Courtesy of Gokul Rajaram, Ava Horton/BI
Gokul Rajaram's approach as an angel investor starts with finding exceptional founding teams who can go the distance.
"At the earliest stages, it's truly all about the founder," he explained. "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."
Rajaram said working in product at companies like Alphabet, Meta, and DoorDash during his formative years provided him with a deep bench of expertise and a powerful network that's useful for startup founders in his portfolio.
"Whatever a founder's situation, I can connect them to an expert that I've worked with at a great company who has solved that problem," he said.
Rajaram has invested his own money in companies like Deel, BetterUp, Figma, Printify, Boon, and Atlas. After a successful track record as an angel investor, he will manage outside capital through Marathon Management Partners, "a venture capital firm that invests in founders who are obsessed with defining their categories."
The firm's name reflects the patience that Rajaram believes an early investor needs to have.
"Building a generational company is an exercise in grit, perseverance, and endurance, not dissimilar to running a marathon," he wrote on X in March.
Rajaram has learned to value authenticity and depth of understanding. "You have to build something. You don't just have to solve a problem β you'll solve a problem better than anything else out there. You've got to truly spend the time to understand why," he said.
Rather than getting wowed by shiny rΓ©sumΓ©s or tenure at big-name companies, Rajaram looks deeper.
"I pay very little attention to where the founder has worked," he said. "I don't think there's any correlation between being a star at a medium-sized or large company and being a seed-stage founder because it's such a different dynamic."
While plenty of investors mythologize a single founder like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, Rajaram looks more for a "complete founding team."
That means a builder and a seller, a balance of product execution and go-to-market savvy.
"There are a lot of builders who don't know how to go to market, don't have the commercial instinct," he said. "The idea is you have both the commercial and the builder side represented on the founding team."
He also looks for "first-principles thinking," the ability of a founder to reason through a problem from the ground up, rather than following conventional wisdom.
That approach led him to write one of the first checks to Printify founder James Berdigans in 2016. The company merged with its competitor, Printful, last year.
"Everyone passed on James in the pre-seed, but I was excited by the founder's depth of understanding and how much he knew about the failures of past attempts," Rajaram recalled.
Rajaram is generous with his advice. On his website, he writes blog posts on product development, company culture, and strategy, among other topics.
As seed investing became more competitive over the past few years, Rajaram has tried to remain disciplined and avoid a sense of FOMO.
"Rounds were moving really fast, happening without any diligence," he said. "You've got to be very thoughtful. I might miss a few great companies, but I also think a lot will flame out."
Rajaram has learned from experience that angel investing requires a great deal of fortitude because you're investing money in ideas with a high failure rate. Even the few who succeed against all odds can take over a decade to pay off.
"If you focus too much on the financial returns, you'll be disappointed," he said. "You're truly planting a seed."
Courtesy of Sara Deshpande, Ava Horton/BI
Sara Deshpande first met Rene Caissie, the CEO of Medeloop, in 2022 at Startup Garage, the Stanford business school class she helps teach. He pitched her a fledgling startup idea.
He and his classmates shared a few business ideas with Deshpande: consumer genetic services, health data tracking, and health management for conditions like diabetes. But Deshpande wasn't convinced. She told Caissie and his team members that they needed to think of their potential consumers first to identify more unique and novel problems.
So Caissie reworked his concept and came back to her 18 months later with something better.
That second version became Medeloop, an AI-powered medical research startup that now counts Deshpande's venture firm, Maven Ventures, as an investor. It has since raised $23 million from General Catalyst, Maven, and other firms.
Deshpande's criticism was emblematic of her approach as an early-stage investor. She isn't the kind of VC who politely nods and writes a check or supports her founders' ideas without question.
"With my founders, I'm really known for tough love," she says. "I never say anything I wouldn't say directly to them, and they know everything I'm saying comes from a place of wanting them to succeed."
Deshpande has been investing at Maven Ventures since 2014, when she joined as a general partner. Founded in 2013 by Jim Scheinman, Maven set out to become a go-to seed-stage firm for consumer startups, with bets including the $22 billion videoconferencing company Zoom and the $9 billion AI search startup Perplexity.
At Maven, Deshpande invests in consumer applications across digital health, climate, and AI. She's backed companies including the fertility benefits startup Carrot Fertility and the sustainable seafood company Wildtype.
Above all, she looks for founders who share her vision of chasing emerging consumer trends and are relentless in their pursuit.
"We like to back people who'll tear through a brick wall to bring their vision to life," she said.
Deshpande began her career at Deloitte in healthcare strategy during the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
"It was a moment when all our clients were trying to figure out what the next wave of consumer healthcare would look like," she says.
That experience sparked a lasting interest in how consumers interact with big, complex systems β and what it takes to simplify those systems through tech. While still at Deloitte, she began volunteering at the Idea Village, a New Orleans-based startup accelerator.
The day she paid off the loans she took out to attend Stanford's business school, she called the Idea Village's CEO and asked if she could come aboard full time.
"That's where I got this knack for helping founders identify and achieve bold visions, against all the odds," she said of the Idea Village.
By the time one of Maven's limited partners introduced Deshpande to Scheinman, she had years of experience coaching founders but had never raised outside capital. Scheinman had a few seed investments under his belt, including in Zoom, and needed a partner to help make his vision of identifying and supporting forward-thinking consumer founders a reality.
"Within 24 hours of that first meeting, I wrote Jim an email like, 'Here's my job description,'" Deshpande said.
Deshpande has been at Maven ever since, helping to grow the firm's portfolio and reputation. She's been a board observer or advisor to companies such as Hello Heart, Carrot Fertility, Daybreak Health, and Medeloop.
Maven Ventures
Now more than a decade in, Deshpande still sees long-term potential in sectors like consumer health, concierge medicine, and personalized care.
Deshpande said consumer health technologies remain a resilient sector despite market challenges. An analysis by the digital health advisory company Galen Growth found that consumer health tech investments grew by 9% between 2023 and 2024.
But Deshpande isn't blind to the moment. She acknowledged that recent recession fears and market volatility may shape consumer and founder behavior.
"It's a really turbulent time to be a founder," she said. "We'd all been hoping for a rosier economic picture. That now seems way less certain."
Still, Deshpande said that great companies are often created during periods of economic uncertainty.
She's keeping her eye on founders willing to push forward, including through layoffs or dramatic market shifts. "Sometimes that's the kick somebody needs," she said.
Courtesy of Gaurav Jain, Ava Horton/BI
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.
Jain ranked No. 2 on Business Insider's Seed 100 list for 2025, which was compiled using data from Termina.
"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."
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."
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."
Courtesy of Rudina Seseri, Ava Horton/BI
Rudina Seseri can spot an "AI-native" company from a mile away.
Before ChatGPT sounded the starting gun on the artificial intelligence revolution, Seseri, the cofounder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, was already writing the first checks to machine-learning startups, arguing that data-hungry algorithms would define the next era of software.
In the current hype cycle, every tech startup is dedicating resources to AI. But that doesn't mean the algorithms are doing the heavy lifting everywhere. Some teams grab an off-the-shelf model, wedge it into an otherwise ordinary software stack, and call it innovation.
AI-native companies follow a fundamentally different blueprint. Their core architecture is designed around machine intelligence from day one.
Founders say that Seseri on a cap table has become code for "the real deal."
"Partnering with Glasswing instantly signals credibility," Philippe Rival, whose risk management platform Enlaye received an investment from the firm, said. "Everyone knows that if Glasswing is involved, it's a real AI-native company."
Seseri has spent the better part of two decades investing and operating at the high-tech frontier. Before venture capital, Seseri was a senior manager in corporate development at Microsoft, where she led several acquisitions.
She's backed fast-rising enterprise-tech plays, including in Reprise, whose interactive demo platform drew a $62 million Series B in 2022; Verusen, a materials intelligence suite that raised $25 million that same year; and Basetwo, which blends physics with AI to tune drug- and chemical-production lines and secured an $11 million Series A this January.
Since 2018, the firm's assets have swelled to over $270 million across two funds. It's going back out for more; an SEC filing shows that Glasswing plans to raise a third fund. Seseri declined to comment on the fundraise.
Seseri has stayed ahead of the curve by being the first to identify founders poised to disrupt enterprises from logistics to Big Pharma. Glasswing said last year that it was the first institutional investor in all of its portfolio companies.
Founders have no shortage of investors to choose from. Seseri said that when a founder has multiple term sheets, she wins deals because of her expertise.
"She is on the bleeding edge of everything with AI," Scott Matthews, the CEO of Verusen, said. Its cloud platform uses advanced data science and AI to clean, unify, and analyze the messy materials data in many manufacturers' enterprise systems.
Fifteen years ago, Seseri was leading deals as a software investor at Fairhaven Capital, an early entrant in Boston's venture scene. One day, she waved Rick Grinnell, her mentor and one of the firm's founders, over to her desk.
She had noticed something new about the companies she was meeting. With the increased availability of big data and ever-more powerful compute, founders were applying deep learning to tackle complex problems for businesses.
"There's something happening and it's not big data," Seseri told Grinnell. "I'm telling you something has changed."
He nudged Seseri to dig deeper.
In 2016, Seseri and Grinnell left Fairhaven to start Glasswing, centered on what she called a "seismic shift" in technology. Forty percent of Fairhaven's limited partners signed on to back their initial fund. In 2022, the firm closed its second, slightly larger fund with $158 million.
Perched on Newbury Street in Boston, Glasswing's offices function as a second home for its founders. Matthews and Verusen's founder, Paul Noble, recently sat with Seseri for two hours in a glass conference room, contemplating the company's architecture and future.
Seseri is in the office five days a week. She spends hours on the phone, working her network to help founders hire, raise a round, or close a customer. That support often arrives before Glasswing even issues a term sheet.
Seseri's track record puts her on speed dial for founders building at the frontier.
"But at the end of the day," Seseri said, "we win deals because of how our founders support us and what they share with other founders."
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.
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.
Laura Rippy
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.
Shruti Gandhi, Courtesy of 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.
Anne Dwane
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.
Meltem Demirors
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.
Mathilde Collin, Courtesy of Front
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."
Ann DeWitt
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.
Courtesy
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."
Trish Costello
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.
Stefan Wieland
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.
Forerunner Ventures
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.
Varsha Rao
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.
Cowboy Ventures
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.
Sara Deshpande
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.
Gale Wilkinson
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.
Elizabeth Weil
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.
Juliana Garaizar
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.
Rudina Seseri
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.
Enke Bashllari
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.
Lan Xuezhao
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.
Floodgate
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."
Freestyle
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.
Yun-Fang Juan
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.
April Underwood
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."
Leah Solivan
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."
Emily Kirsch
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."
Noramay Cadena
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."
Alice Zhang
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.
Lu Zhang
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.
Linda Xie
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.
Courtesy of Jana Messerschmidt
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.
Julie McDermott
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.
Caroline Casson
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.
Serena Ventures
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.
Founders Fund
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.
Maria Salamanca
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.
Holly Liu
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.
Karin Klein
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.
Nisha Dua
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.
Hayley Barna
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 Marc Benioff, Ava Horton/BI
Salesforce chair and CEO Marc Benioff says angel investing is a "side hustle." His returns say otherwise.
Benioff β who shared his investing strategy with Business Insider in an interview β has backed some of Silicon Valley's biggest winners.
Salesforce Ventures has $6.8 billion under management and has deployed $600 million of its $1 billion Generative AI Fund, including a first-quarter investment in Anthropic, according to a spokesperson.
One of its biggest wins is the cybersecurity startup Wiz, which recently sold to Google for a whopping $32 billion. Salesforce Ventures, which first invested in Wiz's Series B in 2021, will make roughly $600 million on the deal, Benioff said. (Salesforce's profit on the Wiz acquisition has not been previously reported. A spokesperson for Salesforce Ventures declined to comment on the firm's profits from the Wiz acquisition, citing the ongoing nature of the deal.)
"I worked directly with Assaf Rappaport," Benioff said, referring to Wiz's CEO and cofounder. "I enjoy working with entrepreneurs. I relate to them."
It's a hands-on approach that in many ways mirrors the early mentorship Benioff, who runs Salesforce's venture arm and writes angel checks through his family office, Time Ventures, received in Silicon Valley.
Benioff's father, who owned a local department store in San Francisco, instilled in him an entrepreneurial spirit from an early age, which fueled Benioff's early career moves.
In high school, Benioff sold his first startup, software that taught users how to juggle, to a computer magazine for $75. At 15, he founded Liberty Software, which made early computer games. While in college, Benioff spent a summer interning at Apple, writing code for the Macintosh team under cofounder Steve Jobs.
It also gave Benioff an early mentor in Jobs. "There would be no Salesforce.com without Steve Jobs," Benioff said in a 2013 interview with Entrepreneur magazine.
Fast-forward a few decades, and Benioff is at the helm of Salesforce, a $255 billion market cap Fortune 500 software company, still thinking like a founder.
Working with and investing in founders, Benioff said, encourages him to think more deeply about how he's running his own business. "I am one myself," Benioff said of being an entrepreneur. "I still feel like I'm running a company where you have to be able to adjust to the market as it adjusts and do whatever you can to be successful."
Founders in Benioff's portfolio don't just get capital β they get his Rolodex. "I can offer way more value to these entrepreneurs than any venture capitalist," Benioff said.
Benioff said that founders who stand out to him create a shared vision. "Many of these people are visionaries," he said. "They're seeing things that don't exist. Am I also able to see what they're seeing?"
He also looks for entrepreneurs who have learned what works and what doesn't, and how to adapt based on that experience.
One of those visionaries is Richard Socher, the founder of the AI-powered search engine You.com. "Marc has been an incredible supporter of my journey," Socher told BI in an email. "Not only did he lead our seed round for You.com, which also included the You.com domain he had owned since 1996, Marc has opened his network to me, introducing me to early customers and CEOs at Fortune 100 companies."
Benioff's Time Ventures invested in You.com's $20 million seed round in 2021, and Salesforce Ventures backed the company in its $25 million Series A in 2022 and its $54 million Series B in 2024, according to PitchBook.
When asked about the AI boom, Benioff said he's still able to discern the most compelling companies from the bubbly ones, pointing to his investments in Socher's You.com and the AI terminal startup Warp, which was founded by Benioff's cousin Zach Lloyd. "They have real revenue lines and real customers and real products that are offering real value," Benioff said. "When you see that, then you've got to say, 'That's a real company.'"
Benioff invested in Warp's $17 million Series A1 in April 2022, according to PitchBook.
This reality-based outlook is necessary when investing in startups with under $100 million in revenue, which Benioff called "fragile companies." It also prevents him from romanticizing early-stage investing, which he doesn't think is right for everyone. "I don't encourage my family and friends to get involved in this," he added. "It's very high risk. Most of these companies do not work out."
Amid the AI hype cycle and a boom in venture investing, Benioff still sees founders' grit β even in himself. It's a mentality he, after decades of building Salesforce into a giant, hasn't quite yet shaken. "We still pivot like an entrepreneur has to pivot," Benioff said. "We're still in founder mode at Salesforce. We're just a 75,000-person startup β there's no difference."
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.
Kevin Mahaffey
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."
Gaurav Jain
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.
Courtesy
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.
Walter Kortschak
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.
Bradley Horowitz
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.
Darian Shirazi
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.
Courtesy
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.
Chris Jung/NurPhoto
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.
Y Combinator
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.
Lachy Groom
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.
Keith Rabois
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.
A vocal proponent of Miami's tech scene, Rabois also cofounded and still serves as CEO of OpenStore, a Khosla-backed e-commerce company.
Daniel Gross
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.
Arjun Sethi
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.
Gokul Rajaram
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.
Y Combinator
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.
Kaitlyn Morris/WireImage
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.
Courtesy
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."
Jon Soberg
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.
Julian Counihan
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."
Courtesy of Micah Rosenbloom
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.
Boldstart Ventures
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.
Scott Belsky
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.
Ryan Hoover
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.
Avichal Garg
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.
Laura Rippy
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.
William Hockey
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.
Alex Iskold
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."
Xamarin
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.
Ali Partovi
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."
Courtesy of Max Mullen
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."
Courtesy
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.
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.
1984 Ventures
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.
Courtesy
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.
Kunal Bahl
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."
Marlon Nichols
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."
Salesforce
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.
Scott Dorsey
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.
Titan Capital
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."
Skyflow
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.
Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images
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."
Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
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.
Justin Mateen
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.
Ali Tamaseb
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."
Sheel Mohnot
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.
Nick Candito
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.
Eric Tarczynski
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.
Jackson Moses
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.
Silverton Partners
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."
Martin Tobias
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.
Bill Trenchard
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.
Itamar Novick
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.
Courtesy
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.
Andreas Klinger
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.
Lucas Vaz
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."
Craft Ventures
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."
Mike Stobe/Getty Images
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.
Courtesy
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.
Steve Loughlin
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."
Hadley Harris
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."
Jason Warner
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.
Opendoor
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.
Astrida Valigorsky/Getty Images for Art Saint Barth
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.
Dan Teran
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."
Neeraj Berry
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."
Peter Thiel
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.
This year, Thiel has seen his influence rise as an ally of the Trump administration. He is considered by many the "godfather of DOGE."
Affirm
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.
Guillermo Rauch
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."
Marc Vasquez; Lattice
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.
Operator Partners
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.
Superstate
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."
Jordan Nof
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.
Ron Pragides
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.
Terrence Rohan
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."
Anne Dwane
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.
Jim Andelman
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.
Immad Akhund
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.
Robin L Marshall/Getty Images
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.
Ashu Garg
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.
Lee Fixel
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.
Courtesy
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."
Ludwig Pierre Schulze
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.
Milad Alucozai
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.
Meltem Demirors
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.
Front
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."
Christopher Golda
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.
Warren Weiss
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."
Ann DeWitt
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.
Michael Sutton
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."
Kimberly White / Stringer / Getty
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.
Nicolas Dessaigne
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."
Abhishek Sharma
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."
Wally Wang
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.
Andrew Vigneault
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."
Zachary Bratun-Glennon
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."
Nitesh Banta
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.
Ash Egan
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."
Morgan Flager
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.
Shannon Fagan/Getty Images
Executives, investors, and boards are united on one thing: AI.
Last month, enterprise AI company Dataiku published a survey that showed that CEOs are putting pressure on themselves, and each other, to ramp up their AI strategy.
But a new report from KPMG shows that some of the heat is coming from investors. Investor pressure to adopt AI has jumped from 68% to 90% from the last quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025, according to the firm's survey of 130 executives from a mix of public and private companies with over $1 billion in revenue.
KPMG's head of ecosystems Todd Lohr said he expects investors to double down more, potentially driving a rise in activism.
"There's a signal of 'change is going to continue to come,' especially if you're not moving fast enough," he told Business Insider. "There's going to be others that are going to move your hand for you."
Lohr said board members, too, are becoming more attuned to AI.
"I do a lot of speeches for boards and board members, and they're getting pretty deep on the technology because they want to make sure they're asking the right questions for how it's going to disrupt their businesses," he said.
Several venture capitalists told BI that they are actively driving their portfolio companies to deploy AI.
"We've been working with our portfolio companies to incorporate GenAI features into their product portfolios," Jai Das, president and partner at enterprise technology firm Sapphire Ventures, told BI. "AI is a generational shift, and companies that don't embrace it in a big way will be history footnotes versus becoming companies of consequence."
Maria Palma, general partner at Freestyle Capital, said the firm has been having discussions with all its portfolio companies on how they are integrating AI. It's also hosting a series of "optional sessions on AI's potential to improve workflows across various departments, like engineering or marketing," she wrote to BI by email.
In the age of AI, Palma's thesis is that companies should have "strong peripheral vision" so they can keep an eye on the tools competitors are deploying. "Adopting AI in your company won't guarantee its survival. But the lack of it? That will guarantee to put your company at a huge disadvantage, and ultimately place it on a path toward extinction," she wrote.
In some cases, though, companies are scrambling to save face. They're applying AI features as a quick fix rather than analyzing where they can achieve real gains, founders of companies developing those AI features told BI.
This results in an "AI arms race that creates real risks," Florian Douetteau, Dataiku's CEO, told BI.
"Without a unified strategy across the business, organizations expose themselves to chaos: siloed experimentation of point solutions, unmonitored AI application usage, data leakage, cost overruns, and more," Douetteau said. "AI is raw power, and it can only work to drive measurable business results if it is controlled."
Darren Louie, a vice president at Proof β a platform for digital identity and verifications β echoed the idea.
"Investor expectations are understandably rising, so businesses are under growing pressure to demonstrate ROI on their AI initiatives, but many of these companies have serious and valid concerns about compliance and security," Louie said.
Across the board, spending on software has accelerated among Global 2000 enterprises in the last two quarters, said FirstMark Capital's Matt Turck. Within that, there's been a "meaningful increase" in spend on AI tooling and applications as companies move from consulting projects and proof of concepts to deploying AI, Turck told BI via text.
That means discussions about AI are happening constantly, he said.
"As an investor, I don't think there's any board of VC-backed startups where there isn't a current conversation on using AI throughout the company to increase efficiency across functions like development, sales, marketing, etc," he said.
The big question, though, is whether the Trump Administration's sweeping new tariffs will change things, he said.
The "tariff nonsense is particularly painful because it may (or may not) have stopped that trend β we'll see what the Q2 numbers look like," Turck said.
Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
When Kathryn Schifferle started Work Truck Solutions, a company that provides the commercial vehicle industry with inventory management, she had some of her own money and quickly raised about $400,000 from family and friends. But when she went out looking for "real money" from venture capitalists, she tells me, "I had three things going against me." She was in a rural market in Northern California. It was 2012; apps were all the rage, and she was focused on commercial trucking. "And then, of course, I was a woman, which was really the toughest part."
Solely female-founded companies receive as little as 2% of venture funding, according to PitchBook data, and just 6.5% of deals secured in 2024 went to all-female teams. Schifferle says she could tell when investors weren't really listening to her or just didn't get the vision when she pitched many firms in Silicon Valley. "You just keep looking until you find the solution," Schifferle tells me. Then she went to angel investors and raised $2.1 million in a Series A round, in part funded by Golden Seeds, an angel network focused on investing in women. She's been on a successful run since, and in March, Work Truck Solutions received a strategic investment from a private equity firm.
There's a growing cohort of female entrepreneurs who are receiving capital from angel investors. In 2023, women made up about 47% of angel investors, jumping rapidly from about 40% in 2022 and 34% in 2021, according to data from the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. Similarly, women-owned companies accounted for some 46% of firms seeking angel capital, growing from 37% in 2022 and 29% in 2021. The number of women receiving capital is high; nearly 29% of women who sought angel capital in 2023 found an investor, compared with the overall success rate of 24%.
That's far outpacing trends in venture capital. Mixed-gender founder teams made up nearly 19% of all venture capital deals in 2024, but the proportion of both women-founded and mixed-gender teams receiving venture fell, according to PitchBook. A survey from Deloitte said women made up 19% of investment partners at venture capital firms in 2022 And even when women get investments, they often get smaller checks than men. All these discrepancies raise suspicion, particularly because startups cofounded or founded by women return more money on the dollar on average than those founded by men, Boston Consulting Group research found.
Women have made gradual but steady progress in getting college degrees, taking up more space in the workforce, and moving into the C-suites of Fortune 500 companies. Now that progress is being met with backlash, and 2025 has ushered in a "masculine energy" moment. The men running some of the richest, most powerful companies in the world have slashed diversity, equity, and inclusion goals and called for more aggression in business. They're axing flexibility in the workforce and calling people back to the office β policies that can be burdensome on women, who still do the majority of domestic labor and childcare. It could lead more women to go out on their own and seek capital.
"A lot of women are really fired up. One way to do something about it β even if we can't change policy, but maybe we can help the female founder that works down the street," Angela Lee, the founder of 37 Angels, an angel investing community focused on closing the gender gap in investing and increasing diversity. "There is a sense of empowerment that angels have, that it is a small way to have change." One example: 37 Angels invested in 2021 in Hey Jane, a startup that delivers Food and Drug Administration-approved abortion pills. Hey Jane has fundraised from both angel investors and venture capital firms, and Kiki Freedman, the company's cofounder and CEO, tells me many investors were excited, but she could tell that women investors really felt a connection to the mission of providing abortion access. "There is a certain level of passion for being able to solve a problem that you have directly experienced," she says. "Our angel investors show up with a level of enthusiasm and support that is incredible."
There is a certain level of passion for being able to solve a problem that you have directly experienced.Kiki Freedman, cofounder and CEO of Hey Jane
Twenty years ago, women made up just 8.7% of the angel market and 8.7% of entrepreneurs seeking angel capital, according to data from the Center for Venture Research. But they were very successful at raising money: 33% of women who pitched angels received investments, compared with about 23% of all entrepreneurs seeking angel capital. And even as women approach parity, they could be poised to surge ahead. "I am encouraged," said Jeffrey Sohl, the director of the Center for Venture Research, who has studied the market trends for years. "I think those numbers will continue to grow."
This is all the fruit of a slowly and steadily growing presence of women in the workplace, through which they've had more funds to invest, angel investors tell me. Plus, they're no longer a novelty; younger women have now had role models for decades whom they can follow. For women, people of color, and other minority demographics, there's less appeal to stick it out in corporate structures that don't work for them and more reason to strike out on their own. "It's completely logical for them to look around and say, 'Where are the opportunities going to be best for me?'" Loretta McCarthy, a co-CEO and managing partner at Golden Seeds, says. "It could be that entrepreneurship makes sense."
Angel investing has more of a sense of community than venture capital. It's more personal than investing in the markets, and angels often serve as mentors for entrepreneurs or on their boards. The movement is more grassroots and value-driven than the individualistic nature of venture capital. The investors want to make money but may feel a closer connection to the firms they fund. "I do hear often, 'I want to invest because maybe I want to make some money, but I really want to support this woman,'" Lee tells me. "The barriers to entry are lower" when it comes to angel investing, Sohl tells me. "Not many people can get in the door" to pitch venture firms, he adds. There are some 422,000 angel investors, Sohl's research has found, compared with about 3,500 venture capital firms, with wealth increasingly concentrated among top firms as valuations of companies like OpenAI and SpaceX boom. Angel investment checks are smaller than venture capital ones (checks from angels are typically $25,000 to $100,000), and the VC market dwarfs that of angels: In 2024, venture capitalists invested an estimated $209 billion in the US, compared with about $18.6 billion from angel investors.
While women are booming in number both as angels and as entrepreneurs seeking capital, people of color are underrepresented, with companies led by Black, Asian, or Latino CEOs receiving just 12% of angel capital in 2023, a drop from 16% in 2020, research from the Angel Capital Association found. It's a trend that not only hurts underrepresented founders but also leads to missed business opportunities. People from different backgrounds know what their communities need and what people will spend money on more than a table of investors. "We need to have more people among the check writers who are reflective of the world," says Lorine Pendleton, the founder and managing partner of 125 Ventures, who started out as an angel investor. She cites Canela Media, a company that has raised $32 million according to Crunchbase to provide free TV streaming to Hispanic viewers, as an example of a highly successful firm that saw a market in the streaming sector ignored by traditional American media companies.
Another bright spot: There's more money on the way. We're about to see the greatest wealth transfer in history as the Silent Generation and baby boomers pass on their money to the tune of an estimated $84 trillion over the next two decades β $30 trillion of which is expected to go to women in the first 10 years. That's in part because women typically live longer than men and are more likely to inherit money from spouses. Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Zers are also likely to get shares of this wealth. This could be a moment when women come into unprecedented wealth and have more capital to invest, says Patrice Brickman, the founder and CEO of Inspire Access, which invests philanthropic dollars in underrepresented founders. "I have a lot of optimism around the younger generation: how they'll invest, how they'll engage with philanthropy," Brickman tells me. Millennials and Gen Zers are more value-driven with their money and highly entrepreneurial. As more funds become available, they could be a boon to creating wealth for women and women-owned businesses.
There are also challenges ahead. In the short term, angel investors could get hit negatively by macroeconomic conditions; higher interest rates and new tariffs that could spike costs might spook investors. A 2025 report from Silicon Valley Bank indicates that the bar is rising to secure funding. Companies that raise Series A funding have a median annual revenue of $2.5 million, a 75% jump from what companies typically had in 2021. The Center for Venture Research found that the number of investments and the amount of money invested by angels fell in 2023, even as the number of active angel investors grew. Venture capital is in a slump compared with the highs of 2021. But businesses run by women are often scrappy and able to bend to challenges. "Because women don't get much funding, the ones that are able to break through are going to do well," Pendleton says. "They don't have the luxury of having a lot of money." It's early, but women-led businesses are outperforming those run by men since President Donald Trump took office in January and sent markets into chaos.
The data about angel investing tells us something clear: There's a strong correlation between women writing checks and women getting checks. The trend is likely to grow as more women get money in their pockets. It's a grassroots force that might be the best way for women to get around the boys' club.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
Photo courtesy of Emily Pitcher
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Emily Pitcher, a 25-year-old content creator and game developer from Los Angeles. It's been edited for length and clarity.
I was valedictorian of my high school and graduated from college with honors. I've always valued excellence, so it was such a treat when, just out of college in 2021, I landed a contract job at Meta that turned into a full-time, six-figure job as a content designer around the start of 2022.
I worked on every major surface of Instagram, including profiles, explore, search, and home. I got to work on features that were used by so many people.
My first annual performance rating was "exceeds expectations" on all markers, and I was given a raise. I thought I was doing really well at the company. Then two months later, in April of 2023, I was laid off.
For the first time, I realized that hard work doesn't always reap rewards. Finding full-time work felt impossible, but struggling to find a job pushed me to give my passion project a shot.
I was laid off via a generic email as part of a series of mass layoffs. The message cited that Meta had changing business needs, and my role was no longer needed. I was devastated.
My true passion has always been indie video games, but I planned to stick around in Big Tech for several years before starting my own studio. I thought I had done really well at a big company like Meta. When I got laid off, it messed with my worldview.
I started applying to more tech jobs, and after four months of unemployment, I landed a contract role at Yahoo as a content designer, which kept me afloat. That job ended a few months later, and I was back to being unemployed.
There were so many Big Tech layoffs happening at the time.
I had been making some money from content creation promoting my indie game, Gold Lining, which I'd been developing with some friends since college.
In the midst of my unemployment, I was included in Forbes 30 under 30 for my work on the game.
It felt like such a jarring discrepancy. On one hand, I received this esteemed achievement and was being told I was a part of the next generation of changers in the game industry. On the other hand, I was crying alone in my bedroom because I couldn't even land a regular job. It felt very dystopian.
I thought maybe being on Forbes 30 under 30 would help me get a job, but it didn't. Nobody cared.
Around this time, I started hating the game I was developing with my friends. We were receiving rejection after rejection from investors, and I found myself trying to appease them at the expense of my own better judgment. I wanted to get back to making games I loved.
I decided to start a hobby project as a way to cope with the anxiety of my two colossal failures β unemployment and a failing game. My honest hope was just to reignite my spark for game development.
I stepped away from Gold Lining in July 2024, and that same month, I came up with the idea to develop Lily's World XD, a psychological horror game where players investigate a young girl's computer.
I made a little Instagram video promoting its development, which got over 2 million views. Now, I fully finance myself through content creation about my journey building Lily's World XD.
I feel so lucky that I'm able to pursue my passion at such a young age, but I still have anxiety every day that it's all going to stop working out because content creation is so futile.
I'm still learning how to manage the anxiety and overwhelm of being my own boss. When I was working at Meta, I'd turn my work brain off after work. Now, I lay in bed at night, still thinking about a bug in my game or stressing about a video that isn't performing well.
It can be tough, but leaning on my network of fellow game developers and content creators for support has been extremely helpful. I'm taking this as my chance to give my dreams a shot, and I won't hold back.
If you were laid off from your dream job and would like to tell your story, please email the editor, Manseen Logan, at [email protected].
Elena Mudd; Courtesy of Spill
Some early adopters of new social-media apps are getting more than just bragging rights.
Two early-stage social startups are opening up investment rounds to include the users of their apps (and other everyday investors). Diem, a social search platform powered by AI, launched its community round in February and is scheduled to close in May. And Spill, a visual conversation app centered on culture, founded by ex-Twitter employees, will launch its own community crowdfund in March.
"We've always wanted the community to be able to own a piece of the product," Diem CEO Emma Bates told Business Insider.
Both platforms are using WeFunder, an equity crowdfunding tool that is compliant with SEC regulations. WeFunder has been used by startups like fintech Mercury and app developer platform Replit to raise millions.
"What we have is a tool that allows you to let a larger number of smaller checks into the deal," said Read Ezell, director of fundraising at WeFunder.
Like angel syndicates, where angel investors pool their own money, community investors on WeFunder are represented by a single lead investor and receive a single line on a startup's cap table (a breakdown of who owns how much of a given company).
Diem's round allows users to invest starting at $100, while Spill is setting its entry point at $250.
Often, crowdfunding rounds listed on WeFunder accompany venture capital investment rounds.
"It's not a signal that you can't raise money," Ezell said. "It's a signal that you have another way to raise money."
For instance, Diem's community round is an allocation of its Seed Plus investment round, which closed withΒ venture capitalΒ partners in June. One of those VCs, Charles Hudson (a managing partner at Precursor Ventures), is the lead investor for the WeFunder syndicate of community investors. That means Diem's WeFunder round offers community investors the same terms that Hudson invested on.
Diem and Spill have each raised over $5 million in venture capital, per the companies.
Ezell said crowdfunding can be "intuitive" for some social startups and consumer-facing businesses.
"For us, it just made sense," said Spill CEO Alphonzo Terrell, adding that users were asking to invest when the platform was still nascent. "We're a community-driven product and for a community that frankly doesn't get billed for in social media and also typically doesn't get access to these types of opportunities to be a part of an early-stage tech platform."
Since it launched, Spill has centered Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ communities on the app. Diem advertises its app as being for "girls, women, and gender-expansive people."
While Spill and Diem are inviting users to invest in the company at an early stage, other larger networks like Reddit have tapped users as investors. When Reddit was preparing to go public in 2024, it offered some power users priority access to buy stock at the IPO price.
By investing in startups like Diem or Spill via WeFunder, users are entering a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE). In other words, if the startup goes public in the future, the users would be guaranteed stock. If the startup is acquired, community investors also receive returns.
For early-stage startups, seeing those returns could take a while. And there's the risk a startup won't successfully make an exit.
"The reality is that it's risky, but also the reality is that most investments are under $1,000 on WeFunder," Ezell said.
Beyond equity, Diem and Spill are also offering different perks for their community investorsΒ β clout being one of them. For instance, Spill will add "investor profile badges" to app users who participate in the round, as well as access to new features, exclusive events, and first-looks at company updates.
Diem is offering similar perks for investors that can be unlocked at different investment tiers. People who invest more than $250 can gain access to Diem events, for example, while people who invest more than $1,000 also receive company merch. (Investment perks are listed on the WeFunder investment terms.)
The current moment in social media is also fueling these startups' decisions to crowdfund. From Meta's changing policies to TikTok's uncertain future, many social-media users have been seeking alternative platforms.
"A lot of people are interested in supporting the next generation of tools that help us stay informed and connected," Terrell said. "Clearly, there's a desire for something different, something much better, and we think people who are participating in this round are going to be key voices and partners for us in that."
Diem and Spill aren't the first social platforms to use WeFunder, either. In 2023, Substack used WeFunder to raise $7.8 million from more than 6,000 participants. Then, in 2024, Beehiiv, another newsletter platform, raised $1 million from over 800 participants.
"From day one, we have always looked to our users to determine what we needed to build," Beehiiv's CEO Tyler Denk said. "They're a huge part of the success we've experienced, and I wanted to ensure they had an opportunity to share the upside with us as we build this thing."
Other startups, like Fanbase, a social network focused on creator monetization, have used StartEngine, another startup crowdfunding platform.
Capim, a startup offering Brazilians the option to buy now, pay later (BNPL) for dental services, has raised $26.7 million in Series A funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Founded in July 2021 by Marcelo Lutz and Roberto Biselli, who serve as co-CEOs, SΓ£o Paulo-based Capim describes itself as a vertical SaaS company specializing in the [β¦]
Β© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Courtesy of Waabi
This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Raquel Urtasun, the founder and CEO of Waabi, an autonomous driving startup headquartered in Toronto, Canada. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I've been working in AI for 25 years after first being exposed to AI research in my undergrad.
I started my career in academia, focusing on technology capable of human reasoning. Around 15 years ago, I became interested in self-driving technology.
I joined Uber in 2017 and became the chief scientist of its self-driving unit. I wanted to push self-driving technology in the real world. However, I felt like the industry was using a capital-intensive approach that I didn't think could scale self-driving vehicles. I saw an opportunity to build my own company with an AI-first approach.
In 2021, I founded Waabi. We're an AI company focused on developing self-driving trucks. We've raised over $280 million, receiving investment from best-in-class investors like Nvidia and Uber.
Waabi raised large amounts during our two rounds of funding so far, but I'm not building the company for an exit. I want to transform the world. Having the best people in the industry supporting us has been a huge help in the endeavor.
I spent nearly four years at Uber. It was a great stepping stone for entrepreneurship. I learned so much about building a business and being an executive. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's CEO, became a mentor to me, which has been an asset in my career.
Had I started Waabi as an academic, I don't think I would be as successful today.
I started Waabi because I didn't think the industry's capital-intensive approach, which has historically involved fleets of vehicles driving physical distances for tests, would generate scalable technology that could be deployed in the real world.
Instead of a system with bits and pieces of AI playing a small role, I wanted to build a single AI system that can safely perform all the necessary tests for self-driving.
This meant building an Al-generated simulation system for testing and training vehicles that was the same as the real world. My background in AI helped me foresee this technology years ahead.
Waabi is headquartered in Toronto, where there's a lot of AI talent. We have trucks in Texas that are driving autonomously on public roads for commercial operations, both through a partnership with Uber Freight and also direct-to-customer.
We've done two rounds of financing. Our Series A was led by Khosla Ventures. It was too large to be a "seed" round, but it was done in the company's first week. We raised $83.5 million.
Our Series A investors are all excited about Waabi. Vinod Khosla, who founded Khosla Ventures, is himself very bullish about our potential. This support is so valuable because as a company continues its journey, your current investors and your reputation help to tell your story.
In our brief three-and-a-half-year history, we've hit ambitious milestone goals. When I pitched during our Series A, I mentioned our plans for the simulator and trucks, and we managed to hit our milestones exactly as I pitched. This resonated well with investors for our second round.
There have been some challenges. There was an accident with an autonomous vehicle in 2023. The market was quite tough after that, and investors were concerned about how one incident could significantly reduce the value of the investment.
There were also concerns about whether the population wanted self-driving in the first place. Investors will always ask you about risks, so we explained them. Our safety approach, which is simulation-first and avoids adding risk to the roads before the technology is ready, resonated with investors.
We announced our second round of financing last June and raised $200 million. It was a very oversubscribed round, and we had to say no to people. We ended up raising more than we intended to.
We were very strategic about the types of investors we wanted to bring to our cap table so that we'd have the best in class to help us in the company's next stage.
On one side, there was the AI bucket. We had investment from Khosla Ventures β who really understood generative AI before anybody else and have also invested in OpenAI β as well as Nvidia.
With logistics, we wanted a forward-looking shipper, which was Ingka Investments, the investment arm of Ingka Group, who operate IKEA. We also had participation from Uber, who jointly led the round.
Additionally, we wanted original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), which is very important when you build technology for self-driving. We had Volvo Group Venture Capital, Scania Invest, as well as Porsche Automobil Holding SE, invest in us.
Our differentiated technology is one reason behind our success. Investors were coming around to Gen AI for the physical world and saw Waabi as at the forefront of that.
Nvidia is one of our investors, but we also partner with them to build the generative AI compute that drives our trucks.
My personal relationship with Nvidia goes back a decade. Jensen Huang has always been a big supporter of my research. When I was an academic, he'd come to academic events. He's very personable and someone I look up to in terms of building a business.
We have a tremendous roster of supporters behind us, including Jensen and the team, Geoffrey Hinton, and Dara Khosrowshahi. It's very important to have a diverse set of voices you can bounce ideas off of. For me, building a company is not really about the money you raise, it's about who's on your cap table and helping you build the best possible company.
I'm not building Waabi for an exit but to transform the world.
As Africaβs tech ecosystem booms, more people from the region are landing remote jobs with big tech firms and global startups. But getting paid remains a challenge for many of these freelancers and remote workers β they struggle to open accounts that accept U.S. dollars, face slow invoicing and payment processes, and it doesnβt help [β¦]
Β© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The newest generation of startups aiming to solve cross-border payments are focusing on stablecoins β cryptocurrency coins often pegged to actual currencies or other commodities to help them keep stable prices β to build solutions that work faster and often cheaper than classic financial rails. This trend is also driving a surge in investor interest [β¦]
Β© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After more than a year of helping solar installers sell, plan, and finance panels for residential and small commercial building owners, Niko found another opportunity.
Β© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alpine Investors
Alpine Investors founder and CEO Graham Weaver often finds himself teaching the students of his Stanford class about more than just strategies for growing a business.
The private equity CEO said that students frequently come to him not with questions about business but about life β specifically, what to do with theirs.
Weaver said on a recent episode of "Lenny's Podcast" that he often prescribes a series of exercises that previously helped give him clarity on his own goals. Chief among them is asking yourself the "genie question."
Weaver said a typical meeting on the topic consists of a student laying out possible career paths and talking through the pros and cons of each.
Weaver said he often watches as students consider option A, which they see as more practical, and try to talk themselves out of option B, something that they have their hearts set on.
"First, I try to let them realize that their real energy is for B. Just let them feel that, and understand that," Weaver said. "And then secondly, I try to figure out β what are the limiting beliefs they have? What are the fears? What are the obstacles?"
His students are often held back by external pressures, whether that be a desire for stability, or simply a fear of failure, he said. They then end up pursuing what they think they should, rather than what they want to.
Getting locked into a career for which you have no enthusiasm leads to a life lived on autopilot, the CEO said. Rushing through a familiar daily routine, with no time to consider what you're doing or whether you even want to be doing it, can lead to an increased degree of anxiety and friction, he added.
"But then once I kind of got into the path of the thing that I was excited about, that's when I really felt my energy change dramatically," Weaver said. "And I developed almost like a superpower in that thing, because, you know, I had more energy. I was willing to work longer, I was willing to do it."
He instructs participants to imagine a genie grants them a boon β guaranteed success in whatever career they dedicate themselves to.
"If that were true, and you had that genie blessing you with that wish, what would you wish for?" Weaver said. "And then the students come up with an answer that's really close to their heart. And it's the thing they would do, absent the fear of failure. And then the second part of the exercise is β that's what you should do."
Weaver said he understands that there can be limitations, often manifesting in financial needs. To help demystify them, he recommends writing problems down instead of actively ruminating on any limitations, thereby reducing hurdles to a series of manageable steps.
"When you get it down on paper, it will almost immediately strip that limiting belief of a lot of its power, and a lot of its scariness," Weaver said. "Because now it's just something like, for example, 'How would I fund this?' So, the second thing is that a lot of that scariness becomes just a to-do item."
But Weaver says success isn't just about overcoming fear. The main variable in Weaver's "formula" is time. He's found that people's expectations are often skewed in favor of an unrealistic immediacy.
"You have to go in at the beginning with that mindset and the structural ability to stay at it for a long period of time," Weaver said. "So the missing ingredient in most of the people that fail is time."
Without patience and grit, he said, his own success would instead be a museum of failures. Weaver's philosophy is that pursuing improvement is always uncomfortable.
"The first move is negative to getting in shape, the first move is negative to get out of a bad relationship, to get into a career you want to be in," Weaver said.
We only get one life, Weaver said. He thinks it's best to start making the most of it as soon as possible β before "not now" becomes "not ever."
"Take the time to really figure out and answer the question, 'What does a wonderful, amazing, incredible life look like?'" Weaver said. "And just get as clear as you possibly can on that."
Many proptech startups, born and funded during the low-interest-rate heydays, are in the throes of struggle. With investments into U.S.-based real estate startups falling from $11.1 billion in 2021 to $3.7 billion last year, according to PitchBook data, some are selling themselves off, while others are closing shop. The two most recent examples are the [β¦]
Β© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
