running Tide
City: San Francisco
Fake is a serial entrepreneur, cofounding the photo-sharing service Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. She makes investments through Yes VC, her firm that invests in climate, AI, health and longevity, energy, and defense companies. She's backed Etsy, Cloudera, Oura, and Adept.
She was also named to the VC firm Trac's list of "SuperForecasters," or people the firm considers "extraordinary" pre-seed and seed VCs. Fake has said that this ability to spot future unicorn companies, "plus strong networks and access, is an absolute requirement for angels and VCs."
8. Trish Costello
Trish Costello, founder and CEO of Portfolia
Trish Costello
Founder and CEO, Portfolia
Notable investments: YourChoice, Bone Health Technologies, Canela Media, Eden GeoPower, Prime Roots, Lighthouse Pharma
City: San Mateo, California
Costello founded the venture fund Portfolia in 2014. The fund taps women investors to lead venture capital deals in areas such as women's health, sustainability, active aging and longevity, and startups led by founders of color. Before that, Costello was part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem for more than two decades with her work as the cofounder of the Kauffman Fellows program, an education and leadership program for venture capitalists.
Costello told BI that while many venture firms slowed their investing pace last year because of market conditions, Portfolia closed 27 investments, adding to its more than 100 investments in the past five years. "Over the past year, we determined that the smartest trend was to stay consistent and disciplined and keep putting our money to work," she said.
9. Julia Hartz
Julia Hartz of Eventbrite
Stefan Wieland
Cofounder and CEO, Eventbrite
Notable investments: Doppler, Mmhmm, Nooks, Oliver Space, Socket
City: San Francisco
Hartz is the animating spirit behind Eventbrite's mission to create a closer world through live experiences. She's also an ardent supporter of early-stage companies.
Her angel investing portfolio includes Socket, a startup focused on helping companies secure open-source software, and Nooks, which is developing a fully autonomous sales assistant.
Before Eventbrite, Hartz helped develop television shows for MTV Networks and FX Networks.
For a seasoned consumer investor like Green, a visionary founder is only part of the equation β when she's evaluating a potential startup investment, she's also looking for which business models are going to make for knockout consumer experiences.
"The strongest businesses don't just have a great product or compelling branding β they are structurally designed to scale in a way that enhances the customer journey, accelerates inevitable behavior shifts, and creates self-reinforcing business advantages over time," Green told BI.
Green founded Forerunner in 2012 and has spent more than a decade investing in early-stage consumer companies such as the fintech Chime, the vision juggernaut Warby Parker, and the healthtech company Hims & Hers.
11. Varsha Rao
Varsha Rao
Varsha Rao
CEO, Zeal AI
Notable investments: Athelas, Grow Therapy, Sanas AI, New Lantern, Observo AI, Candid Health
City: San Francisco
Rao's Zeal AI, an AI-powered restaurant scheduling platform that launched in November, is her latest venture in a storied career at consumer-focused companies. She first founded and co-led the e-commerce beauty site Eve.com, which Idealab acquired in early 2000 for $110 million. She's held leadership roles at Airbnb, Gap's Old Navy, and LivingSocial, which was acquired by its rival Groupon. Before Zeal, she was the CEO of the reproductive health platform Nurx, which merged with the telehealth company Thirty Madison in 2022.
She's also an executive partner at the healthcare-focused VC firm Flare Capital Partners, primarily advising new and existing investments. She's using her experiences as a founder and an investor to keep Zeal AI lean and focused on driving meaningful consumer growth, even amid market volatility. "Now is a really awesome time to build if you can manage your burn because there is going to be less competition," she said.
It's been over a decade since Lee coined the term "unicorn," the once-rare feat for startups worth over $1 billion. She left Kleiner Perkins in 2012 to start her own firm, Cowboy Ventures, to invest in pre-seed to later-stage startups. Since then, a few of Lee's notable exits include Dollar Shave Club, which sold to Unilever for $1 billion in 2019, and Trendyol, which Alibaba acquired for almost $750 million in 2018.
Lee told BI that she loves meeting founders who are "learning animals" and have a keen desire to build relationships, absorb information, and grow quickly.
"We don't require product market fit or even a fully built product to want to invest in a team. We look for a unique insight into an underestimated category, and also pedigree, or a vision, for a way better solution to an existing huge problem," she said.
Wong founded Highbury Group in 2013. She invests in science-driven startups, though she has backed some major SaaS players, such as Slack, as well.
Her technical background helps her assess some of the most technical startups. Wong got her masters and a doctorate in applied sciences, bioengineering, entrepreneurship, and global health from Harvard University and bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering and biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Deshpande has been building Maven Ventures alongside its CEO, Jim Scheinman, since 2014. At Maven, she makes seed investments in companies capitalizing on emerging consumer trends, from areas like fertility care (Carrot Fertility) to sustainable seafood (Wildtype). She said she's known for her "tough love" approach with founders. "I try to be the most honest voice they can have about the risks and opportunities related to the company they're pursuing," she said.
Deshpande is also a board observer at Daybreak Health and Medeloop. Beyond her day job at Maven, she helps teach a course at Stanford Graduate School of Business called Startup Garage, where students devise and stress-test new business ideas. In fact, she invested in Medeloop after its founder got the idea for the AI-powered medical research platform based on Deshpande's advice during the course.
Wilkinson invests in companies working to change how we work. That focus paid off big time during the pandemic as companies moved dramatically toward digital channels. To date, she's invested in over 100 companies and deployed more than $70 million in capital.
One of Wilkinson's portfolio crown jewels is Placer.ai, a startup that turns location data into market research for companies. Last year it crossed $100 million in annualized revenue.
16. Elizabeth Weil
Elizabeth Weil of Scribble Ventures
Elizabeth Weil
Founder and managing partner, Scribble Ventures
Notable Investments: Whatnot, Stoke Space, Omni, Certn, Lemi, Streamline AI
City: San Francisco
A former Twitter exec and partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Weil cofounded Scribble Ventures in 2020. But she's been investing for well over a decade, making over 100 angel investments across all stages, including in Slack, SpaceX, Figma, Coinbase, Superplastic, Gusto, Tipalti, Envoy, Daily, and Carta. At Scribble, Weil invests in pre-seed and seed rounds and will write initial checks of up to $1.5 million.
The rocket developer Stoke Space, one of Scribble's early investments, is preparing its initial launch plans at Cape Canaveral in Florida after being awarded the launchpad space by the US Space Force. The startup also just announced a $260 million Series C round in January, with the launch site to be ready by the end of the year. "We dig in with our founders on product, hiring, and go-to-market because these are the two most precarious β and pivotal β elements of early-stage success," Weil said.
17. Juliana Garaizar
Juliana Garaizar of Porfolia and ClimaTech Global Ventures
Juliana Garaizar
Venture partner, Porfolia and ClimaTech Global Ventures
Garaizar invests with ClimaTech Global Ventures, a firm that invests in early-stage, cross-border startups using AI in the climate tech space. She's also a partner at Portfolia, a firm based in San Mateo, California. Previously, Garaizar was the chief development and investment officer at Greentown Labs, a climatetech startup incubator. One of her investments, Cemvita Factory, is a biotechnology startup that converts carbon dioxide into compounds to make products like oil.
When asked about the future of her portfolio, Garaizar was enthusiastic about its opportunities for overseas expansion: "I am very excited about the international expansion of my portfolio companies such as Cemvita Factory in Brazil, Canela Media in Latin America and Spain, and Kauel in Europe," Garaizar told BI.
Seseri and her firm, Glasswing Ventures, know how to cut through the hype and find companies designed with artificial intelligence at its core, not as an afterthought. She leads the firm's investments in startups harnessing this tech to drive measurable value and enterprise growth.
She also sits on boards including Basetwo, a low-code platform for manufacturing engineers, and Reprise, an Iconiq Growth-backed startup that helps companies create software demos.
Seseri spent her early career at Credit Suisse and Microsoft, where she was a senior manager in corporate development and led several successful acquisitions.
19. Enke Bashllari
Enke Bashllari
Enke Bashllari
Founder and managing director, Arkitekt Ventures
Notable investments: Mural Health, CertifyOS, Paradromics, Nanite, Cofertility, Handspring Health
City: New York
Bashllari launched Arkitekt Ventures in 2017 to back early-stage startups advancing human health. A neuroscientist by training, she's invested in dozens of startups across healthcare and biotech, from the egg donation startup Cofertility to the gene delivery company Nanite to the brain implant maker Paradromics. She's an advisor for Harvard Business School's dual MBA and Master of Science life sciences program, having received multiple degrees herself β an MBA from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
She said evaluating founder-market fit is particularly critical in life sciences investments. "These legacy industries have deeply entrenched structures and complexities β it's crucial for founders to truly understand the nuances of the space, the market dynamics, and stakeholder incentives to successfully build and scale their company," she said.
20. Lan Xuezhao
Lan Xuezhao
Lan Xuezhao
Founder and managing partner, Basis Set
Notable investments: Quince, Sakana, Workstream, Ergeon, Rasa
City: San Francisco
Xuezhao studied the human mind for her doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. Little did she know that studying psychology would be useful for investing in AI, which is programmed to mimic how a human brain works.
Xuezhao is something of a sage when it comes to AI investing. When she started her firm, Basis Set Ventures, in 2017, few other venture capitalists focused on the field. She's among the early investors in startups including Quince, Sakana and Workstream. Before getting into venture capital, Xuezhao built out the corporate development strategy team at Dropbox, using her years of experience at McKinsey helping tech companies with their growth strategies.
Miura-Ko, who has a Ph.D. from Stanford and is a lecturer there, has been dubbed "one of the most powerful women in startups." As the cofounding partner of the seed-stage VC firm Floodgate, Miura-Ko and the firm made early bets on Lyft, Twitter, Twitch, and Okta. Her passion for technology started when she was a child, inspired by her father's work as a rocket scientist at NASA, and continued during her studies at Yale, where she took part in robotics competitions around the world.
Her recent early investments are gaining traction. In the past year, the AI document search startup Hebbia has raised $130 million in a funding round led by A16z. As for what Miura-Ko is interested in investing in, she told BI: "We're excited about founders that are willing to look beyond immediate efficiency gains and instead envision entirely new ways of working, collaborating, and creating value through AI."
Lefcourt is a two-time founder (WeddingChannel.com and Bella Pictures) and a partner at Freestyle, an early-stage venture firm that's sector agnostic and leads seed rounds with funding between $2 million and $4 million.
As one of the few women to ascend to the highest ranks of venture capital, she cofounded All Raise, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity in tech.
In the past year, she invested in Payman, which enables AI agents to move money safely, and Keebler Health, which specializes in AI-driven solutions for healthcare providers.
"Given how quickly AI is evolving, I look for founders who are constantly learning and can react fast to harness AI for maximum impact," Lefcourt told BI.
23. Yun-Fang Juan
Brighter Capital general partner Yun-Fang Juan.
Yun-Fang Juan
General partner, Brighter Capital
Notable investments: Creatify, Little Otter, Expo, Chowdeck, Reddit
City: Cupertino, California
Juan was one of the first 150 employees at Facebook, where she co-created Facebook Ads. She then worked at several startups, including Khan Academy, before she took the ultimate entrepreneurial plunge and founded Fundastic, which looked to provide small businesses with information on funding options.
Juan previously told BI that even though Nav bought her company in 2015, the windfall wasn't massive, and she considered it a failure. But she said she gained valuable perspective from the experience that had helped her guide other startup founders as an investor.
Juan said she really admired what the AI startup Perplexity was doing and wished she were an investor. "I am basically looking for founders who are like the Perplexity team, and I will just give them the money and have them figure things out," she said.
24. April Underwood
April Underwood
April Underwood
Managing director and cofounder, Adverb Ventures
Notable investments: Particle, Untold, Shotsy
Location: San Francisco
Underwood is the embodiment of a builder VC, having held product, partnership, and engineering roles at Slack, Twitter, Google, and Intel. While at Twitter, Underwood started investing in startups through #Angels and personally backed companies like Color, Cue Health, and Carta. She also sits on the boards of Zillow Group and Eventbrite.
In 2023, Underwood teamed up with her fellow Twitter alum Jessica Verrilli to form Adverb Ventures, a $75 million fund focused on early-stage investments. One of Adverb's recent investments, Shotsy, a GLP-1 companion app, breezed past $1 million in subscription revenue in under nine months on the market, Underwood said. As for what she looks for in a founder, Underwood said: "Founders who roll up their sleeves and just start building before waiting for permission get me excited."
25. Leah Solivan
Leah Solivan, General Partner, Fuel Capital & Founder, TaskRabbit
Solivan founded TaskRabbit in 2008 and was CEO of the online marketplace for freelance laborers for nearly eight years before it was acquired by Ikea in 2017. That year, she joined Fuel Capital, where she has helped fund Pacaso, a vacation coownership company, and Upwards, formerly known as Weecare, one of the largest childcare networks in the US.
"I look for founders who are obsessed with solving a specific problem because he or she has a personal connection to it," Solivan told BI. "We call it founder-market fit."
26. Emily Kirsch
Emily Kirsch of Powerhouse
Emily Kirsch
Founder and CEO, Powerhouse
Notable Investments: Amperon, Pearl Street Technologies, Terabase, Presto, ThinkLabs, Tyba
City: Oakland, California
Kirsch has been interested in climate policy for nearly two decades. She began her career working for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, where she worked with local California businesses on the state's Energy and Climate Action Plan. In 2018, she founded Powerhouse Ventures, which works with global corporations such as Google and The Rockefeller Foundation to back climate-focused, seed-stage startups working on decarbonization efforts.
In 2019, she was elected a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and began serving on the advisory board for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which supports the development of clean tech innovation and programming in New York.
When assessing founders, Kirsch opts for those with strong technical prowess and a differentiated approach to a major bottleneck. Her biggest win so far in 2025 has been the energy SaaS company Enverus' acquisition of the automation interconnection solutions company Pearl Street Technologies, Kirsh told BI. "Their CEO David embodies exactly the kind of founder we love to back β understated, brilliant, and deeply technical."
Cadena is an engineer turned investor. She studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began her career at Boeing, eventually leading a team that coordinated support for 400 mechanics on one of the first 787 airplanes. At Supply Change Capital, Cadena invests in environment, health, and diversity-focused startups, according to its website.
"This is a critical time to invest in technology across the food supply chain as a driver for health, consumer preference and efficiency," Cadena told BI. "Food safety, nutrition, and cost of goods are top of mind for all stakeholders and Supply Change Capital invests in infrastructure technologies to improve the flow of data and goods."
Zhang has spent the past decade building the biotech startup Verge Genomics to use AI for better, faster drug discovery. Since then, Verge has raised $180 million from top firms including BlackRock, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, and Y Combinator. The startup also notched a deal with the pharma giant Eli Lilly in 2021 to develop drugs for the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
As an angel investor, she's backed the immunotherapy-focused biotech startup Asher Bio, which raised a $55 million Series C in April 2024, and the biopharma robotics startup Multiply Labs, which notched an $85 million contract with the Sam Altman-backed Retro Biosciences in May 2024.
29. Lu Zhang
Lu Zhang of Fusion Fund
Lu Zhang
Founder and managing partner, Fusion Fund
Notable Investments: Otter.ai, Proscia, Subtle Medical, You.com, Vectara, Lepton AI
City: Palo Alto, California
Zhang's Fusion Fund, which invests in healthcare and enterprise AI startups, celebrated its 10th anniversary this year and closed a $190 million fund, roughly $40 million oversubscribed, bringing its total assets under management to more than $500 million. "It's a key milestone that reflects our decadelong commitment to backing technical founders building transformational companies," Zhang told BI.
Zhang sold her healthcare startup, Acetone, which made medical devices for testing type 2 diabetes, and founded Fusion Fund by the age of 25. In 10 years, Fusion Fund has invested in at least five unicorns, such as the food tech startup GrubMarket and the DNA analysis company Element Biosciences, as well as cutting-edge AI startups including You.com and Otter.ai.
Xie invests in crypto companies alongside working her day job as the developer ecosystem lead at Farcaster. One of Xie's early bets, Sardine, recently raised $50 million in Series B funding. Xie highlighted her in-depth experience in the crypto industry as helping her as an investor.
"I've been working in crypto full time for 11 years, so have seen a lot and found that I'm often able to help founders most as a sounding board, share what else I'm seeing out there, and help make connections to others in the ecosystem," Xie said.
Before becoming a venture capitalist, Messerschmidt worked in tech at companies including Netflix and Twitter, now X, where she spent six years as its vice president of global business development and platform. A few years after leaving Twitter, she joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a partner.
In 2015, she cofounded #ANGELS, a venture capital firm founded by former female tech execs that works to close the gender gap among investors and founders.
After a decadelong career on Wall Street as a bond trader, McDermott decided to turn her attention to the tech startup world. She's since become known as an advocate for female founders and an active angel investor. She was an early backer of Maven, a women's digital-healthcare company last valued at $1.7 billion in 2023. (McDermott sold her stake in 2020.)
McDermott has focused on other investments in sustainability, biotech, and fintech, such as the startups Conekta and Eggschain. Later this year, she plans to turn more attention to ocean tech startups, which she sees as a "huge opportunity."
"I often look for companies that are moving the needle in an impactful way for society," she told BI.
Casson bets on founders with big ideas about how the workforce can work better. Her portfolio includes WorkMade, a fintech helping freelancers keep track of their earnings and pay taxes, and Elevate K-12, an edtech company working to address the nationwide teacher shortage.
Casson cut her teeth as an investor at GE Ventures, where she helped incubate and operate a startup in the drone space. Then she went to IrishAngels, an angel network of Notre Dame-affiliated investors, before settling in at the seed-stage venture fund, Vitalize Venture Capital.
She recently left Vitalize after over six years to pursue a new, unannounced opportunity.
When Williams took a step back from tennis in 2022, she jumped into investing with both feet. The tennis champ raised a massive $111 million fund, a testament to her relationships and competitive edge. Williams invests in consumer brands and software companies that positively impact "the everyday lives of everyday people," she said during an event late last year.
Her firm stands apart from traditional investors because it focuses on underestimated founders. According to a spokesperson, around half of the portfolio companies were founded by women.
Banister has been seed investing for more than a decade and has backed SpaceX, Uber Technologies, and DeepMind. She was previously a partner at Founders Fund and worked at AngelList. She recently raised a $181 million fund with Arielle Zuckerberg for their firm, Long Journey.
Banister told Bloomberg that Long Journey aims to "look for those magically weird people and to find them before it becomes consensus." "There's always a pocket of dreamers and weirdos. You just have to know where to look," Banister said.
36. Maria Salamanca
Maria Salamanca
Maria Salamanca
Partner, Ulu Ventures
Notable investments: Parfait, Career Karma, Maximus, Pine Park Health, KaiPod
City: San Francisco
Before joining Ulu Ventures in 2022, Salamanca was a partner at Unshackled Ventures, where she focused on seed investing in teams with immigrant founders. From 2015 to 2022, Salamanca helped make more than 75 seed investments at Unshackled. She was also an early team member at FWD.us, an immigration lobbying group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and other tech leaders.
When asked what she looks for in a startup before she invests, Salamanca said she assesses how they will use time, not money. "I look for speed of execution, relentless prioritization, and the ability to define the toughest problems that must be solved to de-risk and unlock the next phase of the company," Salamanca told BI.
37. Holly Liu
Holly Liu
Holly Liu
Cofounder and managing partner, PKO Investments
Notable investments: Crypto Art House, Jadu, Lootex, NZXT, Playhouse, Quidd
City: San Francisco
Liu founded the mobile game company Kabam in 2006, and she grew the startup for more than a decade until it was acquired for $1 billion in 2017 by South Korea's NetMarble Games.
Since 2021, Liu has been running PKO Investments, the VC fund she cofounded that focuses on early-stage startups at the intersection of tech and entertainment in sectors including the metaverse, Web3, crypto, the creator economy, gaming, and social media. So far her fund has raised more than $27 million from over 370 investors, and written checks to 33 startups, including Roboto Games, Lovo, and Pixels.
38. Karin Klein
Karin Klein of Bloomberg Beta
Karin Klein
Founding partner, Bloomberg Beta
Notable investments: Anagram, Atolio, Bluefish, Campus, MelodyArc, Shield AI
City: New York
Klein is the founding partner of Bloomberg Beta, the venture arm of Bloomberg. Before helping to launch the firm, she led several initiatives at Bloomberg.
She previously worked at SoftBank, leading the division that reviewed new investments; MC Group, a communications agency; and the education company Knowledge Universe.
Bloomberg Beta has been at the forefront of AI, investing in the space long before it was in vogue. She continues to be excited about this area. "As a firm that has been investing in the future of work since 2013 and AI since 2014, it's rewarding to see new opportunities continue to emerge that make work better," Klein told BI.
She highlighted startups such as Bluefish, which helps brands navigate the new world of LLMs, Folio, which enables employers to hire job-ready students, and Synaptic, which uses AI agents to optimize Salesforce integrations.
39. Nisha Dua
Nisha Dua of BBG Ventures
Nisha Dua
Cofounder and managing partner, BBG Ventures
Notable investments: Spring Health, SuperCircle, Starface, Millie, HopSkipDrive, Nara Organics
City: New York
Dua tried on many hats throughout her career before settling on venture capital. She spent six years as an M&A lawyer at the Australian law firm Blake Dawson before moving to Bain & Co. as a management consultant, and then to the internet provider AOL, where she managed its pop culture website Cambio.
At AOL, Dua created Built by Girls, a software platform that connected young women with tech professionals. Then, backed by AOL, she cofounded BBG Ventures, using that acronym to invest in companies with one or more female founders.
BBG Ventures spun out of AOL in late 2018. The firm now invests at the pre-seed and seed stages in often overlooked founders tackling areas like healthcare, education, and financial security. Spring Health, which Dua first backed in 2018, raised a $100 million Series E round at a $3.3 billion valuation in July.
After a stint in management consulting at Bain, Barna cofounded the subscription company Birchbox in 2010. She moved over to the investing side in 2016 to join First Round Capital to lead its New York office, where she has focused on commerce, supply chain, climate, and healthcare.
"Right now, I'm most excited about a wave of seed-stage companies (still in stealth) applying AI to transform healthcare operations and patient experience," Barna told BI. "These founders are tackling real-world pain points with potential for outsized impact on cost and quality of care."
Interactive development by Annie Fu and Randy Yeip.
Courtesy of Ben Ling, Ann DeWitt, Meltem Demirors, Kevin Mahaffey, Alexis Ohanian, Ava Horton/BI
Behind every great company, there was a prescient early investor who planted the seed that helped it grow into a redwood.
For Facebook, that investor was Peter Thiel. For DoorDash and Opendoor, it was Keith Rabois.
Seed-stage investors arguably have the hardest job in venture capital. They often write a check after hearing just the smallest kernel of an idea, long before there is even a product. But with the greatest risk comes the biggest reward, and some small checks have turned into life-changing fortunes.
"At the earliest stages, it's truly all about the founder," said Gokul Rajaram, who made his debut on the Seed 100 this year. "Great founders can take mediocre ideas and mediocre markets and either pivot or change the market, and do the right thing to change the company trajectory."
The job has also become harder, with seed funding in the first quarter of this year dropping to its lowest level in years, according to Crunchbase, and more money going into megarounds for AI companies.
Not all seed investors are alike. Some prefer defense tech while others like to bet on consumer tech. Some look for specific founding teams while others only invest in repeat founders.
Now in its fifth year, the Seed 100 list celebrates these figures β the sage dealmakers who provide the essential first push to startups that go on to become some of the greatest successes in the tech world. This list is compiled using data analysis supplied by Termina, a software platform spun out of Tribe Capital. Read the full methodology behind the list.
Mahaffey has experience as both a founder and investor. He started the mobile-security company Lookout when he was 22 years old. After an initial spate of rejections from venture capital firms, Lookout would close investments from venture capitalists like Chris Sacca and Vinod Khosla at a $1.7 billion valuation.
As a seed investor, Mahaffey has helped mint nearly a dozen unicorns like Lattice and People.ai. "Nothing gets me more excited than spending time with founders creating businesses that seem audacious today β but will be obvious in retrospect," Mahaffey told BI. "I firmly believe that different + difficult = defensible."
2. Gaurav Jain
Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital
Gaurav Jain
Cofounder and managing partner, Afore Capital
Notable investments: Cruise Automation, Firebase
City: San Francisco
Jain is all about getting into startups as early as possible. In fact, his firm, Afore Capital, has the thesis that no investment is "too early," and they'd like to get involved well before other VCs. Jain has been running the $500 million venture fund Afore since 2016, and the firm raised a $185 million fourth fund in February 2025 to continue investing in pre-seed startups.
In addition to Afore, Jain has made more than two dozen seed investments through Founder Collective, a seed-stage VC fund where he was a principal from 2012 to 2016. Those bets include Airtable, Firebase, which was acquired by Google, and Cruise Automation, which was acquired by General Motors for more than $1 billion.
Ravikant has etched his mark on Silicon Valley for more than two decades. He's perhaps best known for cofounding AngelList in 2010, the fundraising platform that helps investors connect and write checks to early-stage startups. Before that, he colaunched the consumer product review site Epinions, which later merged with another site to become the consumer price comparison website Shopping.com.
In 2007, Ravikant founded the early-stage venture firm The Hit Forge. He also made early bets on companies such as Twitter, now X, and Uber. He's gone on to found several other companies and funds and has been a prolific angel investor in startups, including Substack, Perplexity, and Pipe.
Kortschak's 39 years in venture capital have been full of successful bets on companies like E-Tek Dynamics, Finisar, and McAfee. He spent more than three decades at Summit Partners, where he focused on growth-stage investing. As a private investor, he was an early investor in Trade Desk, Palantir, Stripe, and Robinhood.
"Our north star is assessing a founder's ambition to take a disruptive big idea and imagine the potential to build a generational company," Kortschak told BI.
He helped launch SignalFire in 2013 and started Firestreak in 2022 to invest his personal capital and write pre-seed and seed-stage checks between $50,000 and $150,000 to startups focusing on infrastructure; AI and machine learning; data; and open-source, cybersecurity, and developer tools. He has invested in buzzy AI and data startups like Anthropic, Cohere, Databricks, Hugging Face, MotherDuck, and Perplexity.
5. Bradley Horowitz
Bradley Horowitz
Bradley Horowitz
General partner, Wisdom Ventures
Notable investments: OpenAI, Anthropic, Slack, Miro, Ramp, Scale AI
City: Palo Alto, California
As vice president of product at Google for 15 years, Horowitz led teams that developed some of the company's most important offerings, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google News.
He left Google in 2023 to invest full time through Wisdom Ventures and as an angel investor.
Horowitz has backed more than 150 startups and already boasts four decacorns, startups valued at more than $10 billion. Those include Scale AI, Miro, Applied Intuition, and Ramp. Through Wisdom Ventures, he is also one of the few investors in two of the biggest LLM's, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Last year, he joined the board of Circle, a global fintech company that facilitates payments. He also saw his early investment in Coda, a productivity startup, pay off when it was acquired by Grammarly.
Shiraz, leaping 12 spots up the ranking this year, was recently elevated to managing partner at Gradient Ventures, Google's artificial intelligence-focused venture fund.
Shirazi seeks out companies that harness machine learning to disrupt and reshape traditional industries, such as Legora for the legal industry and Numeral for fintechs and banks.
Shirazi famously became the first intern for Facebook when he was 19. Then he built a marketing tech startup, Radius, before selling it to the fintech startup Kabbage in 2019. Since then, he's mobilized his own social network to invest in breakthrough companies.
Yap has been a full-time angel investor for over a decade, since leaving his day job in derivatives trading at Merrill Lynch in 2012. He's invested in more than 100 startups and sits on the advisory boards of the travel management company TravelBank and the fund of funds Cendana Capital.
He splits his time between San Francisco and Europe. He's backed startups such as the women's healthcare company Maven Clinic, which raised $125 million in Series F funding at a $1.7 billion valuation in October, and the smart ring maker Oura, which raised a $200 million Series D round at a $5.2 billion valuation in December.
Before he was the J. Robert Oppenheimer of our age, Altman was a red-letter startup investor.
Since Altman left his post at Y Combinator in 2019, he's plunged his personal wealth and outside capital into companies working on nuclear energy (Oklo and Helion), supersonic passenger planes (Boom Supersonic), and therapies to delay aging (Retro Biosciences).
While OpenAI made Altman famous, his investments have made him a billionaire. As an investor in Reddit, Altman and his related funds saw a cash windfall from its initial public offering last year.
Tan plays father to thousands of startups a year as the president of Y Combinator, but it was his previous investments at Initialized Capital that made him a top-ranked seed investor. He funded Coinbase in 2012. He invested $300,000 and ended up with shares worth over $2.4 billion.
Since taking over Y Combinator in 2022, Tan has ushered in a new, harder-charging era at the accelerator. It moved itsΒ headquarters to San Francisco, doubled the number of startup cohorts it supports a year, and steered the latest cohort to become the most profitable in the firm's history.
Groom was an early Stripe employee and led Stripe Issuing, the team in charge of virtual and physical cards. He left the fintech in 2018 and last year cofounded Physical Intelligence, an AI startup with the goal of bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world via spatially intelligent robots. The startup raised $400 million last fall from Jeff Bezos, Thrive Capital, and OpenAI.
Groom is also an angel investor, having raised around $100 million in 2020 for his second fund, LFG II. His investments include Notion and Figma.
Rabois made a fortune investing his own money in iconic companies like YouTube, Airbnb, and Palantir. He returned to Khosla Ventures last year after four years at Founders Fund. During his first stint at Khosla, Rabois led the firm's early investments in DoorDash, Affirm, and Stripe.
Gross has invested in multiple startups, often with his fellow Seed 100 honoree Nat Friedman, with whom he started the billion-dollar AI fund C2 Investment, where the two acquired more than 2,000 Nvidia chips to distribute alongside venture funds. He's backed big companies such as Instacart, Notion, and Figma, as well as Gusto and Character.ai.
Gross is also a serial entrepreneur and currently working on Safe Superintelligence, a startup he cofounded with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy that's so far raised $1 billion from NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, and other investors. He previously cofounded Cue, a search engine that was acquired by Apple in 2013.
Gross is a former Y Combinator partner who started the accelerator's AI program.
Instead of relying on gut feelings alone, Sethi takes a data-driven approach to seed investing. His firm, Tribe Capital, uses artificial intelligence and data analysis to predict which early-stage companies are most likely to become unicorns.
This approach has led to breakout investments such as Applied Intuition, the autonomous vehicle software company that was last valued at $6 billion, and Rippling, the workforce management software company that's raised nearly $1 billion in equity financing to date.
Sethi added a new role last year as co-chief executive of the cryptocurrency platform Kraken.
Rajaram was an early employee at Alphabet and Meta and most recently, an executive at DoorDash. He now uses his wallet and expertise to help startups scale. After years of angel investing, he plans to write checks through a new firm, Marathon Management Partners.
"I look for relentless and obsessed founders who are ambitious and aggressive, who have unique insights into their space, understand what takes to win in their space better than anyone on the planet, and who want to build a generational company," Rajaram told BI.
Rajaram also sits on the boards of Coinbase, Pinterest, and Trade Desk.
15. Dalton Caldwell
Dalton Caldwell of Y Combinator
Y Combinator
Managing partner, Y Combinator
Notable investments: Brex, PostHog, Rappi, Retool, Whatnot, Zip
City: San Francisco
During his time at Y Combinator, Caldwell has put his stamp on more than 35 unicorn startups, including DoorDash, Flexport, Brex, and Deel. A former founder himself, Caldwell joined the storied startup accelerator as a full-time partner in 2014. Since then, he's racked up more than 6,500 office hours with founders over the course of 25 batches.
Caldwell is also one of the accelerator's gatekeepers, overseeing the admissions process. He's said that two things he looks for in an application are technical prowess and a clear explanation of why the founder is the right person to start the business of their choosing.
16. Alexis Ohanian
Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian
Kaitlyn Morris/WireImage
General partner and founder, Seven Seven Six
Notable investments: Angel City Football Club, Feastables, Flock Safety, Riverside, Ro
City: Jupiter, Florida
Before he married a tennis superstar and became Mr. Serena Williams, Ohanian was known as the "mayor of the internet." He cofounded Reddit and scaled it to become one of the most popular websites worldwide. Since he sold the company, he's plunged his personal wealth and venture funds into companies building in the blockchain, software, and healthcare industries.
In 2020, Ohanian left the firm he cofounded, Initialized Capital, to launch yet another venture fund. Between Ohanian and his Seven Seven Six founding partner, Katelin Holloway, the fund has backed a number of startups led by women and people of color, including the group coaching platform The Grand and maternal telehealth solution Poppy Seed Health.
Ling was a general partner at Khosla Ventures before launching Bling Capital, a VC firm focused on seed and Series A investments. Ling has also served in senior operating roles at Google, YouTube, and Facebook and was an active angel investor, nabbing early stakes in Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, and Quora.
In 2024, one of Bling's early investments, Printify, grew 100 times the firm's entry valuation and merged with Printful to become one of the largest print-on-demand platforms globally. As for what Ling looks for in an entrepreneur, he said he seeks a founder with "the right level of obstinance, an earned secret about a space, and an innate drive to learn it all."
18. Jon Soberg
Jon Soberg of MS&AD Ventures
Jon Soberg
CEO and managing partner, MS&AD Ventures
Notable investments: Yotpo, Mercury, Flex, Rubrik, ValidMind, Plus Platform
City: Palo Alto, California
This is Soberg's fifth straight year on the Seed 100, a position he's maintained due in part to the seven IPOs and 19 unicorns in his portfolio. His many bets include the marketing platform Yotpo, the business banking fintech Mercury, and Rubrik, the cloud cybersecurity company that went public last year.
Soberg has been leading MS&AD Ventures since 2018. His firm focuses on early-stage startups and invests across insuretech, AI, Internet of Things, big data, and cybersecurity.
For Soberg, success means finding companies that can weather tough conditions β not just shine when the market is great.
"Building in tougher markets makes people focus extra diligently, and we see really responsible growth, great unit economics, and people tackling very tough problems," he told BI.
19. Julian Counihan
Julian Counihan
Julian Counihan
Title: General partner, Schematic Ventures
Notable Investments: Altana, Harbinger, Plus One Robotics, P-1 AI, Infinitform, Chassy
City: San Francisco
Counihan is a general partner at Schematic Ventures, an early-stage firm that invests in supply chain, manufacturing, and enterprise software startups. Before Schematic, Counihan worked at Red Sea Ventures, where he invested in industrial hardware and supply chain companies, and in tech investment banking at Citi. He started his career as a software engineer at Fortna, a logistics company.
"The first wave of industrial startups brought world-class engineering talent into supply chain and manufacturing," Counihan told BI. "Engineers from those companies are now launching startups building from first principles and creating entirely new systems for how the physical world operates. There is more energy, talent and capital working on industrial technology than ever before."
Rosenbloom and his firm, Founder Collective, are the picture of founder-friendly investors. The seed-stage shop forsakes pro rata rights, helping to avoid "signaling risk" in the market, and eggs on founders to raise as little money as possible, even if it hurts the markups on their deals.
Rosenbloom, a three-time founder himself, invests across sectors and has backed everything from security systems to pet DNA tests. He co-leads Founder Collective's New York office.
21. Ed Sim
Ed Sim
Boldstart Ventures
Founder and general partner, Boldstart Ventures
Notable investments: BigID, Common Paper, Kustomer, Protect AI, Snyk, Tessl
City: Miami
Sim thrives in one of the riskiest corners of the market: He invests in startups before they even incorporate. The self-described "inception investor" prefers to roll up his sleeves and work with founders to shape their ideas, close their first hires, and rally the all-important early adopters.
While Sim's portfolio has produced monster exits such as Kustomer's $1 billion sale to Meta, his biggest successes may be ahead. In 2016, Sim wrote one of the first checks into Snyk, the developer-security unicorn startup that's eyeing a potential initial public offering, TechCrunch reported. He also backed Snyk founder Guy Podjarny's latest company, the white-hot coding platform Tessl.
A longtime Adobe executive and creative virtuoso, Belsky left the design software company earlier this year for the role of a lifetime: He joined A24 as a partner, leading tech and innovation projects at the independent studio. In a social media post announcing the move, Belsky pledged to "continue supporting founders as an investor/product advisor" and board member.
One of the bright spots in his portfolio is the fintech Ramp. Founded in 2019, the corporate card and software provider boasts hundreds of millions in annualized revenue and a $13 billion valuation.
Hoover built the launchpad for startups with Product Hunt, a website for sharing and discovering the latest mobile apps and tech creations. Now, as an investor, he's transformed his network of thousands of founders into a sourcing engine for finding and investing in the next big thing.
His portfolio includes Deel, the human resources software provider that closed $30 million in new funding earlier this year, and the embedded finance platform Pipe.
The spectacular collapse of crypto exchanges like FTX and Binance has cast a long shadow over the broader crypto market. But Garg and the fund he founded, Electric Capital, are continuing to bet big on decentralized and blockchain-based technologies.
In addition to his work with Electric, Garg has been a successful angel investor for over a decade, having been an early backer of Cruise, Deel, and Figma. He also worked at both Facebook and Google and founded multiple startups of his own before getting into investing.
25. Laura Rippy
Laura Rippy of Alumni Ventures
Laura Rippy
Managing partner and board member, Alumni Ventures
Rippy says that when the world is chaotic, startups are the most nimble, which is why she's excited for this year.
"The pattern of 2025 so far is highly talented teams tackling big opportunities," she told BI.
Based in Boston, Rippy has built a large network of school-related founders and investors. She runs two school-centric funds, Green D at Dartmouth College and Yard Ventures at Harvard, and she's also the managing partner of Alumni Ventures, one of the most active VC firms in the world. Alumni brings VC investing to individual investors' portfolios and manages more than 650,000 members.
Prior to joining Alumni Ventures in 2017, Rippy spent 14 years at the private family office Ripplecreek Partners.
Hockey worked briefly in consulting at Bain before cofounding Plaid, a fintech infrastructure company, with Zach Perret in 2012. He spent eight years at Plaid as the president and chief technology officer before leaving in 2019.
In 2022, he announced what he'd been building since leaving Plaid: a federally chartered banking startup called Column that allows developers to build financial products faster. Hockey is the cofounder and CEO of Column. He's also a prolific fintech investor who's backed companies such as Moov and the payroll startup Deel, according to PitchBook data.
27. Alex Iskold
Alex Iskold of 2048 Ventures
Alex Iskold
Founder and partner, 2048 Ventures
Notable investments: GlossGenius, Aerodome, Gorgias, Mantl, Healthie, Nomic Bio
City: New York
Iskold immigrated to the US from Ukraine when he was 19 and has built a long and successful career as a founder, software engineer, and investor in over 150 startups. He's also a prolific blogger on his site Startup Hacks. Earlier this year, one of 2048 Ventures' early bets, the fintech Mantl, was acquired by Alkemi for $400 million. "AI was and is an arms race. Instead of horizontal plays, we focus on the vertical value capture, full solves, and strong data moats," Iskold told BI. "On the macro level, capital is scarce both for startups and emerging managers. We view this as a very positive net dynamic for the space as there is less noise in general and more value creation."
28. Nat Friedman
Xamarin co-founder CEO Nat Friedman
Xamarin
Former CEO, GitHub
Notable investments: Figma, Stripe, Deel, Magic, Perplexity, The Bot Company
City: San Francisco
A multi-time founder, Friedman's second software startup was acquired by Microsoft in 2016, paving the way for him to become GitHub's CEO in 2018, when the tech giant bought the coding company for $7.5 billion. Friedman stayed in the top spot at GitHub for three years and stepped down in 2021.
Over the past few years, Friedman has become well known as an investor backing startups like Figma, Stripe, and Perplexity, and often cowrites checks with Daniel Gross. The two acquired more than 2,000 Nvidia chips and distributed them along with venture funding through one of their funds, the billion-dollar AI fund C2 Investment.
Partovi sold his previous company to Microsoft for $265 million and was an early investor and advisor to dozens of startups, including Zappos and Airbnb. He now runs Neo, a startup incubator, venture fund, and professional network. Neo identifies promising individuals, often while they're still in school, and provides them with mentorship, education, job placement, and, in some cases, investment.
One of Neo's graduates, the AI coding startup and Cursor developer Anysphere, recently raised over $100 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. The startup also became one of the fastest companies ever to reach $100 million in annualized revenue, Partovi, who was its first investor, said. "At Neo, we're obsessed with investing in people. Our Neo Scholars program identifies future tech leaders when they're still in college, long before they start a company."
Mullen cofounded the delivery giant Instacart, which went public in 2023. He's also been a prolific seed investor, backing over 100 startups, including Lattice, Checkr, Omni, Mercury, and Pelago. He's also backed a number of startups founded by Instacart alums, such as Anomalo, Ascend, Cabal, Highstock, and Monocle. Among Mullen's advice to founders: "Every minute counts."
Deshpande has generally preferred to focus on technical founders who are building companies in infrastructure software. As it has become clear that AI can write software code, he has focused more on hardware and space investments, which he sees are more defensible.
Two of his biggest wins have been Redis, a data platform he says crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue, and LucidLink, a cloud storage tool he says he invested in before it had any product and has now crossed $40 million in ARR.
Prior to founding Uncorrelated Ventures, Deshpande worked at Bain Capital Ventures for seven years and Bay Partners for seven years before that.
32. Shruti Gandhi
Shruti Gandhi
Array Ventures
Title: Founder and general partner, Array Ventures
Gandhi's track record shows she gets results for limited partners. In under a decade, the solo capitalist has returned her first $7 million fund at a fivefold multiple, with more companies still waiting to exit. A stream of acquisitions has sped along those distributions, including Simility, a fraud-detection company which sold to PayPal in 2018, just two years after Gandhi invested.
As a one-time startup founder, Gandhi decided to raise a fund in 2016 because she saw a need for more investors who rolled up their sleeves at the seed stage. Her fund, Array Ventures, helps technical founders close early sales and develop their go-to-market sales strategy.
Adeeb was hooked on the startup world after joining the speech recognition tech startup TellMe Networks in 2000 as the company's head of enterprise engineering. Seven years later, TellMe sold to Microsoft, and Adeeb spent two years as a principal at Khosla Ventures before starting his own company. He sold that venture, the web curation tool Snip.it, to Yahoo in 2013.
Adeeb founded 1984 Ventures in 2017 to invest in early-stage tech startups. This year, he's particularly excited about his investment in Cline, which he said was stealing away customers from highly funded AI coding editors like Anysphere's Cursor and Windsurf for its competing product, built by a single engineer. Cline hadn't publicly announced its funding as of April.
Another of Adeeb's investments, the commercial contracting software BuildOps, raised a $127 million Series C round in March at a valuation of $1 billion.
When it comes to evaluating seed-stage startups, Gil says that the potential for product-market fit is the most important thing he's looking for when deciding whether to write a check.
This strategy has proved fruitful, with Gil making early bets on AI legaltech darling Harvey, the workplace productivity suite Notion, the AI search engine Perplexity, and the defense tech company Anduril, along with several other buzzy startups that have since become heavy hitters.
A longtime angel investor, Gil has also written checks for Airbnb, Coinbase, Figma, Deel, and a slew of other startups. He was previously an executive at Twitter, now known as X, and worked in product management at Google.
Bahl cofounded one of India's hottest startups, Snapdeal, which was once valued at $6.5 billion. Snapdeal's parent company, the SoftBank-backed Unicommerce, went public in 2024 and was the first software-as-a-service company to go public in India. When the company went public, it was the second-most-subscribed IPO of the year.
"Outside of the usual help a portfolio company would expect from any seasoned investor, one area we are very focused on is ensuring discipline around maintaining a thoughtful, well-structured monthly MIS that is discussed within the startup's leadership and with our team at Titan Capital," Bahl said, referring to a management information system report. "This ensures everyone β internal and external stakeholders β is always on the same page with respect to the direction the business is headed."
36. Marlon Nichols
Marlon Nichols of MaC Venture Capital
Marlon Nichols
Cofounder and managing general partner, MaC Venture Capital
Nichols started his career as an operator at a seed-stage startup, helped scale it, and then transitioned to consulting. But while that career was fulfilling, he felt that something was missing. He wanted to collaborate with executives and decision-makers and be close to the latest technology. For Nichols, the answer was venture capital. He started in VC at Intel Capital and then cofounded Cross Culture Ventures. That firm then merged with another to form MaC Venture Capital in 2021, which raised $110 million for its first fund and followed that up with a second $203 million fund.
In 2024, Mac closed on another $150 million fund, its third in four years. Nichols said this "reflects our impact as a seed-stage firm, the strength of our thesis and the founders we back" and "cements MaC as one of the largest seed-stage firms in Los Angeles and North America."
Nicholas said the new fund had allowed the firm to continue to expand in areas such as energy, sustainability, defense, and hard tech, sectors the firm believes "are at an inflection point and poised for outsized impact and returns."
Benioff caught the startup bug as a summer intern at Apple in the summer of 1984, writing assembly code for the Macintosh 68000 Development System. Fast-forward a few decades, and he's running Salesforce, a 75,000-person Fortune 500 giant.
Seed stage investing isn't his day job, but Benioff says he's drawn to founders because he relates to them. He estimates that over the past 20 years, he's backed more than 200 seed-stage startups. Founders in his portfolio don't just get cash β they also get access to his playbook for scaling and his deep network of executives and operators.
The key signal he looks for in a founder? Shared vision. "Do I have a complementary vision to how they see their own company?" Benioff told BI. "Many of these people are visionaries. They're seeing things that don't exist. Am I also able to see what they're seeing?"
Beyond his personal investing, Benioff also oversees TIME Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. One of its biggest wins: a roughly $600 million return from Wiz's $32 billion acquisition, Benioff told BI. Salesforce Ventures first invested in the cybersecurity startup's Series B in June 2021.
Dorsey has been at the helm of the Indianapolis-based venture studio High Alpha since 2015, which he cofounded with his fellow Salesforce alums Eric Tobias and Mike Fitzgerald and the serial entrepreneur Kristian Andersen. Before getting into venture, Dorsey cofounded the marketing SaaS company ExactTarget and led the company as its CEO through an IPO, public market debut, and subsequent sale to Salesforce for $2.5 billion in 2013. Dorsey said that experience as a founder and longtime CEO had served him well as he guides the next generation of entrepreneurs.
"With my ExactTarget journey from startup founder to public company CEO, I pride myself on being a great partner and sounding board to our founders," he told BI. "I enjoy contributing to important strategic decisions as well as supporting founders with the everyday challenges they encounter."
Before launching Northside Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage firm based in Toronto, McIsaac cofounded an energy storage-focused cleantech startup in 2012 that Blackstone Energy bought in 2018. He transitioned to VC and landed at BDC Capital, the largest venture firm in Canada, where he worked on its seed and women in tech funds. He also led the Canadian investment practice as a partner at Global Founders Capital, a European venture firm.
Bansal, along with his fellow Seed 100 honoree Kunal Bahl, cofounded one of India's hottest startups, Snapdeal, which was once valued at $6.5 billion. The SoftBank-backed Unicommerce, also cofounded by Bansal and Snapdeal's parent company, went public in 2024 and was the first SaaS company to go public in India.
"India is on a rising tide β we will be the third-largest economy very soon β and all boats are being lifted in this significant and positive evolution the country is going through," Bansal said. "We are witnessing tremendous innovation in AI applications being built in India, not only for the Indian market but also for global customers. We anticipate this trend to accelerate in 2025."
41. Anshu Sharma
Skyflow cofounder and CEO Anshu Sharma.
Skyflow
Cofounder and CEO, Skyflow
Notable investments: AirMDR, Ema, Ikigai Labs, Zus Health, Zinc Labs, Fold Health
City: Mountain View, California
Sharma has been writing checks to early-stage startups for over a decade, but his investing motto has remained the same: Always be closest to the smartest people you know.
This rule scored him an investment in Nutanix, as he knew the cloud-computing startup's CEO from his years at Oracle. Nutanix went public in 2016, valued at over $5 billion.
In the past year, he wrote checks to AirMDR, an AI for security company, as well as Ema, an agentic AI startup building universal AI employees. Two of his early investments, Razorpay and Tekion, are seen as likely IPO candidates.
As a three-time founder, Sharma relates personally to the entrepreneurs he works with. Barracuda Networks bought his company Clearedin in January 2022.
After a Hall of Fame career as quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, Montana cofounded HRJ Capital, a fund of funds, in 1999. After a few years of angel investing and learning from the "super angel" Ron Conway, Montana launched Liquid 2 Ventures, which invests in industries as varied as B2B SaaS and defense tech, in 2015. The firm recently closed on a new $100 million fund, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
Montana says that, like football, venture capital is a long game: "At Liquid 2 Ventures, we're committed to being lifetime investors," he told BI. "We look for potential in founders, and aim to be a partner to them throughout their lifetime, not just for one lifecycle. Many of the most successful companies in our portfolio are from founders who are on their second or third company."
43. Dylan Field
Dylan Field
Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
CEO, Figma
Notable investments: Warp, Pattern Biosciences, Retro, Conception Bio, The Browser Company
City: Penngrove, California
Field has carved out time to make angel investments across different verticals, including the DNA startup Pattern Biosciences and The Browser Company, a consumer startup building the internet browser, Arc.
He's vetting startups and writing checks in addition to running Figma, the late-stage collaborative design startup he cofounded in 2012 with Evan Wallace. The company has raised more than $300 million from VCs and was in talks to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion in 2022 before the deal fell apart. In April, the company confidentially filed draft paperwork for an IPO.
Mateen is best known as the cofounder of Tinder, the OG dating app. Now, he swipes right on startups as a savvy early investor in companies like Lyft, which went public in 2019 at a $24 billion valuation, and Brex, which had a $12.3 billion valuation in January 2022.
Mateen told BI he looks for founders with "serious domain expertise who have something to prove to themselves, the world, or someone they care deeply about" and companies that are disrupting large markets and have a clear path to positive-unit economics at scale.
Before landing at DCVC, Tamaseb cofounded and was the CEO of Blocks Wearables, a deep-tech hardware startup that developed wearables for industrial use. He also runs the networking community Super Founders Club, which includes founders with prior meaningful exits and IPOs. Tamaseb told BI that in the past year, he'd been able to grow the community "2x." It allows Tamaseb to get access and find the best and most promising founders.
"My style of investing is 100% founder-first and founder-centric," he said. "I use data, and an institutional way of creating networks to find, fund, and partner with the best founders of our generation at pre-seed, seed, A, and beyond."
46. Sheel Mohnot
Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures
Sheel Mohnot
Cofounder and general partner, Better Tomorrow Ventures
Notable investments: Mercury, Kin, Unit, Relay, Coast, Basis
City: San Francisco
Mohnot has been featured on the Seed 100 every year since its inception four years ago. In 2020, he cofounded Better Tomorrow Ventures, a fintech venture firm. Before that, he was an angel investor in companies such as Flexport and Ironclad. He's been investing in fintech since 2015 and cofounded the food company Thistle before starting his venture capital career.
Mohnot is excited about the prospects for fintech this year. "We had 10 markups over the course of a month earlier this year β fintech is back!" he said.
His firm specializes in helping startups with sales, recruiting, business development, community building, and raising money for the next round of funding, he said, adding that it had introduced founders to their next-round investors more than 90% of the time.
Candito started his career as an operator in the Boston startup scene before heading west to join the sales data startup RelateIQ, which Salesforce bought for $390 million in 2014. He then founded and served as the CEO of the cloud-based enterprise startup Progressly, which Box acquired in 2018.
Candito spent some time at Box and other startups before moving on to investing in startups, including the data importing company Flatfile. He also launched the firm Netshire Technology, and in 2020, he cofounded Angel Collective Opportunity Fund, of which he's the managing director. ACOF helps emerging managers back startups through a pooled investment fund.
Candito said he was very excited about his investments over the past year in several AI infrastructure startups, including Gable, Distributional, Letta (formerly MemGPT), TensorWave, and Fiddler AI.
Tarczynski founded Contrary in 2017 to identify exceptional entrepreneurs early, sometimes before they've even begun their next venture. The firm, which invests in early-stage tech companies, is backed by the founders of tech powerhouses such as Tesla, Reddit, Facebook, and Airbnb. Contrary's portfolio includes tech unicorns such as the defense tech startup Anduril, the Indian grocery delivery company Zepto, and the fintech platform Ramp.
Tarczynski began his own entrepreneurial journey in 2012 with Checkit, a restaurant mobile payments startup that folded after two years of competing against Toast β which Tarczynski describes as an invaluable learning opportunity. He was also an early employee at the social platform Kamcord, whose team was acqui-hired by Lyft in 2017.
49. Jackson Moses
Jackson Moses
Jackson Moses
Title: Founder and managing partner, Silent Ventures
Notable investments: Saronic, CHAOS, Armada, Gallatin AI, Firestorm, UNION
City: Dallas
Moses is a prolific defense tech investor, with some of the buzziest startups, such as the autonomous maritime company Saronic Technologies and the defense detection startup CHAOS, in his portfolio. He started his venture fund, which invests in aerospace, defense, and national security companies, in late 2022.
Previously, Moses angel invested across multiple verticals and cut his teeth starting companies of his own: He founded MainStreet, a corporate tax software company, and Spectrum Labs, a content moderation startup.
Chen moved to Austin six years ago to become a partner at the early-stage investment firm Silverton Partners. He told BI that he tends to "gravitate toward category creators" when evaluating a startup before investing.
That's evidenced by his portfolio of local software and consumer businesses that have become the envy of Silicon Hills, with stakes in Apprentice, Fama, and Grocery TV (formerly Clerk). Chen also received a sizable exit with Edgewell's purchase of the razor maker Billie for $310 million in 2021.
Chen said that in the past year, his portfolio company Rx Redefined had "performed consistently ahead of plan and capped off the year with a Series B." And he's very excited about another of his portfolio companies, the legaltech AI startup DocJuris, which he said "has been able to out-innovate and win deals against peers with significantly more funding."
Tobias is a serial entrepreneur and investor who's been in the game for nearly 30 years. After stints at Accenture and Microsoft, Tobias ventured out on his own to launch two companies, and he led several others during the early 2000s. He says that over the years, he's invested in more than 250 companies as an angel investor, and he's a limited partner in at least a dozen venture funds.
Tobias started Incisive Ventures, a pre-seed fund based in Seattle, in 2020, and he was an early investor in the fintech startup Jeeves, the NFT platform OpenSea, and the electrolyte drink mix company LMNT. He's particularly excited about the recent wave of AI advancement and all of the startups capitalizing on the technology. "I am most excited about the companies that are seizing this AI moment to deliver whole new categories of B2B applications versus AI paste-ons," he said.
Trenchard was an entrepreneur for more than two decades, starting five companies and backing many more as an angel investor. In 2012, he joined First Round Capital, the seed-stage firm founded by Josh Kopelman and Howard Morgan.
In the past year, several of Trenchard's portfolio companies have seen continued success. The insurtech startup EvolutionIQ, one of Trenchard's portfolio companies that he backed in 2019, was bought for $730 million. The security tech startup Verkada raised a $200 million round, valuing it at $4.5 billion.
Trenchard said that in his years as an investor, he'd looked for "founders who are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make customers successful." He recalled that eight years ago, Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan got up on a ladder at midnight to install cameras at the Equinox in Beverly Hills. Kaliszan "recently revisited the site and found those original cameras still in use β with the customer just as happy," he said. "That level of founder commitment and obsession with making customers successful, no matter what it takes, is a powerful indicator.
Novick makes seed investments through Recursive Ventures, the firm he launched in 2014 as a solo capitalist. He announced its third fund in February, with $30 million to back pre-seed startups primarily based in the US and Israel and focused on industry disruption with data and AI.
He started Recursive while still working at Life360, where he was a member of the location-sharing app's founding team. He stayed at Life360 in various roles until its 2024 IPO, for which he served as its acting chief financial officer and general counsel. Before that, he was on the founding team of the customer identity management startup Gigya, which the German company SAP acquired for $350 million in 2017.
Novick has invested in more than 100 startups since 2010. He's particularly excited about his 2024 investment in Perspective AI, which lets founders simulate conversations with their customers β a tool he said he would've loved to have used when he was an operator.
54. Raymond Tonsing
Raymond Tonsing is a top seed investor.
Courtesy
Title: Founder and managing partner, Caffeinated Capital
Notable investments: Saronic, Varda, Airtable, Affirm, Opendoor, Clipboard Health
City: San Francisco
After working in real estate investing, Tonsing switched to tech in 2009 when he founded Caffeinated Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm in San Francisco. He's backed companies like the online payments startup WePay, which JPMorgan acquired, and the app development startup Parse, which Meta bought in 2013.
Tonsing also saw success with the fintech company Affirm, which went public in 2021 at a valuation of over $10 billion, and Airtable, which was valued at $11 billion in 2021.
He was an early investor in Varda Space, which aims to develop pharmaceutical components in space, and serves on its board.
Klinger was a founding member and chief technology officer of the product launch website Product Hunt before it was acquired by AngelList in 2017. He worked at AngelList and its subsidiary CoinList while also investing in pre-seed and seed-stage companies such as Hopin, Clubhouse, and Remote. In 2024, he launched the solo fund Prototype Capital.
Klinger says that in the past year, he's been one of the core people behind a movement to establish a Pan-European legal entity that hopes to fix most of the hurdles to early-stage funding in Europe. The proposal has gotten the backing of the Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison and the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham.
56. Lucas Vaz
Lucas Vaz of Ravelin Capital
Lucas Vaz
Title: Founder and general partner, Ravelin Capital
Notable Investments: Apex Space, Base Power, Covenant, Hadrian, The Lumber Manufactory, Shinkei Systems
City: San Francisco
Vaz founded his venture firm, Ravelin Capital, which backs early-stage startups building "critical software," with bets largely in the industrial, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Vaz was motivated to found Ravelin after noticing "the decay of our infrastructure, the collapse of our institutions, and the changing geopolitical tides," he wrote in a note on the firm's website. Previously, Vaz worked as an investor at Village Global, an early-stage venture firm.
"From manufacturing and defense to other sectors such as industrials, energy, fishing, and lumber, we're witnessing an unprecedented wave of world-class talent pouring into sectors that have long been overlooked," Vaz told BI. "These entrepreneurs aren't chasing trends β they're committing their lives to rebuilding the systems that matter most."
Fluhr dropped out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business to cofound StubHub in 2000 and served as the company's CEO until its sale to eBay in 2007. He then launched the social video platform Spreecast, which shut down in 2016, and joined Craft Ventures a few years later. In March, Fluhr announced in a LinkedIn post that he was transitioning to a new chapter as a venture partner at the firm after seven years as a general partner.
As an investor, Fluhr has backed companies including Warby Parker and Houzz, and other unicorns, including Course Hero, MDLive, and Trulia. Out of his investments in the past year, Fluhr is particularly excited about the AI agent startup CrewAI, which he said was "the leading open source framework for AI agent orchestration, an area that is already having a huge impact on Fortune 500 companies and will only grow in importance over the next five years."
Durant is best known as a star in the NBA, winning back-to-back championships with the Golden State Warriors in 2017 and 2018. But few realize that Durant is also a prolific investor through Thirty Five Ventures, the firm he cofounded with his business partner, Rich Kleiman, in 2016.
His investments include the AI coding startup Hugging Face to the wellness company Thrive Global.
59. Zach Weinberg
Zach Weinberg is a top seed investor.
Courtesy
Title: General partner, Operator Partners; cofounder and CEO, Curie.Bio
Notable investments: Whatnot, Nourish, Ro, Spring Health, QA Wolf
City: New York
Weinberg helps seed-stage founders discover drugs with his biotech-focused accelerator and investment firm, Curie.Bio. It's backed by the industry heavyweights GV, Andreessen Horowitz, and Arch Venture Partners. It raised $340 million in January to back up to 20 more biotech companies this year.
He's a successful two-time startup founder, having sold his adtech startup, Invite Media, to Google for $81 million in 2010. His second company, the oncology tech startup Flatiron Health, sold to Roche for $2 billion in 2018.
Weinberg also deploys capital through the early-stage venture firm he cofounded, Operator Partners, and maintains a personal portfolio as an angel investor.
60. Steve Loughlin
Steve Loughlin of Accel
Steve Loughlin
Title: Partner, Accel
Notable investments: Monte Carlo Data, Airkit.ai, Poggio Labs, Centaur Labs, Productiv, Stairwell
City: Palo Alto, California
Loughlin was originally a founder, developing the sales technology startup RelateIQ, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2014 for $390 million. He joined Accel in 2016, where he helps lead the firm's seed practice. One of Loughlin's early bets, the data startup Monte Carlo Data raised $60 million in Series C funding in 2024 and saw 100% year-over-year revenue growth.
"In looking at new investments for a seed, it's all about the founders," Loughlin told BI. "Startups are never a straight line, so understanding why they are starting and learning about their history of execution is critical in partnering."
Prior to cofounding New York-based Eniac Ventures in 2010, Harris cut his teeth at two VC-backed startups, including an AI voice assistant that would later become Siri.
He's now using that experience to lead Eniac's AI investing efforts, both at the application and tooling layer. Eniac leads early-stage rounds for software, AI, and IT companies.
"I feel incredibly fortunate to have spent over 15 years building and investing in AI-first companies, including building the first voice-based virtual assistant, which became Siri after being acquired," Harris told BI. "This deep-rooted passion has given me valuable experience and insight, helping me partner with founders of AI-first companies today."
62. Jason Warner
Jason Warner of Poolside
Jason Warner
Cofounder and CEO, Poolside
Notable investments: Moderne, Render, The Browser Company, StarTree, Tinybird
City: San Francisco
Warner is the cofounder and CEO of buzzy AI startup Poolside, which just raised $500 million at a $3 billion valuation. Prior to founding Poolside, Warner was an investor at Redpoint Ventures, where he backed AI and infrastructure companies. Warner was also the CTO of GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for over $7 billion.
63. Eric Wu
Opendoor CEO and cofounder Eric Wu
Opendoor
Cofounder and advisor, Opendoor
Notable investments: Ramp, Airtable, Mercury, Harvey, Faire
City: San Francisco
At the end of 2023, Wu stepped down as president of Opendoor, the property technology company he cofounded in 2014. The move opened the door for him to do more angel investing.
"While a common criterion, I place significant emphasis on the slope and market fit of the founding team," Wu told BI.
He has a passion for real-estate tech firms, such as Kindred Concepts, which was founded by two former Opendoor employees, and the Brazilian homebuying marketplace Loft. Wu also oversees a syndicate alongside David King to write bigger checks.
64. Olaf Carlson-Wee
Olaf Carlson-Wee of Polychain Capital
Astrida Valigorsky/Getty Images for Art Saint Barth
CEO, Polychain Capital
Notable investments: Polymarket, Anoma, Yellow Card, Merico, Vesper Energy
City: San Francisco
A self-proclaimed early lover of crypto who wrote his 2012 college thesis on bitcoin, Carlson-Wee became Coinbase's first employee after he famously cold-emailed the company's founders, he recalled in a 2016 interview with Y Combinator. That was the year he left Coinbase and launched Polychain Capital, an investment firm focused on backing crypto and blockchain-based technologies.
Since then, Carlson-Wee has served as the investment firm's CEO, which has racked up nearly 300 investments, according to PitchBook. Those include checks to the crypto-based prediction market Polymarket and the African cryptocurrency exchange Yellow Card.
Teran is a founder turned investor and started backing startups in 2021 after selling his company, the office management software Managed by Q, to WeWork in 2019 for $220 million. His portfolio has since grown to more than 100 startups, and several of his bets have blossomed into companies worth $1 billion.
"Whether it's raising money, hiring executives, finding product-market fit, making an acquisition, or selling the company β most challenges our founders encounter I've done myself," Teran said. "We built our strategy around being the founder's first choice, and our highly concentrated investment strategy allows me to spend real time with our founders to recruit teams, close sales, navigate to product-market fit, and build companies of consequence."
66. Neeraj Berry
Neeraj Berry of Tet Ventures
Neeraj Berry
Title: Founder and managing partner, Tet Ventures
Notable investments: Maven, Chef Robotics, Kingdom Supercultures, Wildwonder, Phytoform, Season Health
City: Oakland, California
A serial entrepreneur, Berry cofounded food delivery startup Sprig. He also founded 12Society, a subscription commerce business backed by a host of celebrities and investors like Mark Cuban. Berry founded Tet Ventures to make seed investments in food tech startups. One of Berry's early investments, Chef Robotics, a startup that brings AI-powered robotics to food services, just raised $20.6 million in a Series A funding round.
"Money is flowing again, but we believe long-term success to be predicated on taking ambitious swings with fewer resources," Berry told BI. "We've seen the rise and fall of the overcapitalized startup many times, and we're betting on teams that are increasingly audacious, nimble, and resourceful."
Thiel keeps a low public profile despite being one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and now in Washington, DC.
He is part of the early lore at some of Silicon Valley's most iconic companies. He cofounded PayPal and Palantir and was an early investor in Facebook and LinkedIn. His more recent bets include the defense tech company Anduril, which is seeing extremely high demand from secondary investors, and Ramp, which doubled its valuation to $13 billion earlier this year.
Thiel has also launched several venture firms: Founders Fund, whose portfolio includes Faire and Rippling; Valar Ventures, an internationally focused firm that was an early backer of the accounting software company Xero; and Mithril Capital Management, which invested in the blockchain-focused fintech company Paxos.
Levchin cofounded the company that would become PayPal with Peter Thiel and cemented his lore in the tech world as a member of the now-famous "PayPal Mafia." Since his PayPal days, he's gone on to launch several companies, including the startup studio HVF. From HVF, Levchin spun out the fintech company Affirm, which he cofounded with Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz, and Alex Rampell. He's been the company's CEO since 2014, heralding it through its IPO in early 2021.
Levchin is also an active investor and cofounded SciFi VC with his wife, Nellie Levchin, whom he credits with finding the firm's investments and many of his angel investments. Levchin was also an early backer of companies including Yelp, Crunchyroll, and Stripe.
Rauch is the CEO of Vercel, a cloud infrastructure startup that last raised a $250 million Series E at a $3.25 billion valuation in 2024. Before Vercel, Rauch founded Cloudup, a startup acquired by the parent company of WordPress in 2013. He has angel invested in some of Silicon Valley's buzziest startups, such as Perplexity and ElevenLabs.
Rauch's own stance on rethinking products like Vercel to account for the rapid pace of AI advancements informs his investment thesis: "It's very easy to rest on the laurels of what you've built," he told BI. "It's hard to try and disrupt yourself while revenue is growing, customers seem happy, and your peers are impressed, yet I think this is what the greatest companies are all about."
A year and a half ago, Altman stepped back as the chief executive of Lattice, the human resources software company he founded and scaled to unicorn status, to return to his first love: the earliest stages of company-building. He locked down $150 million for his inaugural fund and launched an accelerator for business software startups, harnessing artificial intelligence.
Altman's bets include Legora, the legal tech startup that's shaking up the industry, and Rogo, the Thrive Capital-backed startup working to build Wall Street's first truly autonomous analyst.
71. Nat Turner
Nat Turner is a general partner at Operator Partners.
Operator Partners
General partner, Operator Partners; CEO, Collectors
Notable investments: Plaid, Suki, Oura, Zipline, David Energy
City: New York
Turner has been angel investing since 2010, the same year he sold his first startup, the adtech company Invite Media, to Google for $81 million. After two years at Google, he cofounded Flatiron Health, the cancer care startup acquired by Roche for $1.9 billion in 2018.
In 2020, he formalized his investment approach by launching the venture firm Operator Partners alongside three friends, including his Invite Media cofounder Zach Weinberg. He became the CEO of Collectors, an online collectibles marketplace and authentication platform, after leading an investor group in taking the company private in 2021. He joined GameStop's board of directors in November, a month after Collectors notched a partnership with the gaming retailer.
Leshner is known as one of the forefathers of decentralized finance, having cofounded Compound Labs in 2017, which developed one of the first DeFi applications. He went on to cofound and is the CEO of Superstate, an asset management firm that's building blockchain tokenized investment products.
Leshner is also a cofounder and general partner of Robot Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage firm focused on crypto and fintech startups. Since its founding in 2019, Robot Ventures has backed more than 200 companies, and it raised $75 million for its fourth fund last year. Leshner shared his advice for startup founders now building: "Robots/AI are going to perform all jobs, from finance to media. Build accordingly."
Nof started Tusk Venture Partners in 2015 to back early-stage tech companies in highly regulated markets. He's bet on startups like the direct-to-consumer health startup Ro, which was last valued at $7 billion in 2022, and the mental health startup Alma, which raised $130 million in Series D funding in 2022.
Before launching Tusk Venture Partners, Nof was a director at Blackstone Innovations, the private equity giant Blackstone's early-stage investing arm. In its 10-year history, Tusk Venture Partners has invested in companies such as the crypto exchange Coinbase, the insurtech company Lemonade, and the sports betting platform FanDuel.
Pragides is one of more than 350 limited partners at GTMfund, an early-stage venture firm that invests in B2B SaaS companies, according to the company's LinkedIn. He also angel invests and has cashed out on some hot investments, such as Cacheflow, a billing product startup that was acquired by HubSpot in 2024.
The most important qualities Pragides looks for in a startup before investing are founder-market fit, a B2B angle, prioritizing automation and efficiency, and "niches that I am personally interested in," he told BI.
Rohan began his venture capital career with seven years at Index Ventures, during which he built an angel fund for founders to make seed investments. He spun Otherwise Fund out of Index in 2017 with the same premise β to help founders invest in seed- to growth-stage startups. Rohan also invests from the fund, with a focus on seed-stage bets.
In the past year, nearly one-quarter of Rohan's seed investments have seen valuation markups or raised Series A rounds, one of the highest ratios he's seen in his 15 years of seed investing, he told BI. When choosing his investments, he said he focuses especially on the founders' unique insights, as well as the "why now" question: What makes the timing right for that specific company to succeed?
"These essential variables don't easily change and define company trajectory," he said. "Everything else important β product, pricing, distribution, business model, competition β is more malleable and therefore secondary."
For a career investor like Dwane, AI has represented a generational shift, which is creating an exciting time to evaluate startups and founders for new investment opportunities.
"The last year has been like no other," she told BI. "AI's impact is just beginning to show up in legacy industries, where the gap between what's possible and what exists remains wide."
Dwane added that the industry is also experiencing a revolution when it comes to software development, which she said will allow more people to build companies.
Across Village Global's three funds, Dwane's deals have a cumulative holding value of more than $16 billion. Before Village Global, Dwane cofounded the veteran-focused news site Military.com and later served as the CEO of Zinch, a university-recruitment startup acquired by the edtech company Chegg in 2011.
Andelman kicked off his investing career 25 years ago, backing growth-stage software companies at Broadview Capital Partners. A few years later, he founded Rincon Venture Partners, which he calls one of the original "micro VC" firms β seed investing before seed investing as an industry exploded.
His latest venture firm, Bonfire Ventures, backs hot early-stage startups building business-to-business software. The firm raised its fourth and largest fund in February, a $245 million fund that pushed Bonfire's total assets under management over $1 billion. Several of its portfolio companies have also had banner years, including the generative-AI startup Writer, which raised $200 million in Series C funding at a $1.9 billion valuation in November, and the adtech startup Mntn, which filed to go public in March.
78. Immad Akhund
Immad Akhund of Mercury
Immad Akhund
Founder and CEO, Mercury
Notable Investments: Rappi, Airtable, Rippling, Etched, Decagon, Albedo Space
City: San Francisco
Akhund is the founder and CEO of the banking startup Mercury, which recently raised a $300 million Series C at a $3.5 billion valuation led by Sequoia. Before Mercury, Akhund cofounded Heyzap, a startup that made mobile game developer tools, which was acquired by Fyber for $45 million in 2016.
Akhund angel invests in "things that will seem inevitable 10 years from now and can be $10 billion companies," he told BI. To him, these are Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Etched, which makes computing hardware, and Decagon, an AI-powered customer support software startup.
A serial entrepreneur, Shear is best known for cofounding the livestreaming startup Justin.tv with Kan. In 2011, Shear spun the gaming livestreaming business Twitch off from Justin.tv. In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million, and Shear remained as its CEO. In 2023, he was the interim CEO of OpenAI for a short time after Sam Altman was ousted. Shear made early bets on companies like Substack and Cruise.
For Garg, whose firm, Foundation Capital, was founded more than 30 years ago and placed its first AI bet more than a decade ago, there are three important things to look for when it comes to evaluating an early-stage, pre-revenue startup: the founder, the market, and technical insight.
"I look for evidence of 'exceptional' β exceptional intellect, exceptional grit, and exceptionally high willingness to prioritize the startup over almost everything else in their life," he told BI. "What's the unique insight that makes this startup different from the 100-plus other players going after the same market?"
Over the years, keeping these questions in mind has served Garg well as he's made bets in startups like Databricks, which has mulled an IPO, Cohesity, and Turing.
Prior to joining Foundation Capital in 2008, Garg worked at McKinsey and Microsoft.
Miklas cofounded the digital operations management company PagerDuty with Alex Solomon and Baskar Puvanathasan in 2009. He served as the company's chief technology officer until 2016 and then transitioned to venture capital, becoming a venture partner at S28 Capital. He also founded the early-stage firm Functional Capital, which focuses on B2B startups. Miklas has been a visiting group partner at Y Combinator since last year. PagerDuty was part of the accelerator's summer cohort in 2010 and became its second company to go public after a 2019 IPO.
Fixel spent more than a decade at Tiger Global Management and played a pivotal role in investing in companies such as Flipkart, Spotify, and Peloton. In 2019, he departed to launch his own venture capital firm, Addition, which focuses on early- and growth-stage startups.
During the past six years, Fixel and Addition have built an investment portfolio that includes companies like Hugging Face, Lyra Health, Satispay, Chainalysis, and Snyk.
Naimi kick-started his investment career at the age of 15, trading options. He then founded a hedge fund at just 18. Naimi later founded Abstract in 2016, where he focuses on leading seed-stage deals across all sectors. He says the firm has $1.6 billion in assets under management, and recent investments include the AI agent developer tool Anon, the autonomous-robot maker Watney Robotics, and the AI defense tech startup Kela. As for what Naimi looks for in a founder, he said, "I like high-momentum founders that operate with a relentless sense of urgency and demonstrate novel thinking."
84. Ludwig Pierre Schulze
Ludwig Pierre Schulze of Alumni Ventures
Ludwig Pierre Schulze
Title: Managing partner, Alumni Ventures
Notable Investments: Clarium Health, Nixtla, CompScience, ForceMetrics, Synthesis School
City: New York
Pierre Schulze is a managing partner at Alumni Ventures, where he writes checks ranging from $50,000 to $10 million to pre-seed to Series B companies. Through Alumni Ventures, Pierre Schulze manages Waterman Ventures, Brown University's VC community, and 116 Street Ventures, Columbia University's VC community.
"One of our companies went from single to triple-digit millions of revenue in a year," Pierre Schulze said when asked about his biggest accomplishments from 2024.
85. Milad Alucozai
Milad Alucozai of Pamir Ventures
Milad Alucozai
Title: Cofounder and general partner, Pamir Ventures
Alucozai started in venture capital at BoxOne Ventures, where he spent nearly six years leading 70 of the firm's early-stage investments as its head of life sciences and deep tech. While at BoxOne, he helped cofound Revalia Bio, a startup spun out of Yale that's working to enable drug discovery and development through the study of revived human organs. Alucozai led Revalia Bio's pre-seed round and invested in its 2024 seed round.
With a background in neuroscience, Alucozai said his singular focus as an early-stage investor is identifying brilliant technical founders. He said he looks for technical leaders from humble backgrounds setting out to build long-lasting products.
Alucozai left BoxOne this past summer. This year, he said he's focused on building and launching an unannounced early-stage venture fund with two of his friends dubbed Pamir Ventures.
Demirors has had a busy year launching her new firm, Crucible Capital, which invests in energy, compute, and crypto startups. Crucible ended 2024 with $36 million in committed capital from a $50 million target fund and is now oversubscribed, Demirors told BI. The firm also recently made its third investing hire.
For Demirors, Crucible Capital is the natural extension of her long career as an investor outside the traditional venture capital space. Rather than spinning out of a VC fund, she built investment firms and asset managers in crypto while she was angel investing. Prior to launching Crucible, Demirors was the chief strategy officer at the digital-asset investment company CoinShares.
At Crucible, her LPs are mostly builders, operators, and investors, rather than institutional investors or funds of funds.
"I feel like Crucible is a bit of an anomaly and it can be challenging considering how clubby venture can be sometimes," she said.
87. Mathilde Collin
Mathilde Collin of Front
Front
Title: Cofounder and executive chairperson, Front
Notable Investments: Retool, Mercury, Vanta, Copilot, Meter, Browser Use
City: San Francisco
Colllin cofounded Front, a customer service platform startup, in 2013 after working as a project manager at another startup. She served as Front's CEO until October and is now its executive chairperson. Collin also angel invests in a variety of companies, which include the fintech banking startup Mercury and the tool-building platform Retool.
In founders, Collin looks for "a delicate balance between humility, self awareness and self confidence," she told BI. "Enough self confidence to inspire people to be on the journey with them, enough humility to get people to help them, enough self awareness to work on themselves."
Golda began his entrepreneurial career as the founder of BackType, an analytics company that raised funding from Y Combinator and firms such as True Ventures. Twitter acquired BackType in 2011, and Golda stayed at the social media company for three years, leading product efforts at its advertising center. He left to launch Rogue Capital in 2014 to back seed and Series A startups.
Like many of the investors on this list, Golda said he focuses on the founder when choosing bets β but he's specifically looking for "a high tolerance for chaos and uncertainty," a critical skill he says can be especially difficult to develop later in life. "Without that, even the most resourceful founders will struggle to overcome the day-to-day challenges of a startup," he said.
89. Warren Weiss
Warren Weiss
Warren Weiss
Title: Managing partner, WestWave Capital; general partner, Foundation Capital
Notable investments: Theta Lake, Solo.io, Binarly, Secuvy, Cigent, Savant Labs
City: Redwood City, California
Weiss, a four-time CEO, founded WestWave in 2017 to invest in emerging software companies. In the past year, he has backed a number of software companies, including Secuvy, Elate, Savant, and Discern Security. He also serves on the boards of Trufa, Cyphort, Moxie, SilkRoad Technology, Silver Spring Networks, and Visier.
"This is the most distributive and exciting time to be in the early-stage venture capital market that I have ever seen," Weiss told BI. "AI will drive the reinvention of every single category that WestWave Capital invests in. This will create many new multibillio companies."
DeWitt has spent her career helping companies build new transformative biotechnologies. She began in VC at the Massachusetts life sciences firm Flagship Pioneering, then moved to Sanofi, where she guided the pharma giant's investments.
She joined The Engine, an MIT spinout, in 2018, two years after its launch. First as The Engine's chief operating officer, then as a general partner, she supported the startup incubator and accelerator's work with "tough tech" companies, offering an array of resources from lab space to capital for startups building in areas like climate and human health.
In 2023, DeWitt stayed on the investing side of the business when The Engine split its startup support operations from its venture arm. She highlighted Engine Ventures' investment in Cellino, which announced in February plans to open a stem cell manufacturing facility on-site at Massachusetts General Hospital in partnership with the top health system Mass General Brigham's Gene and Cell Therapy Institute.
91. Michael Sutton
Michael Sutton of Runtime Ventures
Michael Sutton
Title: Cofounder and general partner, Runtime Ventures
Notable Investments: StepSecurity, SplxAI, System Two, Todyl, GreyNoise, Orca Security
City: Arlington, Virginia
Sutton worked in cybersecurity for more than two decades before investing in the space as a venture capitalist. He started his career at EY and then worked at the internet infrastructure and security company iDefense, which VeriSign bought in 2005. Sutton then served as the chief information security officer at Zscaler, which helped establish the security-as-a-service industry.
Before cofounding the cyber-focused firm Runtime Ventures with David Endler, a cybersecurity veteran, Sutton worked in VC at Blu Venture Investors, YL Ventures, and StoneMill Ventures. Runtime's first $32 million fund closed in January 2025. "Starting a VC fund from scratch, especially as a former operator, took a tremendous amount of hard work, unwavering determination and exhausting our network, but it was all worth it," Sutton told BI.
"Runtime Ventures is the culmination of my experience and passion building and funding cybersecurity startups. It's what I know and love," he said, adding: "We are blessed to be able to do this every day."
Kan is best known as a cofounder of livestreaming startup Justin.tv and Twitch, the internet live video streaming platform that was sold to Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. He's also invested in some of the well-known startups in tech, including Reddit, Cruise, and Rippling. Kan, who makes seed investments through his firm Goat Capital, recently founded Stash, a direct-to-consumer platform for games.
Dessaigne knows a thing or two about Y Combinator β not only because he's currently a general partner at the famed accelerator, but also because he was in a Y Combinator cohort as a cofounder of Algolia. The search API startup last raised funding in 2021, which valued it at more thanΒ $2 billion. Now on the other side of the table, Dessaigne has invested in a slew of Y Combinator-backed companies, such as the multimodal data labeling AI startup Encord, which raised a $30 million Series B led by Next47 in August 2024.
"I'm amazed by how AI is giving superpowers to new founders, from codegen tools that 10x development speed to new models that unlock massive value," Dessaigne told BI. "Incumbents simply can't keep up with their pace. There's never been a better time to start a company."
An engineer by training who studied at one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, Sharma cofounded the startup HelloIntern.com, worked as an associate at the consulting firm Booz & Company, and did a stint at eBay before jumping into venture capital. Since 2015, he's been with the VC firm Nexus Venture Partners, which focuses on enterprise SaaS startups in the US and digital companies in India. Sharma has led some of the firm's deals with companies such as Clover Health, which went public in 2021.
Sharma said that last year he was an early investor in the fast-growing AI agent development startup StackBlitz, known for its product Bolt.new. He's also excited about his recent investments in the AI workflow automation startup Gumloop and the AI call center startup Leaping AI.
Sharma said he "loves partnering with first-time technical founders" and values those who have "product obsession, single-minded focus, clarity of thinking, and humility."
95. Wally Wang
Wally Wang of Scale Asia Ventures
Wally Wang
Title: Founding managing partner, Scale Asia Ventures
Wang started in tech as a product manager for Microsoft's Bing search engine. After founding two startups and working at enterprise software companies, he led venture investments for the Asian conglomerate Fosun International and a family office.
While Wang is a solo GP at Scale Asia Ventures, the small but mighty team has already had three acquisitions in the past year. When investing in AI infrastructure, Wang scouts founders "who can adeptly adapt successful strategies from the previous cloud era to the emerging generative AI landscape," he said.
96. Andrew Vigneault
Andrew Vigneault, cofounder and general partner of Flexcap Ventures
Vigneault has made his way onto the cap tables of some of the biggest startups through his early-stage fund, FlexCap Ventures. He wrote an early check to the NFT trading marketplace OpenSea and a seed check to the cybersecurity startup Material Security, which hit a $1.1 billion valuation in 2022.
Vigneault said he made 16 new seed investments in 2024, including a startup developing agentic AI to automate silicon engineering and others building AI models to enable early detection of chronic illnesses. Of the 50 seed investments he made from 2022 to 2024, 60% have been marked up through raising follow-on capital, he said.
When evaluating new opportunities, Vigneault said, he focuses on "partnering with founders who exhibit a profound and authentic comprehension of their industry and prospect customers."
97. Zachary Bratun-Glennon
Zachary Bratun-Glennon
Zachary Bratun-Glennon
Cofounder and general partner, Gradient Ventures
Notable Investments: Lambda, Rad AI, ELSA, Venn, Syrup, Clarify
City: San Francisco
Since cofounding Gradient, Google's venture fund focused on AI, in 2017, Bratun-Glennon has invested in more than 35 companies, and he's on more than 25 boards. Before Gradient, Bratun-Glennon helmed acquisitions and strategic investments for Google Cloud. He also worked as a technology banker at Deutsche Bank and began his career as an analyst at the energy-focused firm DC Energy.
At Gradient, Bratun-Glennon invests in pre-seed, seed, and Series A startups building in areas such as applied AI technologies, fintech, and B2B software. This includes Lambda, a startup most recently valued at more than $2 billion that develops a cloud computing platform for AI training and inference, which Bratun-Glennon backed in its seed round in 2017.
"We've been focused on backing the best founders in applied AI at the earliest stages for a decade, and we think the space is just getting started," Bratun-Glennon told BI. "Today's 'wrappers' are tomorrow's software platforms, built by layering unique user value, proprietary data and deep workflow integration."
Banta started the professional services firm B12 in 2015, the same year he began angel investing through a fund called Stellar Capital. Before B12, he cofounded the car-sharing app Getaround and the student-focused VC firm Rough Draft Ventures, and spent five years as an investor at General Catalyst backing early-stage tech companies.
He said the rise of AI has made the current moment the most exciting time he's experienced in more than two decades of early-stage investing, highlighting AI's ability to enable founders to do more with less.
"With less capital, founders can leverage AI to build better products and scale faster than ever," he said.
Egan has been leading investments in seed-stage crypto companies and protocols since 2015, writing early checks to startups including Chainalysis, Mina, Near, and Balancer. He also previously led investments for the VC firm Accomplice in Dapper Labs/Flow and Bison Trails (which was acquired by Coinbase), among others. One of Egan's early investments, Privy, hit 50 million wallets this year and raised a new round of funding led by Ribbit Capital.
Egan said he's interested in investing in startups at the "intersection of crypto and AI; programmable social networks and applications that will be built atop; and infrastructure and middleware that will make blockchains as fast and as cheap as an API call."
100. Morgan Flager
Morgan Flager
Morgan Flager
Managing partner, Silverton Partners
Notable investments: AlertMedia, Ping Identity, Self Financial, The Zebra, The Helper Bees, Repairify
City: Austin
Flager has spent the past 18 years at Silverton Partners, where he has been a managing partner since 2009. At Silverton, Flager has sponsored 24 investments, as well as overseeing 11 acquisitions and two IPOs. Before that, he briefly worked at FTV Capital in San Francisco as an associate. He got his start as an operator at the then startups Ingrian Networks and Kintana. Flager also cofounded the e-commerce infrastructure startup Woosh in 1998.
Flager said that in his 25 years in venture capital and startups, there had never been a more exciting time to be an early-stage tech investor. "We're witnessing an unprecedented wave of innovation, where advances in artificial intelligence are rapidly transforming every industry, from healthcare and finance to education and entertainment," he told BI. "The pace of progress is accelerating, and startups natively leveraging AI are not only solving complex problems faster and more effectively but they are also creating entirely new markets."
Interactive development by Annie Fu and Randy Yeip.
Marveri has emerged from stealth and secured $3.2 million to revamp corporate due diligence.
The company aims to streamline document review, reducing months of work to minutes.
High-profile lawyers like Alex Spiro and Larry Chu are lending their expertise to the founders.
Due diligence by young attorneys underpins every well-run merger or acquisition. It's also the bane of their profession.
A squad of associates might comb through thousands of corporate documents in a data room for weeks, hunting for the single detail that could screw up the deal after the parties shake hands.
Now, legal-tech startup Marveri has emerged from stealth, snagging $3.2 million in funding from Big Law lawyers and venture capitalists toΒ cut months of manual review to minutes.
Marveri says it's building technology that's creating faster and more accurate corporate diligence: it sucks up all of a corporation's documents, then automatically renames, organizes, and analyzes them. One upload produces a digital map of what's in each document and how they're related, revealing hidden risks in the haystack.
Before starting Marveri in 2023, Connor Acle earned his stripes as an attorney in Morrison Foerster's corporate practice. He worked on everything from early-stage startup financings to T-Mobile's $26 billion acquisition of rival Sprint.
"We were given tasks that often even the best lawyers couldn't complete as accurately and as early as possible," Acle, now Marveri's chief executive, said. "I knew there had to be a better way."
The startup's investors include Masha Bucher's Day One Ventures, Bessemer, Alven, Lightscape Partners, Tectonic Ventures, K5 Global, Cadenza, angels such as Larry Chu (cochair of Goodwin's global M&A practice) and Yaacov Silberman (founder of Rimon Law), and a syndicate of early users.
High-profile litigator Alex Spiro β best known for helping Elon Musk defeat a defamation lawsuit and getting Alec Baldwin's manslaughter case dismissed β is advising the Marveri team.
Once a novelty, AI's incursion into the legal profession is now unmistakable β and relentless. A wave of startups is zeroing in on bread-and-butter tasks such as document review and drafting. Capital is flooding in: Harvey and Eudia have secured a combined $400 million in funding this year alone. Marveri's closest analogue, Hebbia, pocketed another $130 million last July.
Acle said dozens of firms from Big Law to Main Street firms have already adopted Marveri, though the company isn't naming many names. Like other legal-tech startups, it charges a fee to pilot its technology, allowing lawyers to try before they commit to a contract.
Yet Marveri's promise of liberating lawyers from drudgery carries its own threat. If software can complete months of a first-year associate's document review in minutes, firms may simply need fewer first-years.
That tensionβeasing the grind while chipping away at the very rung that manyΒ young lawyersΒ use to climb the partnership ladderβhasn't escaped Acle, a former associate himself.
Young lawyers, he said, don't see Marveri as "a replacement" but as "a superpower" that lets them produce stronger work faster and wow partners and clients alike.
Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01.
AI adoption in legal circles is growing as tech meets accuracy standards.
Lawyers use AI for tasks like document summarization and spotting risky clauses.
Attorneys ensure human judgment remains crucial by implementing strict AI guardrails.
Artificial intelligence has a reputation problem in legal circles.
Outside the profession, the popular assumption is thatΒ attorneysβwhose livelihoods still hinge on hours loggedβhave little incentive to automate themselves out ofΒ billable work.
Inside the profession, the story is more nuanced.
Precision isn't optional in a court filing or a merger agreement, so before any Big Law litigator or solo practitioner lets an algorithm near client work, the tech must meet an uncompromising standard of accuracy and accountability.
That bar is finally being cleared, and curiosity is turning into adoption.
From global firms juggling multimillion-dollar matters to personal-injury practices compiling medical records, many lawyers are cautiously testing AI for specific tasks, such as summarizing documents, surfacing precedents, and spotting risky clauses. Whether they sit in a glass tower or a strip-mall office, the aim is the same: trim some time from routine steps and, where possible, pass modest savings and clarity onto clients.
Business Insider asked five attorneys from Big Law, boutique, and solo practices to share the AI tools they love. Here's how they're using AI β and the guardrails they've built to keep the judgment human.
Katherine B. Forrest, partner at Paul Weiss
Katherine B. Forrest, partner at Paul Weiss.
Paul Weiss
As chair of Paul Weiss' digital technology group, Katherine B. Forrest counsels clients on the thorniest questions surrounding digital assets and artificial intelligence.
She also turns to some of the same platforms she advises on for legal work, letting her pressure-test the tools for clients while steadily tightening the gears of her own practice.
She's a Harvey power user. Harvey functions as a virtual junior associate: a platform steeped in case law, statutes, and a firm's own documents. Lawyers can dump thousands of contracts, filings, or emails into its secure "vault," then ask the chat interface to summarize, compare clauses, or draft new language on the fly. Every answer comes hyperlinked to the exact source text, so attorneys can audit the reasoning before it ever reaches a client or court.
Forrest said she uses Harvey to speed up research and review, not as a substitute for legal judgment. "How do you determine that apart from speed, you've got accuracy and analytical excellence?" she asked. "You've got to have a human who's trained to evaluate that for now."
She also uses Hebbia to sift through filings and other documents and answer complex legal questions about their contents. The company sells its software primarily to asset managers and investment banks but is making inroads with law firms like Orrick and Fenwick.
Forrest said one tool truly stunned her: ChatGPT's Deep Research. She asked it to assess antitrust risks in a proposed merger and draft a pitch that maximizes the prospect of clearance. She asked three attorneys to vet the output, and they confirmed it was "100% accurate."
Drew Morris, partner at First Circle Law
Drew Morris, partner at First Circle Law.
First Circle Law
When Drew Morris saw the potential of artificial intelligence to provide better legal service at a reasonable rate, he left his general counsel post to start his own supercharged law firm, First Circle Law. He works with early to midsize startups on funding, business contracts, and corporate governance matters.
Morris explained that as a solo practitioner, he turns to artificial intelligence tools for all the tasks he would typically delegate. "I use it for everything I would otherwise rely on a junior associate to do," he said.
He lives on two platforms. The first is GC AI, which is designed for in-house legal teams. He uses the platform to conduct legal research, create template board consents (a legal mechanism that allows a board of directors to approve a specific action), and redline contracts with proposed changes and revisions.
He opens a plug-in from the legal startup Spellbook in Microsoft Word for deeper contract review and editing. Spellbook lets lawyers provide a prompt, such as "modify this agreement to be suitable in California," then, it marks up the contract with suggested changes for the lawyers to accept, reject, or modify.
John Hamill, partner at DLA Piper
John Hamill, partner at DLA Piper.
DLA Piper
When John Hamill was just starting as an attorney, his firm's partners would hand back paper drafts with their suggestions scribbled in the margins.
Then Microsoft changed the game with track changes in Word, Hamill said.
At DLA Piper, where he helps train young attorneys as part of leading the firm's affirmative litigation practice, Hamill encourages his team to use "the latest and greatest software" to sharpen their writing skills and think outside the box.
"Some of the tools that are now available on the market can give pretty insightful suggestions to the developing writers on what to do and why," Hamill said.
He likes Microsoft Copilot, BriefCatch, and Harvey, among others β though he's reticent to pick a favorite, saying that the best product today could be dramatically different two months from now.
Hamill also recognized the potential for copilots to respond with erroneous information. He tells his team always to check the writing assistant's work.
"We think of it as a smart, creative intern who works really fast," he said, "but just like a new lawyer, consultant, analyst β it's going to make some mistakes."
Sarah Tuthill-Kveton, partner at Chock Barhoum LLP
Sarah Tuthill-Kveton, partner at Chock Barhoum LLP.
Chock Barhoum LLP
Insurance litigator Sarah Tuthill-Kveton remembers the first time her husband, Scott Kveton, showed her ChatGPT. He used it to whip up a love note.
Months later, Kveton outdid himself: He started a company to make his wife's job in personal injury law easier.
CaseMark's platform allows lawyers to upload a plaintiff's medical records and receive an auto-generated medical chronology β a detailed, organized timeline of a patient's medical history. Lawyers use these to clarify the sequence of events and build their arguments.
Tuthill-Kveton, who defends self-insured companies, insurance carriers, and independent contractors in the gig economy, said reviewing medical records is tedious and slow. She estimates that using CaseMark to produce medical chronologies saves her firm up to a hundred hours each case.
The time she gets back, she said, she puts toward taking on more clients.
Justin Parsons, partner at Erickson Immigration Group
Justin Parsons, partner at Erickson Immigration Group.
Erickson Immigration Group
Immigration lawyer Justin Parsons helps tech companies hire top talent from abroad. These days, he's leaning on an artificial intelligence tool called Parley to write first drafts for visa applications.
Parsons said he's using Parley for various matters, including national interest waivers, EB-1 extraordinary ability petitions, and O-1 visas, a temporary work visa designated for individuals with a record of extraordinary ability in their field.
In immigration law, many attorneys charge a flat fee rather than an hourly rate, especially for standard services like visa applications. Parsons said it's for this reason that immigration attorneys are quicker to adopt new technology.
"The fees are flat, so it's in our best interest to make things go faster," he said.
Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01.
Courtesy of Laura Toulme, Jonathan Melke, and Nehan Sethi; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
Long viewed as laggards, lawyers have begun to adopt AI to deliver better, faster services.
Legal-tech startups are now attracting young attorneys with opportunities to shape the future.
Startups offer stock options and flexible work, but can't match Big Law's high salaries.
Last spring, Laura Toulme made a decision that would have raised more than a few eyebrows on her old litigation team. She left a clear career path at Hecker Fink to join Harvey, an AI-powered legal-tech startup backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund. Now, as an applied researcher at Harvey, she spends her days translating legal workflows into machine-readable algorithms.
"It felt like this is a train I had to jump on now or I'd miss it," Toulme explains, recalling how a lively call with an early employee convinced her that the future of law had arrived.
She's far from alone. According to an American Bar Association survey released this month, over 6% of 2024's law school graduates have already defected to business and industry employers. While most grads β 54% β landed in law firm positions, others are choosing to put their JD degrees to work at startups, building the next generation of legal software.
Startups like Harvey, Legora, and Eudia are capitalizing on this trend, helped by significant funding to expand their teams. With legal-tech fundraising surpassing $2 billion last year, according to PitchBook data, new grads and junior associates now have more opportunities than ever to trade in billable hours for stock options and the chance to influence the future of their industry.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em
As a 14-year-old, Jonathan Melke knew he would be a lawyer someday.
"I like to argue," Melke joked, in a clipped German accent.
After law school, he accepted a spot at Hogan Lovells, a prestigious global law firm. In his role advising tech and consumer electronics brands on European regulations, he came across Legora, a Swedish-born legal startup working to streamline contract review, due diligence, and legal research.
Melke sent founder Max Junestrand a LinkedIn request, and within hours, Junestrand replied, inviting him to chat. Junestrand outlined Legora's mission: automate the drudge work so lawyers could focus on big-picture thinking.
After the call, Melke applied for a job on Legora's growth team. "I want to build the future," he said, not watch it pass by.
Max Junestrand celebrates as his company Legora's logo lights up the Nasdaq MarketSite screen in Times Square.
Legora
Historically, young attorneys steered away from tech jobs because they worried it would hurt their ability to return to working at a law firm, says Omar Haroun, a three-time legal-tech startup founder. He said securing capital and hiring lawyers for his latest startup, Eudia, has gotten easier since the legal-tech gold rush.
Going into tech "was probably thought of as a career-limiting move before," said Haroun, "and now, it's starting to become a career-enhancing move."
Long viewed as laggards, law firms and lawyers have begun to adopt artificial intelligence to deliver better, cheaper, and faster services. This has led to an explosion of startups taking large language models and repackaging them as apps to assist with legal work.
Founders are flocking to legal tech for a reason. "Legal work is perfectly suited to how AI works," said Anna Barber, a venture capitalist at the early-stage fund M13 and a Yale Law School graduate. "It's very logical, it's very rule-based. The best answer can be discerned from looking at documents and facts and prior artifacts."
Until recently, big law firms relied on armies of junior associates to scour these artifacts for the information they needed to support their cases or sign off on deals.
Increasingly, that research can be supported by artificial intelligence. This is cause for concern among some young attorneys, according to Kristina Subbotina, who left Cooley to start a solo law practice, Lawlace. Her assistant, who's been applying to law schools recently, asked her if becoming a lawyer "even makes sense" anymore.
The paradox, several lawyers said, is that the threat of automation is nudging more fledgling lawyers not toward the safety of Big Law but toward the startups where the code is written. Large legal startups Harvey and Eudia say law school grads account for over 20% of their workforces.
There are other explanations for this shift. Peggy Gartre, a career counselor specializing in law degree-preferred positions at the Dean School of Law at Hofstra University, thinks many young people are disillusioned with the traditional practice, with its billable hour quotas and heavy workloads. Plus, the number of years it takes to become a partner at a major law firm is getting longer and longer, said Kimberly Kappler Fine, who runs an online platform for lawyers wanting to move from law to industry.
Then there's the Trump factor, said Fine.
President Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders targeting law firms he doesn't like.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Recently, the White House has taken aim at major law firms over what the president has labeled as "frivolous" lawsuits against his administration. Firms like Kirkland & Ellis and Paul Weiss, among others, have negotiated agreements with the administration to avoid penalties. Fine argues that this capitulation, rather than the "fear factor" around automation, is driving some lawyers out of the profession.
Pay cuts and payouts
In her second year as an associate at Campbell Teague, Nehan Sethi started getting contacted by friends of friends who were building software for reviewing contracts and tracking billable hours. They asked her to test drive their tools. Sethi realized that, as a lawyer, she had something to offer these startups.
Now working in business development at Harvey, she tailors sales demos for lawyers to showcase how the platform can be applied to specific areas of the law. Recently, she helped sign Harvey's first firm-wide customer in India. Sethi said having a lawyer on a sales call changes the nature of each conversation.
"They take us seriously," she said. "They understand that we know what they need and the product knows what they need."
Startups offer flexible hours, mission-driven work, and a shot at upside. But for all the perks, they still can't compete with the gilded path to Big Law partner in one critical way: compensation.
Big Law firms offer massive salaries to offset the high cost of attending law school. Starting salaries top $225,000 and increase significantly with experience. Equity partners in these firms can earn considerably more by receiving a cut of the firm's profits.
Toulme, the Harvey researcher, says the company offers generous salaries and stock option grants β yet even a startup with around half a billion dollars in funding could not match her salary as an associate. That helps explain why equity sits at the center of every recruiting pitch.
Startup hires receive stock options that, on paper, appreciate each time investors mark up the company's valuation. If Harvey or Legora someday break the IPO tape, early employees could convert those slips of paper into life-changing windfalls. Toulme believes that Harvey's future success will more than cancel out the pay cut she took to get on board.
Of course, belief only goes so far. Only a very small percentage of venture-backed companies ever reach a public listing, and even the winners can take over a decade to cash out. During that long slog, founders might reprioritize roles, pivot the product, or sell the business on terms that leave option holders with pennies.
"It would almost be naive not to acknowledge that it was a risky move," said Toulme. "I mean, it's a startup, it's a brand new industry, it's a brand new job. There's a lot of brand news."
Yet it is precisely that uncertainty that keeps young attorneys engaged. For lawyers tired of billable-hour quotas β and for a profession finally willing to experiment with the tools it once dismissed β the chance to help design the future of legal practice is beginning to outweigh the security of a corner office.
Whether the bet pays off in millions or fizzles in a shutdown, Toulme and her peers will at least be able to say they tried to build something new, rather than bill another 10th of an hour watching it happen.
Do you have a story to share about leaping into legal tech? Contact this reporter at [email protected].
Parley uses AI to streamline visa applications for immigration lawyers and paralegals.
The platform helps lawyers draft and submit applications faster, easing their workload.
Parley has gained traction amid increased scrutiny and directives affecting immigration processes.
While working as a LinkedIn product manager, Philip Smart saw the opportunity of AI to solve problems in an industry close to his heart: immigration. Smart's father has worked as an immigration attorney for 25 years.
That insight became the legal tech startup Parley, which is wooing and winning over lawyers and paralegals with software that helps them draft and submit visa applications faster.
When developing Parley, Smart pictured his father's desk. "You see these applications that are all printed out, stacks of paper, and you have to diligently put it all together," Smart said. "We felt like that was a great use case and something we could help with."
Parley's platform allows an attorney to upload documents such as a client's resume, college transcript, and job offer letter. It then assembles this evidence to draft an attorney's letter confirming the applicant's eligibility for a work visa.
Smart said its platform has been adopted by a range of law firms, from solo practitioners to large shops with dozens of legal professionals, such as Erickson Immigration Group in Virginia and Murthy Law Firm in Maryland.
Last week, the startup released a product for filing E-2 visas for investors, which means Parley's platform now covers most of the alphabet soup of work visas. It plans to roll out soon a product aimed at "requests for evidence," which the government issues and can cause delays or even lead to visa denials.
To date, Parley has raised a small seed round of funding from Y Combinator, a San Francisco investment firm that gives very young companies some money and a network in exchange for equity.
Tech investors are swooning at the promise of artificial intelligence to shake up the business of law and the profession itself. PitchBook data shows that legal tech startups took in $2.6 billion in equity funding in 2024, up from less than $1 billion the previous year. Immigration has emerged as a hot spot for founders, with its high volume of simple or routine tasks. The startups Casium and Glade Ai are also working on AI for visa filings.
'It's not easy to be an immigration lawyer'
Parley comes to market as the ground shifts beneath high-skilled immigrants and the lawyers who advise them.
Philip Smart.
Parley
Immigration lawyers are used to the long, complicated, and often tedious process of applying for a visa. Now, they're juggling new directives that create fear and increase scrutiny for their clients. The executive orders that have come down have called for stricter "enhanced vetting" of visa applicants and those already in the country.
Additionally, President Donald Trump has directed the Justice Department to seek sanctions against law firms that bring immigration lawsuits and other cases against the government that he deems unethical.
"It's not easy to be an immigration lawyer right now," Smart told Business Insider.
Smart thinks Parley can ease some of the strain. He said lawyers using Parley still work with their clients and teams of associates to craft each applicant's strategy. Parley helps by fleshing out the argument and offering feedback on where it falls short of certain criteria.
The platform also organizes an applicant's documents into a logical sequence and enables the exhibits to be exported as a single PDF, saving an attorney hours in Adobe Acrobat.
Smart lights up sharing customer stories. He said one law firm has been able to take on more clients because of Parley's time savings and even doubled its revenue over the past year. Those lawyers get to spend more time on growing their client base and working on case strategy, Smart said, instead of getting bogged down by paperwork.
There's a debate raging in the legal industry over artificial intelligence's potential to improve productivity and cutΒ billable hours. Smart seems unperturbed. In immigration law, many attorneys, especially for standard services like visa applications, charge a flat fee rather thanΒ an hourly rate.
"It's one of the reasons we started with immigration and one of the reasons that we've seen quick adoption," Smart said.
"As an immigration firm, if you're charging a flat fee for a visa application that you're providing if you can do that faster and then be able to do even more of those applications, that's a really exciting premise for your firm."
Trump's sweeping tariffs could hit tech startups hard.
VCs expect rising costs and fundraising struggles for companies relying on offshore operations.
Investors worry the tariffs could freeze exit markets as companies hope to IPO or get bought.
President Donald Trump's long-awaited tariffs have arrived β and the US markets are reeling.
The president debuted broad "Liberation Day" tariffs on Wednesday, announcing a 10% baseline tariff on all countries, as well as higher tariffs of up to 50% on imported goods from specific countries. The Trump administration's goal, as they put it, is to manage "highly unbalanced" trade deficits and bring manufacturing and supply chains back into the US.
But the tariffs have plenty of US-based investors and founders worried. The S&P 500 index fell more than 4% after Trump's announcement, with some companies' individual stocks tumbling far further.
Investors and founders told Business Insider the tariffs could have significant consequences for the tech industry, including for startups and venture capital β potentially raising the costs of doing business, stunting exit opportunities, and forcing startups to further tighten their belts.
Here are five ways Trump's tariff policy could affect tech workers and startups.
Tariffs could lead to a broader market correction that makes fundraising harder
On Wednesday, President Trump announced "Liberation Day" tariffs, imposing duties ranging from 10% to 49% on imports from 60 trade partners.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Trump's trade war has rattled stock markets and stoked fears of a recession. That has some in tech worried about how a broader market correction could trickle down to startups.
A tighter economy could force some limited partners to call off investments in venture funds as the value of their public assets tumbles β a phenomenon known as the "denominator effect." This would make it harder for investors to close new funds. They might also whittle down the target size of their funds, recognizing that startups will raise smaller rounds in a funding winter.
"If the tariffs stick, and if we see kind of a broader market correction, you're going to see venture going the same way it has over the last two years, where it's difficult to raise capital and to manage funds," said Marcos Fernandez, cofounder and managing partner of Fiat Ventures. "Unless you have a really differentiated model, it's going to be difficult to weather that storm."
The IPO window could close shortly after it opened
Investors worry the market's volatility in response to the tariffs will shrink the backlog of companies seeking to go public.
Getty Images
Just as startups have begun to queue up for IPO listings, Trump's latest round of tariffs has raised questions about whether companies will shelve their plans to go public.
"If tariffs affect the equity markets and that affects the trading of tech stocks, then that could affect the ability of later-stage companies to go public," said Justin Stevens, founder and chief executive of Overlap Holdings, a frontier-tech-focused venture capital firm.
Fernandez of Fiat Ventures shared that sentiment, saying the backlog of companies seeking to go public is shrinking as they wrestle with value multiples out of line with their own.
Both Klarna and Hinge Health have filed their S-1s to go public.
The stock market's reaction to the tariffs could hit potential mergers and acquisitions in addition to public listings, said Jordan Nof, managing partner of Tusk Venture Partners.
"The big headline number on the Google-Wiz deal, other M&A activity that's just heating up, and the momentum in the IPO market β this really does throw a wet blanket on all of that," he said.
Spiking costs for hardware and manufacturing startups
Trump toured one of Apple's manufacturing facilities in Texas in 2019. Most of Apple's products are manufactured in China, which will put the tech giant in the crosshairs of Trump's tariffs.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Investors said startups building hardware or other physical goods could be especially impacted by Trump's new tariffs.
Hardware startups rely on a host of manufacturers that are mostly based in China. Those Chinese manufacturers now face a 54% total effective tariff on goods imported to the US β a combination of a 34% Liberation Day tariff imposed on China and a previous 20% price hike.
Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, a Paris-based general partner at Speedinvest, said industries that depend on complex manufacturing, such as electronics, machinery, and chip production, and hardware-dependent sectors could see spiking costs and supply chain disruptions.
Even healthcare companies could feel the sting of tariffs if they manufacture their drugs and devices offshore, said Sunny Kumar, a partner at Informed Ventures. Those companies "now have to decide whether to pass on these new costs to their customers or absorb them themselves, given the significant time and infrastructure needed to onshore," Kumar said.
However, Overlap Holdings' Stevens maintains that some high-margin businesses in categories such as robotics, life sciences, or space may more easily weather the price hikes. "If you're building a robot, the cost of the metal inputs into the robot is a very small fraction of what you're selling that robot for. And so you have a lot more profit margin to work with," Stevens said.
The growth of US manufacturing may lead to rising demand for global talent
China's AI market is booming as Chinese companies like OpenAI rival DeepSeek and TikTok parent company ByteDance attract and cultivate AI talent.
Dado Ruvic/REUTERS
President Trump said on Wednesday, "Jobs and factories will come roaring back" as he rolled out sweeping tariffs. If that happens, the creation of new jobs could exacerbate an already stretched labor market.
The tariffs may also deter some skilled foreign workers from bringing their talents onshore, said Krish Ramadurai, a partner at AIX Ventures, which invests in the software and biotech industries.
"Tariffs signal a closed-door stance that repels global talent," he said. "The US innovation edge depends on openness, and losing that could prove more costly long-term than any tariff."
However, a manufacturing revival could also lead companies to seek out top global talent.
Sophie Alcorn, a business immigration attorney who advises tech workers and startups, predicts that the construction of state-of-the-art factories, such as Apple's new Houston digs and Hyundai's Georgia plant, will actually create job opportunities for high-skilled immigrant workers.
"The technicality of some of these advanced manufacturing processes is going to require a lot of brilliant talent," Alcorn said. "We will certainly need to rely on brilliant people from around the world to help us build them in the US."
Companies may face a pricing conundrum
Furniture seller Restoration Hardware saw its stock tumble more than 40% following news of the tariffs coupled with the company's subpar earnings report.
AP
Companies now face a difficult choice: absorb the increased costs or raise prices for customers.
The companies that are best positioned to pass rising costs onto customers are those making and selling "mission-critical" products, said Tusk Venture Partners' Nof.
"If you're providing a mission-critical product to anyone that's a must-have rather than a nice-to-have β groceries, medications, shelter, things you have to have to survive β you're going to buy that regardless, so you'll be more willing to take an incremental increase in price," Nof said. "Everything else starts to get cut."
The same is true for business software. "You're not going to stop buying software altogether," Nof said, but enterprises will become more discerning about the subscriptions they keep.
Legora is taking the legal world by storm with its AI software for lawyers.
The Stockholm-born startup recently signed Goodwin as a client and opened a New York City office.
Now, as Legora bears down on the US market, its chief rival, Harvey, faces real competition.
On a drizzly spring morning stroll through New York's Central Park, Max Junestrand, the 25-year-old Swedish founder behind legal tech startup Legora, opened up about a chip on his shoulder.
He started his company over a year after the founding of Harvey, the OpenAI-backed legal tech startup that has emerged as the apex predator in a fast-growing market for artificial intelligence products for law firms and corporate lawyers. Harvey has enjoyed a close partnership with the ChatGPT maker and secured major law firms as clients.
Now, as Legora bears down on new global markets, Junestrand tells Business Insider his company is gaining ground on chief rival Harvey β with less money and fewer employees.
"We're not here to be some European No. 2," he said. "We're here to play."
Founded in Stockholm in 2023, the startup helps legal professionals work smarter with a digital workspace built on top of large language models. Its application is used in nearly 20 countries by more than 250 clients, including the global firm Bird & Bird and Mannheimer Swartling, Sweden's largest law firm.
Last week, at Legalweek, Legora threw down the gauntlet at Harvey by rolling out new product features aimed at serving global tier-one firms, such as a Microsoft Word add-in. Legora said it had signed Goodwin, a leading law firm for tech deals, as a client. It also opened a new office in New York City, the company's first outpost outside Europe, where Junestrand will be based.
Legora's logo lights up the Nasdaq MarketSite screen in Times Square in New York City.
Legora
Not long ago, selling software to law firms looked like a losing business for startups. Lawyers worked mostly out of documents that were hard for software to read. They stored those files on physical servers on location for higher security and control over their data. But over the past few years, as even tech-averse lawyers recognize the clear potential of artificial intelligence, a new class of startups is trying their luck delivering software to the legal industry.
An investor shared on LinkedIn that one year ago, Legora had booked nearly $900,000 in annual recurring revenue, or the yearly value of revenue. Legora declined to share a more recent figure.
To date, Legora has raised more than $35 million in funding from investors such as Benchmark, Redpoint, Y Combinator, and Jack Altman's fund, Alt Capital.
"We're not here to be some European No. 2," Junestrand said.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
Legora's web app looks like a cross between ChatGPT and a chart maker. Its search bar lets users ask questions about the contents of their internal data and browse the web and case law libraries. The app's killer feature is tabular review. It enables the bulk upload of documents and runs software programs called "agents" to answer specific questions about the contents of those documents.
Junestrand took BI through a demo as a pretend lawyer advising SpaceX on raising a make-believe equity round, in which the company's investors want to know about its financial health before deciding whether to write a check.
Junestrand dragged a folder containing dozens of loan agreements into tabular review. File names filled the far left column. In the next column, Junestrand wrote "loan amount" and clicked a button that expanded his prompt, telling the agents to extract the loan's value from the contract. He repeated these steps to work out the loan term.
The agents tunneled through the loan agreements at blazingly fast speeds. In seconds, the columns filled with the dollar amounts and dates. Junestrand clicked into a field and an agreement appeared in the right pane, showing the section where it gleaned the answer.
"Great software has to be intuitive," Junestand said. "Sadly enough, there's a lot of software in the legal space that looks like it was built in the nineties and doesn't prioritize design and ease of use."
Legora competes with legacy legal tech providers like LexisNexis and Thompson Reuters, as well as unicorn startups like Harvey.
Legora
Though he doesn't name them, it's easy to figure out who he's talking about. Two of the biggest players in legal tech are LexisNexis and Thompson Reuters. They boast decades of experience in creating products for legal professionals.
However, the old legal tech guard has one clear advantage over the challengers. LexisNexis and Thompson Reuters are sitting on troves of copyrighted data that feed their legal assistant products.
Sean Fitzpatrick, chief executive of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, spoke at Legalweek about how this data gives it an edge. "The systems are only as good as the data that sits behind them," he said, "and veracity matters in the law. It matters a lot."
Junestand thinks legacy software providers will struggle to keep pace with ChatGPT-era legal tech. He said the technology is moving too rapidly for the incumbents to evolve. He added that he made a conscious decision to keep Legora's engineering team small and nimble, so they can respond quickly to the latest models and AI trends.
As for its battle with Harvey, Junestrand believes the best product will win over lawyers, even if Harvey's ties to OpenAI help boost its brand and credibility.
"When we started, we were immediately at a disadvantage. We were a year behind," Junestrand said, referring to Harvey's headstart on Legora. "And so pace and speed of execution became the things that we optimized for."
Legal professionals confer in the New York Hilton Midtown lobby during Legalweek in New York City.
Chris Williams/Legalweek
As law firms probe how to leverage AI, lawyers are worried about the impact on billable hours.
Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of Lexis Nexis, shared why he thinks billable hours may go up in cost.
AI gives lawyers "that extra set of eyes" that allows them to deliver better service, he said.
Law firms are working out how to use artificial intelligence to save time, but their lawyers are wringing their hands over the effect on their billable hours.
Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, thinks a lot about this question. He oversees the teams responsible for delivering data products and insights to legal professionals at law firms, corporations, and government entities. Last week, during a panel discussion atΒ Legalweek, he tried to ease their concerns.
Fitzpatrick predicted that some law partners could charge a standard billing rate of $10,000 an hour within the decade, placing them on the top shelf of high-paying, white-collar professions.
Billing rates are trending upward at big firms across the country, driven by the continued consolidation of law firms and rising demand for top legal talent. The going rate for senior partners at some of the nation's highest-grossing law firms is close to $2,100 an hour, according to an analysis of public disclosures by legal data platform Valeo Partners.
Sean Fitzpatrick, left, listens during a panel discussion at Legalweek in New York.
Chris Williams/Legalweek
Fitzpatrick's belief is that lawyers who leverage artificial intelligence, from virtual legal assistants to chatbots, will provide a higher quality service to clients. They could then charge more.
During his panel discussion, Fitzpatrick offered a hypothetical.
"Let's say an attorney does 10 hours worth of work at $750 an hour, and let's just say it's a very simple matter. She's the only person that works on it," he said.
She bills the client $7,500.
"Let's say tomorrow, she has almost exactly the same matter, but tomorrow, she's got access to this new technology that helps her with her work. It provides her with some additional perspectives and things that she hadn't thought of previously. It's that extra set of eyes."
"She's actually able to create more value for her client," he continued. "So yesterday, she billed 'em $7,500. Now, she's got a better work product than she did before. Maybe she can bill $8,000."
The work also takes her less time now. She's free to take on additional legal matters and produce more billings.
For top senior partners, "it doesn't take that much inflation to get to the $10,000-per-hour billable hour," Fitzpatrick said. "I think there's a realistic scenario where we could absolutely see this."
The legal industry's reliance on billable hours is facing potential disruption. Legal experts, including attorneys and legal-tech startup founders, shared with Business Insider at Legalweek that law firms are moving toward fixed fees instead of billable hours. The idea is that artificial intelligence can handle simpler legal tasks, freeing lawyers to apply more brainpower to problem-solving.
Those lawyers might lose some of the billable hours they pass on to clients. But the value of their time is likely to increase βΒ a belief shared by Max Junestrand, founder and chief executive of Legora, one of the more buzzed-about software firms making legal copilots.
He told Business Insider that clients will press their law firms on how they're leveraging artificial intelligence to "do more with the hours they have." Law firms will apply fixed fees for bread-and-butter matters as "both [AI] adoption increases and the sophistication of the tools continues to improve."
"The lawyers' clients always want service cheaper and better quality," Junestrand said. "The work that AI cannot do today will become even more valuable. So law firms will have a bigger opportunity."
Attendees at Legalweek watch a virtual reality demo at a vendor booth.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
I attended Legalweek, an annual gathering of thousands of legal professionals in New York City.
The potential of artificial intelligence to reshape the legal profession emerged as a key theme.
Speakers issued stern warnings that a failure to adopt new tech will leave lawyers in the dust.
On the first day of Legalweek, a conference where thousands of lawyers gather to hobnob with their peers and explore the latest tech, Max Junestrand, clad in a black overcoat that highlighted his 6-foot-3-inch stature, stepped out of his hotel, ready to seize the day.
Long viewed as Luddites, law firms and corporate lawyers have begun to adopt artificial intelligence to deliver better service faster and cheaper. This has led to a Cambrian explosion of startups trying to sell tools for drafting contracts and tracking billable hours. Junestrand's startup, Legora, helps legal professionals work smarter with a digital workspace built on top of large language models.
Earlier in the day, Legora jacked up its battle with a chief competitor by announcing in the trade papers that it had signed Goodwin, a leading law firm for tech deals, as a client. It also opened a new office in New York City, the Swedish-born company's first outpost outside Europe. Later in the day, Junestrand would join his employees in Times Square to watch Legora's logo light up the iconic Nasdaq MarketSite screen.
Legora CEO Max Junestrand gives a demo to a reporter in Central Park during Legalweek.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
"We don't build Legora so law firms can check the box on doing AI," Junestrand said, sitting at Legora's event booth. "We want to transform and rethink what it means to do great legal work."
'Lawyers are dinosaurs'
At Legalweek at the New York Hilton Midtown, artificial intelligence was on trial, scrutinized with the precision of a shark litigator. Behind closed doors, lawyers spoke on panels about the coming "death of legal busywork" and the costs of fake legal cases making their way into real briefs. In the exhibition hall, software engineers wearing slacks and pencil skirts tried to woo lawyers with promises to shave off hours of work without killing the billable hour.
I learned that Junestrand, the Legora founder, has an uphill battle ahead of him. Selling software to lawyers isn't the same as shilling to sales reps or programmers. Lawyers work mostly out of documents. Before the arrival of large-scale language models, software wasn't very good at extracting data from text. So the tools weren't all that useful.
Legalweek attendees mill about the New York Hilton Midtown.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
Junestrand said the advent of large models trained mostly on textual data changed everything. Now, these models can parse and understand complex legal documents, streamlining tasks like legal research and contract review. But for all the hype around virtual paralegals at Legalweek, numerous lawyers said the adoption of the tech has been slow.
"Lawyers are dinosaurs," an employment lawyer said over a catered lunch of beet salad and deli sandwiches. The Philadelphia attorney said when she gets a contract by email, she likes to print it and mark it up with a pen. When she's done, she files it away. That's how she's been doing things since the dictaphone.
Tech savants want to work with lawyers like them
Later in the week, dozens of attendees poured into a dimly lit conference room for a panel discussion on how legal teams can start using artificial intelligence. Panelist Amy Sellars, an attorney at the business law firm Gunster, told lawyers to ask vendors for demos and make it easy for people in their firms to experiment with new tools.
"Lawyers need to wake up," said Todd Itami, an attorney at the large legal defense firm Covington & Burling, saying that learning to use artificial intelligence was "imperative" for their success.
The timekeeping startup Billables.ai offered conference-goers a chance to win a Cameo from a TV lawyer.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
Younger lawyers may be more receptive to Itami's call to action. Aaron Crews, a partner at the global law firm Holland & Knight, places lawyers on a bell curve with early adopters and laggards on the far ends and the rest in the middle. Law students and junior associates often try new products before most others.
The tech-savvy standouts in their programs, according to Crews, are likelier to want to work for firms that take a friendlier stance toward new tech. This means the top firms won't be sought after for long if they fall behind the times.
Even as Silicon Valley giants cut jobs like a hot knife through butter, the competition among startups for the best global talent remains as fierce as ever. And with critical skills, particularly in artificial intelligence, still in short supply, startups like OpenAI and Anthropic rely on the H-1B visa program to bring in skillful foreign workers and secure their place in the race.
For a startup to hire a foreign worker, it sponsors their petition for an H-1B visa, which lets them work in the US for up to six years. The job candidate is entered into a lottery for one of 85,000 visas. Despite challenges, including a demand for visas that has outstripped supply and ongoing discussions about reforms, startups continue to recruit talent abroad through this Rube Goldberg system to gain a competitive edge.
Using data from the Department of Labor and US Citizenship and Immigration Services, we ranked the startup employers that filed the most H-1B requests during the 2024 government fiscal year. The data comes from applications submitted by businesses seeking to sponsor workers' visas.
Here are the startups leading the charge, ranked by their number of filings.
Ripple: provides crypto infrastructure for financial services
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.
Stephen McCarthy/Getty Images
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: $325 million, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 26
Grammarly: writing assistant that edits and corrects language
Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra.
Coda
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: $400 million, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 28
Plaid: collects and shares personal financial info with apps and other services
Plaid CEO Zach Perret.
Cody Glenn/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: $734 million, according to the company
Total certified H-1B filings: 28
Carta: helps businesses track ownership and manage equity plans
Carta CEO Henry Ward.
Carta
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: $1.19 billion, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 30
Thumbtack: allows users to search for and hire local service providers
Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta.
Thumbtack
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: More than $500 million, according to the company
Total certified H-1B filings: 31
X Corp.: social media platform
X Corp. owner Elon Musk.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Image
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: Elon Musk took X private at a purchase price of $44 billion in 2022.
Total certified H-1B filings: 32
Anthropic: develops foundation AI models aimed at business users
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Chesnot/Getty Images
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: More than $17 billion, according to the company
Total certified H-1B filings: 35
Zipline: develops and operates drone delivery fleets
Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton.
Taylor Hill/Getty Images
Headquarters: South San Francisco, California
Total funding: $1.23 billion, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 35
Turo: car rental marketplace
Turo CEO Andre Haddad.
Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: $527 million, according to the company
Total certified H-1B filings: 36
Scale AI: data labeling company helping apps and models scale
Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
Scale AI
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: $1.6 billion, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 42
Gusto: payroll and HR solution for small businesses
Gusto CEO Joshua Reeves.
Gusto
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: $751 million, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 48
Verkada: cloud-managed security cameras
Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan.
Verkada
Headquarters: San Mateo, California
Total funding: $700 million, according to the company
Total certified H-1B filings: 52
Nuro: develops self-driving tech for robotaxis and delivery vehicles
Nuro CEO Jiajun Zhu.
Nuro
Headquarters: Mountain View, California
Total funding: More than $2 billion, according to the company
Total certified H-1B filings: 59
Cohesity: develops software for securing and managing cloud data
Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen.
Cohesity
Headquarters: San Jose, California
Total funding: $1.8 billion, according to the company
Total certified H-1B filings: 61
OpenAI: develops cutting-edge AI models and apps like ChatGPT
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
picture alliance/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: $63.92 billion, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 74
Chime: provides fee-free mobile banking services
Chime CEO Chris Britt.
Kimberly White/Getty Images
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: $2.65 billion, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 101
Stripe: provides financial infrastructure for businesses
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED
Headquarters: San Francisco and Dublin
Total funding: $8.73 billion, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 265
Databricks: cloud-based platform to help enterprises build, scale, and govern data
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi.
Ali Ghodsi
Headquarters: San Francisco
Total funding: More than $14 billion, according to the company
Total certified H-1B filings: 283
ByteDance: Chinese internet technology company
Headquarters: Beijing
Total funding: $18.95 billion, according to PitchBook
Total certified H-1B filings: 997
TikTok: video-based social media platform
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Headquarters: Los Angeles and Singapore
Total funding: TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance, which has raised $18.95 billion in venture capital, according to PitchBook.
A trifecta of economics, pandemic-era realities, and political pressure is changing tech culture.
From Big Tech to Silicon Valley startups, companies are pushing to "do more with less."
Leaders aren't shy about wielding their power and aligning around a hard-driving strategy.
For years, Shopify CEO Tobi LΓΌtke enjoyed a reputation for growing the $125 billion e-commerce company without working the grueling hours expected of startup founders.
"My job is incredible, but it's also just a job. Family and personal health rank higher in my priority list," he wrote in a now-deleted post on X, then Twitter, shortly before the pandemic, as reported by Business Insider at the time. "The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so."
This year, even LΓΌtke appeared to change his tune.
"I'm at home for dinner but I work at least 10 or so hours a day and a lot of the weekend," LΓΌtke wrote on X. He was responding to a user who called him a "counter-example" to a meme suggesting you can't have work-life balance and a breakthrough startup. "I don't want people to get misguided by this meme."
Across tech, the tables have turned for employees as performance pressure and proclamations of "efficiency" and "intensity" replace perks and pampering. Sweeping layoffs have become the norm in an industry that, in recent memory, enjoyed job security. The pressure to dominate in AI has created intense competition, as companies use the technology to do more with fewer workers. Already hard-driving workplaces have become even harder.
While the situation for tech employees has been changing since the pandemic boom ended in 2022, more recent developments include a decidedly different tone from executives. Now, companies aren't just making these changes; they want to be seen making them.
Meta earlier this year said it was cutting 4,000 employees deemed low performers as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the "culturally neutered" corporate world had gotten away from "masculine energy." Amazon insisted that employees return to the workplace every weekday, a policy some employees say is stricter than before the pandemic.
Other companies have cracked down, too. Microsoft, which was once referred to as a "country club" for its relatively lax culture, cut 2,000 employees as it overhauled its review process to eliminate underperformers more quickly.
Google, which practically invented tech perks like free lunch, started an "efficiency drive." Its cofounder Sergey Brin, who had stepped away from leading Google but now often shows up to work on the company's Gemini AI models, recently recommended that employees working on its Gemini tools should work 60 hours a week and go into the office "at least every weekday." Wall Street has rewarded this rigor, as stock prices of Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google's parent, Alphabet, have surged since 2022.
Startups also see a trickle-down effect from Big Tech companies' pressures. Krish Ramadurai, a partner at AIX Ventures, said he had noticed a "pronounced shift" toward leaner teams and rigorous performance standards at startups.
Between performance-based cuts, return-to-office mandates, and the stripping of workplace perks, it's clear not only that the tech industry is done coddling employees, but that companies want to send the message those days are over. BI interviewed employees from tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, as well as various tech startups, about the changes. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity since they're not authorized to talk to the press, though their identities are known to BI.
Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon did not comment. Shopify did not respond to a request for comment.
From comfy to collapsed
For years, fierce competition for tech workers meant companies spoiled employees with astonishing salaries and swanky perks, such as in-office massages and free food cooked by fancy chefs.
By 2022, tech companies seemingly couldn't throw enough money at workers. Early that year, Amazon more than doubled its maximum base salary, and Microsoft gave across-the-board raises to employees up to a certain level of seniority to dissuade them from leaving for competitors.
As the pandemic boom ended, tech stocks plummeted, and interest rates increased through 2022. This prompted an efficiency drive by many companies as investors demanded profitability over growth at all costs.
Also that year, companies watched the billionaire Elon Musk's handling of the Twitter acquisition, in which he cut thousands of employees, plus perks like free lunches, and demanded a commitment to a new "extremely hardcore" vision and "long hours at a high intensity." At one point, Twitter workers were begging on Slack for toilet paper and clean bathrooms amid Musk's drastic cost-cutting.
As of late last year, Fidelity valued X at only about 20% of the $44 billion that Musk bought it for in 2022. Still, his approach may have expanded what the tech industry thought possible in terms of workforce and cost cutting.
"People paid attention because the prevailing wisdom was you couldn't take out that much of an engineering organization and put that much instability on it and not have it fall over," Brad Porter, the founder and CEO of Cobot, told BI. "It did come close to falling. He pushed right to the edge of it actually falling over, but it didn't fall over."
'Do more with less'
By the end of 2022 and in early 2023, tech giants had conducted unprecedented rounds of layoffs. Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft collectively laid off more than 60,000 employees during that time.
Layoffs have remained at a steady drip across the industry since. Such cuts have become so frequent at Google, for example, that employees have taken to crowdsourcing information on layoffs in an internal Google Doc.
Employees told BI about the pressure across the industry to "do more with less." "There's lots of uncertainty," one longtime Amazon employee said, "and lots of pressure to perform the jobs of multiple people at the mercy of ruthless middle management."
Tech companies are also culling middle management layers. Amazon in September announced a plan to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of this month. In December, CEO Sundar Pichai told his staff that Google had cut vice president and manager roles by 10% as part of its efficiency drive. Microsoft also monitors what it calls "span of control," tracking the number of reports per manager.
Performance pressures
Amid the cuts, employees across the industry say companies are dialing up the performance demands.
Meta told its staff in January that it would eliminate roughly 5% of its workforce, or about 4,000 employees, to "raise the bar on performance management," as Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo.
Google also increased pressure on employees. Perhaps most telling was Pichai's December comments attempting to clarify what "Googleyness" means for a modern Google. Once a squishy and vague philosophy for the search giant's corporate culture, Pichai said he believed it now meant, among other things, being "mission first."
"There is more pressure for individuals to be better in their roles, and there is much more aggressive performance management happening these days," a longtime Google manager said.
"We're being asked to do more for less," said another current longtime Google employee.
That same Google employee said that Silicon Valley had been moving toward more ruthless, efficient workplaces for a while β and that the current political climate "gives them the green light to do it openly." Google has been working to become more efficient since its chief investment officer Ruth Porat joined the company as CFO from Morgan Stanley in 2015, "but now the masks are off," the person said.
Microsoft was once referred to as the tech industry's "country club," meaning a place employees would go after they were done working hard in their careers and wanted to coast before retirement. A change this year shows how far Microsoft has shifted when it fired 2,000 employees deemed low performers without severance and ended their health benefits the same day. This kind of performance-based mass cut showed a shift for the tech giant.
One longtime Microsoft senior-level employee said they felt that the "culture shifts toward firmer performance expectations" at peer tech companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon made it more acceptable for Microsoft to do the same.
At TikTok, the pressure to perform jumped last year after the company directed managers to deliver more low scores in performance reviews, leading to PIPs and eventual exits. At the same time, six current and former employees told BI their goals had become much harder to hit. One staffer called the goals "unattainable."
The company has also recently heightened RTO requirements for some teams. In February, it told its US e-commerce workers that in addition to being in the office five days a week, they would physically need to be in the building for eight hours a day. Ten current and former workers told BI that burnout had become common, leading to some going on mental health leave to get a break. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
"You feel like if you're not hitting a target, even if it's a moving target, you're in trouble," a former staffer who went on leave for mental health reasons told BI. "For me, it was just feeling like a failure, like I couldn't do anything right."
It's gotten hardcore in the 'valley of death'
The increasing pivot to performance has even made it to already hard-charging startups.
Startups have a time-honored tradition of an always-on, work-first lifestyle. Early employees are expected to put in grueling hours of coding and customer support during this critical phase, known as the "valley of death," when startups are flush with initial funding but not yet profitable.
The free-money era tested this tradition of hustle and thriftiness. Investors heaped money into small startups when interest rates bottomed out, and the blitz scaling that followed set off an arms race of perks to help startups attract top talent. Employees could work from home and set their own schedules. They pocketed wellness stipends and trotted the globe on extravagant off-sites. The tech startup Bolt gave many employees Fridays off.
"I think many individuals β founders included β lost sight of the true goal of a company. It is to make money," Mang-Git Ng, the founder of Anvil, a paperwork automation company, told BI.
Now, the executives who had lavished high salaries and fancy perks on their employees are resetting expectations, winding down remote work, and cutting head count.
"Everyone who comes into our office at Decagon has opted into working with a team that's here because we want to do big things and see bigger and better results," said Jesse Zhang, the founder of Decagon, who now badges into the office six days a week. "There's no such thing as a rocketship that doesn't have a certain level of intensity to fuel its trajectory."
Call it the Big Tech trickle-down effect.
"Founders aren't sugarcoating it," said Natan Fisher, who runs a recruiting firm, SingleSprout, that specializes in hiring technical talent. "I've had a few cofounders tell employees they aren't working hard enough, and, 'If you're not all in, no hard feelings, we can give severance, but we can't slow down.' Late nights, weekends, even people crashing at the office, it's real."
Rippling has created a hotline for companies to flag 'suspicious behavior' by its chief rival, Deel.
Rippling filed a lawsuit on Monday accusing Deel of using a corporate spy to steal company secrets.
The company also sent document preservation letters to Deel board members.
Rippling has put out a Bat-Signal to summon help with its lawsuit against a competitor.
Rippling, which has had a public and bitter rivalry with Deel that predates a lawsuit it filed Monday, created a hotline for companies to report suspicious activity by Deel, the company told Business Insider.
"Shortly after we filed the lawsuit, we began receiving numerous unsolicited reports from companies who experienced suspicious behavior by Deel over the last several months," a Rippling spokesperson told Business Insider.
Rippling's legal team also ramped up its case against the rival human resources technology company on Tuesday bysending letters demanding that Deel's five board members preserve documents potentially related to the case, another Rippling spokesperson confirmed.
Neither Deel nor the company's five board directors immediately responded to Business Insider's requests for comment for this story.
Both Rippling and Deel have competed fiercely for clients, and each have been valued at north of $10 billion.
Rippling's lawsuit filed Monday accuses Deel of competing unfairly by recruiting a Rippling employee to spy on the company and steal its secrets.
The alleged mole, according to the lawsuit, performed numerous searches in Rippling's internal Slack, Google Drive, and Salesforce databases. The spy found information about Deel customers who had spoken to Rippling about signing up with its human resources technology services instead, and then funneled that intelligence back to Deel, the lawsuit alleges.
A representative for Deel denied "all legal wrongdoing."
The website for Rippling's hotline asks for information about "similar activity" to the allegations in the lawsuit. If it receives credible tips, it could bolster the company's accusations in court that Deel misappropriated trade secrets.
The lawsuit alleges the corporate spy stole lists of prospective and existing clients, and that Deel could have used that proprietary information to woo clients to its own platform.
Have a tip? Contact the reporters via email at [email protected] and [email protected] or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01 or @JacobShamsian.07. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
From left: Larsen Jensen of Harpoon Ventures; Dan Gwak of Point72 Private Investments; Katherine Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz; Raj Shah of Shield Capital.
Harpoon Ventures, Point72 Private Investments, General Catalyst, Shield Capital
The defense tech startup industry is attracting more funding from venture capital investors.
This recent wave is driven by investors' techno-optimist patriotism and geopolitical tensions.
Funding to defense-related companies went up 33% in 2024 year-over-year, according to McKinsey.
Venture capital's once-skeptical stance on defense technology has all but disappeared as investors pour billions into startups building everything from autonomous drones to cybersecurity tools.
Investors have lined up to deploy fresh cash despite the high capital demands of hardware defense startups, extended horizons for returns, the complexities of working with the federal government, and the difficulty of encroaching on turf dominated by prime defense companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and General Dynamics.
With the success of defense companies like Anduril and Palantir, which have been able to break into that already crowded field and make a name for themselves, investors and startup founders alike are invigorated to build more in defense tech. Anduril has been able to land big contracts from the government, as well as newer players like Alexandr Wang's Scale AI and Shield AI, a maker of autonomous drones and AI-powered software for the military.
This trend has only accelerated in recent months, as the Trump administration has signaled an interest in "reviving" the defense industrial base by leveraging "emerging technologies," as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in his nomination hearing opening statement.
Globally, investors at established venture firms and those working as solo capitalists deployed $31 billion to defense-related companies in 2024, up 33% from the previous year, according to a recent McKinsey report.
Here are the venture capitalists doubling down on defense tech:
Daniel Ateya, RTX Ventures
Daniel Ateya, managing director at RTX Ventures.
RTX Ventures
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Notable investments: Ursa Major, Hermeus, EnCharge AI, Tomorrow.io, Impulse Space
Why he's on the list: After leading the Silicon Valley office for 3M Ventures, Ateya took over as head of venture for RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies) in 2022. So far, it has invested in aerospace and defense startups, including rocket propulsion provider Ursa Major and hypersonic aircraft developer Hermeus.
"Our main focus is on identifying teams with outstanding technical and engineering talent and experience that have developed a disruptive vision and strategy with an actionable plan to build a scalable business," Ateya told Business Insider.
Why he's on the list: As head of investment strategy (and later President and CEO) of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital fund, Bowsher, in many ways, helped create the entire defense tech startup ecosystem. He made an early bet on Palantir, blowing the doors open for Silicon Valley techies to go after federal contracts. At the time, conventional wisdom in venture capital was that there was no point in trying to sell to the government; too slow, too much red tape, too much competition.
"I don't know how many reference calls I did for venture capitalists between 2006 and 2012 or so who were thinking about investing in Palantir that wanted to talk to me because they didn't understand the government market," Bowsher told Authority Magazine last year.
The son of a federal employee who grew up devouring spy novels, Bowsher has always been interested in the work of the government but actually cut his teeth in Silicon Valley. After graduating from Stanford, he worked for three startups and spent eight years at venture fund InterWest Partners. By combining Silicon Valley's swashbuckling ethos with a government agency's mission-driven mentality, Bowsher has helped shepherd some of the biggest defense tech success stories of the past two decades.
Katherine Boyle, Andreessen Horowitz
Katherine Boyle is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
Andreessen Horowitz
Location: Miami
Notable investments: Anduril, Apex, Hadrian, Rune
Why she's on the list: Boyle is the animating spirit of Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice. She's a former Washington Post journalist who made an impression among founders at General Catalyst, where she invested in Anduril, Relativity Space, Nova Credit, and others. In a blog post at the time of her hiring, A16z general partner David Ulevitch wrote, "when we would meet with the best companies in these areas," such as defense, safety, and national security, "we were always asked if we knew Katherine Boyle." She joined the firm in 2021.
Michael Brown, Shield Capital
Michael Brown.
William Pratt
Location: Palo Alto, California
Notable investments: Nexla, according to PitchBook
Why he's on the list: Brown spent four years working for the Department of Defense, leading the Defense Innovation Unit, which works to advance the use of commercial technology in the military. He left that role in 2022 to join Shield Capital, and he was promoted to partner in 2023.
Prior to leading the Defense Innovation Unit, Brown spent 2016 to 2018 as a Presidential Innovation Fellow working on the unit's collaboration with startups, known as DIUx. Earlier in his career, Brown spent 13 years as CEO of cybersecurity company Symantec and, before that, led Quantum Corporation, a data storage management company.
James Bruegger, Seraphim Capital
James Bruegger, general partner and CIO at Seraphim Capital.
Why he's on the list: Brugger is the chief investment officer of Seraphim Capital, which is focused on investing in space technology. He was also an early venture capital investor in Arqit, Iceye, LeoLabs, and D-Orbit and led investments in several companies that went public, including Spire Global and AST SpaceMobile.
According to his LinkedIn profile, his "focus is on identifying and supporting from inception to exit the sector's most ambitious and fearless entrepreneurs as they aspire to harness the infinite potential of Space to turn science fiction into science fact."
Jake Chapman, Marque Ventures
Jake Chapman, managing director at Marque Ventures.
Why he's on the list: Chapman started his career in venture capital nearly 20 years ago as a fund formation lawyer. He said he "quickly realized that he was a terrible lawyer but loved what his clients were doing." Chapman went on to cofound three companies and later worked as a corporate VC before starting his own deep tech-focused firm, Alpha Bridge Ventures. But over time, Chapman said he "developed an appreciation for the importance of deep tech to the national security mission" and started focusing his efforts more on defense.
He left Alpha Bridge and took over as managing director of the Army Venture Capital Corporation, the VC arm of the US Army, After a few years, Chapman left, along with the team recruited to jump-start the AVCC, and launched the defense and national security-focused firm, Marque Ventures, in 2022.
Dave DeWalt, NightDragon
Dave DeWalt is the founder and CEO of NightDragon.
Why he's on the list: Before launching cyber-focused investment firm NightDragon in 2012, DeWalt held executive roles at three cybersecurity companies, including McAfee. The firm's name is a nod to his pastβunder DeWalt's leadership, McAfee was the first to expose the Night Dragon Operation, a series of nation-state cyberattacks that began in 2006.
At NightDragon, DeWalt invests in "solutions to better protect governments, organizations, and individuals," according to the firm's website. Recently, NightDragon has invested in autonomous maritime company Saronic and Epirus, which develops high-power microwave technology for countering drones and electronics.
DeWalt also serves on the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Council and is the Vice Chairman of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Advisory Council.
Adam Draper, Boost VC
Adam Draper is the founder and managing director of Boost VC.
Why he's on the list: Draper has carved out his own niche in his family's venture empire with Boost VC, the deep tech-focused firm he cofounded in 2012. Boost VC leads pre-seed rounds with $500,000 checks.
Draper has invested in sought-after defense tech companies like Starfish Space and K2 Space that aim to disrupt the government's role in emerging technologies. "In recent years I have watched as the government became more self-aware about their lack of technological innovation, and started to work hand in hand with startups rather than against them," Draper wrote in a 2021 Substack essay. "The next 10 years will be about startups aligning with governments as customers and partners to further innovation."
Elad Gil
Elad Gil is an influential solo capitalist.
Dey
Location: San Francisco
Notable investments: Anduril, Mistral AI, Gitlab
Why he's on the list: Despite not being directly associated with a name-brand VC fund or a government agency, Gil β one of Silicon Valley's biggest solo capitalists β has left his mark on the defense tech sector.
In 2021, Gil personally led Anduril's $450 million Series D, which valued the company at $4.6 billion. The company, led by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, has been one of the most prominent defense-tech darlings in recent memory, and Gil has continued to be an important backer and booster of the company.
Gil is also a prolific investor in the emerging generative AI space, which he believes will have far-reaching impacts on every facet of society, including defense and intelligence use cases. He's also circumspect about the dangers of this nascent technology.
"The first question I asked Anduril when I met them β and it was just the founders β was how do you think about the ethics, and how do you think about what's permissible and isn't?" Gil told Business Insider.
Randy Glein, DFJ Growth
Randy Glein is the cofounder and partner of DFJ Growth.
Why he's on the list: Glein cofounded venture capital firm DFJ Growth in the early aughts and currently serves as its managing partner. At DFJ, he has invested in older defense tech companies like Anduril and newer entrants like Scale AI, the data training startup that recently announced a contract with the Department of Defense. Recently, he invested in Hidden Level's Series C, which develops counter-UAS technology.
"They are helping restore our advantage on the modern battlefield and improving airspace safety, leveraging their unique technology to provide the critical, real-time intelligence needed to covertly intercept inbound airborne threats," Glein wrote on X about Hidden Level. "This capability is crucial to protecting our forward deployed troops, defense assets, and airports in a world where drones and UAS have become a major hazard."
Dan Gwak, Point72 Private Investments
Dan Gwak, managing partner at Point72 Private Investments.
Why he's on the list: Gwak was awarded a Purple Heart and Combat Action Ribbon for his service in the US Marine Corps before getting into VC. He cut his teeth in finance at Credit Suisse and The Carlyle Group and joined In-Q-Tel, the not-for-profit venture firm funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, after his time in the Marine Corps.
After four years as a partner at In-Q-Tel, he joined Point72 Private Investments, the private investing arm of the hedge fund Point72 Asset Management. He oversees the defense tech and growth investment teams at Point72 Ventures. "Today's emergent technologies have the potential to shift the global superpower balance, Gwak told Business Insider. "The startups of today that bring those technologies to bear will be the defense primes of tomorrow."
Why he's on the list: Following a decadelong US Army career where he served as an infantry and Special Forces Officer β including as Troop Commander in the US Central Command's Counter-Terrorism Crisis Response Force β Hendrix earned his MBA from Columbia Business School and later his master's degree in law from the George Washington University Law School.
His first foray into a civilian career was as an analyst at asset management firm Blackstone, where he worked for two years before founding his own venture capital firm, Decisive Point, in 2018. Since starting the firm, which focuses on critical technologies for defense, energy, and infrastructure, Hendrix has invested in startups, including Radiant Nuclear, which is building a portable nuclear microreactor to replace diesel generators, and Firestorm, which builds unmanned aerial systems.
While defense tech plays a big role in Hendrix's portfolio, he told Business Insider that the technology is also important to revitalize America's manufacturing industry.
"Today, we are also seeing a lot of interesting opportunities in adjacent sectors like logistics, advanced materials and manufacturing, and nuclear energy," he said.
Why he's on the list: Hoyem leads the investment team at In-Q-Tel, the venture capital fund for the CIA and broader intelligence community. The fund has been an early backer of some of the most successful defense tech startups in recent memory. Its close intertwined relationship with the US intelligence establishment gives it unique insight into the problems and processes of highly secretive organizations. Hoyem has spent years as an essential liaison between government stakeholders and Silicon Valley.
He spent over a decade as a venture investor and can move seamlessly between the intelligence community, the venture world, and the startup ecosystem. Hoyem specializes in helping startups that have never worked with the federal government navigate the complex process of developing technology for defense and intelligence applications.
Larsen Jensen, Harpoon Ventures
Larsen Jensen, founder and general partner at Harpoon Ventures.
Why he's on the list: An Olympian, Navy SEAL, and now a venture capitalist β Larsen Jensen has always been a competitor. He competed and won silver and bronze in freestyle swimming at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, respectively, and holds the American record in the 400-meter freestyle. He later became a Navy SEAL, and then went on to business school at Stanford.
After stints as a VC at Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed, Jensen founded early-stage firm Harpoon Ventures in 2018. The firm focuses on enterprise tech "critical to national security and democracy." The firm manages $300 million in AUM and has invested in defense tech, cybersecurity, AI, and frontier technology.
Jensen said he was introduced early in his career to VC by the cofounders of coaching platform startup BetterUp, Alexi Robichaux and Eduardo Medina. After witnessing their success, he was "inspired to delve deeper into the venture ecosystem."
Erik Kriessmann, Altimeter
Erik Kriessmann is a partner at Altimeter.
Erik Kriessmann/Altimeter
Location: San Francisco
Notable investments: SpaceX, Anduril, K2 Space
Why he's on the list:Β Kriessmann is a partner at investment firm Altimeter and an Anduril and K2 Space board member. Altimeter recently doubled down on its investment in K2 Space, with Kriessmann co-leading its Series B.
"We are at the dawn of a Space Supercycle, where new launch vehicles and reduced-cost, reliable access to space are transforming the entire market," Kriessmann wrote on X following the fundraise. "K2 Space is taking advantage of this paradigm shift by mass-manufacturing high-power multi-mission satellites that deliver unprecedented capabilities and enable the multi-orbit constellations desired by national security and commercial customers."
Previously, Kriessman worked at Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
Why he's on the list: Kwan spent over two decades as a tech banker at Morgan Stanley, spending his last six years there heading its West Coast team. He moved over to General Catalyst in 2021 to become managing director of its Global Resilience Team.
"We look across the entire defense ecosystem and invest in companies that unlock multiplier effects to modernize our defense, intelligence, and industrial base capabilities," Kwan told Business Insider.
One of those companies is Anduril, where Kwan is a board observer. Now he's looking for the next Palmer Luckey, one of Anduril's cofounders.
"In founders, we look for mission, intentionality, technical depth of the team, commitment to responsible innovation, and the ability to radically collaborate with government customers," Kwan said.
Why he's on the list: Serial founder and investor Lonsdale co-founded Palantir in 2004, soon after graduating from Stanford University. He founded 8VC in 2015, which recently announced it raised $998 million for its sixth fund, nearly double its previous fundraise.
Lonsdale moved 8VC from the Bay Area to Austin in 2020, and wrote on X that Texas was "more tolerant of ideological diversity than SF."
In recent years, after his work at Palantir, Lonsdale has emerged as a prolific defense tech startup founder and investor. He cofounded Epirus, which develops technology to counter unmanned aircraft systems, through 8VC's Build program, invested in autonomous surface vessels startup Saronic Technologies, and was an early backer of Anduril.
Gilman Louie, America's Frontier Fund
Gilman Louie (left), the founder of the nonprofit America's Frontier Fund with Barbara Sobel and Cliff Sobel at The Prostate Cancer Foundation's 2023 Annual Hamptons Gala at Parrish Art Museum.
Why he's on the list: The founder and former CEO of In-Q-Tel, a VC fund backed by the CIA to connect the intelligence agency with the startup community, Louie is now the cofounder and partner at VC fund Alsop Louie Partners and the founder of the nonprofit America's Frontier Fund.
Louie, a director on the Maxar Technologies and Aerospike boards, is also a member of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board and the US Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
Connor Love, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Connor Love is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Connor Love/Lightspeed Venture Partners
Location: Menlo Park, Calif.
Notable investments: Anduril, Saronic, Castelion, Helsing, K2 Space
Why he's on the list: Love is a partner at Lightspeed, where he invests in autonomous systems, defense, manufacturing, and space startups. A former US Army captain with leadership roles and a deployment to northern Iraq, Love's work at Lightspeed is informed by his military service. Love got his MBA at Stanford and joined Lightspeed's frontier tech practice after leaving the military.
Love recently co-led Lightspeed's investment in K2 Space, a satellite manufacturing startup, and has also invested in notable defense tech startups like Anduril and Saronic.
Why he's on the list: Mathias forged his path as a VC while touring as the drummer for his rock band, Filligar. Working closely with the US Department of State, Filligar was dispatched to regions including Russia, the Middle East, South America, and North Africa to strengthen cultural connections, Mathias told Business Insider.
After his band days, he started in venture by landing a student fellowship at .406 Ventures. He then worked at VC firm Bertelsmann Investments, where he was embedded in the European and Chinese startup ecosystems. He's now a partner at Alumni Ventures, "overseeing investments in critical strategic technologies for the United States." Mathias is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Council on Germany.
"I embrace venture capital's original self: as an asset class for the biggest ideas for the most consequential and timeless of challenges," he told Business Insider. "Defense is one of those challenges."
Why he's on the list: Moore was employee number one and director of operators at Palantir, where he still sits on the board of directors. He also cofounded social media analytics company Backplane and cloud automation startup NodePrime, which was acquired by Ericsson in 2016.
As an investor, Moore has invested in over 50 seed-stage companies as both an angel investor and on behalf of 8VC, where he has been a managing partner since 2017. At 8VC, he says he looks for founders with the longer-term outlook defense startups require.
"There's a unique type of founder who's not sort of just hacking something together and then jumping around every four years, which is the Silicon Valley ethos," Moore said on a panel in 2023. "Is this guy going to work on this when he's 25 β is he going to work on it when he's 55? I want someone who's going to because it's their whole life, and they don't have anything else."
Chris Morales, Point72 Ventures
Chris Morales is a defense tech partner at Point 72 Ventures.
Why he's on the list: Morales runs Point72 Ventures' defense tech practice, which he joined in 2020, leading coveted fundraises like autonomous-driving-tech startup Overland AI's Series A, and satellite-servicing startup Starfish Space's Series B.
As a former F/A-18 Super Hornet Weapons Systems Officer in the US Navy and a graduate of the Naval Academy, investing in defense tech is personal for Morales. He also holds an MBA and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an investment banker in Goldman Sachs's technology, media, and telecommunications practice, according to LinkedIn.
Why he's on the list: As the executive director of Lockheed Martin Ventures, John Christopher "Chris" Moran is in charge of the defense behemoth's venture strategy.
In 2022, Lockheed Martin doubled the size of its VC fund from $200 million to $400 million so it could make larger investments and speed up "defense innovation through investments in growing tech companies."
The firm has made over 100 investments since 2007, according to PitchBook data.
Jackson Moses, Silent Ventures
Jackson Moses, founder and managing partner at Silent Ventures.
Why he's on the list: Moses founded Silent Ventures to invest in founders of early-stage aerospace, defense, and national security startups. Since launching his venture fund in late 2022, it's invested in startups, including Firestorm, which builds uncrewed aerial systems, and Saronic, an autonomous surface vessel builder for Western naval and maritime forces.
While Moses has long been in the startup world β he founded AI content-moderation startup Spectrum Labs and corporate tax software MainStreet β building Silent Ventures marks his full-time foray into the defense tech world. Before founding the firm, Moses invested across verticals, including B2B software and manufacturing, as an angel investor.
Josh Manchester, Champion Hill Capital
Location: Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina
Notable investments: SpaceX, Anduril, Umbra
Why he's on the list: A former infantry and combat engineer officer in the US Marine Corps, Manchester and his pre-seed and seed stage firm Champion Hill Capital have backed some of the hottest startups in defense tech and space, including SpaceX, Anduril, and Umbra.
Before launching his firm, Manchester also had investing roles at Foundation Capital and Trubridge Capital Partners. In 2023, Manchester addressed generalist VCs' growing interest in defense tech.
"Defense investing is the ultimate form of mission investing," he told TechCrunch. "Defense investors from decades ago are the reason why this article isn't being written in Russian. It's a great thing that the category has new entrants."
Raj Shah, Shield Capital
Raj Shah is the managing partner at Shield Capital
Why he's on the list: Shah has been an F-16 fighter pilot with the US Air Force since 2000, and his current work at Shield Capital is centered on connecting Silicon Valley to the Pentagon. Since joining the firm in 2020, Shah has invested in startups, including cyber-insurance startup Resilience β he's also the company's cofounder β and Hawkeye 360, a satellite startup that maps radio frequency emissions for defense, maritime, and global protection purposes. Before Shield, Shah was the managing partner of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit, the military's innovation arm intended to connect it with commercial, cutting-edge technology.
Shah told Business Insider that he looks for founders who have grit because founding a company is one of the hardest things a person can do outside combat.
"Founding a deep tech company is especially challenging," he said. "We seek to back founders so passionate and dedicated to their mission that they will run through walls to succeed."
Peter Tague, US Innovative Technology Fund
Peter Tague is the managing partner at US Innovative Technology Fund.
US Innovative Technology Fun
Location: Charleston, South Carolina
Notable investments: Capella Space, Primer
Why he's on the list: At Thomas Tull's US Innovative Technology Fund, Tague invests in and supports companies serving the defense and commercial sectors. He's added promising upstarts to the fund's portfolio, such as the rapidly growing satellite manufacturer Capella Space.
Before joining the firm, Tague worked at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit strategic investor for the national intelligence community and its allies, where he established offices in London and Sydney and oversaw an applied research group focused on national security.
Thomas Tull, US Innovative Technology Fund
Thomas Tull is the founder and chairman of US Innovative Technology.
Why he's on the list: Tull made a fortune selling his film company to a Chinese conglomerate several years ago and now uses his money and influence to support defense-focused startups giving the nation and its allies a technological edge.
With a hefty war chest at his fingertips, Tull is one of the most active investors in the defense-tech category. He's already corralled billions of dollars from backers like Guggenheim Partners for his US Innovative Technology fund.
David Ulevitch, Andreessen Horowitz
David Ulevitch is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
David Ulevitch/Andreessen Horowitz
Location: New York
Notable investments: Air Space Intelligence, Anduril, Flock Safety, Prepared, Radiant, Skydio
Why he's on the list: Ulevitch helped kick-start the American Dynamism practice at Andreessen Horowitz alongside Katherine Boyle, spurring a wave of investment and support for startups advancing the national interest. Before A16z, Ulevitch founded OpenDNS, a cloud-based security service that was sold to Cisco in 2015 for $635 million.
Ulevitch has more financial firepower than ever before. Last year, A16z unveiled a new $600 million American Dynamism fund for investing in aerospace, defense, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, industrials, and manufacturing.
Chip Walter, Marlinspike
Chip Walter is the managing director at Marlinspike.
Why he's on the list: As a nearly three-decade Navy veteran, Walter may be better suited than just about anyone else on this list to understand the real-world impact of advanced technology on the battlefield. Throughout his storied federal career, he oversaw the CIA's innovation and technology sourcing strategy, advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and deployed to Afghanistan. He would go on to lead Northrop Grumman's in-house venture investment where he brought his years of military and government experience to bear on developing innovative new technologies of defense and intelligence applications.
Now, he serves as managing director at Marlinspike, a Washington, DC-based, veteran-led venture capital fund that focuses on technologies solving complex national security issues. Marlinspike has backed some of the biggest and most successful defense tech companies, including Anduril and Palantir.
Why he's on the list: Wolfe cofounded Lux Capital in 2000 and has become known for backing moonshot companies in areas like biotech, artificial intelligence, aerospace, and defense. Before entering VC, Wolfe worked in investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney and capital markets at Merrill Lynch.
Wolfe has been a longtime defense tech investor and an early backer of defense tech standouts like Anduril and the space infrastructure startup Varda. While the industry hasn't reached its peak, Wolfe is a staunch believer in its future.
"Standout companies (like Anduril) are rapidly attracting talent and capital, turning product launches into programs of record that are reflected in rising revenue and valuations," he told BI. "This momentum is expected to spur the creation of adjacent ventures and attract additional capital, driving industry growth, and we expect dedicated 'defensetech' fund-of-funds to follow."
Darius Rafieyan contributed to an earlier version of this list.
Private information from the company kept leaking, the company says in a lawsuit filed Monday.
The suit says recruiters at one of its chief rivals, Deel, had contacted more than a dozen Rippling employees using their unlisted personal phone numbers.
Then, it adds, a journalist approached Rippling, a workforce management software company, with a story claiming it may have violated sanctions, citing messages from Rippling's Slack channels.
After launching an investigation, Rippling says, the company found an employee in Ireland it now says was a spy digging for corporate secrets to pass off to the company's competition.
The lawsuit, filed against Deel in San Francisco federal court, says the employee, who oversaw payroll issues in Europe, was looking at Slack channels with "no connection to his payroll operations job responsibilities" and searching for the term "Deel" more than a dozen times a day.
The suit says the man β who is not named in the lawsuit β found sensitive information about prospective customers who were looking to switch from Deel to Rippling. It adds that he downloaded a 31-slide deck that explained Rippling's strategy for competing with Deel.
Rippling's leaders believed they found their mole. So they set up a honeypot operation, the company says.
Believing that Deel "was most likely to activate its spy if faced with potentially damaging press," Rippling's general counsel emailed a legal letter to three of Deel's top leaders, the lawsuit says. The letter identified a Slack channel called "#d-defectors," on which Rippling employees discussed information that Deel would find embarrassing if it was made public, it adds.
In reality, the lawsuit says, the #d-defectors channel did not exist until shortly before Rippling sent the letter to Deel.
"Rather than being a gathering place for ex-Deel employees, the channel was set up as part of a ruse designed to confirm that Deel was instructing D.S. to search for specific information in Rippling's Slack," Rippling's lawsuit says, referring to the person it says was "Deel's spy."
Deel "took the bait," the suit says. Just hours after Rippling sent the letter, it adds, this person searched for and accessed the channel.
It was a "smoking gun," Rippling says in the lawsuit, that Deel's highest echelon β or someone working on its behalf β fed information to that person.
Over the course of four months, the lawsuit says, the man pulled information from Rippling's Slack, shared Google Drive, Salesforce database, and internal human resources directory.
A representative for Deel denied "all legal wrongdoing" and said Rippling was trying to distract from claims that it violated sanctions laws, which Rippling denies.
"Weeks after Rippling is accused of violating sanctions law in Russia and seeding falsehoods about Deel, Rippling is trying to shift the narrative with these sensationalized claims," a Deel spokesperson said in a statement. "We deny all legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims."
A tech rivalry for the ages
Rippling's lawsuit, which demands a jury trial, marks a fiery escalation in its rivalry with Deel.
Founded in 2016 by Parker Conrad, a mainstay of the workforce software market, Rippling creates tools to streamline a company's back office. It launched with the idea of gathering all of a customer's data about its employees and placing it in one system.
Deel came onto the scene with a different proposition. In 2019, the company functioned as an "employer of record" for companies, allowing its customers to hire globally without having to worry about compliance regulations in different countries. Over time, Deel, led by its cofounder and CEO, Alex Bouaziz, bolted a wider variety of products onto its system, building them in-house and buying up small players in payroll and IT.
The two firms now go head-to-head in the workforce software market, raising bigger and faster rounds of funding to expand their operations.
Their competition has often unfolded in the public eye. This past spring, when Rippling held a tender offer, which refers to the sale of a shareholder's stock in a company, the company barred former employees who work for its competitors, including Deel, from cashing out.
In January, a class action complaint alleged that Deel lacked the proper licenses to process payments for a company accused of operating a Ponzi scheme but that it did so anyway.
The plaintiff's lawyer, Thomas Grady, has been reported to be an investor in Rippling. In a motion to dismiss, Deel denied any wrongdoing and rejected the complaint as a feckless attack by its biggest competitor.
A court order and a flushing toilet
Rippling says it picked up the trail of the person it alleges was a corporate spy partly by looking at his Slack activity. The employee, who joined Rippling in 2023, had rarely used the "preview" function on Slack, which allows users to view a channel's contents without notifying colleagues, the lawsuit says.
In November, the suit says, the employee started previewing dozens of channels a month, sometimes peeking at particular channels more than 100 times each month.
The channels were dedicated to information about Rippling's services and software sales, as well as information about competitors like Deel, the lawsuit adds.
Rippling's suit says the employee's browser and email history indicate he may have also met with Bouaziz and Deel's global head of expansion, Olivier Elbaz, in December.
On Wednesday, after the honeypot operation, Rippling sought a court order in Ireland to seize and inspect the employee's phone.
When a court-appointed solicitor served the employee with the order at Rippling's Dublin office, the suit says, the employee said his phone was in a bag on another floor.
It was a lie, the lawsuit alleges.
"The bag only contained a notebook. It held no mobile device," the lawsuit says.
The suit says the man then went to the bathroom and locked the door, "despite the independent solicitor's repeated warnings that these actions were in violation of the court order."
"I'm willing to take that risk," the employee said, the lawsuit adds.
The employee "then stormed out of the office and fled the scene," the lawsuit says.
Rippling says in the lawsuit the solicitor heard the employee flush the toilet, suggesting he "may have attempted to flush his phone down the toilet rather than provide it for inspection," though a later inspection of the building's plumbing "did not locate any mobile devices."
Winston Weinberg is the lawyer-trained founder of Harvey.
Harvey
In three years, Harvey went from an unknown startup to a pivotal AI force within the legal industry.
CEO Winston Weinberg spoke to investor Sarah Guo on a podcast about how the legal field is changing.
He highlighted how the work of young lawyers will evolve and why billable hours may go up in cost.
Harvey, a startup focused on legal and professional services, has a message for lawyers worried about chatbots coming for their jobs: We come in peace.
Founded by a former lawyer and an ex-DeepMind researcher, the company has taken over the legal world by worming its way through leading firms. It hired lawyers as domain experts and linked arms with high-profile firms like A&O Shearman and PwC early on to develop software for legal professionals.
Harvey investor Sarah Guo recently spoke to Winston Weinberg, Harvey's lawyer-trained founder and CEO, on her podcast, "No Priors." They covered the skepticism among some lawyers regarding artificial intelligence and its potential impact on the industry. Weinberg tried to ease those concerns.
"I don't think there is as much displacement fear," Weinberg told Guo. "It is not job displacement, it is task displacement. And I think that's a super important distinction because getting rid of those tasks does not mean the legal industry falls apart. It'll evolve."
Weinberg's reassurance has backing from the who's who of venture capital. Just last month, the company announced it had secured $300 million in Series D funding to further develop its platform and expand its team. This new round saw participation from return investors such as Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Elad Gil, Guo's Conviction, and the OpenAI Startup Fund, along with new backers Coatue and LexisNexis.
Here are three other predictions the Harvey founder shared about the future of law.
Junior associates become more valuable
Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
The majority of junior associates are hired to do one thing: produce as much billable work as possible. These young attorneys are expected to put in grueling hours of case study and research.Β They are the foot soldiers of the profession.
And so the notion of a law firm using software to automate away parts of the profession might seem scariest for the people responsible for this grunt work. Not so, according to Weinberg.
"The junior folks are incredibly happy about this," he told Guo on the podcast.
The Harvey founder says that most junior associates spend the first leg of their careers on rote tasks. "So whether that's in reviewing documents in discovery or it's reviewing documents in a data room, et cetera, you end up not being able to do the strategic level things until like 10 years into your career, if you're lucky, five," he said.
Software like Harvey allows them to get tasks done faster. "And so what I think will end up happening is the timeline will compress," Weinberg said, "so you will start being able to actually do the high-level strategic work and interact with clients, which is what people really want to do earlier on in your career."
Billable hours go up in cost
Harvey cofounders Gabe Pereyra and Winston Weinberg.
Harvey
The unstoppable march of artificial intelligence has fanned a long-running debate over the potential death of the billable hour or the standard method of payment in the legal profession.
The idea is that when a firm uses software to speed through routine tasks like document review and due diligence, the number of billable hours to a client is likely to be reduced. The Harvey founder believes, however, that even as billable hours fall, the value of a lawyer's time is likely to increase.
"I don't think the billable hour is going to just completely disappear," Weinberg said. The mundane, repetitive tasks can be automated with a lawyer in the loop. "Those tasks will end up being kind of a fixed-fee model," he explained, "and I think the high-level advisory work on top will still be billable hour and will be actually maybe more expensive."
"There's an argument that the specialist at a law firm who has seen all of these different mergers in the pharmaceutical industry, their rates for hours should not be actually 3x the junior associate in the data room, maybe 10x, I don't know," Weinberg said. "My point is there is a specialization in professional services that is incredibly valuable and is going to be more valuable over time."
Other attorneys echoed this belief when speaking to Business Insider's Natalie Musumeci last fall. Frank Gerratana, a partner at the international firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C., posited that in the future, "lawyers can simply charge more per hour because they're spending more time on the highest value work." Michel Paradis, a partner at the global firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP, said firms will charge a premium for "the real value that lawyers provide."
Do you have a story to share about how AI is changing the legal world? Contact this reporter at [email protected].
The author holds a matcha latte and bagged treat outside La Cabra in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
The next Blue Bottle has hit New York's tech scene.
La Cabra's popularity has soared since ChatGPT-maker OpenAI put down roots across the street.
The Danish coffee chain is famed for its $9 pour-over brews and cardamom buns.
The line to La Cabra stretches onto the sidewalk, a tidy queue of office workers and shoppers sauntering through the warm, muggy embrace of a New York City spring.
Inside, at least twenty patrons hover near the bar like caffeinated moths around a flame, clutching iced matcha lattes and croissants. A barista weaves through the standing-room-only crowd, hoisting a tray of pain suisse aloft.
La Cabra, the latest export from Denmark's high-end coffee empire, has inspired a cult following among Manhattan's coffee cognoscenti. Led by founder Esben Piper and head baker Jared Sexton, a Dominique Ansel alum, the sleek, minimalist chain entices crowds with its $9 pour-over brews and cardamom buns worthy of sonnets. Since the ChatGPT-maker moved into SoHo in the fall of last year, the line to get in seems to grow longer each day.
The Puck Building is becoming the red-hot center of Manhattan's tech scene.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
Nestled caddy corner from the Puck Building, La Cabra finds itself in illustrious company. The red-brick structure is owned by Kushner Companies, a real estate developer founded by Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and Josh Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital. The outdoor gear retailer REI covers 36,000 square feet over three levels. Above it, employees of Thrive and a smattering of its portfolio companies badge into their offices.
Thrive Capital, with nearly $25 billion in assets under management, has a small staff of about 75 people. Plaid also leases the entire sixth floor, while OpenAI occupies 90,000 square feet of office space at its first New York City outpost.
Together, their proximity to La Cabra has turned the Danish coffee roaster into an unofficial think tank for anyone in the mood for a latte with a side of world domination.
La Cabra offers limited seating around the counter, where baristas prepare pour-over brews and matcha lattes.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
Amanda Herson, a tech investor at Founder Collective, says she's been buying coffee and cardamom buns for her office since La Cabra opened on Lafayette Street. She goes in the early morning "when there isn't much of a wait." Tech consultant Jason Liu agrees that mornings tend to have lighter traffic. On frequent trips to New York from San Francisco, he holds office hours at the Puck Building and dashes over to La Cabra for a chocolate croissant and iced espresso with milk.
First Round Capital is a five-minute walk from La Cabra, and partner Hayley Barna goes for the pastries and trendspotting. "Honestly, it's tricky to make it a meeting spot because seating isn't reliable," Barna said.
I went to La Cabra twice and found the line was much shorter on a Thursday morning.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
When I stopped in on a Thursday morning, I took in the scene from a stool at the counter, sipping a cardamom latte from a handleless stoneware cup. With its natural color palette and cabinets inset with panels of rattan, La Cabra feels like a Japanese ryokan meets Ikea. Baristas floated behind the counter wearing the de rigueur Danish uniform of beige shirts with three-quarter sleevesdesigned by Copenhagen clothier Another Aspect.
The pastry case at La Cabra.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
First, I dug into a $7 ham-and-cheese croissant baked to a medium brown and speckled with sesame seeds and parsley. It had a crisp, caramelized exterior so that when I bit in, a gust of flakes fell like helicopter seeds, which I picked up and popped into my mouth. The beauty of the laminated spiral gave way to a satisfying buttery crunch with a scant portion of ham. I found it skimping on cheese but recognized that more filling would make the interior soggy.
The ham-and-cheese croissant at La Cabra.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
I couldn't resist trying the $6 Swedish cardamom bun I'd read about online. This knotted pastry was delightfully unexpected: chewy and dense like a cinnamon roll, yet airy enough to puff back into shape with each bite. The recipe goes heavy on the cardamom, infusing the pastry with a piney warmth and gentle sweetness.
The cardamom buns are known to sell out, though Piper, La Cabra's founder, says the chain makes deliveries from its East Village bakery three times a day to restock the pastry case. To expand its operations, the company has secured a fourth location in Manhattan, Piper told Business Insider exclusively.
The cardamom bun at La Cabra.
Melia Russell/Business Insider
As I licked my fingers clean of sugar, I scanned the cafe in search of employee badges or logo apparel, hoping for a glimpse of a startup executive in their natural habitat. In New York, unlike San Francisco, it seems that such overt displays of corporate allegiance are not as prevalent. Here, the tech elite and builders blend into the street milieu, swapping hoodies adorned with company logos for more voguish attire.
Feeling the caffeine buzz kick in, I left knowing that I'd return soon β if not for a meeting, then to try the pain suisse.
