Semil Shah
Mill Valley, California, United States
15K followers
500+ connections
About
I’m the Founding General Partner of Haystack, an early-stage VC firm run by a small but…
Articles by Semil
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Basic Oaths For Investors, And For Founders, Too
Basic Oaths For Investors, And For Founders, Too
I’ve been thinking about this tweet from Garry. I like the idea of an oath, at least in theory, because it forces one…
5 Comments -
Unpacking The $17B Uber Financing
Unpacking The $17B Uber Financing
Uber has come up a lot in conversations recently, so I felt compelled to jot down some notes about what their latest…
2 Comments -
In SF, Your Chariot Awaits
In SF, Your Chariot Awaits
[This post originally appeared on Haywire.] I am a transportation junkie.
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Unfolding The Map Between Uber And Google
Unfolding The Map Between Uber And Google
You can now hail an Uber from right inside the Google Maps mobile app, presumably on iOS and Android. This is a big…
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Perspective On An iPad Market In Flux
Perspective On An iPad Market In Flux
[Originally posted on Haywire.] Lots and lots of chatter about the iPad, some say it won’t grow like the iPhone, while…
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Last Post On TechCrunch, First Post On LinkedIn
Last Post On TechCrunch, First Post On LinkedIn
This week marked my 207th and final post on TechCrunch, after three years as the publication's most frequent…
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15K followers
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Semil Shah reposted thisSemil Shah reposted thisSemil Shah was one of the first investors I met when I moved to San Francisco as a cub tech reporter. How fun that I should bump into him on my return flight to New York City ten years later! https://lnkd.in/eiwgUuFJ
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Semil Shah reposted thisSemil Shah reposted thisHaystack: New Funds, New Era Today, our team is very happy to share that we’ve raised Haystack VIII, an $85M early stage fund and Needles III, a select fund for high conviction opportunities. These new vehicles represent a meaningful step up in our ability to back outlier founders at the very beginning of their respective journeys. They enable our small, focused team to carry forward the same model of making seed and early stage investments with more firepower to lead rounds and support our portfolio as companies scale. Through our history, Haystack has constantly adapted and partnered with founders who have gone on to build market leaders in consumer (DoorDash, Instacart), cloud / SaaS (Figma, HashiCorp), autonomy (Applied Intuition, Nominal), national security (Saronic, Hadrian), and AI (Exa, Granola, Suno). The current AI moment has raised the bar for startups across the board – revenues are exploding, there is a race to capital scale, some markets feel unbounded in size. Many of my priors or frameworks on company building feel the most subject to change that they’ve been in my career, but I’m more energized to learn from entrepreneurs as they navigate this new world and to be a meaningful investment partner as their businesses flourish. Our team has also reflected that it is a time to lean on the fundamentals of our business. We believe Haystack’s historical orientation and focus on founder selection and partnership above all else is evergreen. These funds will enable us to form new relationships with entrepreneurs, and we’re excited to earn our way into their rounds and work for them as they explore new frontiers. Personally, it’s fun to be part of a core team that’s worked together for a long time. This feels increasingly rare in the venture industry. Given our runtime together, my colleagues Semil Shah, Divya Dhulipala, and I all have a high degree of internal trust and interoperate well. It’s a joy to work this way, and we also think it makes for a better founder experience. Thank you to all the parties that make Haystack possible. It is a pleasure to serve the founders we do, and we approach that responsibility with care, humility, and conviction. We are grateful to our Limited Partners, who have placed their trust and faith in us over multiple fund cycles. And Haystack benefits from being an ecosystem participant, where we can collaborate with and learn so much from other co-investors and friends. We couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds. If you are ideating or building at the earliest stages, please reach out. - Team Haystack
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Semil Shah reposted thisSemil Shah reposted thisAs we announce Haystack Fund VIII and Needles Fund III today, I want to share my personal reflections on the ethos of our firm. The founder of Haystack, Semil Shah, was one of the original solo GPs - not really by choice, but because he didn't fit the mold of what a traditional VC firm was looking for in 2013. He carved his own path by helping people across the ecosystem and documenting his insights online. He slowly built a network of mentors who advised him to stop applying for investing roles and to cobble together a small fund to see if he could walk the walk. With that initial fund, he made history. With the funds to follow, he built an enduring firm. He spent his days with the absolute top-of-funnel of founders - seeking and backing people who spike. Over and over again these past thirteen years, he has done just that. Everything we do at Haystack today is the natural extension of the firm’s original DNA. Aashay Sanghvi joined Haystack at the beginning of Fund V. Aashay is a true encyclopedia of people, markets, companies, and the venture ecosystem writ large - learning from and sparring with him is an education in and of itself. Many of you who interact with Semil and Aashay feel the same way, which makes me feel extra lucky to work so closely with them 365 days a year. The Haystack portfolio is evidence that great founders can take a wide variety of forms. In my eyes, the dominant common thread is an unflinching honesty with oneself and the external world. The search for this is my personal interpretation of what it means to sift through an increasingly savvy and talented Haystack. I believe this approach has led our team to founders operating at flow state across a wide range of sectors: Hadrian, Neion Bio, Nominal, Saronic, Astranis, Suno, Granola, Amca, Applied Intuition, and many more. When I first joined Haystack around five years ago, Aashay had me read Nick Sleep’s Nomad Letters. My singular takeaway was that nothing matters more than the captains of the ship - the people who know what adventures are worth pursuing, who can identify and navigate perilous waters, and who have the credibility, verve, and integrity to hold together a formidable crew. We are in the business of identifying, supporting, and weathering storms alongside these captains. In this grand business of people and technology, we announce our funds - a continuation of our ethos since the earliest days of the firm - and we continue to make our small contributions to the ecosystem. If you want to solve important problems - we want to hear from you. We are curious and opinionated across a wide range of sectors, we are always open to breaking our own rules, and no conversation is too early or ill-timed for us.
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Semil Shah reposted thisSemil Shah reposted thisHaystack: New Funds, New Era Today, our team is very happy to share that we’ve raised Haystack VIII, an $85M early stage fund and Needles III, a select fund for high conviction opportunities. These new vehicles represent a meaningful step up in our ability to back outlier founders at the very beginning of their respective journeys. They enable our small, focused team to carry forward the same model of making seed and early stage investments with more firepower to lead rounds and support our portfolio as companies scale. Through our history, Haystack has constantly adapted and partnered with founders who have gone on to build market leaders in consumer (DoorDash, Instacart), cloud / SaaS (Figma, HashiCorp), autonomy (Applied Intuition, Nominal), national security (Saronic, Hadrian), and AI (Exa, Granola, Suno). The current AI moment has raised the bar for startups across the board – revenues are exploding, there is a race to capital scale, some markets feel unbounded in size. Many of my priors or frameworks on company building feel the most subject to change that they’ve been in my career, but I’m more energized to learn from entrepreneurs as they navigate this new world and to be a meaningful investment partner as their businesses flourish. Our team has also reflected that it is a time to lean on the fundamentals of our business. We believe Haystack’s historical orientation and focus on founder selection and partnership above all else is evergreen. These funds will enable us to form new relationships with entrepreneurs, and we’re excited to earn our way into their rounds and work for them as they explore new frontiers. Personally, it’s fun to be part of a core team that’s worked together for a long time. This feels increasingly rare in the venture industry. Given our runtime together, my colleagues Semil Shah, Divya Dhulipala, and I all have a high degree of internal trust and interoperate well. It’s a joy to work this way, and we also think it makes for a better founder experience. Thank you to all the parties that make Haystack possible. It is a pleasure to serve the founders we do, and we approach that responsibility with care, humility, and conviction. We are grateful to our Limited Partners, who have placed their trust and faith in us over multiple fund cycles. And Haystack benefits from being an ecosystem participant, where we can collaborate with and learn so much from other co-investors and friends. We couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds. If you are ideating or building at the earliest stages, please reach out. - Team Haystack
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Semil Shah reposted thisSemil Shah reposted thisThe rules of early-stage venture are being rewritten in real time. At SIERRA Ventures’ Pre-Seed VC Summit, Semil Shah sat down with Shomik Ghosh and shared a candid look at what’s actually happening on the ground right now in early-stage investing. The biggest shift? It’s never been easier to start a company. It’s never been harder to build a great one. A few takes that stuck with us: • “Ownership alone is not the strategy. Selection is.” Getting into the right companies matters more than optimizing for % ownership. • Both sides are reinforcing each other Founders: raise bigger, move faster, skip steps Investors: bigger funds, don’t miss rounds, pile into winners The result is an echo chamber pushing extremes • Multi-stage funds moving earlier is real But it doesn’t mean seed is easier It just means the competition shows up sooner • AI is compressing everything Time to build, time to launch, time to scale Speed is no longer a differentiator. It’s the baseline • The best founders aren’t just technical They understand distribution from day one This market rewards clarity, discipline, and sharp decision-making more than ever. If you’re building or investing at the earliest stages, it’s worth understanding how the game is changing. Full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gQQNx7V4 https://lnkd.in/gQQNx7V4
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Semil Shah reposted thisSemil Shah reposted thisThree years ago, Varun Gupta introduced me to an incredibly talented evolutionary biologist and entrepreneur, Sam Levin. One day, while sipping a coffee in his 400sqft East Village apartment, I asked him what I thought was a straightforward question: why do we make our medicines in Chinese hamster ovary cells? Trying to answer that seemingly innocuous question changed the course of our lives; and the future of biomanufacturing. We shared a belief that AI will have its largest impact in human health. But despite the progress in designing new medicines, the major bottleneck is now in making medicines accessible and getting breakthroughs to patients. To eliminate this bottleneck, Sam and I realized we would have to reinvent biomanufacturing from the ground up. Today, after two years of building quietly, we’re introducing Neion Bio. Synthetic biology has promised a world in which our local farms produce not just the food in our grocery stores but the medicines in our hospitals. But for over fifty years we have manufactured bioproducts in giant steel tanks, in capital intensive industrial facilities. Our critical medicines are incredibly costly, take years to scale, and depend on complex supply chains, increasingly located outside the US. We founded Neion Bio to change that – to dramatically lower the cost of life-saving medicines, reduce drug shortages, increase resiliency, and enable the localization of critical medical supply chains. Building this company, we knew, would require recruiting the world’s best genome engineers, like Sven Bocklandt, and pharma industry leaders, like Ming Li. Meanwhile, we were lucky to be backed by incredible investors like Varun Gupta and Raymond Tonsing (who not only introduced us but led our pre-seed and seed), and Lan Xuezhao and John Mannes. Today, with the help of Carl Zimmer and The New York Times, we are proud to present to the world a new type of bioreactor. This bioreactor harnesses the complexity of evolution rather than stripping it away. It is fully autonomous, self-replicating, and capable of printing virtually any protein for a fraction of the cost of today’s systems. It can be operated without expensive equipment or facilities, and it runs on entirely localized inputs, which are all abundant in the US. It can be expanded to meet global demands without scale up risk. It can even self-assemble to produce high purity, complex biotherapeutics. Perhaps more remarkably, the infrastructure needed to run these bioreactors already exists, in nearly every country in the world, and in every state in America. Building this platform required recruiting some of the world’s leading genome engineers and cell biologists, utilizing frontier genetic engineering and stem cell technologies, as well as inventing some of our own. But the heart of our system is 200 million years old. And it should be deeply familiar to all of you. (Re)-introducing, the egg:
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Semil Shah reposted thisThe most meaningful systems I’ve worked on weren’t built for perfect conditions. They ran for real people, under real constraints, where failure isn’t an option. Early on in my career, as an intern at IBM, I was exposed to Lotus Notes (an old enterprise workflow tool) and had the same reaction most engineers do: how is this still running so much of the world? At my first job out of school, Actifai, where I built product from the ground up for small and mid-sized telcos, I watched teams make high-stakes decisions with outdated maps, paper processes, and software written in the 90s. Then at Applied Intuition, I got to see what happens when you bring modern software principles and strong execution to safety-critical systems, and help OEMs modernize without breaking what already works. That experience is what cemented a lesson for me: the biggest leverage in software is often in the places that are hardest to serve, where constraints are real and teams have been left behind because their environment doesn’t fit the default assumptions. Industrial systems are the ultimate version of that problem: high stakes, tight constraints, and tooling that often assumes a world that doesn’t exist. Old systems can work for years. The problem is what happens when they’re compromised, or when change accelerates and it becomes hard to verify what’s true. That’s what pulled me into operational technology (OT), the software and networks that run factories and critical infrastructure, where the constraints are real and the default assumptions of modern tooling break down. Operators aren’t ignoring best practices; they’re operating under constraints most software teams never face: uptime first, safety always, and legacy dependencies that can’t be swapped overnight. The answer isn’t to shame the environment or copy-paste IT playbooks. It’s to bring modern software discipline to OT: safe change, continuous verification, and real evidence, in a form that fits how these systems actually work. That conviction is what led me to call my longtime friend Jake Fine, who I’ve known since the freshman dorms at University of Pennsylvania. He’s worked close to hardware and embedded constraints for years, and we decided to build the thing we knew had to exist. Today, we’re thrilled to announce Ironloop: modern OT security and compliance software built to run where critical systems operate. If you’re responsible for OT operations, security, or compliance and want a more reliable way to manage risk and change, I’d love to compare notes. DM me or request a demo at ironloop.com.Semil Shah reposted thisToday we’re announcing Ironloop. Industrial control systems and the operational technology behind factories and critical infrastructure are becoming more software-driven and interconnected every year, but the way they’re secured and operated hasn't kept up. This has led to a growing gap between how fast teams are expected to move and how confidently they can manage risk, change, and compliance. We believe industrial environments deserve the same modern software principles that power today’s cloud and internet infrastructure: continuous verification, configuration-level intelligence, and security that’s built into day-to-day operations. Ironloop exists to close that gap, giving critical infrastructure a path to modernize without trading away uptime, safety, or trust. We’re just getting started. Request a demo at ironloop.com.
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Semil Shah reposted thisThis one is special for me. My time at early Anduril Industries was a crucible moment for me, and as it turns out, for the product Nominal would go on to build. At a small, scrappy, 100 person Anduril, I lived first hand what it feels like to be limited by legacy tools that don't scale to meet the ambitions of modern-day teams pushing hardware to the limits. It was a moment that inspired me to go and try and build something better for engineers, alongside Bryce Strauss and Jason Hoch. Being able to announce our partnership today means that things have come a long way! Through this partnership, Nominal is helping advance some of the most ambitious and high-stakes hardware testing efforts in the world. Period. So as Anduril continues to push the boundaries of what is possible with new product development, Nominal will be there to support them with the resilient data and analysis platform that can meet the moment, every time. 🚀Semil Shah reposted thisThe rumors are true: Anduril Industries tests really, really fast. And high-tempo testing demands high-tempo analysis. Anduril runs tests across dozens of autonomous vehicle programs—air, land, sea, space—but this test volume creates a bottleneck: analysis infrastructure. To break this constraint, Anduril adopted Nominal as their unified analysis platform for test & evaluation. One system where every signal from every program could be captured, synchronized, and understood. Now 300+ engineers, operators, and leaders analyze test data in real-time. Swipe to learn more → Full case study: https://lnkd.in/gXNNaTKS
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Semil Shah shared thisEraDrive raises $5.3 million for software-hardware kits to enhance satellite autonomyEraDrive raises $5.3 million for software-hardware kits to enhance satellite autonomy
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Semil Shah liked thisSemil Shah liked thisToday I joined Jon Fortt on CNBC and shared our news: Scribe crossed $100M ARR. 🙌 I still remember the excitement of closing our first customer for $7K. We now have 90,000 enterprise customers, including nearly half of the Fortune 500. I'm so proud of our team, and deeply grateful to our 6M+ users across 150+ countries. 🙏 The milestone is very gratifying, but it’s also a signal: We’re witnessing a new layer of the enterprise stack emerge. Most companies are still very far from the AI transformation they imagined. A lot of AI usage at work is still for personal productivity; it’s not locked into how an org creates its value. The models aren’t the problem (anymore). It’s that they aren’t being taught enough about the business. AI doesn’t know your org’s exceptions, edge cases, unwritten rules, or ways of working. Without that context, AI fills in the gaps, and that’s where things get dicey: it either delivers generic outputs OR confidently gets things wrong. For AI to actually work inside enterprises, something fundamental has to change. CONTEXT is now the deciding factor for the success of every AI strategy. Companies need to map their context layer and make it legible to both humans and agents. Because if AI can’t see how work actually happens, it cannot reliably improve it. I go deeper on that here: https://lnkd.in/gQwcDNYd
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Semil Shah liked thisSemil Shah liked thisAI is making you stupid. Today, we're introducing the all new Oboe, designed to make you smarter. Think about the last 10 answers you got from an LLM. How many of them do you actually remember? Probably none, because LLMs are not good teachers. But Oboe helps you learn the way humans are supposed to: through guided conversations, frequent checks for understanding, real-time adjustments, and multiple formats for all learning styles. Here's everything we're introducing today. And you can read the full breakdown at https://lnkd.in/ew5P32KG
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Semil Shah reacted on thisSemil Shah reacted on thisSemil Shah was one of the first investors I met when I moved to San Francisco as a cub tech reporter. How fun that I should bump into him on my return flight to New York City ten years later! https://lnkd.in/eiwgUuFJ
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Semil Shah liked thisSemil Shah liked this30+ years ago, my parents came to the US with $50 in their pocket to build a better life for my sister and me. Last week, they joined me to ring the Nasdaq Closing Bell. Thank you Sehr Thadhani Bing Chen Daniel Suh Nasdaq Gold House for making it happen!
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Semil Shah liked thisSemil Shah liked thisIntroducing: TaxBench. We tested 16 frontier AI models on real tax work. None of them can reliably do the job yet. We're Rivet, an AI-enabled accounting firm filing returns for Cursor, Cognition, and hundreds more. Today we're publishing TaxBench, a reliability-first benchmark built from the actual questions our clients ask us every day. Methodology: every model scored on pass@1 (right on the first try) and pass^5 (right five times in a row), across three categories: Tax Knowledge, Tax Calculations, and Data Retrieval. Pass^5 matters more, because clients don't give you five chances. They don't know you're wrong until correction notices arrive from the IRS. The headline result: top pass@1 scores of 84.2% / 77.2% / 74.5% collapse to 42.3% / 27.5% / 22.9% on pass^5. No model clears 50% on pass^5 anywhere. Why a 50% bar matters: every engagement is a chain of judgment calls. Ten calls per client at 99% accuracy is a ~10% chance of error per return. 50% is useless. 75% is unusable. Even 99% isn't good enough. "Almost always right" is just another way of saying "wrong often enough to get fired." A frontier model isn't a tax practice. You can't hand an accountant a Claude subscription and expect returns to ship. The model is one layer. The rest of the stack – accountants who know where models fail, a platform that captures every workflow as structured data, a benchmark that tells us when an agent is ready to take a step unsupervised — is what turns capability into a working firm. Models are commodities. We'll run whichever frontier release is best each month. What isn't commodity is the stack around them. Full writeup and leaderboard in the comments.
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Semil Shah liked thisSemil Shah liked thisThank you Semil Shah, Aashay Sanghvi, and Divya Dhulipala for a wonderful day at LP-GP Alignment Summit. Beautiful location, greater roster of speakers, and the guest list. 🙌🏽
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Semil Shah liked thisSemil Shah liked thisHardware teams have more data than they have time. The gap between collection and understanding is where AI earns its keep, if it actually knows the domain. Nominal has acquired Fid Labs, a company that built AI agents for robotics and hardware workflows: connecting AI directly to dev environments, simulators, and physical hardware. Adam Wolnikowski, Fid Labs founder, joins as AI Product Lead. His job: make AI a native part of how engineering teams work inside Nominal. More details from co-founder Jason Hoch: https://lnkd.in/gBHSXfFk
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Semil Shah liked thisSemil Shah liked thisEvery hardware development team has the same problem. More data than they have time to understand. The infrastructure to capture, manage, and collaborate on that data exists now. Nominal built it. But the intelligence layer, AI that actually understands hardware workflows deeply enough for engineers to trust it, is still being born. That vision accelerates with this acquisition. Nominal has acquired Fid Labs. Adam Wolnikowski joins as an AI Product Lead. I've spent the last two years in test facilities, launch sites, and factory floors with our customers. The pattern is the same everywhere: the physics isn't the bottleneck. The tooling is. Adam saw the same thing from a different angle and built an amazing product that helps fix it. Nominal is building the hardware data supply chain. Powered (now even more) by AI. Welcome to Nominal, Adam. Read Jason Hoch's full writeup: https://lnkd.in/g6TwpxR7
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Jos White
Today Isembard announced a $50m Series A fundraise led by Union Square Ventures, less than a year after Notion Capital led their Seed round. 💥This is a company right at the intersection of AI & supply chain sovereignty & they’re exceeding even our most optimistic expectations. By the end of the year they will have 25 factories across the UK, US, Germany, France & Ukraine. 💥Isembard is rapidly scaling its network of AI-first factories for precision manufacturing at the same time as market demand is accelerating. Macro forces (reshoring, rising defence spend, concentration risk in Asia, and the growth of neo-primes) are structurally increasing demand for fast, local, flexible manufacturing that the current industry is unable to deliver on. 💥The innovation is in the way the company builds and franchises factories as a product with tightly integrated units of machines, software, robotics, & process intelligence that turn design files into certified components with speed & reliability. 💥Their AI software platform, MasonOS, connects all sites into a single operating system, replacing fragmented shops with standardised, high-performance industrial nodes & enabling real-time quoting, predictable delivery, & low defect rates. By owning the full production stack, Isembard delivers premium manufacturing performance with the scalability & flexibility of a software platform. 💥We are at the top of the AI hype cycle and there are understandable concerns about the ROI on the vast sums of money being invested into this new super-cycle. But, the ROI for Isembard is both clear and compelling. They will deliver components 10x faster and at 50% of the cost of current suppliers. They will also build a de-centralised, global network of factories to meet the growing demand for national or regional sovereignty. 💥This is a company with a clear vision to disrupt a massive, fragmented $1.8tn component manufacturing market. Today marks another huge stride towards that vision. And they are only just getting started. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Alexander Fitzgerald & the team & we’re also excited to welcome Rebecca Kaden & USV into the investor base. Notion Capital Union Square Ventures Alexander Fitzgerald Rebecca Kaden Maximilian Eichler Stephen Millard Britt Mulder
6 Comments -
Michael Fanfant
I’ve known David Meister for years and backed him at Sydecar, so I’ve seen his ability to build through complexity. Axiom Trust is taking on one of the most outdated parts of wealth infrastructure, trust administration, by pairing a regulated trust company with AI-native workflows. We're proud to invest again and congrats to the team on the launch!
1 Comment -
Kasey Z.
With RL techniques like GRPO, it’s become easy to fine-tune small models to outperform foundation models on vertical tasks. We’re open sourcing Osmosis-Apply-1.7B: a small model that merges code (similar to Cursor’s instant apply) better than foundation models. Links in comments! Using foundation models for high specificity, low complexity tasks like code merging can be overkill - instead, it’s better to use a specialized model instead for higher performance and latency. We fine-tuned the model on 100K real-world code commits where the model needs to merge a code edit snippet into an original code snippet. On the test dataset (subset of CommitPackFT), foundation model performance ranged between 0.77-0.93 reward score. In comparison, Osmosis-Apply-1.7B achieved a 0.98 reward score - while also being 3X-5X more affordable than the next cheaper model AND ~10X faster! Why this matters: the best AI agents use multiple models to ensure task specialization and reliability at scale - on top of cost and latency benefits as well. Links to the model and full write-up (with reward function, hyperparameters, etc.) are in the comments - reach out if you’re interested in using reinforcement learning!
18 Comments -
Ryan Sommerville
Thrilled to share the launch of Criticality, a $65M fund built to back founders solving hard, high-leverage problems at the intersection of technical complexity and real-world urgency. Criticality builds on the foundation we’ve laid at Antler - applying our conviction-driven approach to companies at Seed & Series A. The fund is sector-flexible but applies a deep tech lens to each opportunity, targeting non-obvious, high-leverage problems from the earliest stages of company formation. Grateful to the New Mexico State Investment Council for their support in anchoring Criticality. More to come soon from Cash Allred & I.
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Aaron Golbin
Seed fundraising hasn’t gotten easier. After reviewing thousands of early-stage companies, one pattern is obvious: most founders don’t fail at seed fundraising because their idea is weak — they fail because they misunderstand how seed rounds actually get done. 👉 That’s why we put together the LvlUp Ventures Guide to Seed Fundraising. It’s not a hype piece. It’s the exact mental model we see strong founders use when they raise efficiently and get back to building. Some of the core takeaways: 🔹 Raise when you have momentum you can explain, not just a polished deck 🔹 Size your round to buy 12–18 months of real progress — not optionality theater 🔹 SAFEs and notes are tools, not shortcuts; understand how they compound dilution 🔹 One committed investor changes everything — momentum beats perfection 🔹 Speed and clarity matter more than squeezing every last point of valuation 🔹 The goal isn’t “winning the round” — it’s setting up the next phase of the company This is the guide we wish more founders read before starting outreach — not halfway through a messy raise. 👇 Question for founders raising right now: What’s been hardest for you — getting in touch with investors, structuring the round, or keeping momentum once conversations start? 👇Want the Full LvlUp Ventures Guide to Seed Fundraising? 👍 Like this Post 💬 Comment “Fundraising” ✅ I’ll DM you the guide and share next steps to get reviewed by LvlUp’s Investment Committee and our 25+ VC partners. #Fundraising #VC #Startup #Seed #EarlyStage #VentureCapital #StartupFounders #Founders #RaisingCapital #Startups #SaaS #Tech #CPG #B2B #Entrepreneurship #BuildInPublic #FundraisingTips #VCInsights
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JT Benton
Hot take: lot's of #LP's are growing underwhelmed with traditional venture investing. 💰 Fees are high given the level of engagement with the company operators. ❓ Access is opaque - LP's are unclear on the portco operations and outcomes. Outcomes are scattered - power law investing can certainly work, but many feel that venture capital investing is just a numbers game. There's another way. I'm biased, but I think it's better: #VentureStudios as an asset class. They blend: 🤜 🤛 Control and ownership 💡 Thematic focus 👬 Partnership with operators Studios offer a fund-like structure — but with more alignment, higher value conversion and less noise. If you're interested in understanding more about the studio model, we have resources to share. Please reach out and let's connect!
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Dave Lambert
We invest at Pre-VC and Pre-Seed, and then help our founders find a Seed round when they're ready. Here are 27 Seed investors that we *know* are active right now. Blue Moon Bonfire Ventures Chingona Ventures Flying Fish Partners Foothill Ventures Great North Ventures ground game HealthX Ventures InsurTech Venture Partners KCRise Fund Las Olas Venture Capital Leva Capital Maven Ventures Monte Carlo Capital Moonshots Capital OneSixOne Ventures Oval Park Capital Pixel Perfect Ventures Range Ventures Revolution SNAK Venture Partners Startup Capital Ventures Supernode Global Susa Ventures Trilogy Equity Partners True Ventures True Wealth Ventures
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Tim Ericson
🚀 Meet PACT, simplifying SBA-backed acquisitions with investors. Think YC’s SAFE, but built for Main Street M&A. 📘 What is PACT and why we built it PACT (Partnership Acquisition Commonsense Terms) is a free, balanced starting point for the agreements used in SBA-backed acquisitions with outside investors. For too long, SBA-backed acquisitions with outside investors have been the wild west: every deal is different, inefficient, and confusing, especially for first-time searchers raising capital. PACT gives everyone a common baseline so reviews are faster, expectations are clear, and operators can focus on acquiring the business. 🧩 SAFE for ETA Y Combinator’s SAFE gave startups a shared template that made early investing easier to execute. PACT brings that same idea to ETA. It teaches the key concepts in plain English, aligns searchers and investors on the economics, and sets a fair place to start. Our goal is for PACT to become the default baseline for investor-backed small business acquisitions using SBA loans. 🤝 Who contributed 🏛️ Legal input from top SMB M&A attorneys: Joseph Spina (Cullen and Dykman LLP), Mark Dittrich (Groundswell Advisors, LLP), and Eric Hsu (Clear Focus Law, PLLC) provided feedback on drafts. 💼 Early investor adopters: Jordan F. (Shareholder Ventures), Grant Hensel (Entrepreneurial Capital), Jason Ehrlich (Fruition Capital), Sean Smith (Search Fund Ventures), Adam Kaplan (ETA Funding Partners), Jacob Hall (Kando Capital), Tony Cappaert (Workbench Capital) and Adam Markley (PROX Search Capital) have adopted PACT on new deals. 🎓 Community support: Chelsea Wood and Walker Deibel at the Acquisition Lab and Buy Then Build have committed to start educating the community on how investor deals work using PACT. 👉 What to do next 🔍 Searchers: download the docs and ask your lawyer to start from PACT. ⚖️ SMB M&A Law firms: review the templates and send feedback so the next version is better. 💸 SMB investors: adopt PACT as your starting point and share redlines from real deals. This is a community-led standard, and we will keep versioning PACT as feedback comes in from all sides. 📝 Thanks: Special thanks to Joseph Spina for leading the legal drafting with me and helping shape a true middle ground. 🔗 Download PACT and see the key terms: ETAPACT.com (link in the comments) Let’s make investor-backed acquisitions clearer, faster, and fairer for everyone. 🚨 DISCLAIMER: PACT is not legal advice. Searchers must engage experienced SMB M&A counsel to review and tailor these documents to their deal.
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