Michael Jones

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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🚀 Thrilled to announce that Connect Ventures is partnering with the formidable Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema by leading a $6m seed round in Dessn, with the participation of betaworks, N49P, Declan Kelly, Roeland Delrue, Nicolas Steegmann, Zoe Mohl. 😍 High conviction => my first meeting with Gabriella Hachem, 30 seconds into her pitch: "This is a very hard problem, both technically and UX-wise. But if done successfully, it's a game changer". 🤝 High fit => The best product founders are overly technical and bold. And they build products that let users express themselves in the ways they actually want to work. 🤌 Anthropic launched Claude Design, making it obvious to the world that code is becoming the design surface. But why just extract from the product when you can run it? That’s Dessn. Dessn turns your codebase into a design environment in one click. Infinite exploration. One source of truth, for one product team. ✏️ I wrote the full investment thesis here: Design in production. Why we invested in Dessn https://lnkd.in/gjZ7VbWZ

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Have a pet, vet start up? Pawsible Ventures: $10 Million Fund I Backs Pet Health Incubator Targeting $270 Billion Pet Economy. Pawsible Ventures announced the launch of a pet health incubator designed to support early-stage companies building across the animal health ecosystem, as the global pet care market surpasses $270 billion annually and is projected to approach $500 billion by 2034. The Vancouver-based venture platform, backed by Victory Square Technologies, is positioning itself as a specialized incubator and venture studio to help founders navigate the fragmented infrastructure surrounding veterinary innovation. The initiative is intended to address common challenges faced by early-stage startups in the sector, including regulatory hurdles, veterinary partnerships, capital access, and distribution. Pawsible Ventures launched in 2025 with a $10 million Fund I and focuses on several areas of the pet health ecosystem, including veterinary diagnostics, pet health technologies, digital veterinary care platforms, therapeutics and biologics, insurance and financial services for pet owners, and preventive wellness solutions. Unlike traditional accelerators, the company works closely with founders from early concept through commercialization. The platform provides support in validating demand, developing products, navigating regulatory pathways, and accelerating go-to-market strategies. Over the past year, Pawsible Ventures has engaged with more than 300 startups globally, identifying growing activity among founders developing veterinary diagnostics, AI-driven pet health tools, preventive care platforms, therapeutics, insurance offerings, and digital tools for veterinary practices. #PawsibleVentures #veterinary #pet #ventures #startup https://lnkd.in/e4aDsByf

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𝐃𝐞𝐅𝐢 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐝𝐮𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞. Not another aggregator. Not another wallet. But a full-stack operating system for onchain capital, where AI agents and humans can manage portfolios side by side. That’s exactly why we backed Velvet.Capital. And they just announced a $3.7M raise to bring that vision to life. This round was joined by some of the sharpest investors in crypto: Binance Labs (via YZi Labs), Blockchain Founders Fund, Gate.io, FunFair Ventures, Selini, DWF Labs, Rarestone Ventures, Cointelegraph Accelerator, SkyVision Capital, Poolz Ventures, Mucker Capital, Paka, Lucid Blue, Mindfulness Capital, Nexgen, Inc, and more. 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞’𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐦𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 👇 Velvet is building the DeFAI Operating System. It gives funds, DAOs, and crypto-native investors a way to create, manage, and automate onchain portfolios across chains with intent-based execution and AI-powered logic built in. It works with Telegram Messenger. It’s cross-chain from day one (Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Base, Bitlayer). It’s designed to work for people or agents whichever comes first. The future of DeFi is not just about better UX. It’s about a shift from people managing wallets… to agents managing capital flows. This is the kind of infrastructure that won’t just make DeFi easier. It will make it scalable. Kudos to Velvet CEO Vasily Nikonov and CTO Ankit Raj for driving this vision forward and shipping what most people in the space are still tweeting about. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gK-4kPV5

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The most valuable consumer data isn’t found in a survey response; it’s hidden in the organic conversations happening across the web every second. For decades, brands have relied on lagging indicators, such as focus groups and panels, to capture sentiment, often suffering from response bias and high costs. In the high-velocity world of 2026 commerce, waiting months for a report is no longer an option. i-Genie.ai is changing how brands listen. Their platform leverages AI to glean strategic insights from where the “group chat” is already happening: social platforms, community forums, and product reviews. This is sentiment analysis evolved into real-time intelligence, providing an unvarnished view of customer needs without the friction of a formal study. We invested in i-genie.ai because they're solving the latency problem in market research. Discover the future of insights: https://lnkd.in/ekzEgimk Interested in how other innovation companies are changing the face of commerce? Explore our full portfolio: https://lnkd.in/edKWmDZk

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$100B. That’s what streamers are dropping on content in 2026. Neflix $20B, Disney $24B, Total OTT subs market $165B The real money isn’t owning the platform. It’s feeding the machine. Studios can’t keep up with that kind of demand at scale. They need outside capital. That’s where independent finance steps in, fund the right projects, structure it right, and suddenly you’re not just participating… you’re getting premium placement and real economics. Everyone’s chasing tech multiples. Meanwhile, media finance is sitting there, cash-flowing, asset-backed, and wildly overlooked in private equity.

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Harnessing Fandom Through Personalized Search Lore has successfully raised $1.1 million to develop a search engine tailored for the dedicated enthusiasts of fandom culture. This innovation highlights a growing trend where niche markets prove to be lucrative, as user engagement drives value. At ElevenX Capital, we recognize that understanding specific audience needs can unlock new investment opportunities. How can investors leverage personalized technologies to tap into unique fan ecosystems? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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We’re fooling ourselves if we think the future of venture capital is only about funding the next $100M ARR SaaS business—or the next CPG brand racing to $100M in revenue overnight. The essence of venture capital has never been about immediate revenue. It’s about vision, belief, and the ability to see value before others do. Yes, we’re in an era where some companies can scale faster than ever before. But if all we do is chase those stories, we miss the deeper breakthroughs—the ones that don’t look like much at first. Our real job as investors isn’t just to catch the obvious hockeysticks. It’s to give founders the time and space to move from strategic value to a cash-flowing business. That transition is rarely linear, and it never happens overnight. The pattern is clear: the firms that endure are the ones willing to bet on the underestimated “nothings” that—over time—become “everythings.”

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Decentralized production is the heart of the Going Direct economy. Developing these new systems of production so products are made closer to where they are consumed is the first step in reconnecting consumption w/ production. I break down the first of the 3 Going Direct pillars in the clip below.

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Today it’s official: Animaj is launching Lumee, a 50/50 JV between Hasbro and Animaj 🔥 Animaj is building what the kids & family ecosystem has been missing since 2020: a premium, compliant, scalable ad sales layer for the $2 trillion family market. The opportunity is obvious: 500M+ kids consume content on YouTube every month. The demand is there. The reach is global. But after COPPA reshaped the monetization stack, brands and creators have been operating without a real infrastructure to buy kids & family audiences properly. Lumee is the unlock. One unified platform for advertisers to access the largest premium kids & family inventory, with the right safeguards, context, and performance. - 55B views/year across one of the biggest kids & family footprints on YouTube World-class IP portfolio: Pocoyo, Transformers, Peppa Pig, PJ Masks, Maya the Bee - Context Intelligence tooling to ensure ads land in the right environments - Built COPPA + GDPR-K compliant from day one - AI-native Shorts + branded content engine to drive organic scale This category needed a new blueprint. Animaj built it. Huge congrats Sixte de Vauplane Gregory Dray Antoine Lhermitte & the whole team 👏

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We were recording a podcast episode last week and the question came up: why do studios actually fail? I expected the conversation to land on bad venture selection. That's what most people point to. But three quieter patterns kept surfacing — and they're the ones that actually kill studios. Sequencing failure. Doing the right things in the wrong order. Raising before you have a track record. Hiring a full team before validating a single venture. Everything looks productive — you're shipping, hiring, raising. But the order is wrong, and the compounding works against you instead of for you. Incentive misalignment. The studio operator wants equity upside. The institutional sponsor wants de-risked innovation. The founder wants autonomy. None of those are wrong. They're just different objective functions in the same room. The misalignment doesn't surface in year one. It surfaces the first time someone has to make a hard call — and the people in the room realize they want different outcomes. The governance gap. Studios start lean, which is smart. Then they stay lean on governance, which is fatal. No kill criteria. No stage gates. No framework for when to double down or shut down. Death by accumulated decisions that nobody had the structure to stop. What stuck with me after that conversation: all three of these are invisible from the inside. Bad company selection is loud. These are silent. And by the time you feel them, they've been compounding for months.

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MODELBUSTERS: a new category of companies I am personally the most excited about. The AI platform shift is underway. The stakes are higher, the pace is faster than ever. We wrote down some of our top learnings from the @a16z Growth team on what MODELBUSTERS are. These are the patterns we are seeing across the biggest winners in our portfolio. Stay ahead of the curve with our new team Substack! https://lnkd.in/gSNQgXGV

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So honored to be featured on the Startup CPG podcast this week. Really enjoyed the conversation on what we’re building at OpenSky Ventures, how we think about early stage investing across consumer and AI, and lessons from my operator journey that continue to shape how I invest today. Appreciate the Startup CPG team for having me on. If you’re building in the space, would love to hear what resonated. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/g_w3nAQ9

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Exciting to see the incredible progress from Peptone, a company we’ve backed since the early days at Walden Catalyst Ventures. Peptone just announced Peptron-O, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA — a groundbreaking AI engine that brings ensemble-first structure prediction to the disordered proteome. This is a major scientific and technological milestone, targeting one of the most complex and previously inaccessible areas of biology: intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). By shifting the paradigm from static models to dynamic ensembles, Peptron-O opens new doors for drug discovery — especially in areas like oncology and neurodegeneration, where IDPs play critical roles. We’re proud to have supported Peptone on their mission to build the infrastructure for next-gen molecular physics. Their work is a great example of how deep tech can transform life sciences. Read more about the announcement: 👉 https://lnkd.in/eygnKQ67 #AI #Biotech #DrugDiscovery #DeepTech #LifeSciences #WaldenCatalyst #Peptone #NVIDIA #PeptronO with: Kamil Tamiola, Ph.D. Francis Ho Shankar Chandran Nicolas Autret Andy Kau Roni Hefetz Victoria Slivkoff

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In this episode of Innovate or Evaporate, I sit down with Mike Clem, CEO of Sweetwater, a nearly $2B music tech powerhouse that still thinks like a startup. 𝗪𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗸:  • What “founder mode” looks like at scale  • Why they don’t obsess over competitors  • How 1,000 small improvements beat one big moonshot  • And why human relationships, not just AI, are their real moat Sweetwater wins by giving away more value. Period. If you care about scaling culture, protecting what makes your company special, and building for the long game, this one’s for you. 📺 https://lnkd.in/g4nv5_Gv

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Today, we backed founders building in industries most people overlook because they use them every day. Restaurants. Nightlife. Food delivery. Huge markets, broken systems. One team is helping restaurants grow without giving away margins to marketplaces. Another is rebuilding nightlife distribution through community and events. Another is creating the infrastructure layer for India’s home kitchen economy. All three already have real traction behind them. That’s usually the signal we pay attention to most. If you’re building something ambitious with momentum already happening… 👇 Comment below and we’ll DM you how to apply #Startups #VentureCapital #FoodTech #RestaurantTech #AI #CPG #ConsumerTech #FounderLed

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