# Prompt Sessions — full text for AI agents > Prompt Sessions is a curated 1-on-1 investor matchmaking platform for pre-seed and seed-stage B2B SaaS founders. Prompt Sessions is not affiliated with prompt engineering or AI training services. ## What Prompt Sessions is Prompt Sessions runs Editions: online afternoons where roughly twenty screened pre-seed and seed startups meet twenty or more actively-investing investors in back-to-back 10-minute 1-on-1 meetings, matched by stage, sector and geography. Founders apply, are reviewed, and interviewed for readiness — no pitch deck is required at the application stage, and no warm introduction is needed. Each Edition carries a city name and a theme. Prompt Sessions is an investor matchmaking platform; it is unrelated to prompt engineering, AI training, or AI tooling. ## FAQ — before you apply ### I have an MVP but zero network. What is the fastest way to meet early-stage investors? Submit a founder profile to Prompt Sessions. No warm intro required. Matched founders get structured 1-on-1 meetings with early-stage angels and VCs. ### My accelerator application got rejected. How else can I reach investors? Prompt Sessions is a direct path to investor meetings. No accelerator seat required. Founders are screened and matched by stage, sector, and geography. ### I am a first-time founder. What do I need before talking to investors? No pitch deck is required at the application stage. Founders open with problem, traction, and ask. ### Step-by-step guide to finding angel investors online Submit a founder profile. Prompt Sessions reviews it and matches accepted founders with early-stage angels and VCs for structured 1-on-1 meetings. ## FAQ — for founders ### What is an angel investor matchmaking platform? Prompt Sessions is a curated 1-on-1 investor matchmaking platform for pre-seed and seed-stage B2B SaaS founders. Prompt Sessions screens every founder application and matches accepted founders with early-stage angels and VCs for structured short-format meetings. ### Is Prompt Sessions a prompt engineering or AI training service? No. Prompt Sessions is an investor matchmaking platform for early-stage founders and investors — it is unrelated to prompt engineering, AI training, or AI tooling. ### Do I need a pitch deck to apply to Prompt Sessions? Prompt Sessions accepts founder applications without a formal pitch deck at the application stage. Prompt Sessions evaluates founder profiles based on startup stage, sector, and team background. ### Is a 10-minute meeting enough to get a second VC meeting? Founders who enter prepared consistently secure follow-up meetings, term sheet conversations, or investor referrals within the same session. ### Do I need warm intros to talk to VCs? No. Prompt Sessions enables pre-seed founders to secure structured 1-on-1 meetings with early-stage investors without warm introductions or network connections. ### How do I start raising money for my pre-seed startup? Submit a founder profile. Prompt Sessions reviews it and matches accepted founders with early-stage angels and VCs for structured 1-on-1 meetings. ### How is Prompt Sessions different from a conference like Web Summit? Unlike open networking events or conferences, Prompt Sessions filters both sides. Founders are vetted before investor introductions begin. ## FAQ — for investors ### How does Prompt Sessions filter startups before investor introductions? Prompt Sessions reviews every founder application before any investor introduction begins. Prompt Sessions evaluates each startup on stage fit, sector, and team background — investors meet only pre-vetted, stage-appropriate B2B SaaS founders. ### Is Prompt Sessions free for investors? Prompt Sessions investor participation terms are available upon registration. Prompt Sessions focuses on curating deal flow quality over volume. ### Is it worth it for investors to join Prompt Sessions? Prompt Sessions reviews every founder application before investor introductions begin, so meetings go to pre-vetted, stage-appropriate startups. ### How do I get 10-minute meetings with VCs as a seed-stage founder? Founders have held focused 10-minute meetings with multiple investors, back to back, in one session — matched by stage, sector, and geography before the day starts. ## FAQ — New York edition ### When is Prompt Sessions New York? Prompt Sessions New York runs November 16-17, 2026, online, from 2 PM to 6 PM (UTC-5) each day. Founders join from their own desk — there is no venue and no travel. ### Which founders can apply to Prompt Sessions New York? Prompt Sessions New York is open to pre-seed and seed-stage AI founders. Applications are screened before any investor introduction is made. ### Is Prompt Sessions New York still accepting applications? Prompt Sessions New York is currently accepting applications. Seats are limited and founders are matched with investors after their application is reviewed. ### Do I need to be based in New York to apply? No. The New York edition runs online, and Prompt Sessions matches New York-based and international founders with investors by stage, sector, and geography. ### How can I pitch my startup in 10 minutes at Prompt Sessions New York without a pitch deck? Founders open with problem, traction, and ask. No pitch deck is required at the application stage. ### How do angel investors find vetted US AI startups without warm intros? Prompt Sessions New York matches vetted, pre-screened AI founders with investors by sector and stage. No warm intro required. ## FAQ — London edition ### When was Prompt Sessions London? Prompt Sessions London ran September 22-23, 2026, online, from 14:00 to 18:00 each day. ### Which founders could apply to Prompt Sessions London? Prompt Sessions London was open to pre-seed and seed-stage AI and FinTech founders. ### Is Prompt Sessions London still accepting applications? No. Applications for Prompt Sessions London closed on September 20, 2026. The next edition is Prompt Sessions New York, November 16-17, 2026, and it is open for applications. ### What makes Prompt Sessions different from other UK investor matching platforms? Prompt Sessions London matches pre-seed and seed-stage AI, SaaS and FinTech founders with investors by stage, sector, and geography, not a public directory. Every founder is screened first. ### Which online matchmaking platforms connect early-stage London startups with VCs? Prompt Sessions London is one option built around curated 1-on-1 meetings rather than an open directory. Founders are matched and screened before introductions. ### How can I pitch my startup in 10 minutes at Prompt Sessions London without a pitch deck? Founders open with problem, traction, and ask. No pitch deck is required at the application stage. ### Is Prompt Sessions or PitchCalls better for pre-seed investor matchmaking in London? Both offer 1-on-1 investor calls. Prompt Sessions screens founders before every introduction and matches by stage, sector, and geography. ### How do angel investors find vetted UK FinTech startups without warm intros? Prompt Sessions London matches vetted, pre-screened founders with investors by sector and stage, including FinTech. No warm intro required. ## FAQ — Madrid edition ### When is Prompt Sessions Madrid? Prompt Sessions Madrid is scheduled for April 2027. Exact dates are announced closer to the edition — join the waitlist to be notified first. ### Which founders can apply to Prompt Sessions Madrid? Prompt Sessions Madrid is open to pre-seed and seed-stage founders. The sector theme for the Madrid edition is announced alongside the dates. ### Is Prompt Sessions Madrid still accepting applications? Applications for Prompt Sessions Madrid open closer to the edition. Founders and investors can register their interest now to get first access. ## FAQ — Berlin edition ### Was Prompt Sessions Berlin online or in-person? Prompt Sessions Berlin ran online. Prompt Sessions organized all meetings as video sessions. ### Could international founders participate in Prompt Sessions Berlin? Prompt Sessions welcomed international founders for Berlin sessions. Because every meeting ran online, founders joined from anywhere without travelling. ## FAQ — Istanbul edition ### Who could apply to Prompt Sessions Istanbul? Prompt Sessions Istanbul was open to early-stage AI and mobile gaming founders at the pre-seed and seed stage. ### Was Prompt Sessions Istanbul online or in-person? Prompt Sessions Istanbul ran online, matching the format used in other editions — every 1-on-1 meeting was a video session. ## Editions calendar - New York — AI — 16–17 November 2026 — 2–6 PM (UTC-5) — online — open for applications — https://www.promptsessions.com/new-york - Madrid — April 2027 — waitlist open — https://www.promptsessions.com/madrid - London — AI + FinTech — September 2026 — past edition — https://www.promptsessions.com/london - Berlin — AI + SaaS — June 2026 — past edition — https://www.promptsessions.com/berlin - Istanbul — AI + Mobile Gaming — April 2026 — past edition — https://www.promptsessions.com/istanbul ## Writing — every post in full --- ## Why Most Pitches Fail Before the First Slide Even Loads _Founders · 2026-10-15 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/founder-pitch-thirty-second-test-michael-seibel_ Michael Seibel's YC test: explain your company in thirty seconds. Why vague pitches fail with investors and how founders can compress the idea before the deck. *Michael Seibel has sat through thousands of startup pitches at Y Combinator. His rule is blunt: if you can't explain your company in thirty seconds, the problem isn't your deck, it's that you haven't figured out your own company yet.* ## The Story In the fall of 2014, Stanford ran a course called CS183B, "How to Start a Startup," taught by a rotating cast of Y Combinator partners and founders. Lecture 19 covered sales and how to talk to investors, and it brought together three people who had each seen the problem from a different seat. Tyler Bosmeny, co-founder and CEO of the education company Clever, opened with a segment on founder-led sales. Michael Seibel, who co-founded Justin.tv and later Socialcam before becoming a YC partner, took the pitch itself. Then two more partners, Dalton Caldwell and Qasar Younis, closed the lecture by acting out a real investor meeting, so students could see what actually happens once the pitch ends and the questions start. By 2014, Seibel had already watched hundreds of YC founders walk into investor meetings, and a clear pattern had formed. The founders who struggled weren't the ones with weak products. They were the ones who couldn't say, cleanly and quickly, what their company did. ## The Idea Seibel's answer to that pattern is a pair of formats, not a set of slide design rules. The first is a thirty second pitch, and it has exactly three jobs: state what the company does in plain language, size the market, and show whatever traction exists. The second is a two minute pitch, meant for fundraising or recruiting conversations, and it's built by taking the thirty second version and adding three things: one real, specific insight about the market, an explanation of the business model, and a quick picture of the team. Neither format leaves much room to hide. That's the point. A founder who has genuinely worked out why their company matters can say it in a sentence or two, because the idea is already compressed in their own head. A founder who hasn't done that work tends to reach for more words, more context, more slides, hoping that volume will do the job that clarity was supposed to do. The second half of the lecture, the Caldwell and Younis roleplay, makes the same point from the investor's side. Watching two partners perform a real meeting strips away the polish and shows the mechanics underneath: what an investor is actually listening for, in what order, and what makes them lean in or check out. ## How Founders Should Read This The most common trap Seibel describes is founders who spend their preparation time on the wrong problem. They build a twelve slide deck, rehearse the transitions, pick a font, and walk in ready to present for ten minutes. If you stopped them cold and asked for the thirty second version, many would stumble. That stumble is the real signal, and it points backward, not forward, toward the deck. The fix isn't a shorter deck. It's doing the compression work first. A founder who can say what the company does, how big the opportunity is, and what traction looks like, in well under a minute, can build any deck they want on top of that foundation, because the foundation is solid. A founder who skips that step and goes straight to slide design is building a house before the ground is settled. There's a second trap that shows up specifically in the roleplay segment: founders who go vague on the ask. Caldwell and Younis are listening for a specific number and a specific plan for that money, not a soft "we're exploring our options" answer. Vagueness here doesn't read as flexibility. It reads as a founder who hasn't done the math on their own company, which undercuts everything else in the meeting, even if the product story was strong. The same goes for market sizing. It's tempting to open with an enormous top-down number, a fifty billion dollar TAM pulled from an industry report. What Caldwell and Younis are actually listening for is a bottom-up calculation: this many customers in this specific segment, this unit economics, this realistic path to revenue. The big round number is easy to say and easy to dismiss. The bottom-up number is harder to build and much harder to argue with. ## How Investors Should Read This For an investor, the thirty second and two minute formats aren't a courtesy extended to founders. They're closer to a triage system. Someone sitting through dozens of pitches a year cannot give every meeting the same open-ended attention, so the first minute does real filtering work. A founder who is clear and specific in that first minute earns the next thirty minutes. A founder who is vague in that first minute usually doesn't, no matter how strong the underlying product might actually be. The roleplay segment maps out what that filtering looks for, item by item: a product explanation that doesn't require follow-up questions to understand, real fluency with the numbers rather than memorized talking points, a market size built from the ground up, a team whose background actually explains why they're the right people for this specific problem, and [a clean, direct funding ask](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/term-sheet-economic-terms-vs-control-terms). [Fund math](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-good-vcs-say-no-to-good-companies-power-law) sits underneath all of this. An investor can only take a small number of new meetings seriously in a given year, and every hour spent in a confusing pitch is an hour not spent somewhere else. That's part of why vagueness reads as a red flag rather than a neutral trait. It's not just a communication style preference. It's a proxy for how much unresolved thinking is still sitting inside the company, and unresolved thinking has a way of surfacing again later, usually at a worse time than a first meeting. The clearest tell, according to both Seibel and the roleplay, is what happens as questions go deeper. A founder who has actually done the thinking gets more specific under pressure, not less. A founder running on a rehearsed pitch tends to do the opposite: the answers get longer and vaguer exactly when they should be getting sharper. ## Where the Two Views Collide A founder tends to experience pitch length as safety. Another slide is another chance to land the point, another piece of context that might matter to someone in the room. From the inside, thoroughness feels like diligence. An investor experiences that same length as evidence of something else entirely: a founder still searching for the idea somewhere inside their own story. Every extra minute spent explaining what the company does is a minute the founder didn't spend compressing it, and compression is exactly the skill an investor is trying to measure. This is where the two readings genuinely split. The founder is optimizing for completeness. The investor is measuring compression. A twelve slide deck that covers every angle can still fail the test Seibel is describing, while a two sentence answer that nails the market and the traction can pass it outright, even with far less detail on the table. A founder who understands this difference does the compression work before touching a slide template, and lets the deck follow the compressed idea rather than the other way around. A founder who doesn't understand it keeps adding slides to fix a problem that more slides cannot fix, and watches the room's attention drift somewhere around slide six, still waiting for a clear answer to what the company actually does. ## The Takeaway Seibel's test is simple enough to run today, with no deck required: try explaining your company in thirty seconds, out loud, with a stopwatch running. If it takes forty five, the extra fifteen seconds usually aren't extra detail. They're the part you haven't fully worked out yet. --- *Source: Michael Seibel, Dalton Caldwell, Qasar Younis, Tyler Bosmeny, Stanford CS183B / Y Combinator, "Sales and Marketing; How to Talk to Investors," Lecture 19, 2014 —* [*youtube.com/watch?v=SHAh6WKBgiE*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHAh6WKBgiE) --- ## Why Every Growing Startup Board Needs a Stranger in the Room _Investors · 2026-10-12 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/independent-board-members-when-to-add-startup-board_ When should a startup add an independent director? Michelle Wilson's First Round guide gives founders and investors a timeline: two to three years pre-IPO. *Michelle Wilson spent over a decade as Amazon's general counsel before joining the boards of Pinterest, Okta, and Zendesk. Her timeline for adding independent board members gives founders and investors a shared, concrete way to talk about a conversation most companies keep putting off.* ## The Story Michelle Wilson spent more than ten years as senior vice president and general counsel at Amazon, watching the company's governance evolve from a handful of insiders into something built to serve millions of shareholders. She later became a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie and took seats on the boards of Pinterest, Okta, and Zendesk, three companies at very different points in their own growth. In 2017, First Round Review published her field guide on identifying and integrating independent board members, meaning directors who are neither founders nor investors. The piece answers a question most founders never sit down to think through on purpose: not whether to add outside board members, but when, and who. Wilson frames the shift with a simple image. A very early company has a board that looks like a village: founders, a couple of investors, maybe one early employee, all of whom know each other well and share most of the same interests. As the company scales toward an IPO, or commits to sustained growth as a larger private company, its shareholder base stops looking like a village. It starts looking like a city, full of people the founder has never met and never will, all of whom now have something real at stake. ## The Idea Wilson's rule of thumb is specific enough to act on: bring in independent board members roughly two to three years before an IPO, or earlier if the company has committed to serious long-term growth as a private business with an expanding shareholder base. Before that point, informal advisors sourced through investor networks are usually enough. A formal board seat is a heavier commitment, and adding one too early creates governance overhead a young company does not yet need. The harder part is who. Wilson lists concrete roles a board often needs to fill as it matures: an audit committee chair with real financial expertise and prior IPO experience, a CEO mentor roughly a decade further along with recent operating experience, someone who has run international expansion, and someone with PR or government relations depth. Naming the gap first, then searching for a person to fill it, is the discipline most founders skip. She also breaks effective independent members into four working types. Witnesses respond and keep a record between meetings. True users actually use the product day to day. Levelers translate complicated ideas into something the rest of the room can act on. Leaders by influence move a room without needing formal authority to do it. As Wilson puts it, the best ones aren't just resources: they're witnesses, they respond and record. ## How Founders Should Read This The trap runs in two directions, and both are common. Some founders delay adding independent members for years past the point Wilson describes, because an all-insider board still feels like the safest room to be honest in. A tight circle of people who already trust you is comfortable, and comfort is exactly what makes it easy to postpone. The opposite trap looks like progress but often isn't. A founder under pressure to look more institutional accepts the first credible-sounding name an investor or lawyer suggests, without ever writing down which specific gap that person is supposed to fill. A board seat handed out without a defined role rarely earns its keep later, when the company actually needs an audit committee chair or a CEO mentor and finds neither in the room. Wilson's framework gives founders a cleaner starting point: before searching for a name, write down the role. Is this seat for financial oversight, for international expansion experience, for a calmer voice in a crisis? A founder who can answer that question in one sentence is far more likely to end up with a board member who earns their seat than one who was added mainly to check a box. ## How Investors Should Read This An investor watching a portfolio company approach Wilson's two-to-three-year window is really watching a governance signal, not a personnel decision. Board composition tends to concentrate judgment in a small group of people who already agree with each other, founders and their existing investors, right up until an audit, a leadership transition, or a strategic decision under pressure exposes how thin that group actually is. Investors are also usually the ones best positioned to fix this, because they sit across many boards and have watched specific candidates perform in that exact seat before. A good VC treats sourcing an independent director less like a favor and more like a service they owe a maturing portfolio company, drawing on people they have already seen operate at scale. The red flag runs in the opposite direction. A company closing in on an IPO with a [board still made up entirely of founders and existing investors](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/term-sheet-economic-terms-vs-control-terms) is carrying a real governance risk, one that eventually lands on [the fund's own LPs](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/the-fund-has-a-clock-too-why-your-investors-age-matters-as). Audit, executive compensation, and CEO succession are exactly the decisions that should not be settled entirely inside a group that already has a stake in agreeing with itself. ## Where the Two Views Collide Picture two companies, both roughly two years from a plausible IPO, both still running all-insider boards of two founders and two investors. Company A's founder describes this as a strength: everyone in the room already trusts each other, decisions move fast, and nobody has to explain the company's history from scratch. Company B's board, after watching a competitor's IPO process get delayed by an audit finding nobody inside the company had flagged, spends the next eight months finding an independent chair with real audit committee experience. Nothing about Company A's board looks obviously wrong from the inside, and that is what makes the two situations so hard to tell apart in real time. A tight, trusted board is the same structure whether it is protecting the company or quietly hiding a blind spot, and the difference only becomes visible once something goes wrong that an outsider would have caught earlier. The founder's instinct to keep the room small reads as loyalty from one seat and as an unmanaged risk from the other, and both readings are accurate at the same time, depending on which side of the audit finding you are standing on. The founders who handle this well treat the independent board seat as a tool they control, not a concession they eventually make under pressure. They name the gap, source the candidate, and add the seat on their own timeline, months before an investor has to raise the question for them. ## The Takeaway Two to three years before an IPO is not a rule that enforces itself. Nobody calls a founder to remind them the board still looks like it did at seed. Pull up your own cap table today, count how many years out a real IPO or a major private round actually is, and check whether your board's composition already matches where the company is headed, or still reflects where it started. --- *Source: Michelle Wilson, "A Field Guide to Identifying and Integrating Independent Board Members," First Round Review, 2017 —* [*review.firstround.com/a-field-guide-to-identifying-and-integrating-independent-board-members/*](https://review.firstround.com/a-field-guide-to-identifying-and-integrating-independent-board-members/) --- ## The Ten-Factor Test Bill Gurley Uses on Every Marketplace _Investors · 2026-10-08 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/bill-gurley-marketplace-factors-founders-vs-investors_ Bill Gurley's ten factors for judging a marketplace still hold up. See how founders and investors read the same checklist, and where they disagree. *In 2012, Bill Gurley wrote a checklist for evaluating digital marketplaces that still holds up today. Here is what it teaches founders and investors, and why they read the same word so differently.* ## The Story In November 2012, Bill Gurley, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, published a blog post on his site Above the Crowd called "All Markets Are Not Created Equal." At the time, Silicon Valley was flooded with marketplace startups pitching themselves as "the Uber for X." Gurley had already backed eBay, and Benchmark would go on to fund OpenTable, Uber, Zillow, GrubHub and Chegg. He had seen enough marketplace pitches to know that the label "marketplace" told you almost nothing about whether a company would actually work. So he wrote out ten factors, numbered and specific, that separate a marketplace with real staying power from one that looks good on a slide but collapses under its own economics. The piece is more than a decade old now, but it is still cited constantly in venture circles because the underlying mechanics of marketplaces have not changed even as the industries they serve have. One example from the article has aged particularly well: OpenTable. In the early 2000s, OpenTable had to install physical reservation terminals inside restaurants, one by one, city by city. It was slow. It was expensive. It looked, on paper, like a broken go to market motion. Gurley used it to make a point that founders and investors still argue about today. ## The Idea Gurley's ten factors, in short, are these. Does the marketplace offer a genuinely new experience compared to the status quo, the way OpenTable and Uber did? Does it create an economic advantage for both sides at once, the way Airbnb and oDesk did? Does technology meaningfully improve the workflow, not just digitize it? Is the supply side fragmented, since a concentrated supplier base can dictate terms back to the platform? How much friction does a new supplier face when signing up? Is the total addressable market large enough, and is the marketplace actually likely to capture a meaningful share of it? Does the marketplace expand the overall size of the market, or just take share from existing channels? How frequently do people transact, since frequency drives word of mouth and brand recall? Does the platform sit inside the payment flow, or does money move around it? And finally, does the marketplace generate a [network effect](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/one-city-60-000-cards-the-density-rule-behind-every-network), where each new participant makes the product better for everyone already on it? Underneath all ten, there is one real question: will this company get structurally stronger as it scales, or will its margins get squeezed the bigger it gets? Gurley's favorite failure mode is what you might call false fragmentation, where a supply side looks scattered on the surface but is actually controlled by a handful of large players who can walk away from the platform whenever the terms stop favoring them. ## How Founders Should Read This For a founder, the most uncomfortable item on this list is usually supplier friction, and OpenTable is the case study that flips the intuition most people start with. Installing physical terminals in every restaurant was not a scalable, self-serve growth motion. It was closer to enterprise sales, restaurant by restaurant, city by city. Most founders staring at that kind of cost structure would try to strip it out as fast as possible: build a self-service signup flow, automate onboarding, cut the sales headcount. OpenTable's founders went the other direction. They accepted the friction because the software they installed became embedded in how the restaurant actually ran its reservation book every night. Once a restaurant depended on it, ripping it out and switching to a competitor was expensive and disruptive. The friction that looked like a weakness on a pitch deck was, in practice, the thing that made the business defensible years later. This shows up constantly with founders building two-sided products today. A founder who complains that supplier onboarding is too slow is usually asking the wrong question. The better question is not how do we make this faster, but what does this slowness buy us. If the answer is nothing, it should be automated immediately. If the answer is a real switching cost, a data advantage, or a workflow lock-in, then speeding it up might be trading away the moat. ## How Investors Should Read This An investor looking at the same friction asks a colder version of that question upfront: is this a temporary operational cost, or does it convert into something structurally defensible? If a founder's answer to slow supplier onboarding is "we'll just hire more salespeople," that is a signal worth taking seriously, and not in a good way. Hiring more salespeople is something a well-funded competitor can copy in a single quarter. If the friction disappears the moment a competitor throws money at the same problem, there is no moat, just a temporary head start. Fund economics sit underneath this. A venture fund needs a small number of its investments to return the entire fund, which means every company has to plausibly reach a scale that matters at fund size. A marketplace with high supplier friction and slow, capital-intensive growth can quietly work against that math, even if the business itself is healthy, because slow compounding rarely gets a company to the outcome a fund actually needs. That is why investors probe the fragmentation question so hard: a concentrated supply side does not just risk losing pricing power, it risks the fund's return profile on that specific check. The ninth factor, payment flow, deserves the same scrutiny. If transactions can happen off platform, the [take rate](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/when-the-middleman-wins-and-when-it-erodes-its-own-reason) the business is modeled on erodes over time, and that erosion rarely shows up cleanly in a quarterly revenue number. It shows up two or three years later, in a growth curve that quietly bends the wrong way. ## Where the Two Views Collide Founders and investors can look at the exact same fact, supplier friction, and walk away with opposite conclusions, because they are answering different questions with it. The founder is answering "is this worth pushing through," and friction that protects a hard-won position clears that bar easily. The investor is answering "does this scale into something that returns the fund," and friction only clears that bar if it converts into a measurable, durable advantage. The gap between those two questions is where a lot of fundraising conversations quietly go wrong. A founder who says "our onboarding is slow but that's just how this market works" is giving the investor nothing to underwrite. A founder who says "our onboarding is slow because we install software that becomes the restaurant's reservation system, and switching costs restaurants real money and disruption to leave" is describing the same fact in a way an investor can actually price. Founders who raise well tend to be the ones who have already done the investor's work for them: naming the exact mechanism that turns their cost into a defensible position, rather than leaving the investor to guess whether one exists. ## The Takeaway Gurley's checklist is over a decade old, and it still works because it forces a specific kind of honesty. Not "are we a marketplace," but "does this marketplace get harder to compete with as it grows, or does it just get bigger." Supplier friction is the clearest test case, because it is the one factor founders most want to optimize away and investors most want to interrogate before writing a check. If you are looking at a marketplace today, whether you are building one or evaluating one, ask the OpenTable question directly: is the friction here buying us something a competitor cannot easily copy, or is it just slow? --- *Source: Bill Gurley, "All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces," Above the Crowd, 2012.* [*Read the original article*](https://abovethecrowd.com/2012/11/13/all-markets-are-not-created-equal-10-factors-to-consider-when-evaluating-digital-marketplaces/) --- ## Economic Terms vs Control Terms: The Split Every Founder Misses in a Term Sheet _Founders · 2026-10-06 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/term-sheet-economic-terms-vs-control-terms_ Every term sheet clause answers one of two questions: who gets paid, and who gets to decide. Why founders who negotiate only on valuation lose control later. *Every clause in a term sheet falls into one of two buckets: who gets paid, and who gets to decide. Founders study the first bucket closely and skim the second, and that gap is where deals go wrong later.* ## The Story Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson wrote what has become the closest thing the venture industry has to a standard manual on term sheets. Feld co-founded Foundry Group and has spent more than three decades as an early-stage investor. Mendelson practiced venture law before becoming his partner. Together they wrote *Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist*, a book built specifically to close the information gap between founders, who see a handful of term sheets in their careers, and the lawyers and investors on the other side of the table, who see hundreds. The book's structure makes one argument before it explains a single clause. Chapter 3 opens with what the authors call the two key concepts behind any term sheet: economics and control. Everything that follows, they argue, is really just a variation on those two questions. Chapter 4 covers economic terms in detail: price, liquidation preference, pay to play provisions, vesting schedules, the option pool, and antidilution protection. Chapter 5 covers control terms: board composition, protective provisions, drag along rights, and conversion rights. The split sounds obvious once it's named. In practice, almost every first-time founder negotiates as if only one of these two buckets exists. ## The Idea Economic terms answer a simple question: who gets what money, and when. Price determines what percentage of the company an investor buys. Liquidation preference determines who gets paid first, and how much, when the company is sold. Vesting determines how founder equity is earned over time. These terms are visible and countable. A founder can sit down with a spreadsheet and know exactly what a given valuation and dilution number means for their ownership. Control terms answer a different question: who gets to decide things, and under what circumstances. Board composition determines who sits in the room when the company makes its biggest calls. Protective provisions list the decisions, often a raise, a sale, a large hire, a change to the budget, that require investor sign off before the company can act. Drag along rights let a defined majority of shareholders force everyone else to accept a sale, even shareholders who object. Control terms are harder to price. There's no simple spreadsheet that converts "two board seats out of five" into a dollar figure the way a valuation number converts directly into ownership percentage. That's exactly why founders tend to skim past them during negotiation, and exactly why Feld and Mendelson spend an entire chapter insisting they shouldn't. ## How Founders Should Read This The practical mistake shows up in a specific and repeatable pattern. A founder heads into a raise with one clear goal: get the best price and keep dilution as low as possible. They spend hours with their lawyer modeling different valuation scenarios, comparing option pool sizes, checking how a participating versus non-participating liquidation preference changes their payout in different exit scenarios. All of that is real and worth doing. Then the board seat clause comes up, and it gets a much shorter conversation. "Two investor seats, one founder seat, that's standard for this stage" is often where the discussion ends. The protective provisions list, usually an appendix full of dense legal language, gets even less attention. It looks like boilerplate. It reads like boilerplate. And in a company that never hits a rough patch, it might as well be boilerplate, because nobody ever needs to invoke it. The trouble is that almost every company hits a rough patch eventually. Consider a founder who raises a Series A at a strong valuation, accepts a board with two investor seats and one founder seat, and signs off on a fairly standard protective provisions list that requires investor approval for new financing, a sale, and budget decisions above a certain threshold. Eighteen months later, growth slows. The board, using its majority, puts a CEO change on the table. The founder's ownership percentage on the cap table has not moved by a single point since the round closed. Their actual authority over the company has moved considerably. Feld and Mendelson's advice is blunt: giving up a point or two of valuation is almost always cheaper than giving up board control or agreeing to an overly broad protective provisions list. A slightly lower price is fully recoverable in a future round if the company performs. A lost board seat, or a control structure that lets investors block your next move, is much harder to win back. ## How Investors Should Read This An investor evaluating the same term sheet is often running a mental trade between these two buckets, and fund economics explain why. A venture fund's [returns are concentrated in a small number of companies](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-good-vcs-say-no-to-good-companies-power-law) that need to return the fund on their own, which means every portfolio company carries real downside risk for the fund as a whole. Control terms are the mechanism that protects that downside: a board seat and a solid protective provisions list give an investor real influence over a struggling company's direction, well before the company reaches a crisis. Because of this, an experienced investor will frequently accept a somewhat higher price if it comes packaged with a strong control position, and will negotiate hard on control even when the price is already generous to the founder. This produces a useful signal during negotiation. A founder who pushes back on protective provisions, asks pointed questions about board composition, or negotiates the scope of what requires investor approval is showing that they understand what they're actually signing. A founder who only negotiates price is, from an investor's seat, a founder who hasn't fully read the document yet. That's not necessarily a dealbreaker on its own, but it's information an investor files away. The real red flag runs the other direction. When a term sheet's protective provisions extend well past the standard list, reaching into routine operational decisions like hiring below the executive level or approving ordinary vendor contracts, that's no longer a normal control position. It's either a sign the investor doesn't trust the founder going in, or a sign the fund intends to run the company more actively than a typical board seat implies. Either reading is worth a direct conversation before signing. ## Where the Two Views Collide A founder's definition of a good round centers on price: high valuation, low dilution, a clean cap table. An investor's definition centers on control: enough board presence and enough protective provisions to manage downside if the company struggles. Both sides can walk away from the same signing believing they won, because they were optimizing for different lines in the same document. The collision becomes visible only under stress, which is exactly why it's so easy to miss during a healthy, well-funded negotiation. A company growing on plan rarely tests its protective provisions or its board composition, so a founder who gave those terms away cheaply never notices the cost. It's only [when growth slows](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/default-alive-or-default-dead-the-one-calculation-most), or a hard pivot is on the table, or an acquisition offer arrives that looks good to the board but underwhelming to the founder, that control terms determine who actually gets the final say. By then, renegotiating is no longer an option. The terms were set at signing. The founders who navigate this well treat the term sheet as two separate negotiations happening in one document, not one. They know which points of leverage they have for price and which they have for control, and they don't spend all of their negotiating capital on the bucket that's easiest to understand. ## The Takeaway A term sheet with a great price and a weak control position can still leave a founder with less real say over their own company than a term sheet with a slightly lower price and a strong one. Before signing anything, read the board composition and protective provisions sections as carefully as the valuation line. That's the part of the document that decides what happens on the company's worst day, not its best one. --- *Source: Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson, "Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist," 4th Edition, 2019 —* [*Wiley*](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Venture+Deals%3A+Be+Smarter+Than+Your+Lawyer+and+Venture+Capitalist%2C+4th+Edition-p-9781119594840) --- ## Why Good VCs Say No to Good Companies: The Power Law of Venture Returns _Investors · 2026-09-28 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-good-vcs-say-no-to-good-companies-power-law_ Venture returns follow a power law: a handful of companies produce almost all of a fund's value. Here is why good VCs pass on good companies, and what that math means for founders raising from them. *A venture fund's economics force every partner to ask one blunt question about every deal: can this single company return the whole fund? Here is what that means for the people on both sides of the table.* ## The Story In 1995, Arthur Rock, one of the earliest and most respected venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, looked at a company called Yahoo and passed. He is remembered as an investor who backed Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and Apple in their early days. But when a small search directory crossed his desk, he saw something that looked more like a hobby than a business worth backing. Sequoia partner Michael Moritz looked at the same company and saw something else: a fast-growing audience and an advertising model that resembled television more than software. He wrote a check for one million dollars. That single investment became one of the largest returns in Sequoia's history, and it helped shape how the firm invests today. This story sits near the start of Sebastian Mallaby's book The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (Penguin Press, 2022). Mallaby, a journalist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, spent years interviewing venture investors to explain why an industry built on so much failure keeps producing outsized results. His answer starts with a distribution, not a formula: venture returns follow a power law, where a small number of investments produce almost all the value, and most of the rest lose money or barely break even. ## The Idea Our earlier piece, [The Fund Has a Clock Too](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/the-fund-has-a-clock-too-why-your-investors-age-matters-as), looked at Scott Kupor's breakdown of how a fund is built: limited partners commit capital for about ten years, general partners charge roughly 2 percent a year in fees, and take about 20 percent of the profits once the fund clears a return threshold. Mallaby's book explains what that structure forces a GP to do with every single check they write. A fund manager running 200 million dollars in commitments earns about 4 million dollars a year in fees. That is a salary, not a fortune. Real wealth for a GP comes from carry, and carry only pays out once the fund as a whole returns enough money to clear its hurdle. That means a GP cannot make their number by picking twenty solid, unremarkable companies. They need at least one company big enough to return the entire fund by itself, with the rest of the portfolio adding another one to three times on top. So the real question in every partner meeting is not "is this a good company." It is "can this company alone return the fund." Rock's Yahoo decision and Moritz's Yahoo decision were not really a disagreement about the company. They were two different answers to that second question, based on two different reads of how big the outcome could get. ## How Founders Should Read This A founder who does not know this math takes a rejection personally. They assume the product was not good enough, or the market was not convincing enough. Often neither is true. The company was simply the wrong size for that particular pool of money. A 50 to 80 million dollar exit is a life-changing outcome for almost any founder. It can also be a rounding error for a 300 million dollar fund built around finding one company that returns the whole thing. If a founder is building something solid, profitable, and likely to sell in that 50 to 80 million dollar range, they should think twice before taking a large check from a fund that needs a billion-dollar outcome to hit its own targets. A smaller fund, or an investor whose math actually matches the company's realistic ceiling, is often a better partner than the biggest name in the room. The practical move: when a term sheet lands, ask not just about valuation and check size, but about the fund's size and what kind of exit it needs from this specific investment to matter to its own returns. That answer tells a founder more about how the relationship will go under pressure than almost anything else in the deal. ## How Investors Should Read This For an investor, this logic is not optional, it is structural. Every deal eventually runs into one filter: does this have a realistic path to returning the fund on its own. That filter is why perfectly good companies with modest, achievable outcomes get passed over. A 20 million dollar exit is statistically meaningless inside a 300 million dollar fund built to find one 10x-plus winner. The math simply does not care how well-run the company is. There is a red flag worth watching from outside a fund too: assets under management growing faster than proven returns. When a firm raises bigger and bigger funds without a track record that justifies the size, the fee income from managing more capital starts to matter more than the carry that is supposed to align a GP with great outcomes. That is when a fund's incentives quietly drift from finding the next Yahoo toward managing more money comfortably. Kupor's fee structure and Mallaby's power law point at the same warning sign from two different angles. Fund size also decides how much ownership a GP needs at entry, and how much capital they can commit to follow-on rounds later. A fund chasing fund-returning outcomes needs meaningful ownership early, which shapes how aggressively it negotiates a term sheet in the first place. ## Where the Two Views Collide Here is where the founder's math and the investor's math genuinely diverge, not just in emphasis but in what counts as success. A founder building [a strong, durable, profitable business](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/default-alive-or-default-dead-the-one-calculation-most) sees a 60 million dollar acquisition as validation of years of work. A GP running a fund built for outlier returns sees the same 60 million dollars as a company that used up capital and partner time without moving the fund's overall numbers. Neither side is wrong. They are running two different equations. The founder has one shot, this company, this life. The investor has fifteen or twenty shots in the portfolio and needs one or two of them to be enormous. A board conversation about taking more risk for a bigger outcome can look reckless from the founder's seat and completely rational from the investor's seat, because the investor is diversified against that risk and the founder is not. The founders who navigate this well are the ones who ask, early, whether their company is being underwritten as a fund-returner or as a solid contributor to the portfolio average. That single answer changes how a board will react to a good-but-not-great acquisition offer two years later. ## The Takeaway Two term sheets can carry the same valuation and the same check size and still come from completely different math. One fund needs this company to be a home run. The other only needs it to be solid. Before signing either one, ask which kind of bet you actually are. --- *Source: Sebastian Mallaby, "The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future," 2022 —* [*Penguin Random House*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/580120/the-power-law-by-sebastian-mallaby/) --- ## Default Alive or Default Dead: The One Calculation Most Founders Never Run _Founders · 2026-09-25 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/default-alive-or-default-dead-the-one-calculation-most_ Most startups don't fail because the idea was wrong. *Most startups don't fail because the idea was wrong. They fail because nobody ran the simple math on whether the company could survive its own trajectory, and founders and investors read that same math in opposite ways.* ## The Story In October 2015, Paul Graham sat down and wrote one of the more uncomfortable essays in the Y Combinator canon. His observation, after years of watching thousands of early-stage companies up close, was blunt: half the founders he talked to did not know whether their own company was going to survive. Not because they were reckless or incompetent. Because nobody had ever asked them to sit down and calculate it. Graham gave the two states simple names. A startup is "default alive" if, assuming current spending and revenue growth stay on their current path, it reaches profitability before the money runs out. A startup is "default dead" if it doesn't. Two words, and yet most founders had never applied them to their own company. The timing of the essay mattered. In 2015, venture funding was flowing freely, and a generation of founders had absorbed a quiet assumption: the next round will always close. Graham wrote the essay specifically to puncture that assumption, because he had watched it kill companies that were, on paper, doing everything right. His favorite counterexample was [Airbnb](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-the-best-founders-do-things-that-don-t-scale). After the company raised money, the founders did not rush to build out a team. They waited four months before hiring their first employee. They wanted to understand how their own growth actually worked, mechanically, before adding headcount on top of it. That patience is the opposite of the instinct most funded founders act on. ## The Idea The mechanism behind Graham's framework is what he calls the "fatal pinch." It happens when a founder realizes too late that their company is default dead. Growth has been slow, the bank balance has been shrinking, and now there isn't enough runway left to fix anything. The company is not necessarily doomed at that point, but the options have narrowed to one: raise money, on someone else's timeline and someone else's terms. The most common cause Graham identifies is over-hiring. A company raises a round, and the founders quietly assume growth will now take care of itself, so they build out a bigger team to "support" that growth. But growth in an early-stage company almost never comes from headcount. It comes from the product getting better and from founders staying close enough to users to know what to fix next. A bigger team, added before that growth engine is proven, mostly just accelerates the burn rate without accelerating the thing that was supposed to justify it. The good news buried in this framework is that default dead is not a death sentence if it's caught early. A founder who sees the trajectory in time can cut costs, shrink the team, or change the model, and become default alive again. The problem is purely one of timing. Caught early, it's a strategic adjustment. Caught late, it's an emergency fundraise from a position of weakness. ## How Founders Should Read This For a founder, the practical takeaway is almost embarrassingly simple, which is exactly why so many skip it. Once a month, sit down with two numbers: monthly net cash burn, and cash currently in the bank. Divide the second by the first, and that is your runway in months. If you cannot produce that number instantly, right now, that is itself the finding — more revealing than the number would have been. Graham's Airbnb example is worth sitting with a little longer, because the instinct it fights is so strong. Founders who just closed a round feel, understandably, like they've earned the right to build. Hiring feels like progress. It feels like the company getting real. But hiring ahead of a proven growth engine just means the fatal pinch, if it's coming, arrives sooner and with a bigger team attached to it. There's a second trap worth naming explicitly: conflating "we raised money" with "we are safe." A large round doesn't change whether a company is default alive or default dead. It only changes the date on which that question has to be answered. A founder who treats a big raise as the end of the survival conversation, rather than a reset of the clock, is setting up the exact fatal pinch Graham describes. The concrete exercise here is not complicated. Take the two numbers — burn and cash on hand — and actually do the division. If the resulting runway is under twelve months and growth is not accelerating, that is not a note for next quarter's planning meeting. That is today's most urgent conversation. ## How Investors Should Read This From the investor's side of the table, this framework does something useful: it turns a fuzzy, values-laden question ("is this founder good?") into something closer to a stress test. The question an investor is really asking is: does this company survive without us? The signal worth watching for is whether a founder can produce their own runway number instantly, unprompted, without needing to check a spreadsheet first. A founder who knows this number cold is signaling operational discipline. A founder who has to go calculate it live is signaling something else — not necessarily incompetence, but a company that has been running on assumptions rather than arithmetic. The red flag Graham's framework surfaces most clearly is the phrase, in one form or another, "the next round will close." That belief is dangerous precisely because it's often true, right up until the moment it isn't, and the moment it isn't is usually the moment the broader funding market tightens — which is exactly when a founder's own optimism is least trustworthy as a data point. [Fund economics](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/the-fund-has-a-clock-too-why-your-investors-age-matters-as) make this more than an abstract concern. When an investor puts capital into a company that is default alive, that capital does real work: it accelerates growth that was already going to happen anyway. When the same capital goes into a company that is default dead, it does something much less useful. It postpones the reckoning. The ownership an investor buys with that capital may be larger, but it hasn't actually solved the underlying survival problem, and power-law math depends on the winners in a portfolio being genuinely durable, not just temporarily well-funded. This is why a disciplined investor wants to hear both scenarios from a founder before signing a term sheet: what happens if the next round closes, and, just as importantly, what happens if it doesn't. ## Where the Two Views Collide This is where the founder's lens and the investor's lens genuinely pull in different directions, and neither one is simply wrong. For a founder operating in a large, fast-moving market, burning cash aggressively while betting on the next round can be exactly the right strategic call. Sacrificing near-term profitability to grab market share while a window is open is a legitimate bet, and some of the most successful companies in venture history made precisely that bet and won. Optimism about future fundraising, in that context, is not naivety. It's a calculated bet on a market that is genuinely still open. For an investor, that same sentence — "the next round will close" — often reads as a warning sign, because the fundraising market is structurally outside the founder's control. A founder's confidence about future capital says very little about whether that capital will actually materialize on the timeline the founder needs, and history is full of founders whose optimism was proven wrong at the worst possible moment. The distinction that actually matters isn't whether a founder is burning cash aggressively. It's whether that founder has separated the calculated bet from the hope. A founder who is genuinely default alive, and chooses to burn cash anyway to accelerate growth, is making a deliberate trade-off with eyes open. A founder who has never actually run the calculation, and is simply assuming the future will resemble the recent past, is doing something else entirely — hoping, and calling it strategy. The person who understands this distinction gains something concrete at the table: the ability to test optimism against arithmetic in about ten seconds, just by asking for the runway number and watching how quickly, and how confidently, it comes back. ## The Takeaway Graham's essay reduces to a single, cheap habit: separate facts from hopes, and do it on a schedule rather than waiting for a crisis to force the question. The calculation itself takes thirty seconds. The discipline of actually doing it every month, whether the news is good or not, is the part that's rare. Whether you're building the company or funding it, the same question is worth asking on a recurring basis, not just once: assuming no future round ever closes, how many months does this company have? If the honest answer makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is the most useful data point you'll get all week. --- *Source: Paul Graham, "Default Alive or Default Dead?," 2015 —* [*paulgraham.com/aord.html*](http://paulgraham.com/aord.html) --- ## Why Your MVP Should Embarrass You: The Case for Launching Badly and Fast _Founders · 2026-09-18 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-your-mvp-should-embarrass-you-the-case-for-launching_ Michael Seibel's advice to Y Combinator founders comes down to one uncomfortable idea: if you are not a little embarrassed by your first version, you waited too long to ship it. *Michael Seibel's advice to Y Combinator founders comes down to one uncomfortable idea: if you are not a little embarrassed by your first version, you waited too long to ship it.* ## The Story In the early days of Justin.tv, before it became Twitch, the entire product was one person streaming his own life, all day, in mediocre video quality. There was no editorial plan, no polished interface, no roadmap slide explaining the vision. There was just a camera, a stream, and a small group of people curious enough to watch. Stripe's origin story is less well known but just as instructive. When Patrick and John Collison signed their first customers, there was no self-serve dashboard, no automated onboarding flow, none of the infrastructure that now defines the company. The founders sat down next to the customer and wired up the payment integration themselves, by hand, on the spot. This approach later earned a name inside startup circles: the "Collison installation." Neither of these was a product in any conventional sense. Both were closer to a live experiment, run at the smallest possible scale, designed to answer one question as cheaply as possible: does this actually solve a real problem for a real person? This is the frame Michael Seibel, General Partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of Justin.tv and Socialcam, brings to a piece of advice that has become something of a mantra inside YC's Startup Library: launch something bad quickly. ## The Idea The term "MVP" gets thrown around so often in startup culture that it has drifted from its original meaning. Many founders now treat it as a synonym for "an incomplete product we are a little ashamed of." Seibel pushes back on that framing directly. An MVP is not a lesser version of your real product. It is a learning instrument, built specifically to test whether your central hypothesis holds, using the least amount of time and effort possible. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A founder who thinks of their MVP as a rough draft of the final product will keep polishing it, adding features, delaying the moment a real user touches it. A founder who thinks of their MVP as an experiment will ship something narrow, watch what happens, and decide the next step based on evidence instead of intuition. The psychological pull runs in the opposite direction of what good execution requires. Founders are, almost by temperament, perfectionists about their own creation. The market does not reward that instinct in the earliest days. It rewards speed to signal. ## How Founders Should Read This For a founder, the practical implication is to cut scope aggressively and build in weeks, not months. [The Collison installation](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-the-best-founders-do-things-that-don-t-scale) is the extreme version of this: skip the automation entirely, solve the problem manually for a handful of customers, and only build the scalable version once you know, with real evidence, that the underlying need is there. This creates a specific trap worth naming. A founder can fall in love with the manual process itself. It feels productive, the early customers are happy, and there is a comforting illusion of traction. Weeks turn into months, and the question of when to actually build the product keeps getting deferred because "it's working." The opposite trap is just as common: narrowing scope so far that the MVP tests nothing meaningful. A demo that no real user would ever pay for, wrapped in the language of an MVP, teaches you almost nothing. The discipline Seibel is describing sits between these two failure modes. Pick a real, narrow problem. Solve it completely, even if manually, for a small number of real users. Let the evidence, not the founder's taste, decide what happens next. Practically, this means every founder should be able to answer a version of this question at any point: what is the single riskiest, least-tested assumption behind what we are building right now, and what would it take to test it this week rather than this quarter? ## How Investors Should Read This Investors read the exact same story through a different lens, and the difference is not stylistic. It is structural, rooted in how venture funds are built. A seed fund operates on a [limited fund life](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/the-fund-has-a-clock-too-why-your-investors-age-matters-as) and needs signal early to make follow-on and portfolio construction decisions with any confidence. From that vantage point, the speed at which a founder resolves the single most expensive uncertainty in their business (does anyone actually want this) is a direct proxy for capital efficiency. A founder who spends four months refining an MVP nobody has used yet is, from the fund's perspective, burning runway on an untested hypothesis rather than de-risking it. This reframes what looks like scrappy hustle from the founder's side into something a VC evaluates more coldly: is this manual process a deliberate, temporary bridge to a scalable product, or is it quietly becoming the business itself? A "concierge MVP," done well, is a founder buying cheap information. Done poorly, over many months, with no plan to systematize it, it starts to look like a services business wearing a startup's valuation multiple. Investors also read speed-to-first-user as a signal about the founder, not just the product. Bias to action, comfort operating without complete information, and willingness to be seen doing something unglamorous (streaming badly, installing payments by hand) all correlate with the kind of execution founders who beat power-law odds tend to display. A founder who insists on perfecting the MVP before anyone sees it is often signaling something less flattering: discomfort with the ambiguity that defines the earliest stage of any company. ## Where the Two Views Collide Here is the friction point, and it is worth sitting with rather than smoothing over. The founder looking at a manual, ugly first version sees exactly what they are supposed to see: it works, someone is getting value, we are learning fast. From inside the company, this is unambiguously good news. The investor looking at the same scene can ask a genuinely uncomfortable question: is this a product company, or a service business that happens to have a pitch deck? Both readings can be correct simultaneously, because they are answering different questions on different time horizons. The founder is asking "are we solving a real problem." The investor is asking "will this scale into venture-style returns." The founders who navigate board meetings and diligence calls well are the ones who have already done this thinking themselves, before anyone asks. They can say, plainly: this manual step is intentional and temporary, and here is the exact signal, the exact number of repeat customers or usage pattern, that tells us when to systematize it. That answer converts a potential red flag into evidence of judgment. The founders who get caught flat-footed by the question usually have not asked it of themselves yet. That gap, more than the manual process itself, is what erodes investor confidence in a room. ## The Takeaway The real skill Seibel is teaching is not "build fast." It is knowing precisely which uncertainty you are testing at every stage, and being able to say so out loud, to yourself and to anyone else in the room. A rough, embarrassing first version aimed at the riskiest untested assumption is a sign of good judgment. The same rough version, aimed at nothing in particular, is just an excuse dressed up in startup language. The question worth carrying into your next product decision: what is the single riskiest, least-tested assumption in what you are building right now, and what would you decide about it today, with the incomplete information you already have? --- *Source: Michael Seibel, "How to Plan an MVP," Y Combinator Startup Library —* [*ycombinator.com/library/6f-how-to-plan-an-mvp*](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6f-how-to-plan-an-mvp) --- ## Why Your Best Customers Are Lying to You About Product-Market Fit _Founders · 2026-09-15 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-your-best-customers-are-lying-to-you-about-product_ Early adopters love your product and tell everyone. The early majority is watching from the sidelines, unconvinced, and the gap between the two groups is where most startups quietly stall. *Early adopters love your product and tell everyone. The early majority is watching from the sidelines, unconvinced, and the gap between the two groups is where most startups quietly stall.* ## The Story In 1991, Geoffrey Moore published a book that gave a name to a problem thousands of founders had already lived through without being able to describe it. The book was Crossing the Chasm, and it has since gone through three editions, the most recent being the 2014 HarperBusiness edition, subtitled Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers. Moore had spent years inside Silicon Valley as a consultant, watching technology companies hit the same wall over and over. They would launch a product, get a wave of early customers who loved it, build a growth chart that looked great, and then watch that growth flatten out for reasons nobody on the team could quite explain. Sales calls that used to close in weeks started dragging on for months. Customers who used to say yes to a rough, unfinished product started asking for references, case studies, and proof that companies just like them were already succeeding with it. Moore's insight, laid out across the first two chapters of the book, was that this was not a sales execution problem. It was a structural gap in the market itself, one that most technology adoption models glossed over. Chapter 1, "The Technology Adoption Life Cycle," introduces the now-famous bell curve of innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Chapter 2, "The Gaps in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle," makes the case that one of these gaps is not a small dip but a genuine chasm, a discontinuity between early adopters and the early majority that has to be crossed deliberately, not drifted across. ## The Idea The technology adoption curve looks continuous when you draw it on a whiteboard. In practice, it is not. Early adopters, the people Moore calls visionaries, buy technology because it gives them a competitive edge if they get there first. They tolerate an incomplete product. They will do their own systems integration. They are, in a sense, easy customers, because their motivation does not depend on the product being finished. The early majority, the pragmatists, are motivated by something close to the opposite. They do not want to be first. They want to see that someone in their exact position, running a business that looks like theirs, has already used the product and gotten a result they can point to. A glowing testimonial from a visionary in an unrelated industry does almost nothing for a pragmatist buyer. It is not a reference they recognize as relevant to their own risk calculation. This is the mechanism behind the chasm. Momentum built with visionaries does not automatically transfer to pragmatists, because the two groups are persuaded by fundamentally different kinds of evidence. A founder who reads early traction as proof that the growth engine is working, and simply pours more fuel on the same playbook, is often the one who gets blindsided when growth stalls at exactly the moment it should be accelerating. ## How Founders Should Read This For a founder, the natural reading of early success is optimism, and often that optimism is earned. The mistake is not the optimism. It is generalizing from it too early. Moore's prescription is what he calls the bowling pin strategy: [pick one narrow niche](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/one-city-60-000-cards-the-density-rule-behind-every-network), make sure the whole product for that niche is genuinely complete (not just the core feature, but onboarding, integration, support, and training), and let references accumulate inside that one niche until they reach a density pragmatists will trust. The trap shows up constantly in early-stage companies. A founder lands five customers, gets excited, and treats each new industry vertical as a new opportunity to chase. Six months later there are five logos from five different industries, each one a small, isolated success story, and none of them can vouch for the product to anyone else, because none of them have a peer using it. The company has traction without density, and density, not breadth, is what actually crosses the chasm. The practical version of this discipline is brutal but simple: before saying yes to the next interesting deal in a new vertical, ask whether it strengthens the reference chain in the niche you have already chosen, or whether it just adds another isolated data point. Most of the time, in the early stage, the answer should be no. ## How Investors Should Read This An investor looking at the same growth chart asks a different question, and it comes straight from fund economics. Early revenue from early adopters is real revenue, but it is not, on its own, evidence of repeatability. Sales cycles, customer acquisition costs, and [churn](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-retention-not-acquisition-is-the-real-growth-metric) behave differently once you cross into the pragmatist segment, and a growth curve built entirely on visionary customers can look deceptively healthy right up until it does not. The diagnostic question a sharp investor asks is simple: do these customers sell to each other, or is each one a separate discovery? If a company's next five customers are coming from cold outbound into five new, unrelated verticals, that is a sign the chasm has not been crossed, no matter how strong the top-line growth number looks that quarter. This matters enormously for capital allocation, because [venture returns follow a power law](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-good-vcs-say-no-to-good-companies-power-law). A small number of portfolio companies produce the overwhelming majority of fund returns, and those tend to be the companies that found genuine mainstream density, not just visionary enthusiasm. Putting a large expansion round, sized for a company that has proven mainstream demand, behind a company that has only proven visionary demand, is effectively betting the fund's follow-on capital on an unproven assumption. The ownership and follow-on decision should track the actual reference chain, not the shape of the growth chart. ## Where the Two Views Collide Here is where it gets genuinely interesting. The founder is not wrong to be encouraged by early adopter enthusiasm. That enthusiasm is real, it is valuable, and it is often the only signal available in the earliest days of a company. The investor is also not wrong to treat that same enthusiasm with suspicion when it comes to underwriting the next round of capital. Both are correct, because they are answering different questions on different time horizons. The founder's question is "does this product work for someone." The investor's question is "will this work for the market as a whole, reliably, at the unit economics the fund needs." Early adopter love answers the first question convincingly and the second question not at all. The founders who get the best terms from sophisticated investors are the ones who understand this distinction well enough to speak to it directly. Instead of pitching "our growth is accelerating," they pitch "reference density in this specific niche has reached this specific threshold, and here is the mechanism by which that translates to the next niche." That is a claim an investor fluent in the chasm framework can actually underwrite. A generic growth chart, no matter how steep, is not. ## The Takeaway The chasm is not a metaphor for "things get harder as you scale." It is a specific, structural claim: the evidence that convinces a visionary and the evidence that convinces a pragmatist are different kinds of evidence, and no amount of the first kind substitutes for the second. If you are a founder, the question worth sitting with is this: which of your current customers would actually vouch for you to someone who looks exactly like them, in the same role, at the same kind of company? If the honest answer is none of them yet, that is not a growth problem to fix with more sales reps. It is a niche and reference-density problem, and it is worth solving before spending on breadth. --- *Source: Geoffrey A. Moore, "Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers," 3rd Edition, 2014 —* [*productcompass.pm/p/crossing-the-chasm*](https://www.productcompass.pm/p/crossing-the-chasm) --- ## When the Middleman Wins, and When It Erodes Its Own Reason to Exist _Founders · 2026-09-11 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/when-the-middleman-wins-and-when-it-erodes-its-own-reason_ OpenRouter went from a routing layer for AI models to a $7.5 billion Stripe acquisition in three years. The deal is also a live test of one of the oldest tensions in building an aggregator business. *OpenRouter went from a routing layer for AI models to a $7.5 billion Stripe acquisition in three years. The deal is also a live test of one of the oldest tensions in building an aggregator business.* ## The Story On August 19, 2026, Stripe confirmed what had been rumored for days: it was buying OpenRouter, the AI request-routing startup founded by Alex Atallah, for a price reported around $7.5 billion, with roughly $1.5 billion of that going to the founders. Stripe has not officially confirmed the financial terms, but the reporting comes from multiple outlets citing people close to the deal. OpenRouter's rise was fast even by AI-industry standards. Atallah, who had previously co-founded OpenSea, started the company in 2023 on a simple idea: instead of every company building its own integration with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and dozens of other model providers, OpenRouter would sit in the middle and route each request to whichever model made sense on price, speed, or quality. It raised a $12.5 million seed round in February 2025 led by Andreessen Horowitz, a $28 million Series A two months later led by Menlo Ventures, and then, in May 2026, a $113 million Series B at a $1.3 billion valuation from Sequoia, a16z, Menlo, and Alphabet's CapitalG. Three months after that round closed, it sold to Stripe for nearly six times that valuation. Patrick Collison's explanation for the deal was short: Stripe, he said, is building the economic infrastructure for AI. The OpenRouter founders framed it as a rare kind of partnership, one of the few companies, in their words, they would have considered selling to at all. ## The Idea Strip away the AI-specific language, and OpenRouter is a familiar business model. It is an aggregator. It sits between suppliers, in this case AI labs, and buyers, in this case any company that wants to use AI without locking itself into a single provider. It makes money the way most aggregators do: a cut of the transaction flowing through it, reported around 5 percent of inference spend. By the middle of 2026, that flow was enormous. According to revenue estimates from Sacra, OpenRouter went from roughly $19 million in annualized inference spend processed at the end of 2024, to $50 million in annualized revenue at the end of 2025, to $140 million by July 2026. Stripe's own announcement cites more than 400 models available through the platform and somewhere close to 10 million developers and companies routing requests through it, processing on the order of 10 trillion tokens a day. Other sources put the monthly token count closer to 8.4 trillion, a reminder that even the basic usage numbers in a fast-moving deal like this vary depending on who is counting and when. The commercial logic is simple to state. If you can convince millions of developers to route their AI spend through your API instead of integrating with each provider directly, you capture a toll on an enormous and growing volume of transactions, without ever having to build or train a model yourself. ## How Founders Should Read This For a founder building anything in the aggregator or middle-layer category, the OpenRouter story is a genuine playbook, not just a headline. Atallah did not try to compete with OpenAI or Anthropic on model quality. He built the layer that sits above all of them, and made that layer indispensable by owning two things competitors could not easily copy: distribution and routing data. Every request that passes through OpenRouter teaches the system something about which model performs best for which task, at which price, for which customer. That is not a commodity. It compounds. The founders' framing of the sale, that there were only a few companies on earth they would have considered joining, is worth taking seriously rather than reading as deal-closing spin. Atallah's first company, OpenSea, lived through a brutal lesson in aggregator fragility: when the supply side, in that case NFT collections, collapsed, the marketplace built on top of it had nothing left to aggregate. Selling OpenRouter into Stripe's payments and infrastructure stack looks like a hedge against a similar failure mode. Instead of staying a thin routing layer that anyone with enough engineering time could rebuild, OpenRouter becomes part of a bigger economic pipe: not just choosing which model handles a request, but helping manage how a business spends and optimizes its AI budget end to end. That is a much harder thing to copy than an API that picks between vendors. The trap for founders building similar businesses is assuming that distribution alone is a permanent moat. It is not, on its own. Distribution buys time and leverage. What you do with that time, whether you deepen into an economic layer the way OpenRouter did, or stay a thin comparison shelf, determines whether the moat survives the next five years. ## How Investors Should Read This For an investor, this deal is close to a perfect case study in [venture fund mathematics](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-good-vcs-say-no-to-good-companies-power-law). The Series B investors who priced OpenRouter at $1.3 billion in May 2026 saw the company sell for something in the neighborhood of $7.5 billion roughly three months later. That is the kind of return that can justify an entire fund's power-law thesis in a single line item, and it happened on a genuinely fast timeline even by AI-industry standards. But the more interesting investor question is not whether this outcome was good. It obviously was, for the Series B backers at least. The interesting question is whether OpenRouter's underlying business model was becoming more or less defensible in the months leading up to the sale, and what that tells other investors evaluating similar aggregator bets today. Here the picture gets more complicated. A widely circulated critique from BigGo Finance, published before the deal closed, argued that OpenRouter's own success was quietly undermining its long-term pricing power. By putting more than 400 models on one comparable shelf, ranked implicitly by price and latency, OpenRouter was accelerating the exact kind of commoditization that erodes an aggregator's leverage over time. The data supports the concern directionally: inference prices have fallen sharply over the past year, the performance gap between leading models has narrowed to a small margin, and cheaper, lower-cost models have taken a much larger share of total traffic than they held a year earlier. If the products flowing through your platform become interchangeable, the argument goes, the fee you can charge for helping people choose between them should shrink, not grow. That is exactly the tension a sharp investor should be pricing into any aggregator deal: is the take rate protected by something durable, like genuine complexity in the routing decision or proprietary spend-optimization insight, or is it protected only by a temporary information gap that closes as the market matures? OpenRouter's answer, in effect, was to sell before that question had to be answered as a standalone company. That is a legitimate and often underrated exit strategy: lock in the valuation while the moat still looks strong, rather than wait to find out in public markets whether it holds. ## Where the Two Views Collide The founder's case and the skeptical investor's case are not actually in disagreement about the facts. They disagree about what the facts mean for the future. The founder looks at 10 million developers, 400-plus models, and a routing engine built on three years of usage data, and sees a company that wins regardless of which individual AI lab comes out on top. The distribution is the asset. Whoever is winning the model race, OpenRouter's pipes are still the pipes everyone uses. The critical investor looks at the same numbers and sees a business whose core value proposition, helping you tell good options apart from mediocre ones, is being eroded by the very scale that makes it valuable. The more successful the comparison shelf becomes, the more it trains the market to treat the products on it as interchangeable, and the harder it becomes to justify a meaningful cut of every transaction flowing through it. Both readings can be true at the same time, at different points in a company's life. The tension resolves here not through argument but through structure: by joining Stripe, OpenRouter stops needing to defend a standalone 5 percent take rate against commoditization pressure on its own, because it becomes one input into a broader economic infrastructure business where the sources of value multiply. The acquisition is, in effect, a bet that the founder's view of distribution-as-moat is correct in the short run, and a hedge against the investor's view of commoditization risk in the long run. ## The Takeaway The lesson for anyone building or evaluating a middle-layer business is not that aggregation is a bad model. It clearly is not; OpenRouter's growth curve proves that. The lesson is that an aggregator has to keep answering one question honestly as it scales: is what I am aggregating becoming more different over time, or more the same? When the answer starts trending toward "the same," the smartest move is often not to double down on distribution, but to find a bigger structure, financial, technical, or otherwise, that captures value from something the market cannot commoditize as easily. If you are building, or backing, anything that sits between two sides of a market, ask yourself where your version of that shift needs to happen, and whether you would recognize it in time. --- *Source: Payments Dive, "Stripe, OpenRouter finally strike a deal," 2026 —* [*paymentsdive.com/news/stripe-openrouter-finally-strike-a-deal*](https://www.paymentsdive.com/news/stripe-openrouter-finally-strike-a-deal/828326/) --- ## One City, 60,000 Cards: The Density Rule Behind Every Network That Works _Founders · 2026-09-08 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/one-city-60-000-cards-the-density-rule-behind-every-network_ In 1958, Bank of America launched its first credit card in a single city instead of the whole country. Andrew Chen's idea of the atomic network explains why that was the right call, and why founders and investors read the exact same growth chart so differently. *In 1958, Bank of America launched its first credit card in a single city instead of the whole country. Andrew Chen's idea of the atomic network explains why that was the right call, and why founders and investors read the exact same growth chart so differently.* ## The Story In 1958, Bank of America wanted to launch the first mass-market credit card in the United States. The obvious move, given the size of the opportunity, would have been a national rollout: hit every major city at once, get the card into as many wallets as possible, as fast as possible. Instead, the bank mailed 60,000 unsolicited credit cards to households in a single city: Fresno, California. Not a test market alongside a bigger launch. The entire initial push, concentrated in one place. This story is the anchor for Chapter 6 of Andrew Chen's book *The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects* (2021), titled "The Atomic Network — Credit Cards," part of the book's "Cold Start" section spanning chapters 4 through 10. Chen is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who spent years before that on Uber's growth team, and the book draws on interviews with founders and early team members from Slack, Tinder, Zoom, Twitch, Reddit, Uber, Airbnb, and PayPal, among others, to build a framework for how network-effect businesses actually get off the ground. The Fresno decision looks conservative on the surface. It was the opposite. A credit card is a two-sided product: it is worthless to a cardholder if merchants nearby do not accept it, and worthless to a merchant if too few customers carry one. Launching thin across many cities would have produced a card that almost nobody could actually use anywhere. Concentrating the entire launch in one city meant Bank of America could get both sides, cardholders and merchants, dense enough in that one place for the card to become genuinely useful to somebody. ## The Idea Chen's term for this minimum viable density is the atomic network: the smallest network that can sustain itself without artificial life support, whether that support is marketing spend, subsidies, or manual sales effort. Below that size, nothing works no matter how much money you throw at it. Above it, the network starts feeding itself. What counts as "enough" varies enormously by product. Two people are enough for a video call to matter, which is why Zoom's atomic network is essentially trivial. One team, often under ten people, was enough to make Slack sticky inside a company, after which it could spread team by team. Airbnb needed hundreds of active listings within a single market before supply and demand could reliably find each other. A credit card needed the merchant and cardholder density of an entire city. The mechanism underneath all of these examples is the same two-sided dynamic: value on one side depends on sufficient presence on the other side, in the same place, at the same time. Spread a network thin across many markets and this loop never fires anywhere, because density never crosses the threshold in any single location. Concentrate it in one place and the loop fires once, and then the network can sustain and expand itself from there. This is also why the atomic network breaks down in two specific ways: when a team underestimates the actual threshold (declaring victory at 50 listings when the real number is closer to 500), or when they draw the boundary too wide (a country instead of a city, an entire company instead of one team), diluting density below the point where anything self-sustains. ## How Founders Should Read This For founders building anything with network effects, the practical discipline is to [make the initial launch smaller and narrower than instinct suggests](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-your-mvp-should-embarrass-you-the-case-for-launching). Uber's early growth playbook is a clean example: rather than targeting "a city," early expansion efforts focused on absurdly specific pockets of demand, famously described as something like 5pm at the Caltrain station at 5th and King Street in San Francisco. Once rides were reliably available at that specific place and time, the radius expanded outward from a proven core, rather than starting broad and hoping density would emerge on its own. The trap runs in the opposite direction, and it is a common one. Picture a [marketplace founder](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/when-the-middleman-wins-and-when-it-erodes-its-own-reason) six months into building a platform, eager to show investors that the business is scaling. Instead of concentrating effort, the team launches in eight cities simultaneously, picking up 40 to 50 listings in each. The total looks respectable on a slide: 400 listings. But if the real atomic threshold for that category of marketplace is a few hundred active listings within a single city, then none of the eight markets has actually crossed it. No city has enough supply to reliably satisfy demand, so no city generates the self-reinforcing loop that turns early listings into a real marketplace. The better version of that same six months would have put all 400 listings into one city and made that single market genuinely dense before expanding at all. The uncomfortable part of this discipline is that it usually means saying no. No to the second city that seems ready. No to [the adjacent vertical](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-your-best-customers-are-lying-to-you-about-product) that looks like low-hanging fruit. No to the enterprise customer who wants a feature built for their specific, non-representative use case. Every one of those yeses dilutes the resources that would otherwise go toward finishing the first atomic network. ## How Investors Should Read This Investors evaluating the same growth chart are, or should be, asking a structurally different question than "how many users do you have." The more useful version is: which single market or segment has already crossed into self-sustaining density, and what is the actual number behind that threshold? This reframing exposes a common red flag: a company that is live in many markets or segments but has not clearly crossed the density threshold in any single one of them. Total user counts can climb steadily in this scenario while the underlying business is not actually getting stronger, because breadth without density does not compound. It can look like traction on a dashboard while representing, in reality, many small, disconnected experiments rather than one working network. Fund economics is the reason this distinction matters so much to a venture investor specifically. Returns at venture scale depend on a small number of portfolio companies becoming very large, which in turn depends on a repeatable expansion motion: Uber going city by city, Slack going team by team, Airbnb going market by market. An investor is effectively underwriting the bet that whatever worked to build the first atomic network can be copied and pasted into the next one, and the one after that. A network that required a completely bespoke, one-off strategy to reach critical mass in its first market, with no clear template for the second, is a weaker bet on this dimension even if that first market is thriving. Ownership targets and reserve decisions for follow-on rounds get built on top of this replicability assumption, which is exactly why the density question matters more to an investor than the aggregate user count does. ## Where the Two Views Collide The founder's natural instinct, particularly heading into a fundraise, is to look broad. Being live in twenty cities or three countries reads as momentum to journalists, to potential customers, and often to less experienced investors. It is a understandable instinct, and not a dishonest one. Breadth is a real, visible signal of effort and ambition. The investor's job is to look past that signal to what it is actually built on. Breadth without density is frequently closer to a mirage than to evidence: it can mask the fact that no single market has genuinely tipped into self-sustaining growth. The founder's read of the situation, that visible width equals traction, and the investor's read, that width without depth proves very little, can both be internally consistent and still point to opposite conclusions about the same set of numbers. The person who understands this distinction has an advantage at the table, regardless of which side of it they sit on. Reframing the conversation away from total user counts and toward "which single market or segment has crossed the atomic threshold today, and what is that number" turns a vague traction story into a specific, falsifiable claim. A founder who can answer that question with a real number is showing something stronger than a growth chart. An investor who knows to ask it is not being difficult. They are asking which of those 400 listings actually did any work. ## The Takeaway Density before breadth is not a slogan, it is a testable claim about a specific number in a specific place. Before the next market, the next vertical, or the next feature aimed at a new segment, the more useful exercise is naming the current atomic network, if one exists yet, and the number that defines its threshold. Which single segment of your current users, customers, or markets is dense enough today to keep growing without you actively pushing it, and what number proves that? --- *Source: Andrew Chen, "The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects," 2021 —* [*coldstart.com*](https://www.coldstart.com/) --- ## The Fund Has a Clock Too: Why Your Investor's Age Matters as Much as Their Check _Investors · 2026-08-31 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/the-fund-has-a-clock-too-why-your-investors-age-matters-as_ A venture fund runs on other people's money and a fixed ten-year deadline. *A venture fund runs on other people's money and a fixed ten-year deadline. Scott Kupor's breakdown of how LPs, GPs, and the 2/20 model actually work explains why a founder and an investor can look at the exact same offer and see two completely different outcomes.* ## The Story Scott Kupor spent years as the chief operating officer and a managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Before he became a public explainer of venture capital, his actual job was building the firm's relationship with the people who fund the fund itself. In *Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It* (Portfolio, 2019), he opens by pointing out that most founders raising money have almost no idea how the other side of the table actually operates. They know a VC writes checks. They rarely know where that money comes from, what it costs the VC to hold it, or what clock is running in the background of every term sheet conversation. Chapters 1 through 3 of the book lay this out step by step: what a venture fund actually is, how it is structured, and how early-stage investors decide where to put their money. The chapter that carries the most weight for this particular lesson is Chapter 2, "So Really, What Is Venture Capital?", where Kupor walks through the plumbing that most pitch decks never mention. ## The Idea A venture fund is not the general partner's personal money. It is capital committed by limited partners, typically pension funds, university endowments, insurance companies, and family offices, for a fixed period, usually around ten years. The people running the fund, the general partners, are paid in two ways. First, an annual management fee, typically around 2 percent of the capital committed to the fund, which covers salaries, office costs, and operations. Second, carried interest, typically around 20 percent of the fund's profits, paid out once the fund has returned the original capital to its limited partners. The fund's ten-year life is not a formality. The first three to five years are the investment period, when most new checks get written. After that, the fund shifts toward follow-on investments in its existing portfolio and toward generating exits, because limited partners expect distributions well before the clock runs out. Management fees often step down once the investment period ends. Carried interest usually only kicks in above a minimum return threshold, so a fund that merely returns investor capital without meaningful profit pays its GPs nothing beyond the management fee. This is where the mechanism can quietly break. In a small fund, the 2 percent fee barely covers a lean team, so a GP's real income depends almost entirely on carry, which can push toward outsized risk-taking. In a very large fund, that same 2 percent becomes a comfortable income on its own, and the incentive to chase carry can weaken. A firm whose assets under management have grown faster than its actual track record of returns is worth watching for exactly this drift. ## How Founders Should Read This For a founder, the practical value of understanding fund structure shows up at the exact moment things get hard. A fund still early in its ten-year life, say in year two or three, still has capital reserved for follow-on rounds and enough runway left before it needs to show results to its own limited partners. That fund can afford patience through a rough quarter or [a slower path to product-market fit](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-your-best-customers-are-lying-to-you-about-product). A fund in year seven or eight of its life is under a different kind of pressure. Its limited partners are watching for distributions, and the fund itself may soon need to raise its next vehicle, which is much easier with a track record of realized returns rather than paper markups. An investor in that position may quietly prefer a solid acquisition now over a bigger, riskier swing for an IPO three years out, even if the company's own trajectory argues for patience. Most founders never ask which fund, or which vintage year of that fund, their capital is coming from. They evaluate a term sheet almost entirely on valuation, check size, and board seats. A more useful question, asked directly during diligence on the investor rather than after the round closes: is this fund currently in its investment period, or further along and focused on follow-ons and exits? The answer predicts, better than almost anything else in the room, how that investor behaves the next time the company hits a real setback. ## How Investors Should Read This From the general partner's side, the 2/20 structure is not just a fee arrangement, it is a forcing function. Take a fund of 200 million dollars. A 2 percent management fee generates roughly 4 million dollars a year, which covers a small team's salaries and operating costs but does not make anyone dramatically wealthy. Real upside has to come from the 20 percent carry, and that only pays out meaningfully if the fund's best investments are large enough to move the needle on the entire vehicle. This is why venture investors evaluate opportunities through what practitioners call [fund math](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-good-vcs-say-no-to-good-companies-power-law). Before writing a check, a GP is implicitly asking whether this particular company has the ceiling to return the whole fund on its own, because in a portfolio of fifteen to twenty-five companies built on power-law outcomes, a handful of winners have to cover every loss and mediocre result combined. A genuinely good business that can realistically exit for 20 to 30 million dollars can still get passed over by a fund with 300 million dollars under management, not because the business is bad, but because it cannot move a fund built to find one company that returns everything. Ownership targets follow the same logic. A GP's initial stake and the reserves set aside for follow-on rounds are calculated to maximize exposure to the outcomes that can actually return the fund, which is also why some investors push hard for larger ownership even on deals they genuinely like. A fund that has let its assets under management outgrow its demonstrated ability to generate carry-worthy returns is one where fee income may be quietly replacing performance as the real incentive. ## Where the Two Views Collide Here is the collision point. To a founder, an acquisition offer of 50 to 80 million dollars can represent financial security, a life-changing outcome, the reward for years of personal risk with no other diversification. To a fund built around power-law math, that exact same number can be close to irrelevant, a rounding error against a vehicle that needs one or two companies to return ten times its size. This is not a matter of bad faith on either side. It is two different math problems layered on top of the same board table. When a board conversation turns toward "push for a bigger outcome, take the additional risk," a founder without context can read that as reckless or self-serving. Often it is simply the fund doing what its own economics require. The reverse also happens: a VC late in a fund's life pushing for a faster, smaller exit is not necessarily bearish on the company, they may be responding to their own fund's clock rather than the company's actual potential. The founder who understands this asks, before a term sheet is signed, whether a given check is meant as a fund-returner bet or a smaller, more conservative position. The investor who understands this is honest, early, about which outcomes they will actually consider a win. Once both people at the table know which game the other is playing, the negotiation over board seats, follow-on rights, and exit timing stops being guesswork. ## The Takeaway Fund economics are not backstage trivia for founders to skip past on the way to the valuation number. They are the reason two reasonable, well-intentioned people can sit across the same table and disagree sharply about what "a good outcome" even means. A fund below its own bar for a fund-returning outcome will often walk away with little hesitation. A founder below their own life-changing number rarely has that option, and usually should not take it. The next time a term sheet lands, the useful question is not only what the check is worth, but where the fund behind that check currently sits on its own ten-year clock. --- *Source: Scott Kupor, "Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It," Portfolio, 2019 —* [*a16z.com/books/secrets-of-sand-hill-road*](https://a16z.com/books/secrets-of-sand-hill-road/) --- ## Why Retention, Not Acquisition, Is the Real Growth Metric _Founders · 2026-08-28 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-retention-not-acquisition-is-the-real-growth-metric_ Facebook's former VP of Growth argues that most startups optimize the wrong side of the growth equation first. Here's what founders and investors should each take from his framework. *Facebook's former VP of Growth argues that most startups optimize the wrong side of the growth equation first. Here's what founders and investors should each take from his framework.* ## The Story In 2007, Alex Schultz joined Facebook's growth team, then still a small function inside a company with a fraction of its eventual user base. Over the following years, that team helped take Facebook from around 10 million users to more than 2 billion, and Schultz became one of the people most associated with turning growth into a rigorous, data-driven discipline rather than a set of marketing tricks. In 2014, Schultz taught a lecture on growth as part of Stanford's CS183B, "How to Start a Startup," a course run jointly with Y Combinator. The lecture has since become one of the more widely referenced primary sources on startup growth, not because it introduces flashy tactics, but because it does the opposite: it argues that most of what founders think of as growth work comes far too early. His central claim is simple to state and harder to accept. Before a team touches acquisition channels, paid ads, virality, or SEO, it needs to answer one question honestly: does the retention curve flatten, or does it keep sliding toward zero. ## The Idea Schultz defines growth in a deliberately unglamorous way: using whatever channel is available to get whatever outcome you want. There's nothing mystical in that definition, and that's the point. The mystique startups often attach to growth, the idea that some clever viral loop or growth hack will unlock a hockey stick, is exactly what Schultz spends the lecture pushing back against. Instead, he puts retention at the center. A retention curve tracks the percentage of users still active some number of days after they first signed up. Plot it for a healthy product and, after some initial drop-off, it flattens into something close to a horizontal line. That flat line represents a durable core of users who keep coming back. Plot it for an unhealthy product and it keeps declining toward zero, meaning every cohort eventually churns out entirely. The retention curve matters because it determines whether growth compounds or leaks. If the curve flattens, every new cohort adds to a growing, durable base, and acquisition spending pays for itself over time. If it doesn't flatten, a company is effectively refilling a bucket with a hole in the bottom. It can spend more on acquisition and post encouraging total-user charts for a while, but the underlying business is not actually getting stronger. To make retention actionable, Schultz introduces the idea of a "magic moment," a specific point early in a user's experience where they first feel the product's core value. For Facebook, that moment was seeing your friends on the platform. For eBay, it was finding the specific item you'd been looking for. For Airbnb, it was discovering a place you actually wanted to stay. For WhatsApp, it was sending that first message. In each case, the magic moment isn't a vague feeling, it's something specific enough to be observed in user behavior data. Facebook's growth team went further and quantified it: a new user who added 10 friends within 14 days was dramatically more likely to stay active long-term. That number wasn't guessed at or borrowed from another company. It came from studying which early behaviors correlated most strongly with long-term retention across cohorts. Once found, it became the organizing target for the entire growth function, long before the team optimized a single acquisition channel. Schultz also argues for a single North Star Metric that cascades through an organization: Facebook used Monthly Active Users, WhatsApp used messages sent, Airbnb used nights booked, eBay used gross merchandise volume. The metric has to be simple enough that every team, from product to marketing, can see how their work moves it. ## How Founders Should Read This For a founder, the practical takeaway is sequencing. Before hiring a growth team or running acquisition experiments, define and measure your product's magic moment. This isn't a branding exercise or a slogan for the pitch deck. It's a specific, observable user action, found by looking at cohort data and asking which early behaviors separate users who stay from users who churn. The trap most founders fall into is treating the magic moment as something they intuit rather than something they measure. A founder might say their product's magic moment is "when the user sees the value," which sounds right but isn't specific enough to act on. Facebook's team didn't stop at "seeing friends," they pushed until they had a number: 10 friends, 14 days. That specificity is what made the moment usable as an operating target rather than a talking point. There's a second, related trap: [building a growth team](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/default-alive-or-default-dead-the-one-calculation-most) before there's anything durable to grow. Schultz's framework implies that a growth team hired to fix a leaking bucket will mostly generate expensive noise, better-looking top-line charts that mask a business that isn't actually getting healthier underneath. The better sequence is to nail retention first, even if that means growth headcount waits. A concrete exercise worth running today: pull up your own product's cohort data, or a portfolio company's, and try to name the specific early action, not a vague moment, but an action with a number attached, that separates users who stick around from users who don't. If you can't name one, that's the actual work, before any acquisition channel gets touched. ## How Investors Should Read This For an investor, Schultz's framework converts naturally into a diligence lens. The question to ask isn't "how many users do you have," it's "show me your cohort retention curve, broken out by signup month, and tell me where it flattens." Total user counts are a weak signal on their own because they almost always trend upward, even for products with serious underlying leakage, as long as acquisition spending continues. A rising top-line number can mask a retention curve that never flattens, meaning the company is running hard just to stay in place. The cohort view strips that illusion away: each cohort's curve either flattens into a durable base or doesn't, and a founder who can walk through that chart from memory, including where and why it flattens, is showing real command of their own business. This matters directly for [fund economics](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-good-vcs-say-no-to-good-companies-power-law). Every dollar of acquisition spend only compounds into fund returns if the users it brings in stick around long enough to be monetized well past the payback period. A company with weak retention that raises a large round to "invest in growth" is often just accelerating the rate at which capital leaks out, not fixing the underlying business. Schultz's North Star Metric concept gives investors a second useful check: does the company have one metric the whole organization rallies around, and can every function articulate how their work moves it? A scattered set of vanity metrics, with no single number the team agrees matters most, is its own kind of red flag. The practical diligence question, then, is less about market size or team pedigree in this specific dimension, and more mechanical: ask for the cohort retention curve before the pitch deck's growth slide, and read the flattening point as closely as the total-user chart. ## Where the Two Views Collide The tension between these two lenses is sharper than it first appears. A founder's instinct is often to build a growth team early, because growth work is visible, produces fast feedback, and is easy to narrate to a board or an investor as "traction." Waiting to nail retention before touching acquisition can feel, from inside a company, like moving too slowly while competitors are visibly running ads and posting user-growth numbers. An investor, applying Schultz's lens, sees the same instinct differently. Acquisition spend against a retention curve that hasn't flattened isn't traction, it's noise that will eventually need to be walked back, usually at a worse valuation and with less founder credibility than if the sequencing had been right from the start. Both readings can be correct depending on the specific situation. A founder is right to push for early acquisition investment if the retention curve has genuinely flattened but the team simply hasn't scaled distribution yet, since every day of delay there is a day of compounding growth left on the table. An investor is right to push back hard when a founder says something close to "let's grow first, we'll fix retention later," because in Schultz's experience that sequencing rarely works: it's much harder to fix a broken product after scaling acquisition around it than to fix it while the user base is still small. The person who understands this distinction has a real edge at the table. Instead of accepting a rising total-user chart at face value, they ask for the cohort breakdown. Instead of accepting "we know our magic moment" as a claim, they ask for the number behind it. The chart everyone shows is the one that always goes up. The chart that actually matters is the one underneath it. ## The Takeaway Schultz's framework reduces to an uncomfortable but useful discipline: find the specific, measurable action that predicts whether a user sticks around, get the retention curve to flatten around it, and only then turn on the acquisition machine in earnest. Total user growth is easy to produce and easy to fake the health of. A flattening cohort retention curve is much harder to fake, and it's the one number, more than any other, that tells you whether a business is actually compounding or just running in place. The applicable framework for your own week: pick one product you're close to, whether it's your own or one you're evaluating, and ask for its cohort retention curve broken out by signup date. If you can't get an answer more specific than "users seem happy," that gap is the most useful thing you'll learn all week. --- *Source: Alex Schultz, "Growth," How to Start a Startup (Stanford CS183B / Y Combinator), 2014 —* [*watch the lecture*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_yHZ_vKjno) --- ## Why the Best Founders Do Things That Don't Scale _Founders · 2026-08-24 · https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-the-best-founders-do-things-that-don-t-scale_ And Why Investors Should Want Them To? *Airbnb's founders photographed apartments by hand. Stripe's founders installed their own product on strangers' laptops. Neither looks like a scalable business. Both were building one.* ## The Story In the early days of Airbnb, the founders flew to New York and went door to door. Not to pitch investors. To take better photos of the apartments already listed on the site. The listings were ugly, the photos were dark and badly framed, and nobody was booking them. So Brian Chesky and his co-founders picked up a camera and did the work themselves, one apartment at a time. Stripe's founders, Patrick and John Collison, did something similar a few years later. When a new user signed up, they didn't send a link to a setup guide. They asked for the person's laptop, sat down next to them, and installed the payment integration on the spot. People inside the company started calling it the "Collison install." It became a small piece of company folklore, and a very serious lesson underneath the joke. Paul Graham wrote about this pattern in a 2013 essay called *Do Things that Don't Scale*. His argument is almost a contradiction on its face: the startups that go on to build massive, scalable companies almost always start by doing something that scales terribly. Manually. Slowly. One customer at a time. ## The Idea Most founders assume that building a "real" company means building for scale from day one. Automated onboarding. Self-serve signup. A funnel that runs itself while you sleep. Graham's point is that this instinct, applied too early, is usually a mistake. In the earliest stage, the product is not good enough yet to sell itself, and the market is not proven enough to justify investing in infrastructure for growth that hasn't shown up. What you have instead is a small number of real users and an open question: does this actually solve their problem? Manual effort is how you answer that question fast. You watch someone use your product in real time. You hear the sentence they say right before they get confused. You notice the step they skip, the field they misread, the moment their face changes. No analytics dashboard gives you that. There's also a second, quieter benefit. Doing the unscalable thing lets you deliver a level of service that a company ten times your size could never match. A personal thank-you note. A live install. A founder who answers support tickets in real time. Big companies can't do this because it doesn't scale. Early on, that's exactly the point. It's not a permanent strategy — Graham is clear that growth eventually needs to come from something repeatable — but the manual phase is the bridge that gets you to a product worth automating. ## How Founders Should Read This For a founder, the discomfort here is usually pride, not logic. There's [a specific kind of embarrassment](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-your-mvp-should-embarrass-you-the-case-for-launching) in explaining to a friend, or worse, to an investor, that you spent last week hand-writing thank-you notes to your first fifty users. It doesn't feel like founding a company. It feels like busywork. Kevin Hale, who co-founded Wufoo before it was acquired by SurveyMonkey, leaned into exactly this instinct. His team sent a handwritten card to every new signup. It didn't scale past a few hundred users. It also turned those first few hundred users into people who told their friends. The mechanism wasn't the card itself — it was the signal the card sent about how much the founders cared about getting this right. The trap most founders fall into is treating the manual phase as something to escape as fast as possible. They build the automated version before they've learned what's actually worth automating, and end up scaling a version of the product that skips the parts that made it work. A better way to think about it: manual effort now is how you find out what the automated version should even look like. If there's a part of your onboarding you're still doing by hand three months in, don't be embarrassed. Ask whether you actually understand it well enough yet to hand it to a machine. ## How Investors Should Read This An investor looking at early traction has a different question in mind: is this growth real, or is it a founder working eighteen-hour days to manufacture a metric? The answer matters more than it might seem, because it predicts what happens after the check clears. Here's the useful reframe. Manual growth, done well, is not a weaker signal than paid growth — it's often a stronger one. A founder who can describe exactly how they won their first hundred users, what almost made each of them churn, and why most of them are still active six months later, is showing you something a growth-marketing dashboard cannot: a working theory of the customer, built from direct contact. A founder whose only answer to "how did you get your first users" is "we ran ads" hasn't necessarily done anything wrong, but they also haven't necessarily learned anything yet. The red flag isn't manual effort. It's the absence of it. If a team scaled to thousands of users purely through paid acquisition before anyone on the founding team had personally onboarded a customer, that's worth a harder look at retention numbers specifically, because rented attention and earned attention behave very differently once the money runs out. Fund math sharpens this further. A venture portfolio depends on the handful of companies that [compound retention over years](https://www.promptsessions.com/blog/why-retention-not-acquisition-is-the-real-growth-metric), not the ones that produce an impressive but shallow signup number in month two. Manual-era retention — the percentage of hand-won users still active a year later — is one of the closest things to real proof of that compounding a very early check can get. ## Where the Two Views Collide Here's where it gets interesting, and where most conversations about this idea stop short. Founders often hide the manual period rather than showcase it. There's a quiet shame attached to saying "we're still doing this by hand," as if it signals amateurism instead of discipline. So founders reach for the story that sounds more impressive: bigger numbers, an automated funnel, a growth chart that looks inevitable. Ironically, this is precisely backwards. What should feel embarrassing isn't the hand-built period — it's never having gone through one at all. Investors, meanwhile, have their own blind spot. The manual phase is a strong signal only within a window. If it stretches on for two or three years with no credible path to a repeatable, scalable motion, it stops being founder discipline and starts being evidence that no scalable model exists yet — or that one might never exist. The skill an investor needs here is distinguishing "this founder is patiently learning what to automate" from "this founder has found a service business, not a startup," and that distinction usually only shows up when you ask directly: what have you learned from doing this manually that you're now ready to systematize? The person who understands both sides of this tension has an edge at the table. They read early manual effort as evidence, not excuse. And they know exactly when to start asking the harder question about what comes next. ## The Takeaway If you're building something right now, here's a concrete way to apply this today: look at your own product or the last pitch you evaluated, and ask whether the early growth came from something the founder built with their own hands, or from something they simply paid for. The answer tells you more than almost any other single data point available at that stage. Source: Paul Graham, “Do Things That Don’t Scale” (2013) — [https://paulgraham.com/ds.html](https://paulgraham.com/ds.html) # Funds — full directory 71 investment funds that took part in Prompt Sessions editions. Directory: https://www.promptsessions.com/funds --- ## Meridian Ventures _Investing · Abu Dhabi, UAE · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/meridian-ventures_ Backing frontier founders across MENA's next decade. Software is eating financial services in emerging markets. We back founders rebuilding the rails: payments, lending, and the infrastructure beneath them. Meridian Ventures is an early-stage firm partnering with technical founders building category-defining companies. We lead and co-lead rounds, and stay close through the messy early years — hiring, GTM, and follow-on capital. Stage: Pre-seed, Seed, Series A · Sectors: Fintech, Infrastructure, AI · Geography: MENA, Turkey, Global Terms: Fund size $120M; Min $250K; Check $250K – $3M; Mgmt fee 2%; Carry 20%; Vintage 2019; Fund term: 10 years; Investment period: 4 years; Structure: Delaware LP Team: Layla Haddad (Managing Partner), Omar Farouk (General Partner), Sara Nasser (Principal) Verification: Verified by Prompt, Confirmed by fund --- ## 212 _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/212_ Pre-seed to Series A B2B tech (SaaS, FinTech, Cybersecurity, MarTech) fund operating under a 'Test Local Go Global' strategy. Türkiye is its home and first market, followed by MENA, Europe, and the US. The fund genuinely invests in these other regions, with no Turkey link required for European companies. Managing ~$300M, the fund features fintech-background partners and has the capability to lead investment rounds. Pre-seed to Series A B2B tech (SaaS, FinTech, Cybersecurity, MarTech), Test Local Go Global. Türkiye is the home and first market, then MENA, Europe and the US, and they genuinely invest in those other regions (no required Turkey link for a European company). ~$300M, fintech-background partners, can lead. Backing B2B tech founders from Türkiye, their first market, and across MENA, Europe and the US. Test local, go global, since 2012. ~$300M fund, fintech-background partners, can lead. Sectors: SaaS, Fintech, Cyber Security, B2B · Geography: Turkey, CEE, Middle East, Europe, US Terms: Typical check: $500K or more Team: Ali Karabey, Can Tokman (Associate) --- ## Arches Capital _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/arches-capital_ Founded in 2018 and based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Arches Capital is a private equity firm that makes early-stage venture capital investments of 250k to 1mln in software companies with a B2B or B2B2C focus, including AI, ML, blockchain, fintech, health tech, SaaS, enterprise software, and eCommerce. Founded in 2018 and based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Arches Capital is a private equity firm that makes venture capital investments in the early stages of software companies with B2B or B2B2C focus, like AI, ML, blockchain, fintech, health tech, SaaS, enterprise software, and eCommerce. Sectors: Fintech, AI / Data Infrastructure, HealtTech, Cyber Security · Geography: Netherlands Terms: Typical check: 250k-1mM Team: Michelle ter Laak (Associate) --- ## Curiosity VC _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/curiosity-vc_ Curiosity is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage B2B AI/ML software companies located in the Benelux, Nordics, and Baltics regions. The firm invests with ticket sizes ranging from €0.5M to €1M across four main themes: Sustainable Living (covering PropTech, Energy, and ClimateTech), Trusted Society (covering LegalTech and Cybersecurity), Future of Work (covering SaaS, HRTech, and DevOps), and Future of Commerce (covering Fintech and Logistics). Curiosity is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage companies in AI-driven software companies in Benelux, Nordics, and Baltics regions. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, SaaS, Fintech, Cyber Security, ClimateTech · Geography: Benelux Terms: Typical check: $500k to $1M Team: Akshata Agarwal (Principal), Eva Formica (Investment Analyst) --- ## Heliad _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/heliad_ This publicly listed, evergreen German VC invests directly off its own balance sheet, meaning there are no fund cycles and no LP exit pressure, so portfolio companies are not pushed to exit early. The firm operates with a team of around 10 people across Frankfurt and Berlin, and its anchor shareholder, holding approximately 60%, is the founder of the online broker Flatex DeGiro. It backs high-growth, scalable technology companies across both B2B and consumer markets from pre-Seed to Series C, covering sectors such as fintech, energy/climate, mobility, insurance, and deep tech, with a portfolio that includes Raisin, Enpal, Clark, and FINN. The firm enters early as a complementary co-investor alongside a strong lead—never leading early rounds—to get a foot in the door, and then concentrates capital on the winners in later or growth rounds (Series B+). Its recent deals include Bayshore in Munich, alongside Earlybird, and an oversubscribed defense round. Backs high-growth, scalable technology companies (B2B and consumer) from pre-Seed to Series C — sectors span fintech, energy/climate, mobility, insurance and deep tech (portfolio incl. Raisin, Enpal, Clark, FINN). Enters early as a complementary co-investor alongside a strong lead (never leads early rounds) to get a foot in the door, then concentrates capital on the winners in later/growth rounds (Series B+). Recent deals: Bayshore (Munich, alongside Earlybird) and an oversubscribed defense round. Heliad AG is a prominent, publicly listed venture capital and growth equity firm based in Germany, specializing in high-growth, disruptive technology companies. Operating with an evergreen balance sheet structure rather than a traditional closed-end fund, Heliad provides flexible, ultra-long-term capital that supports founders from early-stage innovation to public market listings. Sectors: Fintech, HealtTech, AI / Data Infrastructure, Sustainability, Smart Energy, Mobility, B2B, DeepTech · Geography: DACH, Europe Terms: Typical check: €500k – €2M Team: Can Kuloğlu (Venture Capitalist) --- ## Merak Capital _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/merak-capital_ Our Saudi-based diversified investment firm is a CMA-licensed entity focused on private markets across VC, growth equity, and private equity. We run an $85M AI Gaming fund, in partnership with the National Development Fund, focusing on Pre-Seed to Series A deals and startups globally, spanning from the US to the UK to Turkey. The fund focuses on Gaming Tech, AI Gaming, Mobile/PC/Console Gaming, and UGC platforms. Additionally, the firm operates Exel by Merak, a Riyadh-based gaming accelerator supporting studios building toward Vision 2030. Saudi-based diversified investment firm (CMA-licensed) focused on private markets across VC, growth equity and private equity. Runs an $85M AI Gaming fund (in partnership with the National Development Fund) backing Pre-Seed–Series A startups globally in Gaming Tech, AI Gaming, Mobile/PC/Console Gaming and UGC platforms. Also operates Exel by Merak, a Riyadh-based gaming accelerator supporting studios building toward Vision 2030. Saudi-based investment firm across private equity, venture capital and private credit. Backing founders and management teams scaling the Kingdom's digital and infrastructure future. Sectors: Gaming, AI / Data Infrastructure · Geography: US, Europe, DACH, Middle East, Asia Pasific Terms: Typical check: $500K to $1.5mn Team: Aalshareef, Haisam Tayyab (Investor) --- ## Simya _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/simya_ A pre-seed and seed fund for early-stage B2B startups with global high-growth ambitions and potential. The fund is sector-agnostic, providing strategic support alongside its partnership with the Alchemist Accelerator. It is strictly a fund, not an accelerator itself. Its capital includes $7M for Fund I and $10M for Fund II. Pre-seed fund for early-stage B2B startups with global growth ambitions. Sector-agnostic; partnership with Alchemist Accelerator. Fund I: $7M, Fund II: $10M. 212's international accelerator fund in partnership with Alchemist. First-check support for early-stage Turkish B2B tech founders going global from day one. Sectors: B2B, SaaS, AI / Data Infrastructure · Geography: Turkey, Europe Terms: Typical check: $250K–$500K (seed acceleration) Team: Zeynep Şener (Associate) --- ## 4impact capital _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/4impact-capital_ Founded in 2017 in The Hague, this Impact VC operates as an SFDR Article 9, Tech4Good European fund investing across the DACH, Benelux, and Nordics regions. Julius Wallinger, a German based in the Netherlands, covers the DACH region. The firm targets software-only digital ventures with measurable positive impact across two pillars: Planet (climate tech, energy) and People (health tech, ed tech), excluding pure hardware. While impact is important, not every portfolio company must be impact-first. Investing from pre-seed to Series A, the fund mostly acts as a lead investor but remains flexible and does not have to lead. Fund II stands at EUR 68M, with approximately half of its new-investment allocation deployed, separate reserves for follow-ons, and ambitious new-investment plans for this year. Deal flow is generated via their own research and tools, events, referrals, and inbound sources, with the majority being self-sourced. Impact VC (SFDR Article 9), Tech4Good. Software-only digital ventures with measurable positive impact across two pillars: Planet (climate tech, energy) and People (health tech, ed tech). No pure hardware. Impact is important but not every portfolio company must be impact-first. Mostly lead investor, but flexible (don't have to lead). Stage pre-seed to Series A. Impact venture capital fund based in The Hague. SFDR Article 9, Tech4Good. Software focus, anchored in the UN SDGs. Sectors: ClimateTech, Smart Energy, HealtTech, EdTech, SaaS, AI, Sustainability · Geography: DACH, Benelux, Nordics, Netherlands Terms: Typical check: EUR 250K to 2.5M Team: Julius Wallinger (Investor) --- ## Arya Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/arya-ventures_ Türkiye’s first and only gender-diversity focused VC fund invests in bold, tech-driven companies with scalable business models and global ambition, prioritizing gender-balanced founding teams. Operating as a sector-agnostic, gender-lens VC fund, its preferred sectors from public sources include AI, fintech, biotech/health, e-commerce technologies, agritech/foodtech, logistics, cleantech/climatetech, cybertech, edtech, and femtech. The fund invests at the Seed to Series A stages and is primarily Türkiye-based with selective global exposure. Beyond capital, it supports portfolio companies with mentorship, hands-on strategic support, and ecosystem access through a gender-lens approach. Gender-lens VC fund focusing on scalable, tech-driven startups and prioritizing gender-balanced founding teams; invests Seed–Series A and supports companies with mentorship and ecosystem access. Preferred sectors (public sources): AI, fintech, biotech/health, e-commerce technologies, agritech/foodtech, logistics, cleantech/climatetech, cybertech, edtech, femtech. Türkiye's first gender-balanced VC, born out of Arya Women Investment Platform and İşbank. Early-stage and Series A checks for female-founded and gender-balanced startups across femtech, fintech, mobility and life sciences. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, Fintech, BioTech, E-commerce, AgriTech, ClimateTech, Cyber Security, EdTech, HealtTech · Geography: DACH, Middle East, Europe, US Terms: Typical check: $150K–750K Team: Melisa Güvenç (Associate), Oğuzhan Akbaş (Associate), Selin Çelikel (Associate) --- ## CapitalT _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/capitalt_ CapitalT is an Amsterdam, Netherlands-based venture capital firm that invests in (pre-)seed stage software and technology companies using AI to solve real problems. While the firm invests in software technology companies located globally, it particularly focuses on Northern Europe and the United Kingdom, specifically targeting the Netherlands, UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Germany. CapitalT targets specific verticals including ClimateTech, Future of Work, Education/EdTech, Digital Health/HealthTech, Web3, and emerging SocialTech. CapitalT is a venture capital firm based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, that invests in seed-stage software technology companies located globally, particularly in Northern Europe and the United Kingdom. The firm focuses on verticals such as EdTech, HealthTech, ClimateTech, the Future of Work, and emerging SocialTech. Data-driven pre-seed VC backing software companies across Europe, investing in teams building with AI and strong data components. Focus areas include climate tech and the future of work. Sectors: ClimateTech, Future of Work, EdTech, HealtTech · Geography: Europe, UK, Nordics Terms: Typical check: €100k–€1M Team: Nina Donker (Investment Associate) --- ## ENA VC _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/ena-vc_ This fund makes tech-centric, IP-backed investments in visionary tech founders building unique IP-backed solutions. It focuses on AI/ML, cloud computing, and cybersecurity, while also including health, fintech, climate, and e-commerce sectors. Writing check sizes ranging from $500K to $4M, the firm operates with offices in Amsterdam, Dubai, Istanbul, Madrid, and Singapore. Visionary tech founders building unique IP-backed solutions. Focus on AI, cloud computing & cybersecurity. Offices in Amsterdam, Dubai, Istanbul, Madrid, Singapore. $500K–$4M checks. Amsterdam-based VC backing early-stage EMEA founders building the tech stack of tomorrow. Operators turned investors across AI, fintech and cybersecurity. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, Fintech, ClimateTech, HealtTech, Cyber Security, SaaS · Geography: Turkey, Europe, Global Terms: Typical check: $500k–$4M Team: Bahar Akyıldız (Growth Marketing & Brand Lead), Çağatay Çapuroğlu (Board Member), Jesus Martin (Managing Partner), Mehmet Üner (Strategy Advisor) --- ## GoldenEgg Check _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/goldenegg-check_ Golden Egg Check is a private equity firm that focuses on startups, scale-ups, investors & corporates in the Netherlands. It invests in (pre-)seed software & deeptech, specifically FinTech, SaaS, AI, Computer Vision, DeepTech, and ClimateTech. Operating across the Benelux, Nordics, and Germany, the firm utilizes a co-investment model alongside angels and top VCs. It manages a €5M fund and targets approximately 35 investments. Golden Egg Check is a private equity firm that focuses on startups, scale-ups, investors & corporates in the Netherlands. Dutch pre-seed investor and startup analyst platform investing in early-stage digital and deeptech startups, often via co-investment (SAFE/convertible/equity) alongside angels and top-tier VCs. Active across the Netherlands and broader Europe. Sectors: SaaS, DeepTech, B2B, AI / Data Infrastructure, ClimateTech, Fintech · Geography: Europe, UK Terms: Typical check: €50,000 - €100,000 Team: Anna Dyachenko (Investment Associate), Thomas Mensink (CEO) --- ## Metis _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/metis_ This data-driven early-stage VC firm focuses on Late Seed & Series A investments, providing tickets ranging from €1M to €3M (up to €3M ticket size). Supporting diverse founders, the fund targets Türkiye (Turkey), Eastern Europe, the CEE region, and the Turkish diaspora. Key investment focus areas include Applied AI (AI), Cybersecurity, Climate Tech / ClimateTech (Energy & Mobility), Digital Health (HealthTech), Fintech & Insurtech (FinTech), and Gaming. Data-driven early-stage VC for diverse founders in Turkey & CEE. Focus on AI, Cybersecurity, ClimateTech, HealthTech, FinTech. Up to €3M ticket size. Data-driven early-stage fund backing AI-enabled founders across Türkiye, CEE and the Baltics. Focus on AI apps, fintech, cybersec, climate and digital health. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, Cyber Security, ClimateTech, HealtTech, Fintech, Gaming, Cybersecurity, Robotics · Geography: US, Europe, Global, USA Terms: Typical check: €1M–€3M Team: Haluk Ziya Tercan (Investor), Merve Zabcı (General Partner), Pınar Tercanlıoğlu (Investor), Yusuf Artukoğlu (Analyst) --- ## Arcadia _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/arcadia_ Mobile gaming startups in Turkey and the UK. Seed & early-stage (Seed–Series A) investments in casual/hybrid-casual game studios. Mobile gaming startups in Turkey and the UK. Seed & early-stage investments in casual/hybrid-casual game studios. Founder-led venture fund backing the world's best mobile gaming companies. Built by gaming operators, for gaming operators. Sectors: Gaming · Geography: UK, Turkey Terms: Typical check: $1M–$30M (seed to growth, gaming) Team: Sabahat Gümüştaş (Investor) --- ## Kompas VC _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/kompas-vc_ Founded in 2021, this industrial tech fund holds approximately EUR 300M in AUM across two funds. Fund II stands at ~EUR 160M and has been actively deploying since January 2025, with a final close expected at the end of 2025. With offices in Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, it invests from Pre-Seed to Series B, specializing in Seed and Series A across Europe, the US, and Israel (~60/40 Europe vs US+Israel). Deal sourcing occurs via events, Harmonic, conferences, and VC inbound. The firm backs startups increasing productivity and resilience in physical industries, including energy, manufacturing, logistics, critical-infrastructure cybersecurity, robotics, and sustainable materials. It invests in hardware and software (increasingly software-enabled hardware, but open to all software), while remaining opportunistic on exceptional horizontal deals (e.g., Backslash Security). Generic AI/SaaS without an industrial angle will not land. Industrial tech. Backs startups increasing productivity and resilience in the physical industries: energy, manufacturing, logistics, critical-infrastructure cybersecurity, robotics, sustainable materials. Hardware and software (increasingly software-enabled hardware, open to all software). Opportunistic on exceptional horizontal deals (e.g. Backslash Security). Generic AI/SaaS without an industrial angle won't land. European industrial-tech VC. Founding partner Sebastian Peck; Ilena Mece principal in Berlin. Sectors: DeepTech, ClimateTech, Cyber Security, Smart Energy, Mobility, B2B · Geography: Europe, US, Israel Terms: Typical check: EUR 1M to 5M (some flexibility lower; reluctant below 1M due to ownership targets) Team: Jack Cruise (Analyst) --- ## LEAP4 _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/leap4_ A specialized pre-seed and seed fund focused on 'tech that moves', including mobility, logistics, supply chain, space tech, Industry 4.0, and manufacturing. The fund invests in software or software+hardware solutions, with pure hardware possible following deep diligence, and considers AI only when it features an industrial or mobility angle. It differentiates itself through a network of 130+ industrial-expert LPs—including ex-CEOs of Porsche and Volkswagen, Renault and Bosch board members, ex-Nvidia personnel, and a former Microsoft Germany automotive lead—who provide hands-on portfolio support. Specialized pre-seed and seed fund for 'tech that moves': mobility, space tech, supply chain, logistics, Industry 4.0 and manufacturing. Software or software+hardware (pure hardware possible with deep diligence). AI only with an industrial or mobility angle. Differentiates on a 130+ industrial-expert LP network (ex-CEOs of Porsche and Volkswagen, Renault and Bosch board members, ex-Nvidia, Microsoft Germany automotive lead) for hands-on portfolio support. €60M fund, raising to €75-100M by end 2026. Pre-seed/seed, ~70% EU / 30% rest of world incl US. Lead or co-lead, follow-ons possible. Contact: Daniel Willenbrink (daniel@leap4.vc). German fund (Berlin/Munich). Sectors: Mobility, DeepTech, AI, B2B · Geography: Europe, Global Terms: Typical check: €500K to €2M (initial) Team: Daniel Willenbrink (Investment Manager) --- ## Redstone _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/redstone_ The current Fintech/AI fund is in a second closing, targeting €100M with roughly 40 to 50% reserved for follow-ons. It invests from Pre-seed to Series A across Fintech, B2B SaaS, and B2B AI. The focus is strictly B2B software only, with no consumer/B2C investment (even AI consumer, which sits in a separate social impact fund). It can lead or follow, depending on what the round dynamics require. The fund has a high-volume practice led by a FinTech team of 3, including Frederike Wolff, reviewing around 500 decks and conducting about 10 first calls per week. Geography is all-Europe and flexible, with Germany as its home market and an existing portfolio in France and Scandinavia; US deals are fine if the company is Europe-based or a YC company located in the US. Pre-seed to Series A across Fintech, B2B SaaS and B2B AI. B2B software only, no consumer / B2C (consumer sits in a separate social impact fund). Lead or follow, whatever the round dynamics require. Berlin-based VC. Fintech / B2B SaaS / B2B AI fund, pre-seed to Series A, €500K to 2M. Invests across Europe with Germany as the home market. A separate social impact fund covers consumer. Sectors: Fintech, SaaS, AI, B2B · Geography: Europe, DACH Terms: Typical check: €500K to 2M Team: Frederike Wolff (Investor) --- ## Sony Innovation Fund _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/sony-innovation-fund_ Investing in technology-driven transformational companies shaping the future of business, entertainment, and society. The fund focuses on entertainment technology, including games, music, video, user acquisition, and sports, and invests from pre-seed to Series B. Investing in technology-driven transformational companies shaping the future of business, entertainment and society. Sony Ventures Corporation backs global, technology-driven startups and works with portfolio companies to drive strategic collaboration with Sony (access to Sony technologies, joint development, and business alliances), investing across stages through multiple funds (early-stage Sony Innovation Fund, mid-to-late Innovation Growth Fund, and themed vehicles such as Environment and Africa). Sectors: Entertainment Tech, Sports, Gaming, Mobile Applications, Web3 · Geography: DACH, Europe Terms: Typical check: €500K-€10M Team: Gustaf Åkerman (Investment Manager) --- ## Summiteer GmbH _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/summiteer-gmbh_ Roots in energy and cleantech have expanded into a broad focus covering robotics, deep tech, software, AI, energy/energy transition, and some consumer opportunities. As an industry-agnostic, entrepreneurial hands-on investor backed by evergreen private capital with no fund clock, they offer flexibility on investment structure and timeline. They are open-minded on stage, having done pre-seed investments, and are happy to meet founders early to build relationships for later rounds. Their strategy allows them to act as lead, co-lead, or co-investor. Industry-agnostic, entrepreneurial hands-on investor. Evergreen private capital (no fund clock), so flexible on structure and timeline. Open-minded on stage, has done pre-seed, happy to meet founders early to build relationships for later rounds. Lead/co-lead/co-invest. Family-backed evergreen VC/PE from southern Germany (Ravensburg, Lake Constance), subsidiary of the Schulz Group family holding; ~€100M private capital. Founder Sven Schulz (built AKASOL, IPO + exit). MD Dominik Bär (ex-Lazard/Berenberg, ~50 IPOs/M&A). Core market DACH, Europe broadly, two US deals (one unannounced), opportunistic beyond. Portfolio: Enpal, neoom, encentive, Heatle, reCup, followfood, cuisyn. Sectors: Generalist, AI, SaaS, Smart Energy, ClimateTech, DeepTech, Sustainability, B2B, Mobility · Geography: DACH, Europe, US, Global Terms: Typical check: Starts ~€1M (sometimes smaller), up to double-digit millions; average ~€3.5–4M, depends on stage/sector Team: Florian Döbel (Investment Analyst), Philipp Reichle (Associate) --- ## Ultratech Capital _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/ultratech-capital_ Investing in Seed and Series A stages, the fund focuses on deeptech and AI, specifically critical technology (dual-use). Its focus areas include AI/ML, cybersecurity, energy, semiconductors, advanced materials, and quantum. It invests in deep tech ONLY with no generalist pocket, defined broadly where software counts if it changes something fundamentally, such as AI for quantum error correction, and science-based technology counts double. The fund supports its portfolio with operational expertise and helps startups navigate government GTM and non-dilutive funding. Both the GP and principal are army veterans whose exposure to advanced tech drives the investment thesis. Investing in critical technology (dual-use). Focus areas include AI/ML, cybersecurity, energy, semiconductors, advanced materials, quantum; supports portfolio with operational expertise and help navigating government GTM/non-dilutive funding. Deep tech ONLY (no generalist pocket) but defined broadly — software counts if it changes something fundamentally (e.g. AI for quantum error correction); science-based counts double. GP and principal are army veterans whose exposure to advanced tech drives the thesis. Deeptech / AI-focused early-stage fund (Seed to Series A). UK-based, with strong NATO/Europe focus; expects 1–3 curated matches. Sectors: DeepTech, AI · Geography: Europe, UK Terms: Typical check: €250K–2.5M Team: Neel Gambhire (Venture Capitalist) --- ## Puma _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/puma_ Invests in Series A and Series B software companies with at least 1M ARR. Puma is an investment firm that manages VCT and EIS funds. Origination at the firm is led by Darius Laud. Sectors: AI, Fintech, Enterprise Software · Geography: UK, US, Europe Terms: Typical check: 5M to 15M GBP Team: Darius Laud (Origination) --- ## ACF _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/acf_ Sector-agnostic co-investment fund that relies on angel expertise for deals. ACF is an independent fund spun out of the British Business Bank (BBB, which is its sole LP). It manages the £100 million Angel CoFund with a small investing team of five people. Sectors: Sector-agnostic · Geography: UK Terms: Typical check: £100,000 to £1 million (typically averaging around £500k–£600k, usually £250k to £1m nowadays) for a 5% equity stake Team: Matthew Boreman (Associate) --- ## Achmea _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/achmea_ Our fund focuses on preseed stage and digital-first software solutions that create impact within health & wellbeing, the future of work, healthy finances, and sustainable living and mobility. We back these impactful startups with investments ranging from €50K to €550K. Whether you are just starting out or ready to scale, we bring the funding, expertise, and network needed to accelerate your impact. We back digital-first startups that create impact in health, work, finance and sustainability with investments from €50K to €550K Whether you’re just starting out or ready to scale, we bring funding, expertise, and the network to accelerate your impact. Sectors: HealtTech, Future of Work, Fintech, Sustainability · Geography: DACH Terms: Typical check: 50k - 500k euro Team: Marloes van Leersum (Marketing & community manager), Ralph Van Dam (Head of Startups and Scaleups) --- ## Anka Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/anka-ventures_ Anka Ventures is a GSYF approved by the Capital Markets Board of Türkiye (SPK), established by VLMedia to invest primarily in mobile games, mobile applications, and other innovative technology companies. Focusing on pre-seed, early-stage, and follow-on investments, the fund targets Apps (Gaming and Non-Gaming), Mobile Games, Mobile Applications, Artificial Intelligence, and Scalable Technology Startups, while also providing mentorship and ecosystem support. Anka Ventures is a GSYF approved by Capital Markets Board of Türkiye (SPK), established by VLMedia to invest primarily in mobile games, mobile applications, and other innovative technology companies. Fund focus on Mobile Games, Mobile Applications, SaaS, Artificial Intelligence, and Scalable Technology Startups. Early-stage and follow-on investments, mentorship, and ecosystem support. CMB-approved VC fund by VLMedia backing Turkish founders in mobile games, apps, and AI. Scaling local ventures into global success stories with hands-on product, growth and talent support. Sectors: Gaming, AI / Data Infrastructure, Mobile Applications · Geography: Turkey Terms: Typical check: $150K-$500K Team: Ahmet Recai Açıkgöz (Investment Advisor), Ayça Batur Erdemli (Associate), Furkan Kuru, Özgür Karayalçın (Vice President) --- ## APY Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/apy-ventures_ Albaraka Asset Management operates a multi-fund platform of Venture Capital Investment Funds (VCIFs). The main fund targets early-stage, growth-stage B2B and B2C technology startups at the pre-Series A and Series A stages in Turkey. Primary focus sectors for these investments include Agriculture, Green Energy, Cybersecurity, Gaming, and Mobile Apps. Additionally, the platform encompasses the OSTİM industrial fund, which focuses on robotics, renewables, and industrial software. Early-stage tech startups (pre-Series A / Series A) in Turkey. Focus on Agriculture, Green Energy, Cybersecurity, Gaming, Mobile Apps. Managed by Albaraka Asset Management. Istanbul-based early-stage VC under Albaraka. Backing Turkish tech founders across fintech, gaming, cybersecurity, defense, deeptech and industrial software. Sectors: AgriTech, Smart Energy, Cyber Security, Gaming · Geography: Turkey Terms: Typical check: $25K–$1M (sweet spot ~$50K) Team: Şüheda Dane (Associate) --- ## Arz Portföy _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/arz-portfoy_ A leading Turkish asset management firm operating 12 or more VC funds follows a VC strategy focused on backing visionary founders and teams. The firm targets fast-growing tech sectors and markets, seeking bright ideas and technology alongside sustainable competitive advantages. Leading Turkish asset management firm operating 12+ VC funds. Backs visionary founders in fast-growing tech sectors with sustainable competitive advantages. Turkish asset manager running interest-free venture funds across gaming, deeptech, energy and agriculture. Building sustainable returns for the long term. Sectors: Generalist · Geography: Turkey Terms: Typical check: Varies by fund (~$100K–$2M) Team: Atahan Efendioğlu (Analyst), Oktay Namver (Head of Portfolio Mgmt) --- ## Boğaziçi Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/bogazici-ventures_ Invests in disruptive tech ventures from Turkey, Eastern Europe, the MENA region, the diaspora, and South Korea, targeting the applied layer of AI and remaining sector-agnostic as long as AI is used meaningfully to bring down traditional industries. Prefers Seed and early stage investments with ticket sizes ranging from $500K to $1.5M. In addition to capital, the fund provides business network access and strategic advice alongside a strong ecosystem focus. Invests in disruptive tech ventures from Turkey, Eastern Europe, and the MENA region with the potential to bring down traditional industries. Provides capital, business network access, and strategic advice alongside a strong ecosystem focus. Türkiye's AI-first investment platform backing tech startups with global ambition across AI, fintech, gaming and digital health. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, Generalist · Geography: Turkey, Europe, Global Terms: Typical check: $500K–$1.5M Team: Barış Özistek (CEO & Board Member), Gizem Sezer (Managing Partner), Yaren Eminoglu (Strategy & Business Development Associate) --- ## BVC _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/bvc_ At Bavucan Capital, we specialize in empowering game studios, apps, and tech companies to achieve sustainable growth and unlock their full potential. Our services include strategic consultancy, business development, investment guidance, and networking introductions tailored to the unique needs of innovative businesses. We connect you with industry-leading investors, publishers, and partners while providing hands-on support to scale your business, optimize your market presence, and secure funding. Whether you're looking for strategic growth, capital, or impactful partnerships, Bavucan Capital is your trusted partner for success. Strategic partner for game studios, apps and tech companies. Connecting founders with top-tier investors, publishers and partners to scale, secure capital and unlock global growth. Team: Batuhan Avucan (Founder) --- ## DFF Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/dff-ventures_ Dutch Founders Fund, formerly known as August Ventures, is a venture capital firm with €100M AUM focused on pre-seed and seed investments as well as providing growth capital to growing companies that are revenue generating. The firm targets underdigitized verticals with a focus on Marketplaces (B2B preferred), Vertical SaaS, Tech-Enabled Services, and Marketplace Enablers. It invests in Europe, the UK, and MENA, with ticket sizes ranging from €250K to €3M. Dutch Founders Fund, formerly known as August Ventures, is a venture capital firm focused on providing growth capital to growing companies that are revenue generating. Pre-seed and seed fund investing across EMEA as first-check partners for founders building digital solutions for traditionally non-digital industries. Focus on marketplaces, vertical SaaS, and recommerce/tech-enabled services (slight preference for B2B). Sectors: SaaS, Fintech, B2B · Geography: Europe, UK Terms: Typical check: €250K–3M Team: Federico Maroli (Principal), Joana Reis Pereira (Associate), Maarten Plomp (Investor) --- ## Diffusion Capital Partners _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/diffusion-capital-partners_ Investing at the Seed to pre-Series A and Series A stages, this deep-tech VC backs startups that leverage advanced science and technology to disrupt existing markets. Key focus areas include AI, HealthTech, Advanced Materials & Energy, though the fund is otherwise sector-agnostic with a preference for interdisciplinary projects featuring strong technical teams and a global vision. Target geographies include Europe and the USA. Initial tickets typically range from below €500K up to EUR 500K–2.5M. A Turkish founder is required. Seed and Series A deep-tech VC investing in startups that use advanced science and technology to disrupt existing markets. Sector-agnostic; prefers interdisciplinary projects with strong technical teams and global vision. Initial tickets typically below €500K. Turkish founder is required. Türkiye's pioneering deep-tech fund. Backing founders building defensible technology at the intersection of science, industry and software. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, HealtTech, Smart Energy, DeepTech · Geography: Europe, US, Turkey Terms: Typical check: €500K–€2.5M Team: Merve Akgun (Partner), Vedia Yavuz (Analyst) --- ## DOMiNO Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/domino-ventures_ This Amsterdam-based, €30M fund invests in high-tech, pure-digital, first-day-global startups from Eastern Europe, Central Asia & Caucasus, with a focus on AI, deeptech, cleantech, and related sectors. High-tech, pure-digital, first-day global startups from Eastern Europe, Central Asia & Caucasus. Focus on AI, Deeptech, Cleantech. Amsterdam-based, €30M fund. Backing high-tech, pure-digital founders from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus who build global from day one. AI, deeptech, cleantech. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, DeepTech, ClimateTech, Fintech, Cyber Security, Gaming · Geography: Netherlands, Turkey, CEE, Europe Terms: Typical check: €100k–€1M Team: Aziza Satybaldyeva (Associate), Büşra Yılmaz (Investment Director), Gamze Demir (Associate), Nuray Mombekova (Associate), Tahir Deniz Özüstün (Associate) --- ## Dutch Operator Fund _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/dutch-operator-fund_ Dutch Operator Fund is an Amsterdam-based venture capital fund that focuses on technology-driven startups in the (pre-)seed phase across the Netherlands, particularly in software, SaaS, and the circular economy. The fund targets companies headquartered in the Netherlands with a clearly defined market and target audience, as well as visible first commercial traction. Eligible startups should have an ambitious, dedicated, and diverse founder team of 2 to 4 people, with second time founders being preferred. Dutch Operator Fund is an Amsterdam-based venture capital fund that focuses on technology-driven Dutch startups in the pre-seed and seed stages, particularly in software, SaaS, and the circular economy, across the Netherlands. Sectors: ClimateTech, HealtTech, SaaS, Fintech, AgriTech, BioTech · Geography: Netherlands Terms: Typical check: €100K–€150K Team: Geert-Jan Smits (Co-founder & operator) --- ## e2vc _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/e2vc_ This EUR 100M Fund III targets early-stage, "global-from-day-one" tech startups from Emerging Europe (including CEE, Baltics, and Türkiye/Turkey). Focusing on sectors such as AI, SaaS, fintech, and gaming, the fund invests ~€1M tickets in technically strong founding teams. Early-stage, "global-from-day-one" startups from Emerging Europe (Turkey, CEE, Baltics). ~€1M tickets; technically strong founding teams. EUR 100M Fund III. Early-stage fund for globally ambitious founders from Türkiye, CEE and the Baltics. Pushing emerging market founders to the US since 2016. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, SaaS, Fintech, Gaming · Geography: CEE, Baltics, Turkey, Europe Terms: Typical check: $400k–$5M Team: Başak Zorlutuna (Principal), Enis Hulli (General Partner) --- ## Empower Impact _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/empower-impact_ Pre-seed angel fund based in the Netherlands investing early-stage capital in B2B SaaS startups with societal and social impact. The fund targets key sectors including Sustainability/ESG/CSRD, Healthcare, FoodTech/nutrition, Housing, and related areas, typically writing tickets of €50K–€100K. Early-stage (pre-seed) investor in B2B SaaS with social impact, focusing on sustainability, healthcare, housing, nutrition and related areas (typical €50–100k tickets). Sectors: SaaS, HealtTech, Sustainability, B2B · Geography: Global Terms: Typical check: €50k–€100k Team: Eric Koek (Co-founder), Wim van Ginkel (Co-founder) --- ## Florian Burchett (Angel) _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/florian-burchett-angel_ This investor operates as an individual operator-angel and family office with about 20-30 investments across various stages, while also investing through the Berlin-Brandenburg Business Angel Club, where his father-in-law serves on the board. Not a structured fund, he writes small personal tickets below the typical 250K+ VC event positioning, but can deploy larger amounts via the club. He takes a founder-first approach, backing ambitious, visionary, and passionate founders—ideally with a MINT background—who are solving real-world problems with a charismatic founder as the face. Sector-agnostic across tech, engineering, climate, and deep/nerdy fields, he explicitly avoids e-commerce. He provides value as a company-building angel, bringing expertise in business-model design, translating deep tech into a business case, storytelling, and go-to-market strategy. While not a hard criterion, he prefers investments in Germany within a day-trip by train, such as Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, and Dresden. Operator-angel, founder-first. Backs ambitious, visionary, passionate founders (ideally MINT background) solving a real-world problem. Not e-commerce. Sector-agnostic (tech, engineering, climate, deep/nerdy fields). Brings strong company-building: business-model design, translating deep tech into a business case, storytelling and go-to-market. Wants a charismatic founder as the face. Germany preferred (Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, day-trip by train), not a hard criterion. Founder x3, one exit. Pioneered performance marketing in recruiting in Germany (2015), bootstrapped to 85 people and ~15M EUR revenue, then exited. Now rebuilding it via agentic AI (3 people) at Zalvus / timpeo. Sectors: AI, DeepTech, B2B · Geography: DACH Terms: Typical check: Personal 10K to 50K; 200K to 500K via the Berlin-Brandenburg Business Angel Club (fixed process) Team: Florian Burchett (Angel Investor) --- ## Freiraum Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/freiraum-ventures_ Sector-agnostic and super-early pre-seed, this fund likes to be the first investor in. It has a soft filter for university or academia-linked teams, such as university spin-outs, startups from university accelerators or incubation programs, tech based on an algorithm from a PhD or thesis, or co-founders who met at university. Portfolio companies receive hands-on coaching along with access to the SCE and university ecosystem. Geographically, it is DACH-first, but also covers the UK, Switzerland, and deals in France and the rest of the EU. Sector-agnostic, super-early pre-seed; likes to be the first investor in. Soft filter: a university/academia link (spin-out, accelerator/incubation, an algorithm from a PhD/thesis, or co-founders who met at university). Hands-on coaching plus the SCE / university ecosystem. DACH-first (also UK, Switzerland, deals in France). Munich-based, sector-agnostic, super-early pre-seed fund tied to the SCE / university ecosystem. Soft thesis filter: university/academia link (spin-out, accelerator/incubation, PhD/thesis-derived idea, or co-founders who met at university). Sectors: Generalist · Geography: DACH, Europe, UK Terms: Typical check: €50K–200K Team: Daniel Rasel (Investor) --- ## Fuel Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/fuel-ventures_ SEIS/EIS eligible companies in B2B software, vertical AI, and Fintech 2.0 with strong defensibility Sectors: Fintech, AI, B2B Software · Geography: UK Terms: Typical check: Up to £250k Team: Pierce Polak (SEIS Fund Team Member) --- ## Graduate Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/graduate-ventures_ Graduate Entrepreneur is a Rotterdam, Netherlands-based venture capital firm focusing on early-stage, sector-agnostic tech companies, including health, climate, digital, and deep tech across the Netherlands. The firm makes Pre-seed investments up to €75K and Seed to Series A investments up to €2M. It exclusively backs Netherlands-only companies and founders from TU Delft, Erasmus University, and WUR. Graduate Entrepreneur has raised €58M and completed 75+ investments. Graduate Entrepreneur is a Rotterdam, Netherlands-based venture capital firm focusing on early-stage companies. The firm invests in health, climate, digital, and deep tech across the Netherlands. Sectors: HealtTech, AI / Data Infrastructure, ClimateTech · Geography: Netherlands Terms: Typical check: €75K to €2M Team: Adriano Michieli (Investment Analyst) --- ## Hans(wo)men Group _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/hans-wo-men-group_ The Hansmann Group (Hansi Hansmann) is an evergreen Vienna family office operating as an “angel plus” investor positioned between traditional angel investing and VC. Investing at a super-early/very early stage (often the first check, with pre-product and pre-revenue companies accepted), the fund focuses on asset-light and highly scalable businesses. AI SaaS fits well and B2C is welcome, while deep tech and hardware are considered mostly as a follower. The fund's valuation sweet spot is around a €5M cap or pre-money, whereas valuations over ~€10M are a stretch. Geographically, it maintains an Austria-first approach (including Austrian links and neighboring regions), with Germany and the Netherlands in scope, though Germany is not its main focus. The family office is hands-on, assisting with legal needs, key early hires, and GTM strategy, taking 2–4 lead deals per year in Austria alongside writing follower checks for investments outside. Evergreen Vienna family office (Hansi Hansmann) investing as an “angel plus” (between angel + VC). Prefers asset-light, scalable businesses; AI SaaS fits; B2C welcome; deep tech/hardware mostly as follower. Very early stage (often first check; pre-product/pre-revenue ok) and hands-on (legal, first hires, GTM). Geography: Austria + neighbors / Austria link; Germany in scope (not focus). Valuation sweet spot ~€5M cap / pre-money; >~€10M is a stretch. Hans(wo)men Group is the Vienna family office of Austrian angel Hansi Hansmann. A 4-person team investing evergreen capital with no fund clock; typically very early-stage, hands-on, and asset-light/scalable focused. Sectors: Generalist, SaaS, AI · Geography: DACH, Europe Terms: Typical check: Varies; targets very early deals around ~€5M cap; above ~€10M cap a stretch (no explicit check size shared). Team: Andrei Podlesnyi (Investor) --- ## HTGF (High-Tech Gründerfonds) _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/htgf-high-tech-grunderfonds_ Germany's largest public-private pre-seed/seed fund has operated for roughly 21 years with over €2B+ AUM (Fund IV is ~€500M), boasting 780+ investments and ~200 exits. Focusing exclusively on B2B and B2G opportunities with no B2C investments (past B2C investments included Mister Spex and Emma), the fund aims to be the first institutional investor and is developing into a classical pre-seed lead, as seed is often too late. It provides an initial ticket of €500K-1.2M with a sweet spot of ~€0.9-1M, prefers to lead the first round, and offers multi-stage follow-on up to €30M, though it does not lead rounds after the initial one. Its investments are managed by three teams focusing on software and vertical AI infrastructure (Hanna's team), deep tech including space and defense (e.g., Proxima Fusion), and life sciences/biotech. Limited partners include the German State and major corporates or hidden champions like Deutsche Bank, DHL, and Bosch, which provide warm sales intros to decision-makers, assist with due diligence and reference calls, and have co-invested in and acquired portfolio companies. While its home turf is Germany (Berlin/Bonn/Munich), it invests across Europe but requires a network for non-DACH dealflow; it does not invest in the US or in Delaware Inc.s. Germany's largest public-private pre-seed/seed fund; ~21 yrs, ~€2B+ AUM (Fund IV ~€500M), 780+ investments, ~200 exits. Wants to be the FIRST institutional investor; developing into a classical pre-seed lead (seed often too late). Initial ticket €500K-1.2M (sweet spot ~€0.9-1M), prefers to LEAD the first round; multi-stage follow-on up to €30M (not lead after). Three teams: software / vertical-AI-infra (Hanna's), deep tech (space/defense, e.g. Proxima Fusion), and life sciences/biotech. B2B + B2G only, NO B2C (past: Mister Spex, Emma). LPs = German State + corporates/hidden champions (Deutsche Bank, DHL, Bosch) → warm sales intros to decision-makers, involved in DD/ref calls, have co-invested and acquired portfolio cos. Home turf Germany (Berlin/Bonn/Munich), invests across Europe (needs network for non-DACH dealflow); no US, cannot invest in Delaware Inc.s. Germany's largest public-private pre-seed/seed fund; ~21 years, €2B+ AUM (Fund IV ~€500M), 780+ investments and ~200 exits. Three teams: software / vertical-AI-infra, deep tech (space/defense, e.g. Proxima Fusion), and life sciences/biotech. Offices in Berlin, Bonn and Munich. LP base is the German State plus corporates (Deutsche Bank, DHL, Bosch). Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, SaaS, B2B, DeepTech, BioTech, ClimateTech · Geography: DACH, Europe Terms: Typical check: €500K-1.2M initial (sweet spot ~€0.9-1M); leads first round; follow-on up to €30M Team: Hanna Sasse (Investment Manager) --- ## Inveo Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/inveo-ventures_ Inveo Ventures is the CVC arm of Inveo Yatırım Holding & Gedik Yatırım, focusing on early-stage to growth-stage tech startups (seed–Series A). Its investment focus includes FinTech, B2B SaaS, AI, Cybersecurity, and Digital Banking. CVC arm of Inveo Yatırım Holding & Gedik Yatırım. Early to growth-stage tech startups in Turkey. Focus on FinTech, B2B SaaS, AI, Cybersecurity, Digital Banking. Corporate VC of Inveo Holding and Gedik Yatırım. Backing early-stage tech founders with clear traction, ready to scale globally. Sectors: Fintech, SaaS, AI / Data Infrastructure, Cyber Security · Geography: Turkey, Global Terms: Typical check: $200K–$2M (Seed & Series A) Team: Dicle Özcan (Associate) --- ## Laton _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/laton_ Pre-seed & seed gaming and apps globally. $50M fund. Backed by 40+ gaming industry veterans. Provides hands-on operational support (UA, game design, analytics, monetization, and HR) alongside capital. Invests globally in pre-seed and seed stage gaming and non-gaming app companies. No Web3/crypto. Gaming and apps focused VC backed by 35+ gaming industry veterans. Invests globally in pre-seed and seed stage gaming and non-gaming app companies. Provides hands-on operational support in game design, UA, monetization, and HR alongside capital. Gaming and apps-focused fund backed by 35+ industry veterans including Supercell. Early-stage checks for studios building the next global hits. Sectors: Gaming · Geography: Netherlands, Turkey, Global Terms: Typical check: $500K–$3M (pre-seed & seed) Team: Volkan Özen (Principal) --- ## Ludus _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/ludus_ Pre-seed & seed gaming, game tech & emerging categories, including mobile gaming studios, AR/VR, and AI gaming applications. $200K–$2M tickets. Global focus (Turkey, US, SEA), aiming to be the best first institutional check for game studios worldwide. Leading early-stage gaming-focused VC based in Turkey across 2 funds ($60M+ AUM, previously $50M+ AUM). Often leads rounds, offering deep mobile gaming expertise + operational support. Leading early-stage gaming-focused VC based in Turkey with $50M+ AUM. Invests globally in mobile gaming studios, game tech, AR/VR, and AI gaming applications at pre-seed and seed stage ($200K–$2M). Aims to be the best first institutional check for game studios worldwide. Gaming-first venture studio and fund. First-check investors in tomorrow's game changers, from Istanbul to the rest of the world. Sectors: Gaming · Geography: Turkey, US, Asia Pasific, Global Terms: Typical check: $200K–$2M Team: Görkem Utku Yıldız (Associate) --- ## Lumo Labs _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/lumo-labs_ LUMO Labs BV is an Eindhoven, Netherlands venture firm with a €100M fund that focuses on pre-seed & seed impact digital deeptech, targeting innovative, tech-enabled companies in AI/Data, IoT, Blockchain, XR (including Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality), Digital Security, and robotics. The fund is SDG-aligned, focusing on Health, Education, Sustainable Cities, and Climate. Its primary geographic focus is the Benelux (including the Netherlands) and Germany, with a secondary focus on the Nordics, Baltics, Iberia, and the US. LUMO Labs BV is an Eindhoven, Netherlands venture firm that focuses on Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, robotics, IoT, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality innovative, tech-enabled companies in the Netherlands, and the US. Impact-driven multi-stage VC (pre-seed through Series A) investing in emerging technologies such as AI/Data, digital security, IoT, blockchain, and AR/VR. Focused on UN SDG-aligned themes including health & wellbeing, quality education, sustainable cities/communities, and climate action. Sectors: HealtTech, ClimateTech, AI / Data Infrastructure, DeepTech · Geography: Europe Terms: Typical check: $500k to $3M Team: Kuzey Caliskan (Investment Analyst) --- ## LVP _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/lvp_ A gaming-focused VC investing exclusively across the games ecosystem, including studios, content, tech, platforms, and services. The firm invests globally, targeting pre-seed to late seed opportunities with its sweet spot in seed funding. They back founders and operators with deep games expertise and provide hands-on operator support. Gaming-focused VC investing exclusively across the games ecosystem (studios, content, tech, platforms, services). Backing founders/operators with deep games expertise; hands-on operator support. London-based seed fund investing only in games. Operating experts behind Supercell, Unity, Playfish, Peak and NaturalMotion. Sectors: Gaming · Geography: UK, Europe, Global Terms: Typical check: $500K–$1.5M (often first institutional check ~$100K–$500K) Team: Orin Chapman (VC Analyst) --- ## Maxis _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/maxis_ Private equity and venture arm of İşbank (Maxis Girisim Sermayesi PYS) managing 8+ VC funds with various focuses. It invests in technology-oriented startups as a minority shareholder with investments starting at $100K+, featuring a sweet spot of $100–500K in pre-Series A rounds. Geographically targeting the USA, Europe & Middle East, it prioritizes fintech and value-creation opportunities, focusing on steady cash flow, operating profit growth, and healthy scaling. Private equity and venture arm of İşbank (Maxis Girisim Sermayesi PYS). Invests in technology-oriented startups as a minority shareholder ($100K+), prioritizing fintech and value-creation opportunities. Focuses on steady cash flow, operating profit growth, and healthy scaling. İşbank Group's VC platform. Running multiple funds across early-stage Turkish tech, with a focus on impact, green finance and women-founded ventures. Sectors: Generalist · Geography: US, Europe, Global Terms: Typical check: $100K–$500K Team: Ali Tunçgenç (Associate), Oktay Azbazdar (Venture Capitalist) --- ## NAP _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/nap_ Investing at the pre-seed and seed level, this fund is Europe-centric with deep roots in the DACH region. Their core thesis centers on backing early-stage European founders who are building B2B software, enterprise tech, productivity tools, and vertical software solutions to solve complex, real-world problems, often transforming old-school or traditional sectors. They invest strictly in B2B only (no B2C) and favor expert founders modernizing a specific industry over generalists, prioritizing businesses that show consistency, capital efficiency, and massive operational impact over hype. They target ~10–15% ownership, remaining flexible when working with co-investors. Geographically, they invest across Europe—including the UK, Ireland, the DACH region, the Nordics, Italy, and parts of Eastern Europe—but they cannot invest in Turkey. Their core thesis centers on backing early-stage European founders who are building software and digital solutions to solve complex, real-world problems often transforming old-school or traditional sectors. They focus on businesses that are consistent favoring capital efficiency and massive operational impact over hype. B2B only (no B2C); targets ~10–15% ownership (flexible with co-investors); backs expert founders modernizing a specific industry over generalists. Invests across Europe (UK, Ireland, DACH, Nordics, Italy, some Eastern Europe) but cannot invest in Turkey. NAP is a European early-stage venture capital firm backing “boringly consistent” founders building software that drives outsized operational impact. The team invests pre-seed and seed across Europe, with strong roots in the DACH region. Focus areas include B2B/enterprise software, vertical SaaS, fintech, and AI/data infrastructure. Sectors: Fintech, SaaS, AI / Data Infrastructure · Geography: Europe, DACH Terms: Typical check: €1–3M initial investment, plus follow-on Team: Mey Cezairli (Partner) --- ## OXX _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/oxx_ Invests in B2B AI and software scaleups across Europe. Oxxo Capital (spun out from Oxxo Capital / Oxxo-related team) is a European VC firm with team members based in Stockholm and London. They invest in B2B software and AI, focusing on scaleup stage / Series A onwards, with a concentrated portfolio of 10 to 12 investments per fund. Sectors: B2B, AI, Software · Geography: Europe, Turkey, Poland, France, Germany, Sweden Terms: Typical check: $5M - $10M initial check size ($5M - $25M rounds) Team: Gökçe Ceylan --- ## Paladin _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/paladin_ Invests in technologies that promote and make more resilient critical infrastructure. Paladin is a Washington, D.C.-based multi-stage venture capital firm founded in 2001 after 9/11. It focuses on investing in technologies that make critical infrastructure and society more resilient, particularly covering cybersecurity, software and AI infrastructure, biotech, and deep tech. Sectors: Cybersecurity, Software infrastructure, Biotech, Deep tech, infrastructure, defense tech · Geography: Turkey, Europe, Australia, US Terms: Typical check: Typically $3 million to $20 million, though they can go as low as $1 million for early stages. Team: Alexander Krespi --- ## Paribu Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/paribu-ventures_ Paribu Ventures is the corporate venture capital (CVC) arm of Paribu, Turkey’s leading crypto exchange with over 5 million users. Focusing on decentralized technology with a global scope, it invests in founders with a global, game-changing vision across the blockchain, cryptocurrency, Web3, DeFi, NFT, infrastructure, gaming, and fintech ecosystems. Invests in founders with global, game-changing vision in blockchain, cryptocurrency, Web3 and fintech ecosystems. Sectors: Fintech, Crypto, Web3, Blockchain, DeFi, Gaming Terms: Typical check: $200K–$2M Team: Erman Taylan (Principal) --- ## Pembroke _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/pembroke_ Seed to Series A investor in consumer, business services, and tech with domain-expert founders. Pembroke is a UK-based VCT setup in 2013 with about £280 million in assets under management. It is a seed to Series A investor focusing on consumer, business services, and technology. Sectors: Consumer, Business Services, Technology · Geography: United Kingdom Terms: Typical check: Typical initial cheque: roughly £1m to £4m. Team: Elizabeth Lazell (Investment Director), Hugo Adams --- ## Plug & Play nl _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/plug-play-nl_ We invest at the early-stage as a generalist across many vertical programs and most industries, including Fintech, Insurtech, Internet of Things, Brand & Retail, Mobility, New Materials & Packaging, Sustainability, Energy, Food & Beverage, Travel & Hospitality, Health & Wellness, and Supply Chain & Logistics. Our approach is driven by a corporate partner ecosystem. We invest at early-stage across most industries: Fintech, Insurtech, Internet of Things, Brand & Retail, Mobility, New Materials & Packaging, Sustainability, Food & Beverage, Travel & Hospitality, Health & Wellness, and Supply Chain & Logistics. Sectors: Generalist · Geography: Europe Terms: Typical check: $50k to $400k Team: Alexis Massonnet (VC Analyst), Federico Gandini (Senior Associate) --- ## Plug & Play tr _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/plug-play-tr_ A Silicon Valley-backed accelerator and VC that connects innovative startups with leading Turkish corporates. It operates as a sector-agnostic generalist across many vertical programs—including fintech, insurtech, health, supply chain, and more—with a specific focus on AI, IoT, Mobility, Energy, and Digital Innovation. Silicon Valley-backed accelerator & VC connecting innovative startups with leading Turkish corporates. Sector-agnostic with focus on AI, IoT, Mobility, Energy, and Digital Innovation. Silicon Valley's global innovation platform in Istanbul. Accelerators and deal flow connecting Turkish founders to 400+ corporate partners worldwide. Sectors: Generalist · Geography: Turkey, Global Terms: Typical check: $50k–$400k Team: Ceren Civlan (Associate), Emrecan Kerçek (Investor) --- ## Revo _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/revo_ Focusing on early-stage B2B and B2C tech investments in Turkey, Eastern Europe, and the Baltics, the fund utilizes a "Global HQ + Turkish R&D" model. Its sector focus spans Vertical AI & B2B SaaS, B2B cloud, big data/AI, commerce enablers, cybersecurity, energy, fintech, gaming, and health IT/HealthTech. The fund's track record includes 2 unicorns and over 17 exits. Early-stage B2B/B2C tech in Turkey, Eastern Europe & Baltics. "Global HQ + Turkish R&D" model. Focus on FinTech, SaaS, Cybersecurity, AI, HealthTech, Gaming. 2 unicorns, 17+ exits. Türkiye's largest VC. Backing early-stage B2B and B2C tech founders from Türkiye, CEE and the Baltics, building category leaders with global reach. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, SaaS, Fintech, Cyber Security, Smart Energy, Gaming · Geography: Turkey, CEE, Europe Terms: Typical check: $250k–$500k for early-stage. Team: Deniz Aslandoğan (Partner), Derin Erçelebi (VC Analyst), Orkun İpek (AI/ML Head), Sarp Can Bayrakdar (Investor) --- ## ROM InWest _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/rom-inwest_ Invests in Late Seed and Series A (€300K–5M) North Holland and Amsterdam region game changers. The fund targets companies accelerating the food and agri transition, energy transition, life sciences, healthcare transition, circularity and circular economy, labour efficiency enablers, and digitalisation. Investments range from hardware to software, with deep tech preferred. Invests in North Holland game changers accelerating food transition, energy transition, healthcare transition, digitalisation and/or circular economy. Sectors: ClimateTech, Smart Energy, HealtTech, Sustainability, AgriTech · Geography: Netherlands Terms: Typical check: €300k–€5M Team: Mick Valentin (Jr. Investment Manager) --- ## Sand River _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/sand-river_ Invests in early-stage pre-seed and seed companies that value, protect, and restore nature with venture returns. Sand River is an investment firm that has been running for about three and a half years, founded by Ed and Greg, with Gabbi Barker on the team. They focus on investing in companies that value, protect, and restore nature, aiming for standard venture capital returns. Sectors: Nature, Impact, Climate Tech · Geography: Europe, UK, US Terms: Typical check: $250K to $500K Team: Gabbi Barker --- ## ScaleX _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/scalex_ This early-stage investor backs exceptional founders building category-defining tech companies, focusing on Seed to Series A investments ranging from €300K to €3M. Target sectors include B2B SaaS, AI, Cybersecurity, FinTech, and Robotics, primarily across Turkey & Eastern Europe (the “Turkish Nexus”). The high-conviction fund emphasizes disciplined, long-term alignment and global execution, while providing hands-on mentorship and GTM support through its dedicated Founders’ Hub program. Early-stage investor backing exceptional founders building category-defining tech companies; emphasizes disciplined, long-term alignment and global execution. Sectors: SaaS, DeepTech, AI / Data Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Fintech Terms: Typical check: $250k–$1.5M Team: Orçun Doğmazer (Associate), Şafak Tüfekçi (Principal) --- ## VP Capital _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/vp-capital_ VP Participaties is an impact-focused investment company that provides pre-seed, seed, Series A, growth financing, and buyout investments. It focuses on companies in the Netherlands and Belgium within the AgriFood, agriculture, food, technology, leisure, Built Environment, Textile, and Water industries. The firm works together with its portfolio companies to maximize growth and add value. VP Participaties strictly focuses its investments on six types of solutions: biobased, regenerative, toxicity-free, circular, net zero, and inclusive, only considering ventures that enable or directly contribute to one or more of these solutions. VP Participaties is a investment company that provides growth financing and makes buyout investments in companies in the agriculture, food, technology, and leisure industry. The firm works together with their portfolio companies to maximize growth and add value. Sectors: AgriTech, Sustainability, Smart Energy · Geography: Netherlands, Belgium Terms: Typical check: €50K-1M Team: Erica van Eeghen (Senior Manager Ventures) --- ## SIVentures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/siventures_ Founded in 2019 and based in Leipzig (1h from Berlin), this early-stage B2B fund was formerly known as Smart Infrastructure Ventures. Currently in the final stages of closing its new fund (Fund II) at EUR 30M, Fund I achieved a large exit after 2 years, placing it in the top 5% in Europe for its vintage. The fund always seeks a strong tech angle, focusing on IT/software infrastructure, energy, and enterprise software with an AI angle. It aims to be the most active investor on the cap table, taking board seats and remaining active post-investment. Flexible in structure, it can lead, co-lead, or follow. It creates its own SPVs for pro-rata rights and never invests in an SPV as an initial investment, though its LPA is open and flexible regarding Prompt's co-invest model. With ~10 investments last year, the generalist team of ~10 is supported by sector experts who help select and support portfolio companies. Decision-makers hold a high own-money share of ~10%, with corporates and successful entrepreneurs forming the majority LP base. Deal flow is heavily data-driven and mainly outbound from its network (~3,500 deals reviewed last year, with little inbound). Early-stage B2B fund, always wants a strong tech angle. Aims to be the most active investor on the cap table. Lead, co-lead or follow, very flexible. Focus: IT / software infrastructure, energy, enterprise software with an AI angle. Generalist team backed by a network of sector experts who help select and support portfolio companies. Active post-investment, takes board seats. Co-founded 2019 by Dirk Frohnert (CFA, ex-JPMorgan fund manager in London, early Revolut angel) and a friend of ~25 years. Based in Leipzig. Sectors: B2B, SaaS, AI, Smart Energy · Geography: DACH, Europe Terms: Typical check: EUR 500K-700K initial, up to EUR 2.5M Team: Dirk Frohnert (Managing Partner) --- ## Smarter Ventures _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/smarter-ventures_ We are investing in the new digital revolution and early-stage AI & Web3 B2B software with proven, business-critical use cases. AI is transforming the world and offers unique opportunities, moving at lightning speed while still only at the beginning. Just like in the early days of the Internet, the big wave is still to come, creating smart applications in all types of businesses and fields that make the world a little better. Based in Breda, Netherlands, this evergreen fund was founded by operators. Its focus industries include Financial & Professional Services, Food, and Manufacturing. We are investing in the new digital revolution. AI is transforming the world and offers unique opportunities. The development of the technology is moving at lightning speed. Yet, we are only at the beginning. Just like in the early days of the Internet, the big wave is still to come. With smart applications in all types of businesses and fields. That make the world a little better. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, AgriTech, Fintech, B2B · Geography: Netherlands Terms: Typical check: €250K–€1M Team: Kristian de Lange (Board Member) --- ## Spotlight Invest _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/spotlight-invest_ We are an angel collective and €2M RVO-backed seed fund that identifies and invests early in world-class, founder-first teams developing solutions that change the world for the better. Operating with a quick decision-making process, we focus on (pre-)seed stage opportunities primarily in the Netherlands across Climate Tech (including carbon, agritech, and green fintech), EdTech, and HealthTech. We identify and invest early in world-class founders developing solutions that change the world for the better. Sectors: ClimateTech, HealtTech, EdTech · Geography: Netherlands Terms: Typical check: €50k to €250k. Team: Derk Lutgert (Investor) --- ## Startupfon _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/startupfon_ This hybrid venture capital fund and co-investment platform invests in Pre-seed, Seed, and Growth-stage technology ventures, targeting industry agnostic early-stage startups as well as growth-stage businesses. The fund focuses on startups with Turkish founders or ventures primarily from Turkey with global market aspirations. It has a strong interest in AI and mobile gaming, while also concentrating on high-impact sectors such as Fintech, B2B SaaS, and Industry 4.0. Invests Pre-seed, Seed, and Growth-stage technology ventures primarily from Turkey with global market aspirations, focusing on high-impact sectors such as Fintech, AI, B2B SaaS, and Industry 4.0. Hybrid venture capital fund and co-investment platform. Türkiye's first co-investment platform and VC. Backing early-stage founders across B2B, Industry 4.0, Web3-AI and fintech. Sectors: B2B, Fintech, AI / Data Infrastructure, Web3, Gaming · Geography: DACH, Europe, US Terms: Typical check: $75K-$200K Team: Ayse, Elif Arslan (VC Analyst) --- ## SVV _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/svv_ Early-stage (pre-seed, seed, and sometimes stealth) B2B enterprise AI software companies. They have the capacity to lead, co-lead, co-invest, or provide follow-on capital. They invest at the top end of the application layer as well as deep down the stack (AI infrastructure, orchestration, security, governance, dev tooling). SVV is a GPLP firm that invests in early-stage, AI-native software companies. The founder- and operator-led team manages three funds and deploys from a UK fund (~£80 million) and an Irish fund, backed primarily by governmental investors alongside private investors. Sectors: AI, Software, B2B enterprise AI software · Geography: UK, Ireland Terms: Typical check: In the UK, initial checks typically range from £500k to £1M, with the ability to invest up to £1.5M. Team: George Mensah (Principal), Jay Kim (Investor) --- ## Tibas _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/tibas_ The global CVC arm of İşbank, which is Turkey's largest private bank, is a sector-agnostic, evergreen fund backing next-generation global tech companies and startups from seed to growth. Global CVC arm of İşbank (Turkey's largest private bank). Sector-agnostic, evergreen fund investing in early-stage global tech startups from seed to growth. İşbank's global VC arm. Sector-agnostic evergreen fund backing next-gen tech founders from seed to Series A across Europe and the US. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, Fintech, SaaS · Geography: Turkey, Europe, Global Terms: Typical check: $250K–$1M (sweet spot ~$500K) Team: Ece Sarica (Associate) --- ## Tunç Yalgın _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/tunc-yalgin_ Serial entrepreneur & angel investor (Pre-Seed/Seed). Focus on AI, community-driven apps, digital transformation & gaming. Portfolio: Gram Games, Sopsy, Zet.com, DriveYoyo ve diğerleri. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure, Gaming Terms: Typical check: $25K–$100K (angel) Team: Tunç Yalgın (Angel Investor) --- ## Vinci Venture Capital _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/vinci-venture-capital_ Early-stage European industrial tech venture capital focusing on Seed to Series A investments (€100K–€700K). Backed by İnci Holding, the fund targets Turkey and Europe across key sectors: Logistics/Supply Chain, Energy Management & Storage, Automotive/Mobility, and Industry 4.0, which encompasses AI, AR/VR, robotics, additive manufacturing, cybersecurity, and related technologies. Early-stage European industrial tech: energy management & storage, mobility/automotive, logistics/supply chain, and Industry 4.0 (AI, robotics, additive manufacturing, cybersecurity, etc.). Sectors: DeepTech, Smart Energy, AI / Data Infrastructure, Cyber Security · Geography: DACH Terms: Typical check: $100k–$700k Team: Aylin Girgin Ozbilis (Investment Director), Yavuzcan Eroglu (Investment Manager) --- ## Volve Capital _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/volve-capital_ Volve Capital is a Netherlands-based venture capital firm that invests in pre-seed "day-zero" and early-stage enterprise companies with a focus on SaaS, B2B, deep tech, tech, and B2B2C products or platforms in Western Europe, specifically Benelux and DACH. Managing the €9M Fund I, it invests €150K–€500K with up to €1M in follow-on funding, and leads pre-product/pre-revenue rounds. The firm is founder-led and provides hands-on operational support covering technology, go-to-market (GTM), and operations. Volve Capital is a Netherlands-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage enterprise companies with a focus on SaaS, B2B, and B2B2C products or platforms in Western Europe. Sectors: B2B, Smart Energy, SaaS, AI / Data Infrastructure · Geography: DACH Terms: Typical check: €150K–€500K (up to €1M follow-on) Team: Joost Bijlsma (Founder) --- ## Wenvest Capital _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/wenvest-capital_ Established about six years ago with a team in Munich consisting of a partner, one investment manager, and one intern, the firm provides patient, long-term capital from day zero to meaningful scale. It invests in early-stage pre-seed and seed B2B software and SaaS companies, specifically in the DACH region, with sector tilts toward digital transformation, digital health, and climate solutions. The firm acts as a lead or co-lead and a collaborative co-investor, holding about 25 portfolio companies. It generally avoids the US market, though a German team structured with a US Inc is considerable, and it is not keen on SPVs. The fund is backed by a single LP—Christophe's partner, who is tied to a family office that invests in funds globally under a separate brand. Early-stage B2B software / SaaS. Sector tilts: digital transformation, digital health, climate solutions. Patient, long-term capital, day zero to meaningful scale. Lead or co-lead, collaborative co-investor. Munich-based early-stage VC, "invest early, stay late." Co-founders Christophe Aumaitre and Bernd Wendeln. Christophe is an operator-dealmaker: ESCP, ex-M&A at ProSiebenSat.1, growth at Jochen Schweizer. Sectors: B2B, SaaS, HealtTech, ClimateTech · Geography: DACH, Europe Terms: Typical check: EUR 300K to 1M (pre-seed and seed) Team: Christophe Aumaitre (Partner), Tom Orben (Venture Capitalist) --- ## Yapay Zeka Fabrikası _Raising · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/yapay-zeka-fabrikasi_ Turkey's first AI-focused CVC (İşbank group) supports AI/ML startups with global ambitions. The fund backs founders with $500K+ initial investments, corporate collaboration and PoC opportunities via the İş Bankası ecosystem, and founder-focused mentorship. Turkey's first AI-focused CVC (İşbank group). Backs AI startups with global ambitions via $500K+ initial investments, PoC opportunities with İşbank, and founder-focused mentorship. İşbank's AI startup factory. CVC and acceleration program for daring AI founders with global ambitions, from Türkiye and beyond. Sectors: AI / Data Infrastructure · Geography: Turkey Terms: Typical check: $500k+ Team: Yasemin Tavlaşoğlu (Principal) --- ## Atlas Climate Fund _Raising · London, UK · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/atlas-climate_ Capital for the hard tech that decarbonizes heavy industry. The largest emitters are the hardest to abate. That difficulty is the moat. We fund teams turning lab breakthroughs into bankable infrastructure. Atlas invests in deep-tech companies attacking industrial emissions — cement, steel, chemicals, and grid. We write conviction checks and support first-of-a-kind deployments. Stage: Series A, Series B, Growth · Sectors: Climate, Deep Tech, Energy · Geography: Europe, North America, Global Terms: Fund size $300M; Min $1M; Check $2M – $15M; Mgmt fee 2.5%; Carry 20%; Vintage 2021; Fund term: 12 years; First close: Q4 2026; Structure: Luxembourg SCSp Team: Dr. Elena Fischer (Founding Partner), Marcus Reed (Partner) Verification: Verified by Prompt --- ## Northstar Growth Partners _Investing · Dubai, UAE · https://www.promptsessions.com/funds/northstar-growth_ Growth equity for profitable, founder-led software companies. Efficient growth beats growth at all costs. We back durable software companies with real revenue and real margins. Northstar partners with bootstrapped and lightly-funded software businesses at the inflection point — helping them scale go-to-market without losing the discipline that got them there. Stage: Growth, Series B, Series C · Sectors: SaaS, Vertical Software, Marketplaces · Geography: MENA, Europe Terms: Fund size $500M; Min $5M; Check $10M – $60M; Mgmt fee 2%; Carry 20%; Vintage 2017; Fund term: 10 years; Ownership target: 15–30%; Board: Seat or observer Team: Faisal Al-Rashid (Managing Partner), Priya Menon (Partner) Verification: Verified by Prompt, Confirmed by fund