Jeremy Levine

Building Surround Ventures has been an entrepreneurial journey with a great deal of learning along the way, and I am very excited to launch our second fund. As a finance person at heart who shifted into the VC world centered around people, I always say that we are ultimately a derivative of the underlying asset, the entrepreneurs we are fortunate to work with. We look forward to continuing to work hard alongside the founders we partner with and help where we can in building some of the world’s most important deep tech startups emerging from Israel. I am truly grateful to the founders, investors, advisors, and everyone who chose to join us on this journey.

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Eclipse is proud to be leading Jetson's $50M Series A, partnering with Stephen Lake, Aaron Grant and Matthew Bailey, to deliver the electric home of the future. Jetson is on a mission to power the entire home more efficiently, affordably, and cleanly by reinventing the products and process by which energy infrastructure is installed, financed, serviced, and managed. Starting with heat pumps (the core energy-consuming infrastructure of the home that accounts for $300B in annual consumer spend), Jetson is building a vertically integrated, software-driven home energy ecosystem. This approach is a complete departure from the fragmented, largely manual home energy industry that exists today. Jetson isn't just delivering the economic and environmental benefits of electricity; it's transforming the customer experience. They believe every homeowner deserves an Apple-level experience for critical home infrastructure service, from quote, to install, to operations — and with up to 50% lower cost. A little more than a year after launching, the company is already in more than 1,000 homes across the U.S. and Canada. This is after a breakout 2025 with over 10x growth and a 75 Net-Promoter-Score. Beyond the incredible execution and massive opportunity, Jetson hits home personally for me, for 3 big reasons. First, as a fellow University of Waterloo 🇨🇦 Engineer, I’ve seen Stephen, Aaron, and Matthew execute on trailblazing full-stack products for over a decade. They’re an immensely talented, focused, and grounded team who has irreplaceable chemistry and taste. Second, from my time founding Kojo and investing in the built environment, I've seen firsthand that the existing value chain of installers, suppliers and manufacturers can only gain so much efficiency with new tech. The Jetson team is working from first-principles and owning everything from the hardware, firmware, consumer facing software, all the way to the crews, trucks and warehouse operations. This end-to-end control allows them to deliver a best-in-class product experience, while also shortening the value chain and passing significant cost savings to the customers. Finally, in addition to this great team and opportunity, we’re investing alongside some of our favorite people. Alex Kolicich (8VC), Eric Meyer, Caroline C. (Activate Capital), Mike McCauley (Garage Capital), Mike Winterfield (Active Impact Investments) and Garry Tan. Read all about the investment here: https://lnkd.in/g4MZJS5j Read Sean Silcoff's coverage in the Globe and Mail: https://lnkd.in/gmGzPx54 Jiten Behl, Michael Laser, Charly M., Lior Susan, Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Greg Reichow, Seth Winterroth, Kaitlyn Glancy, Greg Lyon, Angela Hayward, Laura Spaventa Lewis, Heather Mack, Mary Wells

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Here at Rocketship.vc, we run our algorithms across millions of early-stage startups to identify themost promising companies in the ecosystem right now. While AI is everywhere (and it shows up heavily in our list), a deeper look reveals three emerging themes that go far beyond the usual headlines: 🔬 1. Health + Bio is Breaking Out Startups at the intersection of biology and software are gaining serious traction. Terms like health, bio, care, and diagnostics appeared frequently, pointing to innovation in digital health, computational biology, and personalized diagnostics. We're seeing founders tackle problems like fertility, mental health, and chronic care—often using tech-native, platform-first approaches. This could be the beginning of a golden era for bio-software convergence. 🔧 2. Infrastructure & Deep Tech Are Back Not everything is app-layer AI. A surprising number of startups reference compute, cloud, fusion, security, and materials—signaling a return to technical infrastructure and deep science. These are the builders creating foundational tech: novel compute paradigms, advanced materials, secure data layers, and new physics. It’s a clear sign that hard tech is having a moment, with founders embracing complex engineering problems again. 🌍 3. Climate Is Quietly Scaling Climate-focused startups aren’t always loud—but they’re increasingly world-class. Words like energy, earth, zero, and blue hint at fusion energy, carbon removal, and next-gen sustainability infrastructure. These aren’t grant-funded science projects—they’re fundable, scalable, and climbing the ranks based on real traction and ambition. — The next wave of breakout companies may not just be AI wrappers. They’ll be science-forward, mission-driven, and technically deep. The data says it’s already happening. Let’s keep building. #startups #venturecapital #deeptech #healthtech #climatetech #seedstage #founders #vc #AI

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Very happy to share that we are leading Pursuit's Series A. Mike Vichich and Brandon Max are exceptional leaders. I met Mike in December 2024 and was immediately struck by his focus on building in government, one of the most important and under-innovated sectors. Big vision, strong execution, and optimism. At the time, I was between roles and doing some angel investing. That conversation made it clear I wanted to work more closely with founders like him. A year later, I get to do exactly that. Leading this round is a full-circle moment. If you're building in GovTech please consider taking a look at their fantastic product. And reach out to us at Builders VC as we love the market!

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SF VC Takeaway #2: Pricing expectations, performance bars, and what’s actually getting funded. One theme that came up repeatedly in SF was how far pricing expectations and performance bars have shifted, even compared to just a few years ago. A few things investors kept anchoring to: 1️⃣ Median Series A valuations are higher than their 2021 peaks, but fewer of them are getting done. 2️⃣ Capital is being concentrated into fewer and fewer companies (and lots of capital!) 3️⃣ “Good” progress is no longer enough and the bar for standout performance has moved in an AI-native world So what does “top performance” mean right now? One investor told me that top quartile seed companies in their portfolio are going from $0 to $2M in ARR in <12 months. Outside of pure traction numbers, a few other themes that came up to describe "top performance": 📈 Explosive early revenue ramps (or a very credible path to them) 📊 Strong velocity and momentum for 2 quarters in a row, even if the baseline is small. 🚀 Clear signals of category leadership, not just product-market fit. Sometimes shown by either domain expertise, speed of product optimization, or by lack of competition in the category. This creates a counterintuitive dynamic where it can be easier to fund a company with strong pedigrees in a hot space and no traction yet than a company that went from 0 to $1M ARR at what used to be considered a rapid pace. Pricing today is driven by trajectories, not moments in time. We used to say investors invest in lines not points; I think that's more true than ever now because crossing certain milestones doesn't carry as much influence as it once did. Finally, investors still say that valuation matters, but many of them are acting differently. Pace and belief in category-defining companies really sets the price; while slower growth gets scrutinized rather than discounted. One silver lining in the camp of durable growth: Series A rounds are happening so fast that many companies don’t yet have meaningful history of retention data. Large bets are being made on velocity before the durability is proven. Several investors told me the same thing: we may soon swing back to a market where retention, not growth, becomes the defining metric. Let's hope so. I'll share my third SF VC takeaway tomorrow!

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Two weeks ago on Swimming with Allocators, we sat down with David Clark, CIO at VenCap, to talk about what decades of venture data can teach allocators. One takeaway that stood out: discounts don’t matter as much as people think in venture secondaries. Because venture is such a power-law asset class, outcomes are driven by exposure to a few massive winners. Whether a stake is bought at a small discount, or even a premium, often matters far less than the quality of the underlying company and its upside. Great conversation on venture returns, manager selection, and the nuances of how allocators should think about secondary investments. 👇 Link in the comments.

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More great insights from Montauk Capital and Evan Caron on the extraordinary risks, and opportunities, at the intersection of energy and the real estate industry.

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Excerpted From the Stanford Closer Look Series paper titled: "THE CEO SCORECARD: HOW DIRECTORS SELECT A CEO WHEN THEY HAVE REAL SKIN IN THE GAME" "In this Closer Look, we consider the perspective of ValueAct Capital, an institutional investor with extensive, direct experience serving on the boards of directors of portfolio companies during multiple succession events. Through an analysis of these events, ValueAct has identified common deficiencies, including the manner in which required skills are identified and framed and the process by which they are evaluated. "ValueAct has also observed that many companies do not use rigorous scorecards built on quantitative metrics to guide the CEO evaluation process. Instead, the qualifications for a replacement CEO are often expressed as a list of vague qualities or adjectives, such as “leadership,” “vision,” “customer-centricity,” “communication skills,” “operational excellence,” and others. "Why are scorecards not more rigorous? Part of the problem lies with the board. All too often, board members lack a clear consensus around a company’s strategy and priorities and struggle to define the company’s future success in terms of specific outcomes. Without consensus, it is not possible to develop a rigorous and objective scorecard by which to evaluate potential internal and external candidates." Think about what ValueAct is saying. Boards (not sometimes but all too often) have difficulty defining the future success of a company in specific outcomes. This is obviously a huge problem in regard to defining what is needed in a new CEO in terms of experience, skills and track record. But it is also a huge problem in regard to: 1. Holding management accountable for results. If there is no consensus on outcomes, how can there be clarity in regard to what is expected of management? 2. If the board has a lack of consensus or clarity in regard to what the value creation drivers are how can there be any assurance that the board is doing its job well in allocating capital and driving operating performance and longer-term shareholder value? Said another way, how can shareholders have any degree of comfort that the board is focused on the development of the full potential of the company? Without major value creation initiatives with measurable results there cannot have been a deep dive diligence process designed to identify the full potential of the company. If such a process is absent, then there must also be the absence of a value maximization governing objective. And if that is absent, what is the role of the board? #valuemaximization #corporategovernance #boardofdirectors #governance #shareholdervalue

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Temporal Technologies has become the de facto durable execution engine making AI agents reliable in production, and is defining a crucial part of the AI infra stack. Couldn't think of a better set of folks to be solving this problem, and excited to partner up with Samar and the team on their Series D fundraise as they embark on the next phase of hypergrowth! 🚀 cc: Casber, Adam, Adrian

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Frasca Executive Dispatch — Macro + Policy I've watched three platform shifts up close. Every one of them had a moment where the regulatory infrastructure flipped from obstacle to accelerant. We are in that moment right now for digital assets, on both sides of the Atlantic. 1. GENIUS Act meets its first deadline. The FDIC approved rulemaking on April 7 to implement the prudential framework for stablecoin issuers. Supervisory agencies must publish final rules by July 18. Stablecoin market cap has crossed $317 billion. The plumbing is being installed. 2. The Fed published its stablecoin stability assessment. The April 8 FEDS Note analyzed financial stability implications of stablecoins at scale. Meanwhile, Mastercard is acquiring stablecoin infrastructure. Coinbase has integrated with Citi and American Express. Traditional rails are not competing with digital assets. They are merging with them. 3. MiCA's July deadline approaches. Every crypto-asset service provider in the EU must achieve full MiCA compliance by July 1. Over 30% of EU institutional investors have already increased digital asset exposure. The DAC8 tax reporting framework went live January 1. Europe is building the institutional on-ramp while the US finalizes the stablecoin guardrails. What this rhymes with: 1996. The Telecommunications Act didn't kill the internet. It created the legal certainty that let capital flood in. July 2026 is shaping up as that inflection for digital assets. Second-order effect: Firms without licenses will lose access to institutional capital. Firms with them will set the terms. For institutions: The question is no longer whether to allocate. It is which regulated infrastructure to allocate through. Regulation is a feature, not a bug. — Rob Frasca | COSIMO Digital | Capital markets, rebuilt on-chain, amplified by AI #DigitalAssets #Tokenization #RWA

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🦄 $150M to improve tutoring and education globally. Preply just announced a new round, putting the company on a clear trajectory to become an iconic global marketplace. In a world obsessed with fast wins and volatile growth, some companies quietly beat their goals year after year — for more than 6 years in this case (as long as we’ve at Acurio Ventures been partners). A few learnings from this journey, relevant for founders and investors: Pick a growing market with an unsolved problem. 2 out of 8 billion people globally are learning a second language. Despite many options, outcomes are still poor. Our original thesis was simple: if you build the reference platform, everyone who wants to learn will eventually come to you. Category leadership matters. When we backed Kirill Bigai and Dmytro Voloshyn back in 2019 (together with Rob Kniaz), there were dozens of similar startups. Small details showed Preply had already built a superior tutor base and a scalable growth engine. Build a product customers love. Speaking a language and teaching it are very different things. Preply transformed the learning experience by combining a motivated base of +100,000 tutors with tools that actually drive outcomes. Never stop experimenting. Few companies maintain a strong experimentation culture as they scale. Preply’s DNA reminded me of Booking.com — enabling them to execute 10x better than most marketplaces. Great companies turn every change into an opportunity. From riding the post-COVID shift to online learning, to betting early and heavily on AI as Dmytro Voloshyn has excelled at. What once sounded like sci-fi is now reality. Great companies become talent magnets A company maturity can't be addressed only by looking at the revenue, profit or product. I like to see how much better they become at attracting talent and retaining it. Proud that Acurio Ventures made this possible and the WestCap team saw things as bullish as we do and are now supporting the next phase of Preply’s journey. Huge congratulations to the entire Preply team!!

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Pear GTM Summit in NYC: • How to master founder-led sales • The core GTM principles and best practices every founder should know • The essential tools and workflows to operate efficiently • When and how to start thinking about building your first sales organization More below! 🍐

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Announcing our portco Zeno has raised next round of $25mn with participation from Congruent Ventures Lowercarbon Capital Trifecta Capital ! Advantedge Founders continues to back the team with $2mn additional investment. Its been terrific working with Michael Spencer & Greg Moran to establish the full stack model in Africa. With this raise expansion in new markets and planning for India launch is next steps. https://lnkd.in/gGr6qiBj

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The future of corporate venture capital isn’t about optionality or one-off M&A wins. It’s about designing modular, industry-specific platforms that flex and scale with market needs. In this article, I share a playbook for how CVCs can move from cheque-writers to ecosystem architects, building future-ready platforms one module at a time.   Let’s stop acquiring the future and start assembling it. https://lnkd.in/gWSjg9fT

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Advice from Luke Carroll for VC's raising their first fund. I’ve been thinking a lot about how CIOs and fund selectors like Luke Carroll at Reference Capital look at emerging managers and what that means for those of you raising Fund I. A few takeaways that really stuck with me: 1️⃣ Venture is a power law, not a participation trophy 2️⃣ “Access” is your actual product Capital is abundant; differentiated access is not. A first-time fund has to prove: Why the right founders will choose you over established brands What proprietary communities, ecosystems, or networks you sit in How your career to date translates into non-commoditized deal flow and insight If an LP can’t clearly see your access edge in the first 5 minutes, they’ll mentally file you under “nice, but interchangeable.” 3️⃣ Be honest about marks and “zombie risk” We’re coming out of a cycle where a lot of portfolios are still marked to the 2021–2022 world. CIOs are looking straight through shiny TVPI to ask: Which companies have raised recently at real, external prices? Where are you still relying on old marks? How will you avoid building a tail of zombie positions that never raise again and never get written down? For Fund I, that means leading with realized outcomes and externally priced rounds wherever possible – and being transparent about where risk lives. 4️⃣ LPs crave simplicity, not clever structures Family offices and private clients in particular are gravitating to vehicles and relationships that are “bankable and operationally simple.” For emerging managers, that’s a strong argument for: Keeping fund structures and terms straightforward Making capital calls, reporting, and communications highly predictable Reducing friction rather than showing off how innovative your docs can be Your operational experience is part of your edge. 5️⃣ Your fund is a solution, not a story CIOs don’t buy “great funds,” they solve portfolio problems. The question on their side of the table is: What specific gap in geography, stage, theme, or risk profile does this fund fill for us? How does this manager’s sizing, reserves, and pacing plug into our broader private markets plan? If your deck doesn’t answer that explicitly, you’re asking the LP to do your job. 6️⃣ The questions a CIO would actually ask you From the LP side, the conversation quickly becomes: What is the one thing that makes this fund truly non-commoditized? Who are the 10–15 founders or co-investors that would call you first, and why? If you never raised Fund II, what about this vehicle would still make it a win for your LPs? As a first-time manager, internalizing this LP lens is uncomfortable but powerful. It forces you to sharpen your thesis, right-size your fund, and be radically clear about what makes you worth the illiquidity, complexity, and time. If you’re raising or thinking about a Fund I, what’s the clearest articulation of your edge that would stand up in front of a CIO like Luke Carroll?

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I had a great time chatting with Patrick O'Shaughnessy on Invest Like The Best. I've known Patrick since college, and this is the first time we've talked markets and investing at this much depth. The fundamentals of company building haven’t changed: people, products, and markets matter. But obviously, private markets have evolved substantially over my career: there are now ~6x more private unicorns than public companies with a $1b+ market cap. And at the end of 2010, just 2 public technology companies were among the top 10 in market cap; today it’s 8 of 10. AI (alongside software eating everything more generally) is clearly driving a lot of this. But it’s instructive to look at everything from the steam engine, to the early days of Facebook and Google user monetization, to real-time success stories like Databricks, Anduril, OpenAI and Waymo, to get a clear picture of where the opportunities lie. It was a pleasure to go deep on all this and more!

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**The Power of Speed in Startup Growth: Lessons from Base44's Acquisition by Wix** Base44's rapid transformation from a startup to an $80M acquisition in just six months highlights the significance of agility and market responsiveness in today’s tech landscape. At ElevenX Capital, we recognize that successful startups often leverage unique niches and are built on solid user engagement metrics. What strategies can startups implement to achieve rapid growth and attract acquisition interest? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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One of the things I appreciate most about our Entrepreneur In Residence model is the ability to develop a true partnership with a founder and really understand how they think before they start building. Viral Shah joined Deciens Capital as an EIR after co-founding Better.com. Before he even started building June Point Lending, we got to see firsthand how he approached hard problems — the rigor, the ambition, and the operating instincts that you only develop through having already built to scale. June Point Lending went from initial funding to a live lender in eight months. It's focused on Non-QM mortgages — a $232B market where institutional capital demand far outpaces the supply of originators who can meet it at scale. They're automating with AI what the rest of the industry still does manually, and secured tier-1 capital markets partners out of the gate, creating a powerful technology + capital combination and condensing what would ordinarily be years of work into the company’s formation. We're proud to have backed Viral and co-founder William DeVar from the start, and in a world increasingly focused on short-term profit taking, we're excited to be on this journey with them for the long term. https://lnkd.in/ecGQtMx7

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Fullstack startups are the latest craze: Marc Andreessen talked about this phenomenon on Jack Altman's latest podcast Today Browserbase launched Director.ai for consumers to automate the web This follows Vercel launching @v0 for consumers to build sites and apps Both of these companies are infrastructure (picks and shovels) providers that have now moved "up the stack" to launch consumer applications on top of their infra This is the latest in vogue playbook following: Compound startups (multi-product - i.e. Rippling) Layer cake vertical startups (SaaS+Payments+Lending - i.e. ServiceTitan) Links in comments: Jack altman Marc podcast Director.ai launch video Paul Klein IV, Guillermo Rauch, CRV

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