Ajay Kamat
San Francisco Bay Area
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About
Formerly founder of Wedding Party. Currently Partner at Pear VC focusing on pre seed and…
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3K followers
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Ajay Kamat shared thisPear is coming to NYC and we'll be doing PearX office hours with select teams interested in joining our summer cohort. I'm excited to meet the all the great New York based companies.Ajay Kamat shared this🍐 Pear VC is coming to the Big Apple next week! 🍎 We’re excited to spend time with founders and friends of Pear and meet with exceptional, NYC-based teams building at the pre-seed and seed stages. A few ways to connect with us: 🏔️ 𝗚𝗧𝗠 𝗦𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗶𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗹 𝟮𝟮: A curated, hands-on session on founder-led sales and early GTM, led by Pepe Agell. 👉 Apply to join: https://luma.com/llclveo2 📆 𝗣𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗫 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗹 𝟮𝟯: In-person interviews with Mar Hershenson, Ajay Kamat & Harris Stolzenberg for a limited number of teams interested in joining our next PearX cohort. 👉 Apply to join: https://luma.com/lt96l4jr See you in NYC!
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Ajay Kamat shared thisThe early application deadline for PearX S26 is tomorrow (2/22) at 11:59PM. Get your apps in and we are working around the clock to get back to you ASAP.Ajay Kamat shared this🚀 𝗣𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗫 𝗦𝟮𝟲 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 AI has made it easier than ever to build. That also means it’s easier than ever to build something no one really needs. At the earliest stages, the real advantage isn’t how fast you ship — it’s how fast you learn to: 👥 Find real customer pain 🖥️ See workflows others miss 💡 Turn early insight into durable advantage That’s why PearX exists. It's our exclusive, small-batch program for pre-seed companies where founders get dedicated time with Pear VC partners — all former founders or operators. We work closely with teams on everything from customer discovery to fundraising to help them get on the path to success as fast as possible. If you’re interested in building with us, we’d love to meet you. 👉 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗣𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗫 𝗦𝟮𝟲 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆: https://pear.vc/pearx/
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Ajay Kamat shared thisPear VC backed Henry's first company and we said we would back anything he works on next. Recently we had the opportunity to partner with him again on the The Relationship Company. They launched their first product Date Drop on campus at Stanford and 5000 students are using it to find dates weekly. They’ve since launched on 10 additional campuses and there is a lot more to come. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Henry again! https://lnkd.in/gV83RMEsA Stanford grad student created an algorithm to help his classmates find love; now, Date Drop is the basis of his new startup | TechCrunchA Stanford grad student created an algorithm to help his classmates find love; now, Date Drop is the basis of his new startup | TechCrunch
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Ajay Kamat shared thisWe've just opened applications for the summer cohort of PearX. Apply before our early application deadline on Feb 22nd and we will get back to you ASAP.Ajay Kamat shared this🚀 𝗣𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗫 𝗦𝟮𝟲 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 AI has made it easier than ever to build. That also means it’s easier than ever to build something no one really needs. At the earliest stages, the real advantage isn’t how fast you ship — it’s how fast you learn to: 👥 Find real customer pain 🖥️ See workflows others miss 💡 Turn early insight into durable advantage That’s why PearX exists. It's our exclusive, small-batch program for pre-seed companies where founders get dedicated time with Pear VC partners — all former founders or operators. We work closely with teams on everything from customer discovery to fundraising to help them get on the path to success as fast as possible. If you’re interested in building with us, we’d love to meet you. 👉 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗣𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗫 𝗦𝟮𝟲 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆: https://pear.vc/pearx/
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Ajay Kamat posted thisToday we’re opening applications for PearX S26. Twice a year, we partner with a small group of exceptional founders at the very beginning of their journey, frequently before the idea is fully formed. The goal is simple: help companies get on the path to success as fast as possible. One thing we’ve learned over and over: ideas change, but our conviction in the people doesn’t. Blueberry (PearX S25) is a good example. We met Nima Mozhgani at the idea stage and backed him early for an idea that wasn’t quite right. He met his co-founder Sean Rich working out of our office. During PearX, they went deep with customers, uncovered a sharp insight about enterprise brands managing large social accounts with few resources. They quickly rebuilt their product around this customer need and saw an immediate pull from the market. By Demo Day, they had real revenue and quickly closed a strong seed round. Now they’re scaling fast. This pattern isn’t all that rare. Many PearX companies pivot after we back them and still find product-market fit during the program. I love working with founders like Nima and Sean who bring real intensity to their company every day. That focus and urgency shows up in the outcomes. PearX is a small-batch, pre-seed program with deep partner involvement, plus hands-on recruiting and GTM support. The cohort starts in July and runs for 12 weeks. If you’re early, ambitious, and moving fast, apply before our early application deadline on Feb 22nd.
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Ajay Kamat shared thisSnout is a company very special to us at Pear VC because they have a mission to provide affordable vet care for every pet. Snout enables every veterinary clinic to offer wellness plans so pet parents can cover routine preventative care (vaccines, regular medications etc.) and unlimited telehealth or in office visits without breaking the bank. Today Snout announces their $10m Series A led by our friends at Footwork and a $100m line of capital to provide wellness plans to vet clinics nationwide. We're so excited to have partnered with Emily Dong and David Nietzke from the very early days. They've seen tremendous growth in the last year and are on pace for an incredible 2026.Ajay Kamat shared this💸 Today, we're announcing Snout’s Series A: $10M led by Footwork alongside a $100M financing facility from Clear Haven Capital Management, LLC. This milestone is being covered by Fortune’s Term Sheet, but what matters most to me isn’t the headline, it’s what this capital enables. No one should ever have to make a health decision for their pet based on the cash in their bank account. I’ve spent 10+ years experiencing the growing divide between pet parents and veterinarians. With vet prices rising at twice the rate of inflation, pet owners feel scammed and abandoned by care takers. Veterinarians are underpaid and forced to turn away clients due to financials. We all avoid the vet clinic in fear of the bill, sometimes until it's too late. Wellness plans have always been the right idea, but until now, vets were asked to take on the risk. With this new capital, Snout brings much needed funding into preventive care: • no credit checks • no interest payments • predictable monthly plans for pet owners • upfront payment to veterinarians Get in touch! 🐶🐱 Snout works exclusively through veterinarians. If you’re a pet parent, you can find a Snout clinic near you or ask your vet to join us. https://lnkd.in/e3Prq4be 👨🏽⚕️👩🏻⚕️ Veterinarians - find time to speak with us, we promise a human will get back to you same day. 🚀 I couldn't be more excited to build this with David Nietzke Kyle Cartmell Ashley Tocco and the entire Snout team. And if this mission touches you, please reach out. We’re hiring! https://jobs.gem.com/snout 🙏 Grateful to Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Mike Smith, Mark Simmer, Brian Smith, Mar Hershenson, Ajay Kamat and our early believers for backing this vision. And incredibly proud of the Snout team building a better system for pets, families, and veterinarians. 🔗 Full announcement from Fortune by Allie Garfinkle: https://lnkd.in/epQ8hrPKAs vet bills jump 40% in recent years, startup Snout raises $110 million for its ‘membership’ model to defray costs | FortuneAs vet bills jump 40% in recent years, startup Snout raises $110 million for its ‘membership’ model to defray costs | Fortune
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Ajay Kamat shared thisIt was not an obvious bet when we met Michael Ding primarily because he was so young and a solo founder when we met him. But Michael is a special founder and we were excited to partner with him in building Bobyard (PearX S23). Congratulations to him and the team on their $35m Series A.Ajay Kamat shared thisI met Michael Ding when he was a Freshman at Stanford University. He was working on AI software for the construction industry. Two things caught my attention: 1️⃣ 🔥 Michael's intensity - the way he spoke about his vision, what he had done and what he was planning to do. It was clear he knew where he was going and that he was going to make it happen. 2️⃣ 👷♂️ Michael's depth of knowledge - Despite his age he knew construction "in-and-out". His PearX application said "I have almost gone to court several times over scope of work issues and contract breaking”. He had also studied for the California general contractor B-2 license! We all work for the moments we meet founders like Michael. The road ahead is long and we have a ton of work but we are excited about the huge opportunity ahead of us and applying real technology finally reaching an overlooked industry. Congrats Bobyard (PearX S23) team! https://lnkd.in/gnP5gdADBobyard raises $35M Series A to power how the world gets built - Pear VCBobyard raises $35M Series A to power how the world gets built - Pear VC
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Ajay Kamat shared thisCongratulations to the Federato (PearX S20) team on their $100m Series D! Exciting to see how far founders William Ross and William Steenbergen have come in making their vision a reality.Ajay Kamat shared thisWe’ve raised a $100 million Series D led by Goldman Sachs, a milestone that reflects a profound shift underway in the insurance industry. 🌐 Insurers are signaling that the era of the Old Core is ending. The future belongs to AI-native, full-lifecycle platforms built to help insurers make better, real-time decisions in tune with the AI transformation surrounding all of us. This raise is powerful validation of our mission. Changing the way insurance work gets done drives huge returns to insurers and insureds alike. With continued support from all our existing investors, Emergence Capital Caffeinated Capital, StepStone Group and Pear VC, we’re doubling down on building the technology that will define this next chapter of an impactful industry. Read the full story 👉 https://lnkd.in/eVcKGJrH
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Ajay Kamat shared thisLast chance to apply to PearX W26!Ajay Kamat shared this🚨 Last call! Applications for PearX W26 close on 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟴𝘁𝗵 𝗮𝘁 𝟭𝟭:𝟱𝟵𝗣𝗠 𝗣𝗦𝗧. Apply now: https://pear.vc/pearx/ PearX is our 12-week accelerator program for pre-seed companies. Each batch is small by design so that every company gets dedicated, hands-on support from a Pear partner who's a former founder or operator. As a PearX founder, you get: 💰 Capital to build your company: Check sizes range from $250K–$2M tailored to your unique needs ☁️ Cloud credits: Up to $1M from partners like Azure, OpenAI, AWS, Google, Anthropic, and more 🏢 Office space: Get a 6-month home base in Pear Studio SF 🤝 GTM & recruiting support: Our Platform team helps you make your critical first hires, nail your ICP and messaging, and more 🍐 Community: Connect with other founders and builders from across the Pear ecosystem 🚀 Demo Day: Pitch to 200+ GPs in the room and 1000+ investors online We're excited to work with founders across all verticals (consumer, healthcare, biotech, B2B SaaS) and every layer of the AI stack (chips, foundational models, apps, tooling).
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Ajay Kamat liked thisAjay Kamat liked thisEach year, medical device and pharma companies lose $80B+ in revenue to insurance denials, even after FDA approval, while patients are left to navigate insurance coverage on their own. The team building Paxos Health knows this problem firsthand. While at Stanford GSB, CEO Haley King met Alex Lacey, who once overturned a $40K health insurance denial with the help of an anonymous Reddit user. Driven by Alex’s personal experience, they decided to build a company to help patients navigate health insurance appeals. Shortly after they met another Stanford student, Malcolm Asher working on the same problem. As it turns out, Malcolm was the anonymous Reddit user who helped Alex with his appeal. The three joined forces, and Paxos Health was born. Paxos Health uses AI to help patient access teams navigate complex payer rules, clinical guidelines, and appeals workflows—turning a slow, manual process into a structured, repeatable system. By analyzing coverage policies and clinical evidence, they help teams build stronger cases, streamline appeals, and secure more approvals so patients can access care faster. Congrats to Haley and team on taking the stage at our PearX W26 Demo Day. They're just getting started! 🚀
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Ajay Kamat liked thisAjay Kamat liked thisLast week we were busy in NYC, 🍐 🩷 🍎 ! We saw 100+ founders and hosted several events. Excited to come back soon. “𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐀 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧” a private session for our founders hosted by Rebecca Kaden at Union Square Ventures. A big thanks 🙏 to Rebecca. USV is a greapt partner to all founders in NYC. “𝐆𝐨-𝐓𝐨-𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐭” led by our partner Pepe Agell with founders and operators from Glide, Moda, Spur, August, Frontdesk, and Nooks sharing what actually works. A big thanks to Joel Albarella and his team at New York Life for hosting us. “𝐏𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐗 𝐎𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬” with my partners Harris Stolzenberg and Ajay Kamat. A big thanks to all the founders who came to meet us in person - they were terrific. A big thanks to Luis Molina and his team at Kale for hosting us. “𝐄-𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬”, breakfast with our companies selling into the e-commerce ecosystem Kale, Polynomic, Spur, Cape, Frontdesk. It was great to see our founders share their know-how and support each other. “𝐏𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐕𝐂 𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐍𝐘𝐂 𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐫” where we shared stories with 70+ Pear community friends (founders, operators, students and investors).
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Ajay Kamat liked thisAjay Kamat liked this🍐 Pear VC is coming to the Big Apple 🍎 next week! 📆 𝐖𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐏𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗫 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗹 𝟮𝟯 In-person interviews with Ajay Kamat, Harris Stolzenberg and myself. for a limited number of teams interested in joining our next PearX cohort 👉 Apply to join: https://luma.com/lt96l4jr See you in NYC!
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Ajay Kamat liked thisAjay Kamat liked thisCelebrating Gusto’s recent monumental achievement with Josh R. and Edward Kim over delicious food from Northern Iran at komaaj. We missed you Tomer London !
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Ajay Kamat liked thisConstruction is one of the biggest industries in the world and Bobyard is super charging it! Everything from the first measurement to the final bid can all be done in Bobyard.👇 🍐 ❤️ BobyardAjay Kamat liked thisToday we're launching Bobyard 2.0, and I’m so excited about what our team built. When I founded Bobyard, the mission was simple but imperative: construction is one of the largest industries in the world, and it's been massively underserved by technology. Estimating alone was still being done by hand and I was certain we could fix that. Bobyard 2.0 is the clearest proof yet that we can. Takeoffs are now material-centric from the start. Our AI tools are consolidated into a single workbench that's faster and easier to trust. And the whole platform is built to move as fast as the people using it can think. Everything from the first measurement to the final bid can all be done in Bobyard. But what makes today really special isn't just the product. It's that two of the most respected names in professional landscaping, Marty Grunder and Richard Sperber (who between them have built and sold companies worth billions) looked at what we've built and said it’s a game-changer for the industry and how landscapers can run their business. The future of how the world gets built is being decided right now, and Bobyard is building it. Read the full launch breakdown at the link in the comments.
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Ajay Kamat liked thisAjay Kamat liked this17 years ago Eren, Oktay and I met and we hatched a plan to reinvent education. Today it looks like a major success but in reality we were STRUGGLING in this photo (taken 16 years ago). Investors didn’t want to touch Udemy because they thought education was a bad market. Our first 18 months resulted in almost no traction and no clear path to success. We ripped out our core product and started over again. We went into significant credit card debt. I slept on an air mattress on the floor for almost a year - the mattress would deflate overnight which was creating a pain in my back. Eventually, we raised $1M. Then $3M. The company IPO’d. This year, Udemy will do $800M in revenue - $500M ARR. Hundreds of millions of people learned skills and changed their careers on Udemy. I think hundreds (more likely thousands) of people became millionaires due to Udemy’s success. We founders made life-changing money, retired our parents, and lived the Silicon Valley dream. Sometimes it’s good to remember where you came from. It was freaking hard - but worth it. Building is always worth it, succeed or fail. You gotta keep going.
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Lakshmi Shankar
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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs
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Salesfully.com
2K followers
Startups don’t need VC to grow. Revenue-based financing doubled from $1.8B in 2021 to over $3.8B in 2024 and average deals are ~$350k with a 6% cap. Funding mix in 2025: VC 52%, crowdfunding 14%, RBF 11%, angels 10%, partnerships 7%, grants 6%. 1,500 companies raised $700M via crowdfunding in 2023. Explore smarter funding options: https://lnkd.in/ebTeA_MX #StartupFunding #AlternativeFinance
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Jose Adrian Luna Maya
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From Garage to Giant: The San Francisco Startup Ecosystem San Francisco isn’t just a city; it’s a launchpad. Every day, founders, investors, and builders gather at pitch events, hackathons, and coffee shops, sharing ideas and forging partnerships. The energy is palpable—every conversation could spark the next unicorn. My advice to newcomers: immerse yourself. Go to events, ask questions, and don’t be afraid to pitch your vision to anyone who’ll listen. The connections you make here can change your life. #SanFrancisco #StartupEcosystem #Networking #TechCommunity
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Aviel Ginzburg
Founders Co-op • 4K followers
While there has never been a more exciting time to be a founder building dev tooling or next-gen infra, it has also never been less investable at seed/pre-seed. I'm either really missing something or a lot of my peers are lost. As someone who has not just written, but also SHIPPED, about 75k lines of code in the past 6 months I can tell you that the evolution of how to build products has changed as much in the past year as it did in the entirety of 2007-2017. The complete rise and fail of frameworks, platforms, methodologies, etc... paved over and forgotten... that is of course except for the 1 company that gets a 1000x return from a wildly overvalued hyper-scaler or drunken growth stage investor obsessed with compounding at scale. Imagine a world where any seed investor in trends like Openstack, Hadoop, PaaS, etc all took a full loss on their investment. That's what we're looking at right now. I personally know of over a dozen well-funded seed-stage companies building in these spaces, with years of runway, scrambling to get acquired for a return of capital + several million personally while they're still relevant. If you're not seeing this unfold in front of you, you either aren't paying attention or you're satisfied playing the lottery instead of investing.
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Neal Ghosh
9point8 Collective • 3K followers
Trying something new this week - a studio industry roundup with my take on what matters. The studio model is no longer an experiment being run in a handful of places. It is infrastructure being built across geographies, sectors, and institutional types. 5️⃣ stories from the past seven days: 1️⃣ OSS Ventures hit a EUR 40M first close on a EUR 75M follow-on fund -- capital raised specifically to back the 30 companies their studio created since 2019. The "build then fund" lifecycle is maturing. B'More Venture Studio with a similar thesis: studio operations first, then dedicated capital to scale what's working. 2️⃣ Delta40 raised $20M from 54 investors across 13 countries to launch Africa's first integrated venture studio and fund. The LP base is almost entirely DFIs and foundations. Impact capital is discovering the studio model as a deployment vehicle, something I seeing across geographies (conversations with Michael Bob Starr and Damias McDonald this week alone) 3️⃣ Start Holdings launched Start.vc out of NYC and Barcelona after a $200M EV infrastructure exit. Another operator-turned-studio-founder. This is the pattern we see quite often in our work at 9point8 -- experienced operators like Jason Goldsmith who've built and exited deciding the studio model is how they want to build next. 4️⃣ UBC HATCH admitted 10 new deep-tech spinouts for Winter 2026 -- mostly climate tech. University venture builders are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing segments. Follow Evan Allen and Jaimie Testai to keep track of its rapid evolution. 5️⃣ The INVEST Act is advancing through the Senate. If passed, it expands qualifying VC fund size from $10M to $50M and loosens general solicitation rules for accelerator and university events. For studio-funds -- and for folks in the The Venture Studio Forum community tracking policy -- this could be the most significant capital formation legislation since the JOBS Act. If this roundup format is useful, I'll keep it going. What other noteworthy news hit your desk this week, and what stood out to you?
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Matt Rappaport
Future Frontier Capital • 9K followers
Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation
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Brittany Walker
CRV • 5K followers
Voice is a super interesting modality right now - maybe the first modality we're seeing move to open source models across a number of scale ups / enterprises. Reliability concerns, high costs, and open source model performance are pushing engineers to do their own fine tuning vs. relying on third-party vendors of proprietary models. Many of these orgs have already been collecting their own first-party data and now with third-party vendors like Extrian, David AI, etc they can train really high quality models. RL has been insanely hyped, but it's been unclear how long it will take scale ups and enterprises to actually lean in. Voice AI might be hitting that inflection point faster than expected.
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Jordan Steiner, CFA
Developer Capital • 3K followers
"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?
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James Green
CRV • 10K followers
CRV Security: Request for Startups I never know if this actually works for our friends over at YC but figured we'd try. Here's what we want to fund in 2026! 1. Golden Artifacts: Think Chainguard but more broad. Artifact attestation exists for open source. Almost nothing exists for internal software — especially the vibe-coded tooling now running in production. We want the company building cryptographic proof of secure software delivered from secure artifacts: who built it, how, and whether it was reviewed. If more things are being yeeted into the world via Claude Code (myself included), this feels like an issue. 2. MCP & Agentic Security: Agents are getting real credentials and taking real actions. The security posture of most orgs around this is basically zero. That changes fast. You'd never give an employee hardcoded API keys or write access to your email without supervision/trust. Why give it to agents? 3. AI Governance: Boards are asking CISOs to account for AI risk. CISOs have no good answer other than "Palo has a module" 4. Next-Gen Endpoint: CrowdStrike was built for a world of static binaries and human operators. AI workloads, cloud-native infra, and AI-assisted attackers need a new architecture. The category is ready to be reinvented. 5. Networking in the AI Era: Zero trust was designed for humans. What does network security look like when the entity requesting access is an agent? Nobody's really solved this. 6. Email Security + Next-Gen Phishing: LLMs have made spear phishing infinitely scalable. I've never truly understood why Abnormal and KnowBe4 aren't one company. Maybe this time it's different. 7. Frontier Security Lab: We'd back a credible, well-staffed lab focused entirely on red-teaming models and setting the evidentiary standard the industry needs as LLM built apps become the norm. 8. Dependency Security: That Actually Remediates Malicious and vulnerable dependencies are a top attack vector. The tooling is mostly noise — scanners that don't close the loop. The winner here ships fixes, not just alerts. 9. Critical Infrastructure Cyber: Data centers, satellites, power grids, undersea cables. The physical backbone of the internet is increasingly exposed and wildly under-defended. We have data centers in space, for God's sake. Surely we need better cyber for critical infrastructure? 10. PAM for the Modern Era Legacy: PAM was built for static roles, human users, on-prem directories. Cyberark was founded in 1999.....Agents, ephemeral workloads, and cloud-native infra have broken all of those assumptions. Is anyone rebuilding this from scratch? If you're building in any of these areas — or something we haven't thought of — reach out. james@crv.com
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