Coworker.ai cofounders Alex Calder and Bradford Church.
Coworker.ai
Coworker.ai nabbed $13 million in VC funding from Triatomic Capital, Abstract Ventures, and Eniac.
Founded by former Uber managers, the startup builds a general-purpose AI teammate for the workplace.
Business Insider got an exclusive look at the pitch deck Coworker used to raise its seed round.
Your newest work colleague might not be joining you at the water cooler or at the team's next happy hour: AI agents are infiltrating the workplace, and one startup building those β aptly named Coworker β just cleared a big funding round to put "AI teammates" to work.
Jeff Huber, managing director at Triatomic Capital, led Coworker's $13 million seed funding round, which was announced on Tuesday. Ramtin Naimi of Abstract Ventures, Mallun Yen of Operator Collective, Tim Young of Eniac Ventures, and Clark Golestani, Ken Hausman, and Jack Greenfield of K2 Access Fund also participated in the raise.
Based in San Francisco, Coworker bills itself as a general-purpose AI teammate that can research, plan, and execute high-level work just like an experienced colleague can. The startup said its technology, which about 25 companies have been beta testing since late 2024, has been used across engineering, product management, sales marketing, and operations functions.
For example, a Coworker can act as an engineering teammate toΒ write code, create and review pull requests, and automate release notes, keeping human developers focused on shipping new features. It can also act as a sales teammate, analyzing sales calls and generating proposals and follow-up emails.
Coworker uses its own products at work, which gives the startup a leg up in shipping new features and developing the technology, said CEO and cofounder Alex Calder. For example, Coworker's agents do work like drafting product requirement documents based on customer feedback, creating tickets, writing code, and turning that code into sales talking points, he said.
"In the last six months, we've seen our internal team going from 'AI is good at giving me information' to 'AI is good at using that information to do work for me'," Calder told Business Insider. "That's only possible when you give AI really rich context on your company, your goals, and how you do work."
Calder and his cofounder, Coworker chief product officer Bradford Church, are former Uber managers who led the transportation company's shared rides team.
AI agents are generating strong interest from VCs, and there's high demand, especially for agents that take over rote workplace tasks and free up human employees to focus on more creative and high-impact work. In May, ThriveAI, which builds AI agents that act as junior software engineers, announced a $1.2 million pre-seed round, and AI coding agent startup StackAI announced it landed $16 million.
Another general-purpose AI workplace agent, Artisan, announced in April it raised $25 million.
Calder acknowledged that the AI agent market is getting crowded. When it came to getting VCs excited, focusing on customers helped Coworker close the round, he said.
"There are so many jaw-dropping AI demos these days that VCs are totally desensitized to them," he said. "What they really care about is how customers are actually using the product and whether it can solve real problems at scale. I think what worked in our favor is that we were able to show the real impact Coworker is having inside large companies during our fundraise."
Coworker previously raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding from Soma Capital, Focal VC, Mischief, and Karman Ventures.
Check out the 14-slide presentation Coworker used to raise $13 million in seed funding.
AI fintech startup Affiniti just raised a $17 million round led by SignalFire.
The startup is building AI agents that act like CFOs for small businesses.
The agent can provide specific financial guidance in different industries.
One startup is betting that AI agents will become an invaluable tool for the country's 33 million small businesses, and it just raised a fresh round of funding to bring to life its vision for an "AI CFO."
The fintech startup, Affiniti, just raised a $17 million Series A led by SignalFire, Business Insider has learned exclusively. Contrarian Thinking Capital, Sequel, Indicator Ventures, Lightshed Ventures, RiverPark Ventures, Rocket Money founder Yahya Mokhtarzada, Morning Brew founder Austin Rief, Chelsea Football Club player Trevoh Chalobah, and other angel investors also participated in the funding round.
Founded in 2021, New York-based Affiniti is a fintech platform for small- and medium-sized businesses that make up 99.9% of businesses in the US, employ nearly half of the American workforce, and represent 43.5% of America's GDP, according to the Chamber of Commerce.
While SMBs make up the vast majority of businesses in the US, Affiniti cofounders Aaron Bai and Sahil Phadnis believed that they lacked the resources they needed to survive and thrive: namely, a platform to track spending and saving and offer financial analytics that could then be used to make better business decisions.
The duo launched Affiniti in November 2024 with its first products: an expense management platform and a small-business credit card, along with $11 million in seed funding.
While onboarding their first customers, Phadnis said that for many SMBs, Affiniti was the first fintech they had ever interacted with. Additionally, many companies didn't have finance teams, and they wanted additional tech tools to help complete tasks typically handled by a finance team or chief financial officer.
Around the same time, AI agents were starting to get big in Silicon Valley. The tech presented an opportunity for a new Affiniti product: an "AI CFO" that manages every aspect of a company's finances, from banking, bill pay, sales, and more.
Phadnis told BI that Affiniti is virtualized in different industries, so it can provide specific financial guidance to SMBs in healthcare, finance, automotive, and other industries.
"Understanding what's going on in AI across verticals has allowed us to stay innovative, from planning out how our agent can co-pilot a pharmacy's financial decisions to using LLMs to analyze financials internally to assess a business's financial health," he said.
AI agents have been slow to enter the highly-regulated world of finance compared to other industries like sales and advertising. Hebbia, which uses AI agents to help bankers and lawyers with investment research, raised $130 million last year from A16z. Another startup bringing AI agents to research, Auquan, raised $8 million earlier this year.
Moving forward, Phadnis said that Affiniti is focused on customer acquisition and data.
"We believe the real power of AI agents lies in the data they're trained on," he said. "If we can become the go-to financial platform for managing all of an SMB's financial activities, we'll be in a unique position to create the most accurate AI CFO for each SMB vertical we target."
Here's an exclusive look at the 11-slide pitch deck Affiniti used to raise its $17 million Series A funding round.
For Gaurav Jain, there's no such thing as "too early" when it comes to making a VC investment.
During the last decade, he's built a reputation as one of the most influential early-stage investors in venture capital: first at Founder Collective, and, since 2016, at Afore Capital, the fund he cofounded to make pre-seed investments at a time where rounds of at that size and dollar amount had a negative connotation in the industry.
Since then, Afore has grown into one of the most active early-stage funds and has backed companies such as Modern Health, Neo, and Hightouch.
Jain said he's always been obsessed with finding the right founders who had great ideas but weren't far enough along to raise a seed round. That thesis eventually became Afore Capital, he said.
"A lot of founders were telling us that we were too early, but you need money to get traction, and you need traction to get money," Jain told Business Insider. "That became the genesis for us to start Afore Capital."
A career at the early stage
Jain, who was born in India, started his career at Google in 2009. He was one of the earliest product managers at the company's Android division when the mobile platform had fewer than 1 million users. While he was there, he led the Android Nexus product line, a range of phones and tablets that later became Google Pixel.
Jain left Google in 2011 to attend Harvard Business School, with the goal of moving into the world of venture capital. He started working with Founder Collective, a seed-stage fund based in Boston, and joined the firm as principal when he graduated with his MBA in 2013. While at Founder Collective, Jain was directly involved in the firm's investments in Cruise, Socure, Firebase, Airtable, and Smyte.
At the same time, Jain said he was meeting with plenty of founders who seemed like they'd be great bets but weren't yet at the size or scale to raise a seed funding round. At the time, pre-seed rounds weren't as common, and they sometimes carried a negative perception with investors because they were so risky.
Jain, however, saw an opportunity in the market.
"There was this gap in the market, where all of these first-time founders had no celebrity and no meaningful traction," he said. "I saw the problem firsthand, which is how we decided to create a fund dedicated to fixing it."
Creating a market for pre-seed investing
In 2016, Jain teamed up with Anamitra Banerji, a partner at Foundation Capital who'd been Twitter's 25th employee and the company's first product manager.
The two cofounded Afore Capital, a fund specifically dedicated to investing in pre-seed startups. Afore currently has around $500 million in assets under management, and it closed its most recent fund, a $185 million Fund IV, in February. The firm writes checks of up to $2 million.
Afore's portfolio includes Modern Health, a mental health benefits platform for employers that raised a $74 million Series D in 2021 and achieved unicorn status with a $1.17 billion valuation; the Canadian fintech Neo, which raised a 259 million in Canadian dollars Series D at the end of 2024; and the AI marketing platform Hightouch, which in Februrary raised $80 million at a $1.2 billion valuation.
The firm's recent exits include Highlight, a web-monitoring app for developers that was acquired by the software development platform LaunchDarkly in April, and the AI supply-chain startup Factor, which was acquired by the supply-chain logistics platform Cofactr in March.
While Afore is technically a generalist firm β when it comes to backing pre-seed startups, Jain said it doesn't have the luxury of building out an evolved thesis on a specific market or sector β it tends to gravitate toward software investments, which, today, means making a lot of AI bets. Jain added that it's much more important to identify strong founders, whose ideas might change five times before achieving product-market fit.
"At the stage where we invest in, which is pre-traction and pre-revenue, what we are really investing in is the people," Jain said, adding that he looks for founders with a strong growth mindset who can iterate new ideas quickly and take setbacks in stride.
To that end, Afore has a program to support "pre-idea" founders while they search for the right spark to build a startup. If the idea hits, the firm will eventually invest at minimum $100,00 or lead its pre-seed funding round. There's also a college version of the program, in which students can iterate on a startup idea with Afore support instead of completing a traditional summer internship.
"At the pre-seed stage, it's crucial to give founders a safe space if things aren't working," Jain said. "We're backing you, not one rigid idea. We invest the time it takes to get to product-market fit, and our commitment is that we'll be the most active, hands-on investors you'll ever have."
AI startup ThriveAI just raised a $1.2 million pre-seed funding round.
The startup uses AI agents as junior product managers to free up senior PMs from rote work.
Here's an exclusive look at the pitch deck ThriveAI used to raise its funding round from 500 Global.
AI agents are launching into product management, and one startup in the space is super-charging its growth with a fresh round of funding.
The startup, ThriveAI, just launched from stealth and announced it raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding, Business Insider has learned exclusively. 500 Global led the funding round, which was oversubscribed. Iterative and Hustle Fund also participated.
ThriveAI was founded in 2024 by Ishwar Dhanuka and Brian Ngo, a pair of former product leads who cut their teeth at various Big Tech firms before teaming up to build the startup.
Dhanuka was a lead product manager at Google from 2020 to 2024, where he grew engagement at Google Maps, while Ngo previously held software engineering and management roles at Slack, Palantir, and Google.
The pair created ThriveAI because, throughout their careers as product managers, they were bogged down by numerous small tasks, meetings, and other administrative work. These job functions took time away from the creative work that they'd rather be doing as PMs, such as designing a better-working tool or developing a new product for users.
That's where ThriveAI comes in: the startup's AI agents act as junior product managers that work alongside their human counterparts and take over the grunt work that keeps more senior product managers preoccupied from completing high-value projects.
ThriveAI's tech integrates into Slack and Microsoft Teams, flags issues, and synthesizes and catalogues data. Human PMs can delegate work to ThriveAI agents, the same way they'd interact with any human junior employee.
Dhanuka, ThriveAI's CEO, told Business Insider that employees at the startup are using tools internally like AI code editor startup Cursor and that they recently spun up a dev agent that takes Slack requests and makes code changes.
ThriveAI's pre-seed funding round will go toward training the AI agents to complete additional PM-related tasks at a high level, Dhanuka said. Since the PM role is incredibly broad and can span from anything including analyzing user feedback to monitoring metric, coordinating with teams, and keeping an eye on the marketing, building out the tech's capabilities is the number one goal right now.
"We're being selective about where we go deeper, prioritizing reliability over novelty, because the goal is to make Thrive feel like a real teammate PMs can trust," he said. "That includes things like synthesizing, feedback, training product health, and even monitoring competitors to give teams sharper context during planning.
As agentic AI continues to captivate Silicon Valley, VCs have backed other startups that are using the tech to aid workers. These so-called copilots can help coders code, lawyers draft documents, and other knowledge workers complete the more rote aspects of their jobs, such as filling out a customer relationship management database or sending cold sales emails.
AI coding juggernaut Poolside raised a $500 million Series B in late 2024, while legal tech darlingΒ Harvey, which uses AI to help lawyers answer complex research questions, raised a $300 million Series D in February 2025.Β Artisan, meanwhile,Β a general tool to replace some human employees, rather, their repetitive work, with AI, raised a $25 million Series A last month.
ThriveAI is also one of the many startups founded by Palantir alumni that have landed venture funding. Other AI startups run by the so-called Palantir Mafia include legal contract management startup Ironclad; AI code search tool Sourcegraph; and senior medicare advisory platform Chapter.
Check out the 16-slide pitch deck ThriveAI used to launch from stealth and raise its $1.2 million pre-seed funding round.
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.
StackAI co-founders Bernard Aceituno and Antoni Rosino
StackAI
StackAI just raised $16 million in Series A funding from Lobby VC.
The startup provides a no-code platform for companies to build their own AI agents.
BI got an exclusive look at the 13-slide pitch deck StackAI used to raise its funding round.
Agentic AI continues to be a bright spot for VC investing in 2025, and one startup in the space just landed a fresh round of funding to bring no-code agents into the workplace.
The startup, StackAI, just raised a $16 million Series A funding round led by Lobby Capital. LifeX Ventures, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Weaviate CEO Bob Van, Gradient, startup accelerator Y Combinator, and Epakon Capital also participated in the round.
Founded in 2022, San Francisco-based StackAI is a no-code platform for companies to develop AI agents that help with business functions. The startup's agents can interact with software such as Snowflake and Salesforce and be customized to complete back-office tasks like data entry, aggregating content, and categorizing information.
StackAI was a member of YC's Winter 2023 batch and raised a $3 million seed funding round from Gradient, YC, Epakon Capital, Soma Capital, True Capital Ventures, and angel investors in April 2023.
For cofounder Bernard Aceituno, one of the most surprising things about scaling StackAI has been the types of customers that have benefited most from the tech.
"We found that sometimes the least technologically advanced companies β construction firms, local governments, and insurance β are the ones that gain the most value from AI agents," he told Business Insider.
StackAI may be all about no- and low-code solutions, but Aceituno and his cofounder, Antoni Rosino, are coming at the problem from the opposite end of the spectrum. The pair met while earning their PhDs in computer science and artificial intelligence at MIT. They both graduated in 2022.
Aceituno said that on StackAI's backend, the startup was leveraging AI itself to stay competitive as it grows, and as the tech evolves.
"We heavily leverage AI for our development β Cursor and our own StackAI Agents to build 100-plus integrations and add new models as soon as they are announced," Aceituno said.
AI agents are shaping up to be all the rage in Silicon Valley this year, with plenty of VCs showing a willingness to open their pocketbooks for startups that automate everything from sales calls, to data entry, to coding with AI.
In the last month, Reco, which deployes AI cybersecurity agents, raised $25 million from Insight Partners; Artisan, which is replacing human employees with AI agents to complete repetitive tasks, raised $25 million from Glade Brook Capital; and Spur, which uses AI agents to debug websites, raised a $4.5 million seed round from First Round and Pear.
Check out the 13-slide pitch deck StackAI used to raise its $13 million Series A funding round.
Josh Cohenzadeh and Noah Martin have been building startups together since they were young teenagers and co-founded Emerge Tools in 2020.
Sentry
App performance monitoring unicorn Sentry is acquiring Emerge Tools.
Emerge Tools, a Y Combinator alum, offers a suite of developer tools for mobile apps.
Emerge Tools' customers include OpenAI and Spotify, while Sentry is used by Disney+ and Anthropic.
Wall Street's recent volatility has spooked some founders and investors, but deals are still getting done β and for a lucky few, that means an exit.
Sentry, a late-stage, enterprise tech unicorn that provides application performance monitoring and error tracking, is acquiring Emerge Tools, a startup that makes developer tools for mobile apps, Business Insider has learned exclusively.
Founded in 2020, Emerge Tools has built several performance and optimization tools for mobile teams, such as app size, launch performance, visual regressions, and code health. Emerge Tools' customers include OpenAI, Spotify, DoorDash, and Duolingo.
The startup was a member of startup accelerator Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch, and it raised a $1.7 million seed funding round in 2021 from Haystack, Matrix Partners, YC, and Liquid2 Ventures.
Josh Cohenzadeh, Emerge Tools' cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider that the startup has been profitable for the majority of its life cycle and hadn't been looking to raise a funding round or explicitly to exit.
But he and Sentry cofounder David Cramer had been following each other on X, formerly known as Twitter, for a long time, and it turned out that Cramer had circulated some of Emerge Tools's tweets and blog posts to the Sentry team.
Their relationship β and the deal β originated in DMs.
"This wasn't an overnight courtship thing, but the goal of an acquisition is that we make each other way better," Cohenzadeh said.
He explained that Emerge Tools is bringing its suite of pre-development mobile app tools to Sentry while Sentry is providing Emerge Tools with a massive distribution upgrade: the former company is used by 4 million developers and 130,000 organizations.
The goal is that by joining forces, Sentry and Emerge Tools will become a one-stop shop for enterprises looking to launch an app while also debugging their website.
"This felt like a very peanut-butter-and-jelly situation," Cohenzadeh said.
Founded in 2008, Sentry offers an open-source debugging software that monitors for and fixes code problems quickly. Its clients include Disney+, Cloudflare, GitHub, Anthropic, Vercel, and Atlassian.
The startup most recently raised a $90 million Series E funding round in 2022, led by Accel and BOND Capital, at a $3 billion valuation. In total, it has raised more than $200 million.
In 2021, Sentry acquired analytics firm Spectry; in 2022, it acquired Codecov, a startup helping software developers test their code before deploying it; and in 2023, it acquired web dev podcast Syntax.
Β Paramark co-founders Pete Belknap (CTO) and Pranav Piyush (CEO), and founding engineer Hourann Bosci
Paramark
AI startup Paramark has raised $8 million total from Greylock and other investors.
The startup uses AI to help businesses determine which parts of their marketing work.
BI got an exclusive look at the 34-slide pitch deck Paramark used to raise its seed funding round.
In a weird economy with plenty of Americans bracing themselves for a recession, companies' marketing teams are having a harder time than ever trying to prove their worth.
One startup is working to change that, and it just raised a fresh round of funding to help marketing teams use generative AI to quantify how their ad campaigns drive sales.
The startup, Paramark, just launched from stealth and raised a $6 million seed funding round led by Greylock. Former chief marketing officers at Dropbox, Salesforce, and Amazon also participated in the round.
Paramark previously raised an unannounced, $2 million pre-seed funding round, bringing its total VC funding to $8 million.
Founded in 2022, Paramark is building a data collection tool that shows the incremental value a marketing campaign has on a company's sales. The tool, which is powered by generative AI, can be modified to show the sales effect of running more or fewer ads through multiple marketing channels, such as TV, email, or social media.
These AI-powered forecasts can then be used to improve the working relationship between a company's marketing and finance teams, the latter of which is looking for data to green-light a budget for a new or recurring ad campaign.
Paramark launched its initial product in 2024, with clients including Square, ClickUp, Speak, and Chime. Paramark co-founder and CEO Pranav Piyush said the startup is already planning to roll out new tech advancements both externally to clients and internally with employees.
One of these is the potential of building out AI agents that work alongside human users on the Paramark platform to forecast and plan budgets.
"We've identified several critical areas within our roadmap that can now be done differently because of agents and AI," Piyush told BI.
Additionally, Piyush said that all of Paramark's employees are using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Perplexity in their day-to-day work.
"Whenever a new use case arises and we start evaluating new tools, we look for opportunities to leverage AI, whether DIY or baked into the tools we're adopting," he said.
AI is expanding into the marketing space, with multiple startups exploring generative AI and AI agents to increase output and cut costs.
Some are playing in Paramark's arena of AI and analytics, such as Prescient AI, which uses AI to analyze and maximize ad campaign revenue, and raised a $9 million Series A in early 2024; and Measured, a startup that uses AI to measure the incremental value of advertising to business outcomes, which raised a $21 million Series a in 2022 led by Telescope Partners.
Check out the 34-slide pitch deck that Paramark used to raise its $6 million seed funding round.
Mira Murati is working on a secretive AI startup called Thinking Machines Lab.
Philip Pacheco/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Murati founded her AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, in 2024 and seeks a record-breaking $2B seed.
Before that, she was OpenAI's CTO and served as interim CEO when Sam Altman was ousted in 2023.
Earlier in her career, Murati worked on Tesla's Model X and at augmented reality startup Ultraleap.
Mira Murati is the talk of Silicon Valley.
Murati made plenty of headlines in 2023 and 2024 amid the turmoil and brain drain at OpenAI. And in early 2025, she's already grabbing more attention for raising a massive new round of funding for her new AI startup.
The 36-year-old is building Thinking Machines Lab, the secretive AI startup she launched in late 2024 after leaving OpenAI, where she served as chief technology officer. Murati hasn't revealed many details on what the startup is developing, but in a recent blog post, shared that the company is developing AI models focused on human and AI collaboration.
Thinking Machines Lab is currently seeking $2 billion in seed funding, Business Insider first reported, which could be the largest seed round in history. The round could value the startup at more than $10 billion, two sources told BI.
A representative for Murati declined to comment for this story.
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
Murati was named to Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in AI in September 2024. That same year, Dartmouth College, her alma mater, awarded her an honorary doctor of science for her work democratizing tech and making it safer for people to use.
Prior to founding Thinking Machines Lab, Murati spent six and a half years at OpenAI and was its CTO from 2022 to 2024. When Sam Altman was briefly ousted as CEO of the AI startup in late 2023, Murati stepped in to lead the company on an interim basis. At OpenAI, Murati led the development of ChatGPT and the text-to-image model Dall-E.
Earlier in her career, Murati worked at Tesla and at augmented reality startup, Ultraleap.
Here's a look at Murati's life and career so far.
Mira Murati's early life, education
Ermira "Mira" Murati was born in VlorΓ«, a coastal city in Southwestern Albania. She lived there until she was 16, when she won an academic scholarship to study at Pearson College, a two-year pre-college program in Victoria, British Columbia.
Murati participated in a dual-degree program that allows students to earn two degrees from two liberal arts schools in five years. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, in 2011 and a Bachelor of Engineering from Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 2012.
After graduating from college, Murati interned at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo and French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace. She then spent three years at Tesla, where she was a product manager helping develop the Tesla Model X car. From 2016-2018, Murati worked at augmented reality startup LeapMotion, where she worked on replacing computer keyboards with the tech. LeapMotion is now known as Ultraleap.
Mira Murati's career at OpenAI
Murati originally joined OpenAI in 2018 as the vice president of applied AI and partnerships. In December 2020, she became senior vice president of research, product and partnerships.
She was promoted to be CTO of the startup in May 2022, leading the company's work to develop image generator DALL-E, video generator Sora, chatbot ChatGPT, and their underlying models.
On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board shocked the tech world by announcing that Altman was stepping down as CEO and as a member of the board, effective immediately. The board in a blog post said that it "no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," adding that Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications."
Murati has become known for her more cautious approach to AI and has said she believes it should be regulated.
As far back as 2023, Murati acknowledged that there areΒ dangers associated with AI, particularly when it comes to bad actors misusing the tech. In an interview, she told Time Magazine that it shouldn't be up to OpenAI and other AI companies to self-regulate and that regulators and governments should "definitely" be involved to ensure that AI use is aligned with human values.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Following her brief time as interim CEO of OpenAI, Murati took on a more forward-facing role at the company. In May 2024, she helped to announce ChatGPT 4-o, the startup's new flagship model that is faster than its predecessor and can reason across text, voice, and vision.
OpenAI also debuted a custom chatbot at the 2024 Met Gala, with Murati attending the exclusive event.
While weighing in on AI-driven job loss, Murati said that some creative jobs might go away, "but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place." Her comments angered many, with one writer telling BI they represented "a declaration of war against creative labor."
Mira Murati and Thinking Machines Lab
Murati departed OpenAI in September 2024, a move that surprised many people in the tech world.
Since departing, she's quietly been working on her new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, which has captured the attention of many in Silicon Valley. While little is known so far about the startup, it is a research and product lab with the goal of making AI more accessible.
The startup officially emerged from stealth in February 2025.
She's recruited a long list of former OpenAI staffers to Thinking Machines Lab. Ex-Meta and Anthropic employees have joined, too.
So far, Thinking Machines Lab employees from OpenAI include John Schulman, who co-led the creation of ChatGPT; Jonathan Lachman, formerly the head of special projects at OpenAI; Barret Zoph, a cocreator of ChatGPT; and Alexander Kirillov, who worked closely with Murati on ChatGPT's voice mode.
Multiple OpenAI employees have left the company to join Thinking Machines Lab, including two ChatGPT co-creators, John Schulman and Barret Zoph.
Kimberly White/Getty Images for WIRED
In early 2025, BI reported that Thinking Machines Lab was raising a $1 billion round at a $9 billion valuation. In April 2025, BI reported that Murati doubled her target and was now seeking to raise a $2 billion round, which would be the biggest seed round in history. Two sources told BI that the round could value Thinking Machines Lab at more than $10 billion.
Mira Murati's personal life
Little is known about Murati's personal life, family, or relationships.
At the Cannes Lions Film Festival in 2024, Murati shared a humorous anecdote about her mother's first interaction with ChatGPT was asking the chatbot when Murati would be getting married.
Murati told Time Magazine that the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey stirs her imagination, specifically, the movie's imagery and music in the scene where the space shuttle docks.
The movie follows astronauts and an AI supercomputer as they journey to space to find the origin of a mysterious artifact. As the crew travels to the planet Jupiter, the computer tries to kill the astronauts.
Murati also told the magazine she likes the song Paranoid Android by Radiohead, as well as the book Duino Elegies, which is a poem collection by Rainer Maria Rilke.
A driving force for Murati's work is achieving AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which is AI that mimics human abilities. AGI would be able to adapt to a broad range of tasks, teach itself new skills, and apply that knowledge to new situations.
The pursuit of this goal took Murati from Tesla, to Leapmotion, to OpenAI, she told WIRED in a 2023 interview.
"I very quickly believed that AGI would be the last and most important major technology that we built, and I wanted to be at the heart of it," she said.
Reco co-founders Ofer Klein, Gal Nakash, and Tal Shapira
Reco
AI startup Reco just raised a $25 million extension round from Insight Partners and other investors.
The startup provides a SaaS security platform that uses AI agents to secure companies' software.
As companies embrace AI tools, startups are creating security software to keep their platforms safe.
Reco, which uses generative AI and AI agents to provide businesses with an SaaS security platform, just raised more funding.
The startup told Business Insider exclusively that it secured a $25 million Series A extension from Insight Partners, Zeev Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Angular Ventures, and Redseed.
The startup originally raised a $30 million Series A in 2022, led by Insight and Zeev. In total, Reco's has raised $55 million from VCs.
Investors are clamoring to back AI security startups following Google's historic $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity startup Wix.
Founded in 2020 by Ofer Klein, Gal Nakash, and Tal Shapira, Reco is working to fix the "SaaS security gap," which Klein, the startup's CEO, explains is the gap that exists between a company's existing cybersecurity protections and the rapidly advancing tech β which, these days, is mostly AI β that employees are using, often without proper oversight.
To solve the problem, he linked up with co-founders Nakash, who previously headed up research at the Office of the Prime Minister in Israel, and Shapira, a machine learning ph.D. who also worked in Israel's Office of the Prime Minister.
Klein is based in Orlando, while Nakash and Shapira both live in Tel Aviv, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Klein explained that the market has undergone a huge change during the last few years. Most companies have changed their policies from banning employees from using AI tools in the workplace to embracing them.
"AI and gen-AI agents are amazing for the business and not something you can block anymore," he said. "Banks, insurance companies, and healthcare are all starting to adopt it, but the only way to adopt it is to have the right visibility and security for it."
That's where Reco comes in. The startup helps companies keep their cloud apps safe β especially ones that employees use without telling IT, like a random tool they download and try out. As enterprises rely more and more on apps, it's easy to lose track of who's using what, which can open the door to security risks. Reco's AI finds the apps, monitors how they're being used, and flags risks before they become big problems.
Klein added that Reco has spent the last two and a half years building AI agents that can quickly understand and fix app issues. The AI agents are trained on Reco metadata rather than customer data, making them faster and more secure than competitors on the market.
"We could foresee an AI revolution, and having thousands of AI applications is amazing, until you get to the problem of, 'I'm a security expert, and I don't have any visibility'," Klein said. "Our vision has been to empower teams and enable businesses so that security feels like innovation."
Reco is one of many startups using AI to help enterprise customers beef up their cybersecurity offerings.
Tel Aviv-based Torq, a no-code security platform, raised a $70 million Series C funding round in 2024 led by Evolution Equity Partners with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners. 7AI, which is building a "swarm" of AI cybersecurity agents, launched from stealth in 2024 with a $36 million seed round led by Greylock. And Astrix Security, which uses AI agents to shield enterprise customers from cyberattacks, raised a $45 million Series B in 2024 led by Menlo Ventures.
Artisan co-founders Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Sam Stallings
Artisan
Artisan is a startup that uses AI agents to replace human employees who do repetitive work.
The startup just raised a $25 million funding round from Glade Brook Capital and other investors.
BI got an exclusive look at the pitch deck Artisan used to raise its Series A funding round.
One startup is on a mission to replace a bunch of repetitive work that humans do, and it just scored a big funding round to replace workers with AI agents.
The startup, Artisan, just raised a $25 million Series A funding round led by Glade Brook Capital. Oliver Jung, Day One Ventures, BOND, Soma Capital, and Sequoia Scout also participated in the round, along with the startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Artisan was a member of YC's Winter 2024 batch, and it previously raised an $11.5 million seed round in October 2024 led by angel investor Oliver Jung.
Co-founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Sam Stallings, Artisan is developing AI employees, called Artisans, that fully take over specific jobs that have been traditionally done by human workers. These jobs are often routine in nature β think copy and pasting data, updating CRMs, and writing emails.
Artisan's first Artist, Ava, is a fully autonomous business development representative who can tackle every part of outbound sales, from discovering leads to researching them to outreach to booking meetings.
Some of Artisan's marketing has garnered viral shock value β in a recent campaign, its founders donned t-shirts reading "Hire Artisans, Not Humans," β but the startup's broader goal is that by offboarding rote tasks to AI agents, their human co-workers are less bogged down by tasks and can focus more on creativity.
Thanks to AI advancements, that's becoming a reality, explained Carmichael-Jack, Artisan's CEO.
"Six months ago, all investors wanted to hear about was AI's potential," he told BI. "Conversations evolved from 'What could this become?' to 'What's it doing for customers right now?'"
"That's why our 'Stop Hiring Humans' campaign resonated so strongly," he said. "It tackled the question of what the role of humans moving forward will be."
AI's role in the workplace has been a hot-button issue lately, with both employers and employees weighing in on the benefits and detriments of using the tech on the job.
Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO, who's now running an AI startup, said last year that some jobs at risk of being replaced by AI shouldn't have existed in the first place β prompting outrage.
The controversy hasn't deterred a bevy of startups from developing workplace-centric AI agents. AI voice agent Vapi raised $20 million in December from Bessemer. AI agent job recruiter OptimHire landed a $5 million seed in March. And earlier this month, Spur, which uses AI agents to quality test websites, raised a $4.5 million seed round from First Round and Pear.
Check out the 16-slide pitch deck Artisan used to raise its $20 million Series A funding round.
Spur co-founders Sneha Sivakumar and Anushka Nijhawan
Spur
Spur uses AI agents to test websites for quality assurance using natural language.
The startup just raised $4.5 million from First Round Capital and Pear.
Spur's two founders met as freshman at Yale and developed the tech their senior year.
When Sneha Sivakumar and Anushka Nijhawan met during their freshman year at Yale University, they immediately connected.
"Generally at Yale, not every student there is trying to become a startup founder or entrepreneur, so we saw that fire in each other and connected over that," Sivakumar told Business Insider.
Five years later, that relationship is still going strong: the duo is now building startup Spur, which quality tests websites with AI. The startup just raised a $4.5 million seed funding round led by First Round Capital partner Liz Wessel.
Pear VC's Mar Hershenson, Neo's Ali Partovi, and Conviction's Sarah Guo and Mike Vernal also participated in the funding round, along with angel investors, including Figma director of product Mihika Kapoor, Rippling chief operating officer Matt Maccinis, Dropbox CEO Arash Ferdowsi, and others.
Founded in 2024, Spur uses AI agents to test websites for bugs. Users can set up tests using plain language, such as adding a product to a shopping cart or submitting a job application. The agent can then test these functions and help with debugging if necessary.
Spur was a member of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch under group partner Jared Friedman.
Plenty of software testing startups have caught investors' attention over the years, such as QA Wolf, Cypress, and Rainforest QA. AI agents are poised to be all the rage in 2025, but Sivakumar says that Spur stands out because she and Nijhawan were the first to build a fully autonomous software tester back in 2023, when the two were still college seniors.
In fact, Spur still uses the computer and original agent they built while they were still in school, Sivakumar said.
"A lot of the other agents weren't advanced enough," she said. "We were at the bleeding edge of what we were doing."
Using technical backgrounds to find and solve a problem
Sivakumar grew up in Singapore and was a professional squash player, and she was a student athlete at Yale while double majoring in computer science and philosophy. Nijhawan, meanwhile, double majored in computer science and economics.
The two arrived on campus in 2020 in the depths of COVID and were some of the few students to stay in the dorms and take computer science classes in person together. They started building projects together in their freshman year, and while they had many ideas that didn't pan out, each had something in common: every project had the name "Spur," a nod to the first app they built together, a "spur of the moment" social planner.
Sivakumar and Nijhawan both landed internships between their junior and senior years: Nijhawan was headed to Google as the only US intern accepted to the DeepMind team, and she spent the summer working on AI agents. Sivakumar, meanwhile, landed a role on Figma's growth team, where she said she ended up spending almost 30-40% of her engineering hours doing bug batching.
"I just thought, 'Why am I being paid to do manual QA? Why is there not a better way to do this?'," Sivakumar said.
When she and Nijhawan came back to campus in the fall of 2023, they put their summer experiences together. They began developing what would become the current version of Spur: synthetic users that go through a website, make sure everything works, and give feedback β an advancement compared to paying engineers hundreds of dollars an hour to doing the job manually.
The importance of networking and building community
While developing Spur as seniors, Sivakumar and Nijhawan worked with Dr. Arman Corhan, who leads Yale's Natural Language Processing lab.
They were also laying the groundwork for what life would look like after graduation. Plenty of well-known founders dropped out of school to work on their companies, but Sivakumar and Nijhawan both knew they wanted to earn their diplomas before they focused on Spur full time. In the fall of their senior year, they applied to YC's winter batch and got in, but deferred to Summer 2024 and moved to San Francisco for the program after graduating.
Sivakumar said that she and Nijhawan made a point to participate as possible during their YC batch, especially when it came to mock pitch events. At one such event, YC companies were pitching to a panel of external investors, and one of the investors ended up participating in Spur's seed round.
"It's all about putting yourself out there," Sivakumar said.
Sivakumar said that building community and connections at YC was a "phenomenal" experience that's continued to provide opportunities for Spur. YC β which has an application portal that hundreds of thousands of people go through four times a year β is now a Spur customer, and she's now built relationships with YC's engineers and business teams.
Some people might view networking as an afterthought, Sivakumar says. But as someone who also has a technical background, getting to know the right people can be just as important as maintaining top-knotch engineering chops. She first met investors at Pear VC when she was a venture partner there in college and completed an engineering fellowship at Kleiner Perkins.
"We've built very close bonds," Sivakumar said, adding that since she and Nijhawan have been working together for so long, that bond starts with the two of them.
"Doing this as a solo founder would have been very difficult, so if you're a young founder, you should be doing this with a partner, someone you trust, and someone you're friends with," she said. "It makes the whole experience a fun one when you're on the ride together."
When Melissa Henderson, a content marketer for crypto and web3 companies, went to her first sauna class at Othership during the holiday season last year, the vibe shift was immediate.
"Something I've learned the hard way is that startup lifestyle is intense and can be all-consuming," she told Business Insider. "When we arrived, it was another universe. I felt so creative afterward."
Stress relief was a founding ethos of Othership, which is located in the Flatiron district β which is referred to as the city's "Silicon Alley." With this proximity, Othership has quickly become a hotspot for VCs, founders, and other health-obsessed members of New York's tech community.
Andrew Yeung, who organizes tech-focused networking events in New York, has hosted events there. Business-banking app Rho, New York Tech Week, consumer wellness startup Muse, and VC fund Northzone, Collision Conference, and legaltech darling Harvey AI have also held events at Othership.
For Muse, a meditation app backed by OMERS, Felecis, and BDC Capital, Othership was a no-brainer when the startup was looking for a space to host its launch party for its new EEG headband last month, explained chief marketing officer Nadia Kumentas.
"We'd been aware of Othership for a while and always admired the way they built a space where people could genuinely unplug and reset," she told Business Insider. "It was a natural match for what we're trying to do with brain health and mental clarity."
Muse, a sleep meditation startup that has built an EEG headband, hosted their launch event at Othership on March 5, 2025.
Muse
"It sounds cliche, but there's no other place in New York where you can just sit in solitude and escape from everything," Yeung told Business Insider. "I've never experienced anything like it."
Recreating bathhouse culture
Othership was founded in Toronto in 2020 by Robbie Bent, who formerly worked in ecosystem development at Ethereum, along with his wife, Emily, Amanda Laine, Myles Farmer, and Harry Taylor.
The group was searching for community and socialization without alcohol, and Bent wanted to re-create the bathhouse culture he enjoyed while living in Berlin years prior, where he would hit up saunas with VCs and founders.
The Bents built a cold plunge in their backyard and let friends come over to use it as they liked. Eventually, they converted their garage into a sauna and tea room and self-funded the first Othership location in Toronto, which opened in 2022. A second Toronto location opened a year later, and in 2024, Othership finally landed in New York.
The company also has an app, also called Othership, that offers guided breathwork sessions with music.
Every day, Othership offers a schedule of classes that guide participants into the facility's 90-person sauna, which is heated to 185 degrees. Throughout the class, instructors use aromatherapy snowballs to increase the sauna's heat and humidity to 200 degrees, and the room is lit in different colors based on the theme of the class.
Othership's sauna fits up to 90 people, making it one of the largest in North America, and reaches temperatures of up to 200 degrees.
Othership
After a period in the sauna, participants are guided to a dark, cave-like room, where they dip into one of eight ice baths, each able to accommodate up to four people. The baths are kept between 32 and 40 degrees, and depending on the class, participants might be encouraged to sit in the water for multiple minutes.
Different classes explore themes like happiness, unwinding, and acceptance, and many include multiple trips each to the sauna and cold plunge. All of the classes are 75 minutes long, which includes 15 minutes at the end for participants to gather in Othership's common area β an amphitheater-like space with rows of comfortable seating β to drink tea and socialize with other class-goers.
A drop-in class at Othership costs $64, and the company offers various packs and memberships at a discount to frequent visitors.
Othership's cold plunge room features eight ice baths that fit four people each, and the water hovers between 32 and 40 degrees.
Othership
While Othership isn't exclusive to tech workers β the space is open to anyone, and the company has built relationships with running clubs and other community organizations throughout the city β it was designed with the intense world of tech in mind, Bent told Business Insider.
The average Othership community member is a professional working a job where they're stressed, Bent said. They could also be a parent navigating work with kids in New York.
"Our take is that if you want to have a spiritual experience, that's great, but we're not a traditional wellness company, and we're not prescriptive about health benefits and we're not a longevity club," he said. "This is a way to deal with stress in a fun environment."
New York's tech scene is jumping on the wellness train
Othership isn't the only wellness destination in New York. With locations in Flatiron and Williamsburg, Bathhouse offers saunas, steam rooms, pools, hot tubs, cold plunges, and spa services. Remedy Place, also in Flatiron, offers acupuncture, cryotherapy, IV, and various other treatments. And upscale gym chain Equinox remains a stalwart among many tech and finance professionals.
For Yeung, who has gained popularity in New York for hosting various tech parties and events and is now a VC investor, Othership brought something new to the table. He first learned about the company a few years ago, when he was living in Toronto. After he moved to New York, Yeung said that he would occasionally make trips back to Toronto just to visit Othership, and he thought New York was the perfect place for their eventual expansion into the U.S.
Compared to other gyms and wellness centers in the city, Yeung said Othership is special because it places a high value on community and getting people out of their comfort zones so they can form deeper relationships with one another.
"They have these classes that can make people scream or cry or laugh with joy, really just becoming their most vulnerable self," he said. "There's no hiding behind the mask. Compare that to most networking events, where you meet someone and don't really know who they are."
New York techies say that they like Othership both because the guided classes encourage them to be vulnerable and make deeper connections with others, and also because it's a community activity that doesn't involve alcohol.
Othership.
Yeung is a small angel investor in Othership. During its opening week last year, he hosted an event at the space as part of his popular Junto series. This is a smaller and more selective networking group that spans tech, finance, media, and other related industries. He said that out of all the Junto Club events he's hosted, the one at Othership was by far his most successful.
"You can't quite tell if it's a social or networking event, it's fun, everyone's in a swimsuit, so it's not completely corporate," he said. 'That forces people to bring the best version of themselves, where they're the most vulnerable."
Bent acknowledges that the vulnerability that comes with an Othership class β both emotionally as well as the thought of wearing a bathing suit next to a co-worker or investor β can seem daunting for some. The space offers amenities like rash guards and flip flops, and Bent added that the classes are designed to give each individual the choice of what they want to participate in. Each class includes a sharing portion, where participants are given the opportunity to share a thought or feeling that came up for them during the session.
"This is a golden time to connect," Bent said. In addition to partnering with various tech companies and startups across the city for corporate wellness events, Othership has also started a regular founder night, where members of New York's tech community can meet other founders, share the difficulties they're facing, and make connections.
Othership classes are 75 minutes long and build in time for participants to connect in the social commons room over tea and water.
For Hendrickson, who visited Othership right before the holidays, this held true. As a content marketer who works in the crypto and web3 space, she says that it's difficult to find networking events that don't happen at a bar. When she was visiting New York from Miami on a business trip, and a colleague and friend recommended they go to Othership, she was game to skip the traditional happy hour.
"In general, we're experiencing a moment where people are redefining how to make professional connections and what that looks like," she said. "You can't do networking events all day every day, and drinking is bad."
Chef Robotics just raised a $20.6 million Series A led by Avataar Venture Partners.
The startup builds AI robots that make food in an assembly line.
BI got an exclusive look at the pitch deck Chef used to raise its funding round.
AI is ushering in a new era of robotics, and one startup just raised a big funding round to bring spatially intelligent robots to food companies.
The startup, Chef Robotics, raised a $20.6 million Series A funding round led by Avataar Venture Partners. Construct Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Promus Ventures, MFV Partners, Interwoven, HCVC, Alumni Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Red and Blue Ventures, Tau Partners, Siddhi Capital, and BOLD Capital Partners also participated in the round.
Founded in 2019, Chef is a robotics company that uses AI-powered robots to make and package food in processing plants. While a traditional factory machine can be programmed to automate some repetitive steps, like portioning a serving or placing a lid, Chef's AI robots can reason with their surroundings, make adjustments, and complete additional tasks while working next to humans.
"Our customers have a ton of ingredients," Chef founder and CEO Rajat Bhageria told Business Insider. He added that the company is focused on using generative AI techniques to "onboard" new ingredients into the robots' intelligence.
"The more ingredients we can manipulate, the more utilization the robots have, and thus the more value we can create for our customers."
Customers include Amy's Kitchen, meal delivery kit company Sunbasket, and frozen Indian food company Chef Bombay.
The food industry is facing a critical labor shortage, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, thanks to a combination of low wages, high risk, and unpleasant conditions in factories and processing plants. By supplementing the food workforce with capable, autonomous robots, Bhageria's bet is that companies will have more business options at a lower price point.
To that point, Chef, as part of its funding round, announced it received $22.5 million in equipment financing from Silicon Valley Bank, which will be used to continue building out the company's hardware. Chef robots are currently deployed at plants in North America and have manipulated nearly 2,000 ingredients and produced more than 44 million food servings.
"I think the world and especially investors have really awoken to the power of AI in robotics," Bhageria said. "The reality is that 90% of GDP is in the physical world, and investors are seeing how much of an impact GenAI can have on robotics and thus the labor market."
Many investors are excited to back spatially intelligent robots, and there are a handful operating in the food and manufacturing space. Botrista, which mixes specialty beverages like iced tea and lemonade, raised a $65 million Series C last year from Jollibee Foods.
And Figure AI, which is similarly working to address the labor shortage by bringing spatially intelligent robots to unsafe jobs across manufacturing and logistics, raised a massive $675 Series B funding round from Microsoft and Bezos Expeditions last year.
Here's an exclusive look at the 12-slide pitch deck Chef Robotics used to raise its Series A funding round.
Incentify is an AI startup that helps companies find and use tax credits and incentives.
The startup just raised $9.5 million from Innovent Capital Group and other investors.
Here's an exclusive look at the 20-slide pitch deck Incentify used to raise its Series A round.
Enterprise startup Incentify estimates that companies are missing out on up to $1.2 trillion in incentives β and it just raised a new round of funding to help businesses find tax benefits using AI.
The startup today announced a $9.5 million Series A funding round led by Innovent Capital Group, an early-stage fund and venture studio. Consulting firm Ryan LLC and Gary Gilbert, who co-founded RocketMortgage and co-owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, also participated in the round.
Founded in 2019, Los Angeles-based Incentify offers software that helps companies manage their tax credits and incentives (C&I). The startup uses AI to find applicable benefits based on a company's background and location, and it manages the application process and timeline for a company's entire C&I portfolio.
Incentify previously raised $4.25 million in 2020, and its clients include KPMG, Amazon, Cargill, and investor Ryan LLC.
Incentify CEO Laurence Sotsky said that adding AI to the platform β namely, Incentify's Explore tool, which is where companies get personalized tax incentives β has helped the startup supercharge its business.
"To create Explore, we compiled every federal, state, and local grant, credit, abatement, and incentive into a massive data warehouse," he said. "We then trained our AI model on this vast dataset, enabling us to deliver unparalleled insights and rich content to our customers."
Sotksy added that Incentify's business model was a tough sell for some VCs during the fundraising process. In addition to traditional SaaS revenue, Incentify also earns a fee when it connects customers with a network of advisor partners that it maintains.
"Interestingly, the larger the VC, the harder it seemed for them to fit us into their investment thesis," Sotksy said.
Investors are anticipating that 2025 will be the year of specialization when it comes to AI startups, and the tax and accounting space is no exception: startups like Finally, which offers AI bookkeeping, and AccountsIQ, which is building accounting tech in Ireland, both raised funding last year.
In the tax credit space, Incentify's competitors include MainStreet, which finds tax credits for startups and small businesses and has raised over $100 million from VCs, including Moxxie Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Gradient Ventures.
Here's an exclusive look at the 20-slide pitch deck Incentify used to raise its $9.5 million Series A funding round.
Auxia cofounders Sandeep Menon, CEO (right) and Ravi Desu, CTO (left).
Auxia
AI marketing startup Auxia just raised $23.5 million in combined Series A and seed funding.
The startup brings AI agents to marketing and product teams to personalize consumer offerings.
BI got an exclusive look at the 10-slide deck Auxia used to raise funding from VMG and other VCs.
AI agents are revolutionizing marketing and sales, and one startup in the space just scored a combined funding round to the tune of $23.5 million.
Auxia, the startup, just announced the combined Series A and seed funding round, which was led by VMG Technology Partners. MUFG Innovation Partners, Incubate Fund, Vela Partners, and Stage 2 Capital also participated in the rounds, along with more than 50 industry leaders, including Google CMO Lorraine Twohill, Booking.com CMO Arjan Dijk, and David Fischer, the former chief business officer at Meta.
Auxia, founded in Palo Alto in 2022, is a marketing platform that uses AI to create personalized shopping journeys for consumers. The startup's AI agents parse customer data and deliver tailored marketing content, such as an emailed coupon, text message, or push alert, that can help land a purchase.
For Sandeep Menon, Auxia's cofounder and CEO, the rise of AI agents in the past year has helped the startup bridge the gap between collecting customer data and actually being able to use it well.
"We see AI agents as a game changer, seamlessly integrating into existing workflows to enhance everything from content creation and digital experience development to deep data analysis and optimization," he told BI. "As the technology matures, we anticipate AI agents becoming an indispensable part of how companies scale their operations, personalize engagement, and drive strategic decision-making."
AI agents are all the rage right now in Silicon Valley, and investors are eyeing bets to bring the autonomous tech to multiple industries. Marketing is no exception. Startups like Jasper, Rox, and 11x have all begun integrating AI agents into their marketing offerings or to support sales reps.
Jasper raised a $125 million Series A at a $1.5 billion valuation in 2022 led by Insight Partners. Rox and 11x, meanwhile, both raised rounds last year βΒ Rox announced $50 million in combined seed and Series A funding from GV, Sequoia, and General Catalyst in November, while A16z led 11x's $50 million Series B the same month.
Other startups are taking a horizontal approach. Vapi markets its AI voice agents as sector-agnostic, meaning they can be programmed to complete tasks such as scheduling doctor appointments, conducting employee training, and making outbound sales and marketing calls. The startup raised $20 million in December.
Menon said that Auxia has a competitive advantage because it's staying laser-focused on bringing the best AI agent experience to the marketing space.
"The world is rapidly shifting toward autonomous systems, and we firmly believe that AI-driven agents will unlock transformative opportunities across marketing and product teams," he said. "These agents are not just tools; they represent a fundamental shift in how businesses operate β streamlining workflows, automating complex tasks, and enabling teams to move faster and more efficiently than ever before."
Here's an exclusive look at the 10-slide pitch deck Auxia used to raise $23.5 million in Series A and seed funding.
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.
AI startup Onyx just raised $10 million from Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital.
The startup offers an open-source AI agent to search through all of a company's tools and documents.
Here's an exclusive look at the pitch deck Onyx used to raise its oversubscribed seed round.
From PTO requests, expense reports, and reporting lines to meeting notes β there are a ton of resources employees need to do their jobs, and it can be difficult to keep track of them all.
That's why one startup created a "ChatGPT" to query company documents and tools, and it just raised an oversubscribed seed round to bring its open-source tech to more workplaces.
The startup, Onyx, set out to raise $3 million and instead landed a $10 million seed funding round co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital. Also participating are Y Combinator (Onyx was a member of the accelerator's winter 2024 batch) and angel investors Gokul Rajaram, a Coinbase and Pinterest board member, Dropbox cofounder Arash Ferdowsi, and Amit Agarwal, a partner at ICONIQ Capital and Datadog board member.
Founded in 2023, San Francisco-based Onyx offers an AI assistant that connects to all of a company's tools and documents β think Google Drive, Slack, Salesforce, GitHub, and more. Instead of sifting through old messages to find a piece of information, users can query Onyx, and its AI agent will use company documents that are available to that specific user to find an answer.
Onyx can also complete more detailed analyses. If a user were to ask why one sales process was quicker and more successful than another, Onyx could search through company data for that account, compare it to others, and offer recommendations for being more efficient in the future.
"We are the first team to build agent-based search, our own version of deep research, across internal documents," Yuhong Sun, Onyx's cofounder, told BI. None of Onyx's competitors have done this yet, he said, which gives his startup an edge and means they can provide the best quality search and the most comprehensive answers.
Sun added that Onyx is using techniques to reduce hallucination rates compared to its competitors and that the team is building LLM-based knowledge graphs and implementing RAG techniques, which make AI responses more accurate by retrieving data from specific and relevant data sources.
Onyx is also open-source, so enterprises can choose their preferred LLM provider, customize what their AI agents can do, and get help from a large developer community. This differentiates it from competitors like Glean, a closed-source startup offering a similar, AI-powered workplace search function.
More broadly, AI agents are shaking up the enterprise world and automating various workplace functions. Notable startups in the space include Decagon, which is deploying AI agents for customer services and has raised $100 million; 7ai, which is building a fleet of AI agents to prevent cybersecurity attacks and has raised $36 million; and HeyGen, which uses AI agents to provide live customer support via video and has raised $60 million.
Here's an exclusive look at the nine-slide pitch deck Onyx used to raise its $10 million seed round.
Some former Palantir employees have left the software company to build their own startups.
BI identified 30 founders building in the AI, legaltech, consumer, and healthcare spaces.
The Palantir Mafia includes Partiful, Ironclad, Joe Lonsdale, Anduril, Garry Tan, and more.
Move over, PayPal: there's a new tech mafia in town.
Meet the Palantir Mafia: from Y Combinator's Garry Tan, to Joe Lonsdale, to the founders of ElevenLabs, IronClad, and Partiful, the big data software company has produced a slew of former employees who now run startups and investment funds of their own.
More than a decade ago, PayPal set the standard for producing a formidable group of alumni who now run their own companies, including Elon Musk, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, and Peter Thiel β who later co-founder Palantir.
Now, Facebook and Oracle each have their own mafias and more recent tech companies like Square, OpenAI, and Instacart have mafias, too.
Palantir's original clients were federal agencies, and one of its core product offerings, "Gotham," assists in locating targets on battlefields. While some former Palantir employees are leveraging their experience to found defense tech startups, others are building companies in healthcare, consumer, AI, and enterprise.
Palantir mafia companies have been backed by top VC firms including a16z, Sequoia, Redpoint, and Accel, as well as the prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator.
In total, the startups identified by BI have collectively raised more than $6 billion in VC funding, according to PitchBook data as well as founders themselves. More than half of that funding β $3.8 billion β went to one place: Anduril, the defense-tech startup founded by three Palantir alums.
Take a look at BI's list of 30 Palantir Mafia members who are now startup founders. We put Y Combinator's Garry Tan at the top of the list and then listed everyone else in descending order based on how much VC funding their startup has raised.
Garry Tan
Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator.
Y Combinator
Role at Palantir: Lead engineer, designer
Garry Tan needs no introduction: a longtime fixture of the tech community, he founded the early-stage VC firm Initialized Capital in 2012 and was its managing partner through the end of 2022 (he's still a board member and advisor). His investments, which include Coinbase, Instacart, Patreon, Flexport, Rippling, and more have created more than $200 billion in market value in nine years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Tan worked at Palantir for two years: in 2005, he joined the company as employee number 10 and co-founded the first version of Palantir's financial analysis product. He also designed the company's current logo.
Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, and Brian Schimpf, Anduril
Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, and Brian Schimpf, Anduril
Anduril
Total funding: $3.8 billion, according to the company
Notable investors: Founders Fund, Sands Capital, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Elad Gil, Human Capital
Total employees: 4,000+, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Trae Stephens, Forward Deployed Engineer (5.5 years); Matt Grimm, Forward Deployed Engineer (6 years 8 months); Brian Schimpf, Director of Engineering (9 years 7 months) (all according to their LinkedIn profiles)
Former Palantir employees Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, and Brian Schimpf cofounded Anduril in 2017 alongside Palmer Luckey and Joe Chen to bring advanced autonomous systems to the military. Like Palantir, Anduril has attracted some of Silicon Valley's most prolific defense investors. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund (where Stephens is now a partner), an early investor in Palantir, seeded Anduril. Anduril last raised $1.5 billion at a $14 billion valuation in August 2024.
"Anduril's founding was motivated by a belief that the U.S. technology community should play a central role in both the development of weapons and supporting capabilities for US and allied militaries," Stephens wrote in a Medium post in 2022, underscoring the company's mission.
Joe Lonsdale, Addepar and 8VC
Joe Lonsdale
Brian Ach/Getty Images
Total funding: $495 million, according to PitchBook
Notable investors: 8VC, Valor Equity Partners, Peter Thiel, Thrive Capital
Total employees: 1,118, according to PitchBook
Role at Palantir: Founder
Joe Lonsdale cofounded Palantir, a data and defense tech company, in 2004 with current CEO Alex Karp, Silicon Valley magnate Peter Thiel, current president Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings.
"Our success relied on boldness and talent and a unique approach to mapping customers' data and processes and encoding it in our solutions," Lonsdale wrote about Palantir in a blog post from October 2024.
Lonsdale left Palantir in 2009 and founded Addepar, a software platform for investment portfolios.
Addepar has raised nearly half a billion dollars from the likes of Valor Equity Partners, Thrive Capital, Peter Thiel, and Lonsdale's venture capital firm, 8VC.
Cai Wangwilt, Ironclad
Cai Wangwilt
Ironclad
Total funding: $333 million, according to the company
Notable investors: Sequoia, Accel, YC Continuity, Franklin Templeton
Total employees: 516, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Software engineer
Cai Wangwilt is the co-founder and chief architect of Ironclad, the hot contract management software company that automates the contracting process for legal teams. Wangwilt founded the company in 2014 after spending three years as a software engineer at Palantir, where, among other projects, he built the successor to the company's original desktop client.
Given his background in developing tech at Palantir, Wangwilt recommends that aspiring founders reconsider what's possible in terms of delivering products to customers.
"AI is allowing us all to move exponentially faster with more precision," he said. "If there's something you're targeting, say, five years from now, ask yourself: 'is this something we might be able to do today?' You'll be surprised with your answer."
Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs
Mati Staniszewski (right), co-founder of ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs
Total funding: $281 million, according to the company
Notable investors: a16z, ICONIQ Capital
Total employees: 150, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Deployment strategist
Mati Staniszewski spent nearly four years at Palantir, working as a deployment strategist from 2018 to 2022. Now, he's the co-founder of buzzy AI startup ElevenLabs, which is building audio models that generate realistic speech and sound effects in multiple languages. He said that when he worked at Palantir, he was given a high level of autonomy and ownership from day one, which made him effective at quickly solving problems.
"That shaped how we built ElevenLabs β lean, empowered teams that move quickly to make things happen," he said.
The startup, which has raised $281 million in total funding from investors like a16z and ICONIQ Capital, closed an $180 million Series C in January.
Nick Noone, Peregrine
Peregrine Technologies cofounder and CEO Nicholas Noone.
Peregrine Technologies
Total funding: $252.7 million, according to PitchBook
Notable investors: Founders Fund, XYZ Venture Capital, Village Global, Sequoia Capital, Craft Ventures, according to Pitchbook
Total employees: 190, according to PitchBook
Role at Palantir: Head of U.S. Special Operations Business Unit
Nick Noone spent five years at Palantir, where he led the U.S. Special Operations (SOCOM) Business Unit and was the Business Operations and Strategy team's first hire in 2012. He now leads Peregrine, which makes a decision-support platform for government organizations, like public safety and law enforcement agencies, as well as commercial companies. Peregrine is growing fastβthe company has tripled its annual revenues over the past three years, according to a press release.
The startup, which has raised money from prominent defense tech investors, including Founders Fund and XYZ Venture Capital, raised $190 million in Series C funding in March led by Sequoia Capital. The financing valued the company at $2.5 billion and will enable it to recruit more software engineers, the press release said.
Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu, Sourcegraph
Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu, Sourcegraph
Sourcegraph
Total funding: $235 million with a $2.6 billion valuation, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Slack was a forward-deployed engineer, and Liu was a software engineer
Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu have spent the last 12 years building Sourcegraph, an AI code search and intelligence tool for software developers. The company, which is valued at more than $2.6 billion, most recently raised a $125 million Series D in 2021 from investors including a16z and Insight Partners. Slack Sourcegraph's CEO, while Liu is CTO.
The pair also overlapped at Palantir: Slack spent 10 months in 2011 and 2012 as a forward-deployed engineer advising banks in the home lending space, while Liu spent two years as a software engineer building software to analyze mortgage datasets and other financial data.
"As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir, I worked directly with top executives at major banks, getting feedback by day and building solutions overnight, Slack said. "That incredibly tight feedback loop taught me how to build products the right way: close to the problem and the customer."
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, Chapter
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, CEO of the Medicare technology startup Chapter
Chapter
Total funding: $111 million, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Deployment Strategist on the US Government team
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz started as an intern at Palantir and returned full-time as a Deployment Strategist on the US Government team, where he spent nearly six years. The fast-paced environment helped shape his approach to problem-solving: "When I was at Palantir, it was a chaotic environment," Blumenfeld-Gantz told BI. "There was little structure and everything was open to be defined by the teams closest to the problems. It's not quite the same as being in a green field environment, but I learned how to just figure stuff out and get stuff done β because I had to."
After leaving the company in early 2020, Blumenfeld-Gantz cofounded Chapter, a medicare advisory provider that helps seniors choose the right health coverage. Chapter closed a $50 million Series C led by XYZ Venture Capital in May 2024.
Tarek Mansour, Kalshi
Tarek Mansour
Sequoia
Total funding: $110 million, according to the company
Notable investors: Sequoia, Charles Schwab, Kravis, Y Combinator, SV Angel
Total employees: Unknown
Role at Palantir: Forward-deployed engineer
After spending a year as a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir, Tarek Mansour completed stints as an AI researcher at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and as a macro trader at Citadel before turning to startups. In 2021, he co-founded Kalshi, a fintech platform that lets users trade on the outcome of any event, like whether or not a bill will pass through Congress.
Alex Katz, Two Chairs
Alex Katz, Two Chairs
Two Chairs
Total funding: $103 million, according to the company
Notable investors: Amplo, Goldcrest Capital, Fifth Down Capital, Maveron
Total employees: 750 million, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Deployment lead and enterprise lead
Alex Katz is currently the founder and CEO of mental healthcare startup Two Chairs, which matches clients to therapists. Since launching in 2016, the startup has raised $103 million, most recently in a $72 million debt and equity Series C in April 2024 led by Amplo and Fifth Down Capital.
Prior to building a healthtech startup, Katz spent two years at Palantir, where he was first a deployment lead, and then an enterprise lead β and he said that the entrepreneurial talent at the company during that time was "off the charts."
"It's no surprise to me that Palantir has turned out to be such an incredible generator of founder talent," he said. "It was an environment that gave enormous opportunity to people often quite early in their career β certainly much earlier than any more traditional environment I'd worked in."
Ashwin Sreenivas, Decagon
Decagon cofounders Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas
Decagon
Total funding: $100 million, according to the company
Notable investors: A16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Elad Gil, A*, Bond Capital, Acme Capital
Total employees: 60
Role at Palantir: Deployment Strategist
Ashwin Sreenivas worked as a Deployment Strategist at Palantir for a year before pivoting to startups. In 2019, he cofounded Helia, a computer vision platform acquired by data labeling company Scale AI for an undisclosed amount in 2020.
Sreenivas' latest startup, Decagon, makes AI support agents that autonomously handle customer inquiries across chat, email, and voice calls. The startup has raised $100 million to date, and Bain Capital Ventures led its $65 million Series B in October 2024, which quadrupled Decagon's valuation, according to the company's blog. Elad Gil, A*, Accel, Bond Capital, and Acme Capital also participated in the fundraise.
Barry McCardel, Caitlin Colgrove, and Glen Takahashi, Hex
Barry McCardel, Glen Takahashi, and Caitlin Colgrove Hex
Hex
Total funding: $100 million, according to the company
Role at Palantir: McCardel was a forward deployed engineer; Colgrove was a software engineer, software engineering team lead, and software engineering group lead; and Takahashi was an intern and forward deployed engineer.
As a forward deployed engineer at Palantir, Barry McCardel spent more than four and a half years at the company, from 2014 to 2018, before eventually becoming a startup founder in 2019. His company, Hex, provides collaborative data analytics for enterprises, and it last raised $28 million in Series B funding in 2023 from a16z, Amplify, and Snowflake.
McCardel, who is Hex's CEO, co-founded the startup alongside two other Palantir alums: CTO Caitlin Colgrove built one of Palantir's first modern web applications at Palantir, and chief architect Glen Takahashi was an intern before becoming a full-time forward deployed engineer from 2014-2018.
For McCardel, building a successful startup requires a deep understanding of users and the ability to rapidly iterate on a great product for them.
"I can't imagine a better training ground for this than being a forward-deployed role at Palantir β even if we didn't realize it at the time," he said.
John Doyle, Cape
John Doyle, Cape
Cape
Total funding: $61.4 million, according to the company
John Doyle spent nearly nine years leading national security at Palantir, where he experienced the company's "flat and high-ownership culture" and saw "tons of room for creative people with big ideas to build," he told BI.
His work with national security customers shaped his vision for Cape, the private and secure mobile carrier he founded in 2022.
"That work crystallized for me that many of those same threats also apply to everyday citizens, which is what made me want to build a mobile solution for the average consumer that doesn't come at the expense of being productized or compromised," he said of his time at Palantir.
Cape last raised $61 million in funding rounds led by A* and Andreessen Horowitz in August 2024, according to a press release.
Eliot Hodges, Anduin
Eliot Hodges
Anduin
Total funding: $49 million, according to the company
Notable investors: 8VC, GC1 Ventures, Asymmetric Capital
Total employees: 130, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Forward Deployed Engineer
Eliot Hodges worked as a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir for over two years. At the company, he focused on "fraud workflows" for "big box retailers" and monitoring and compliance within the federal government, according to his LinkedIn.
Hodges' time at Palantir was pivotal to launching his career: two of his last three jobs since leaving the defense tech company were all a result of Palantir connections, he said. "Palantir taught me how a small group of mission-driven people can solve some of the world's hardest challenges for government and commercial organizations alike," Hodges said.
Anduin, founded in 2014, makes tools for private market investors. Its platform simplifies the subscription process for limited partners, reducing administrative work. The startup has raised money from prominent investors, including 8VC, the venture firm started by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale. Hodges joined Anduin as its CEO in 2020.
Hodges has carried over a key lesson from Palantir while building Anduinβand advises aspiring founders to do the same: "Build deeply technical teams and find promisingly unsexy problems to solve."
Rebecca Egger, Little Otter
Little Otter cofounders Rebecca Egger (left) and Dr. Helen Egger.
Little Otter
Total funding: $35 million, according to the company
Notable investors: Charles River Ventures, Pivotal Ventures, BoxGroup, Torch Capital, 8VC, Palantir Alumni Group
Total employees: 175
Role at Palantir: Forward Deployed Product Lead
Rebecca Egger spent over two years as a Forward Deployed Product Lead at Palantir before transitioning to a role as a product and program lead at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In 2020, she cofounded Little Otter, an online counseling and therapy service focused on serving families and children, alongside her mother, Dr. Helen Egger.
In February, Little Otter secured $9.5 million in strategic funding in February from investors, including Charles River Ventures and Pivotal Ventures. The funding will help the startup scale its operations using AI and expand its services to families covered by Medicaid and commercial insurance plans, according to a company blog post.
Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao, Partiful
Partiful co-founders Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao
Shreya Murthy, Joy Tao
Total funding: $27 million, according to PitchBook
Notable investors: a16z, according to PitchBook
Total employees: 27, according to PitchBook
Role at Palantir: Tao was a product engineer, and Murthy was an enterprise lead and business operations and strategy lead
Joy Tao and Shreya Murthy are currently running Partiful, an app for inviting friends and connections to IRL events. The pair founded the startup in 2020. Since then, it has become a go-to organizing tool for group gatherings, and at the end of 2022, Partiful raised a Series A funding round from a16z.
Tao and Murthy both worked at Palantir from 2014 to 2018. Tao was a product engineer, while Murthy held multiple positions: enterprise lead, deployment lead, and business operations and strategy team lead.
Alex Ince-Cushman, Branch Energy
Alex Ince-Cushman, Branch Energy
Alex Ince-Cushman
Total funding: $20 million, according to the company
Notable investors: Prelude Ventures, Zero Infinity Partners
Total employees: 20, according to PitchBook
Role at Palantir: Head of Product Operations
Alex Ince-Cushman worked as Palantir's Head of Product Operations for nearly four years after over six years at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. After Palantir, Ince-Cushman spent almost two years as chief technology officer at Just Energy, a retail energy provider in the US and Canada.
He founded Branch Energy in late 2020. This vertically integrated power provider helps customers lower their energy bills and carbon footprints by providing access to clean energy. In August 2024, the startup raisedΒ just under $11 millionΒ in a round led by climate tech venture firm Prelude Ventures.
Gary Lin, Explo
Gary Lin, Explo
Explo
Total funding: $15 million, according to the company
Notable investors: Craft, Felicis, and Y Combinator
Total employees: 25, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Forward deployed engineer, enterprise tech lead
In 2019, Gary Lin co-founded Explo, which allows companies to quickly build customer-facing dashboards and reporting. The company was a member of YC's Winter 2020 batch and has since raised $14 million in VC funding, most recently through its $12 million Series A in August 2022, which was led by Craft Ventures.
Prior to starting Explo, Lin spent more than two years at Palantir, first as a forward-deployed engineer working with the Department of Defense and later commercial clients and then as an enterprise tech lead for the Department of Defense.
"Being an engineer on the frontlines via forward deployed engineering gave me a glimpse into what it was like to embed closely with customers, make difficult, multi-dimensional tradeoffs, and close pilots," he said.
Angela McNeal and Mayada Gonimah, Thread AI
Angela McNeal and Mayada Gonimah, Thread AI
Angela McNeal, Mayada Gonimah
Total funding: $6 million, according to the company
Notable investors: Greycroft, Index Ventures
Total employees: 14, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Angela McNeal: Head of AI/ML Product, Foundry Modeling; Mayada Gonimah: Head of AI/ML Engineering, Foundry
At Palantir, McNeal and Gonimah led the Foundry Modeling team, where they worked on AI and machine learning projects. Drawing on that experience, they left the company in 2023 and cofounded ThreadAI, a composable infrastructure platform that allows companies to make, implement, and manage AI-powered workflows.
For aspiring founders looking to break out of their current company and start something new, Gonimah emphasizes the importance of building a resilient team: "There are a lot of tourists, so make sure you have a deep bench to build a durable company that isn't at risk of being eliminated by the next shiny thing," she told BI.
Thread AI raised a seed round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Greycroft and a handful of angel investors, in 2024.
Sinclair Toffa, Mural Pay
Sinclair Toffa
Mural Pay
Total funding: $5.6 million, according to PitchBook
Notable investors: Alleycorp, according to PitchBook
Total employees: 13, according to PitchBook
Role at Palantir: Forward deployed engineer, technical lead
Blurb: Mural Pay facilitates cross-border payments between the U.S., Europe, Latam, and Africa. While he's now based in New York, Toffa spent just under three years working at Palantir in London, first as a forward-deployed engineer and then as a technical lead.
Steve Heitkamp, Hence Technologies
Steve Heitkamp, Hence Technologies
Steve Heitkamp
Total funding: $5 million, according to the company
Notable investors: Broad Creek Capital and Daybreak Capital Partners, according to PitchBook
Total employees: 20, according to the company
Role at Palantir: Lead in US Government Practice
Founded in 2020, Hence makes AI software that helps companies identify and tackle geopolitical, legal, and AI risks. The London-based startup's backend is powered by Palantir Foundry, the defense tech company's data integration and analytics platform.
Hence's cofounder, Steve Heitkamp, told Business Insider that he spent over seven years at Palantir leading its US government practice. Here's one of the lessons he learned at Palantir: "Don't be sorry for what you are not," he wrote to BI. Instead, embrace what makes you unique and use your superpowers to be the best version of you. This is how you create transformative value."
Total funding: $3.5 million, according to PitchBook
Notable investors: Will Ventures, according to PitchBook
Total employees: 8, according to PitchBook
Role at Palantir: Nikolaou was a deployment strategist, project lead, forward-deployed engineer, and technical lead, while Rizk was a forward-deployed software engineer.
Blurb: Palantir in London in 2018, and by 2023, the pair teamed up to build Wondercraft, an AI audio editor that creates ads, podcasts, and other spoken content in multiple languages through typing. The startup, which was a member of Y Combinator's summer 2022 cohort, raised a $3 million seed funding round in January from Will Ventures, YC, and fellow Palantir Mafia and AI audio startup Eleven Labs.
