Dev Iyer

Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation

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We invest at Pre-VC and Pre-Seed, and then help our founders find a Seed round when they're ready. Here are 27 Seed investors that we *know* are active right now. Blue Moon Bonfire Ventures Chingona Ventures Flying Fish Partners Foothill Ventures Great North Ventures ground game HealthX Ventures InsurTech Venture Partners KCRise Fund Las Olas Venture Capital Leva Capital Maven Ventures Monte Carlo Capital Moonshots Capital OneSixOne Ventures Oval Park Capital Pixel Perfect Ventures Range Ventures Revolution SNAK Venture Partners Startup Capital Ventures Supernode Global Susa Ventures Trilogy Equity Partners True Ventures True Wealth Ventures

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If you are building in Climate, definitely join this session with Yvonne Chen to learn more about non-dilutive funding opportunities!

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Hot take: lot's of #LP's are growing underwhelmed with traditional venture investing. 💰 Fees are high given the level of engagement with the company operators. ❓ Access is opaque - LP's are unclear on the portco operations and outcomes. Outcomes are scattered - power law investing can certainly work, but many feel that venture capital investing is just a numbers game. There's another way. I'm biased, but I think it's better: #VentureStudios as an asset class. They blend: 🤜 🤛 Control and ownership 💡 Thematic focus 👬 Partnership with operators Studios offer a fund-like structure — but with more alignment, higher value conversion and less noise. If you're interested in understanding more about the studio model, we have resources to share. Please reach out and let's connect!

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Seed fundraising hasn’t gotten easier. After reviewing thousands of early-stage companies, one pattern is obvious: most founders don’t fail at seed fundraising because their idea is weak — they fail because they misunderstand how seed rounds actually get done. 👉 That’s why we put together the LvlUp Ventures Guide to Seed Fundraising. It’s not a hype piece. It’s the exact mental model we see strong founders use when they raise efficiently and get back to building. Some of the core takeaways: 🔹 Raise when you have momentum you can explain, not just a polished deck 🔹 Size your round to buy 12–18 months of real progress — not optionality theater 🔹 SAFEs and notes are tools, not shortcuts; understand how they compound dilution 🔹 One committed investor changes everything — momentum beats perfection 🔹 Speed and clarity matter more than squeezing every last point of valuation 🔹 The goal isn’t “winning the round” — it’s setting up the next phase of the company This is the guide we wish more founders read before starting outreach — not halfway through a messy raise. 👇 Question for founders raising right now: What’s been hardest for you — getting in touch with investors, structuring the round, or keeping momentum once conversations start? 👇Want the Full LvlUp Ventures Guide to Seed Fundraising? 👍 Like this Post 💬 Comment “Fundraising” ✅ I’ll DM you the guide and share next steps to get reviewed by LvlUp’s Investment Committee and our 25+ VC partners. #Fundraising #VC #Startup #Seed #EarlyStage #VentureCapital #StartupFounders #Founders #RaisingCapital #Startups #SaaS #Tech #CPG #B2B #Entrepreneurship #BuildInPublic #FundraisingTips #VCInsights

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💥 Metropolis Technologies Raises $𝟭.𝟲𝗕 💥 Funding comes in 2 rounds: $500M equity round led by LionTree and $1.1B from J.P. Morgan. Metropolis is now 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 $𝟱𝗕. With the fresh funding, the plan is to take their "recognition and payment-automation" tech beyond parking assets. This would include retail stores, drive-throughs, gas stations, hotels and partnerships with real estate/asset owner. Congrats to Alex Israel, Peter Fisher, Courtney Fukuda, Travis Kell, Ryan Hunt,Chris Sherman, Robert Bland, Paul Rooney, Lookman Olusanya and the rest of the Metropolis family. #fundraise #parkinginvestment #parking #parkingindustry #metropolois Parking Today Media Parking Network B.V. National Parking Association International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI) Tim Maloney Advisory Tim Maloney Reservations Lab

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PSA to seed and early-stage founders: stop worrying about competition. I’ve spoken to hundreds of late-stage founders, and they all say the same thing. The biggest mistake they see at the early stage is founders obsessing over who else is in their space. When you are pre-PMF, comparing yourself to other buzzy AI startups is a distraction. They already have a defined GTM motion, some level of product-market fit, and a playbook to execute. Their “big new feature” might just be about expanding revenue or building parity. You’re still trying to land your first 10 paying customers. Here’s the truth: 1. Worry about competitors only when you actively lose a deal to them. THESE ARE THE COMPETITORS TO WORRY ABOUT. 2. When a customer chooses someone else, they will usually tell you why. Nine times out of ten it’s not the reason you think. It’s rarely a missing feature. More often it’s pricing, brand trust, or timing. 3. Competitors often move in completely different directions. OpenAI went after consumers, while Anthropic leaned into enterprise and APIs. Playbooks diverge fast. 4. The only real roadmap at the early stage is customer pain. Every conversation, every demo, every user insight. Talk to as many customers as possible. If you spend your time trying to copy what competitors are doing, you will always be a step behind. If you spend your time talking to users, you’ll know exactly what to build next. The path to PMF isn’t found on Twitter threads about “AI competitors.” It’s found in the feedback from the 5 people actually using your product every single day.

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The YC W26 batch is settling into rhythm, and week by week, the direction of this cohort is becoming clearer. As always, Y Combinator selection process acts as a powerful market filter: thousands of applications distilled into a small group of founders whose focus often hints at what’s coming next. This week’s launches suggest a batch leaning into complexity, regulation, and the real-world systems that actually keep the economy running. What stood out: 🧬 Healthcare & life sciences are gaining momentum Companies like Ruma Care, Rhizome AI, and Strand AI reflect renewed founder interest in regulated healthcare, biotech, and life-science workflows. From prior authorization and regulatory intelligence to biological datasets and financial crime prevention, these teams are tackling high-stakes problems where accuracy and trust matter deeply. 🏭 Manufacturing, logistics, and the physical world are being supercharged by AI Startups including Kyten Technologies, Servo7, Inviscid AI, and Pollinate are applying AI to atoms — battery manufacturing, adaptive warehouse robotics, building and data-center optimization, and ERP-layered supply chains. This is practical AI, focused on efficiency and resilience. 🏢 Enterprise operations continue their AI-native rebuild General Legal, FullSeam, Oximy, Orthogonal, Librar Labs, and Booko are rethinking legal services, finance ops, AI governance, API infrastructure, inventory management, and dynamic pricing. Less dashboard-watching. More execution. Taken together, this feels like a turning point. Early-January experimentation is giving way to conviction — companies built for regulated environments, physical infrastructure, and enterprise-scale execution. This week’s Fund Manager Picks: 🔹 Rhizome AI — Always know what the FDA thinks Citation-backed, hallucination-free regulatory intelligence for life sciences. Already generating six-figure revenue and becoming indispensable for regulatory affairs teams. 🔹 Inviscid AI — Real-time building simulations Physics-informed AI and digital twins that optimize energy use, HVAC efficiency, and air quality — pushing building management beyond rule-based systems. 🔹 General Legal — The AI-native law firm Flat-fee, high-quality contract drafting and negotiation for growth-stage companies. Contracts in hours, not days. 🔹 Servo7 — Autonomous warehouse robots Flexible, learning-based robotics that adapt as warehouse needs change — increasing value over time rather than becoming obsolete. 🔹 Booko — Dynamic pricing for service businesses Bringing marketplace-style pricing to appointment-based services, unlocking ~20% revenue uplift by monetizing perishable time slots. More to come — but this week’s launches made one thing clear: YC W26 founders are building for the hard, regulated, and deeply operational parts of the economy. And that’s where things get interesting. https://lnkd.in/edAyRgRk

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Monochrome Capital is proud to be investing alongside Slow Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, and Jim Messina in Ando - a significant increase in our stake following the initial pre-seed check we wrote to help get the business off the ground in 2024. I’ve spent a significant portion of my career in the "pre-AI" era of logistics digitization - from the early days of Uber to working closely with Paul Wellons at Jyve. While we solved massive problems back then, the frontline workforce was often left behind by the technology meant to manage them. Having seen Paul’s leadership firsthand at Jyve, we knew early on that he was the right person to tackle the 'last broken supply chain': labor. What is Ando? They are building the world’s first AI infrastructure for the global hourly workforce. By using high-accuracy demand forecasting and intelligent staffing tools, they match the right people to the right shifts at the right time - turning a chaotic scheduling process into a precise, stable system. As our industry moves toward an AI-driven future, I am especially focused on what happens to blue-collar and hourly workers. I’ve always believed a "win/win" is possible where optimization for the employer also means better, more predictable lives for the workers. Paul is charting that course responsibly, and I believe Ando will lead to better outcomes for everyone involved than a world without it. Excited to continue our partnership with this additional financing! #FutureOfWork #AI #Logistics #HourlyWorkforce #ResponsibleAI #VentureCapital

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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One of the reasons early-stage fundraising feels inefficient is that founders are forced to figure out investor fit through trial and error. Different investors back different stages, sectors, and levels of traction. And when that alignment is off, conversations either stall quickly or never really get off the ground. This is one of the pain points that we’re focused on closing at ThatRound. We help founders see which investors actually make sense for their business before they start applying for funding. Fundraising works best when alignment comes first, and this review shows how we’re simplifying the process for UK founders.

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🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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2026 federal funding update for ecosystem builders A week ago I wrote about where federal innovation funding stands for 2026. Here's what's changed in 7 days: What's now signed into law: The Commerce, Justice, and Science bill passed the Senate 82-15 on January 15 and is headed to the president's desk. This locks in: NSF → $8.75 billion (with protection against disproportionate cuts to any directorate) → Regional Innovation Engines: Up to $200 million EDA → Tech Hubs: $41 million → Build to Scale: $50 million → MEP: $175 million What passed the House, awaiting Senate action: The Financial Services bill passed 341-79 on January 14, confirming: SBA → Entrepreneurial development: $330 million (Congress rejected the proposed cut to $150M) → Regional Innovation Clusters: $9M → Federal and State Technology Partnership (FAST): $9M → Growth Accelerator Fund Competition: $9M What's still in flux: Leaders just released a final bipartisan package for Defense, Homeland Security, Labor-HHS-Education, and Transportation-HUD. The House may vote this week, with the January 30, 2026 deadline approaching. SBIR/STTR authorization remains expired. No new solicitations until reauthorization—though there's been some movement here. There's also a bunch of new AI policy I need to dig into still. The bottom line hasn't changed: You cannot build a 10-year innovation ecosystem on annual appropriations battles. The regions that succeed are strengthening their partnership infrastructure now, and leveraging federal funding as a bonus to accelerate outcomes. See the full analysis: https://lnkd.in/euDxDVkZ

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Excited to announce Verdi’s $6.5M CAD ($4.7M USD) oversubscribed seed round, led by SVG Ventures | THRIVE. When we started Verdi, it felt like a crazy idea — could a small team really modernize the massive, decades-old systems that power global agriculture? Today, we’re seeing it happen. From local family farms all the way to the world’s largest food brands, Verdi’s technology is being used to automate irrigation and farm operations. We’re changing the way agriculture works. It’s surreal to walk into the grocery store and SEE the food our technology is helping farmers produce on store shelves. With this round, I’m thrilled to welcome NEC X Inc., Elemental Impact, Ponderosa Ventures, and other strategic partners to our mission. Their investment will help us scale Verdi’s impact to the next order of magnitude of farmland. All of this wouldn’t have been possible without our world-class team. Building in the physical world is incredibly challenging, and I’m so proud of the impact we’ve created. We’re just getting started. #agtech #climatetech #startup

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Three years ago, we launched Wisdom Ventures with a clear intention to support founders building at the intersection of well-being, human connection, and transformative tech. Since then, we’ve made 37 investments from our oversubscribed "minimum viable" $10M Fund I, backing early-stage companies in physical and mental wellbeing, women’s health, ethical AI, and human connection-centered innovation. We’ve always known we are on to something—what we didn’t expect was how quickly the data would back it up. Recent industry benchmarks show that most 2022-vintage emerging funds are experiencing the usual J-curve dip. In contrast, Wisdom Ventures is showing strong early performance: 📈 Net IRR (internal rate of return): >10% 📊 MOIC (multiple on invested capital): ~2x* ⏰ Median investment age: 18 months 💥 ....and # of our companies have a diverse founder by gender, race, or sexual orientation: 75% As we get ready to make our 38th and final investment out of Fund I and start deploying out of our significantly larger Fund II (first close May 1st), we’re filled with gratitude—for our founders, our LPs, our early supporters, our early believers, and this growing movement toward a more conscious, connected future, fueled by innovation from the ❤️ *Based on most current reports **Not in photo: Our fantastic operating partner, Zoe Rogers #WisdomVentures #ImpactInvesting #ConsciousTech #Wellbeing #AIForGood #FutureOfWork #VentureCapital

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Amped to be an early check into Marik Hazan (via Earthling VC) on this "Vibe coding" and AI-generated code/agents are vaporizing the value of middleware. As such, it seems increasingly likely that the value of the picks and shovels layer of generalized app creation is asymptotically heading to 0 (other than possibly some monopolistic winner). The idea of being a studio that leverages AI to ideate, build, and test apps really, really fast and accumulate a previously impossibly huge portfolio of apps is the most logical, but still contrarian and controversial vibe coding company — and that's typically where I like to invest. Marik was the first builder I’ve seen instrumenting this insight

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🌎 “Does our climate tech have a positioning problem? Or is it something else?” — That’s Jason, my potential client, asking on our initial call. (And yes, that is an em-dash in there, and no — this is not GPT writing it, it’s me) Here’s what was really going on: ↳ The early-stage climate tech startup has been growing mainly through founder-led sales, relying on personal relationships and trust. ↳ They've brought on salespeople who struggle to communicate the value of their solutions in the same compelling way the founder does,  especially when explaining complex climate innovations. ↳ They launched right before COVID, entering a new category. But that category quickly got crowded with copycats, making it tough to stand out and clearly articulate what makes them different. ↳ They started with one target segment, but now they’re trying to sell to a few different markets. Their messaging got diluted and less focused. ↳ The teams aren’t aligned on what makes their technology unique or valuable. Everyone’s talking about different benefits, which confuses prospects. ↳ They’re hearing “Let’s revisit this in a few months” more often — meaning they’re struggling to create urgency around their climate solutions. Good news for Jason — he did have a positioning problem, the one that could be fixed. The ‘job’ of positioning is to clearly explain what your solution is, who it's for, what impact it delivers, and how it stands out. While aligning your team. Now, positioning isn’t a magic fix for all G2M problems. Here’s when Jason would’ve had the bad news: 💀If his product didn’t actually deliver on the promises around emissions reductions, energy savings, or sustainability. 💀If the demand for his solution would not be there. 💀 If his sales team did not have skills or processes to communicate  his tech’s value. 💀If Jason’s brand was perceived shady, not trustworthy and had a bad reputation. 💀If his marketing strategy was not intact, not reaching the right audience with the right message. Positioning is powerful, but not a panacea. It helps to know when you should “take the pill”. #positioning #messaging #cleantech #climatetech

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Two trends in fundraising that I’m seeing on a daily basis: 1/ The "we'll monetize later" era for infrastructure startups is dead "We'll figure out revenue once we have users" / "we're focused on adoption first"/ "monetization comes later" This worked in 2021. It doesn't work now. Today’s market won’t reward research organizations or companies that believe in perfection over getting it in users' hands. If you don't have a clear path to revenue… you won't get funded. period. VCs aren't writing checks hoping you'll figure it out later. 2/ "Vibe ARR" is everywhere Remember Jasper? hyper growth, but the model companies ate them alive. We're seeing this again. Companies growing really quickly on point-in-time technology that isn't defensible These companies look amazing on paper. Growth charts going up and to the right. But if you think models are getting better and becoming platform companies, many solutions become obsolete. 

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