General Catalyst

Building a truly global firm takes people who can carry everything we stand for into new markets and make it real. Zeynep Yavuz-Willson is one of those people. I'm happy to announce Zeynep has been promoted into the partnership at General Catalyst. Zeynep joined us in 2022 with a rare combination: operator instincts, real fluency in growth investing, and a point of view on Europe that was both deeply local and globally ambitious. Her path to GC wasn't a straight line - she moved from growth equity to operating, then back to investing - and that deliberate detour shows in how she works with founders. As she puts it, she didn't think she could ever understand a founder's mindset without having been an operator herself. In a few years, Zeynep helped shape our growth investing strategy in Europe, built out our AI roll-up approach on the continent, and was instrumental in integrating La Famiglia - helping establish GC as a real presence and brand across European markets. She has earned command of the entire GC capital stack (venture, Customer Value Fund, and Creation) and is exceptional at bringing all of our capabilities together to create the conditions for founders to capture the power law. Congratulations, Zeynep.

AI is creating an era of abundance. The data center is its foundation. Legacy data centers waste more than 30% of their electricity before it ever reaches a processor. Daniel Kultran built Claros to solve this by reimagining power delivery from chip to grid. We backed Claros last year and are proud to deepen that relationship by co-leading their seed round today.

KP Reddy is a legend in construction tech, spending more than two decades as a founder, operator, and investor in the industry. Today, we're proud to announce the launch of Zero RFI, our latest AI-enabled roll-up, acquiring the best businesses in one of the last major industries to have its AI moment. Every RFI (Request for Information) on a construction project is a sign something slipped. We're on that journey with KP aiming to get that number to zero. More in comments from Paul Kwan, Marc Bhargava, Adrian Stehnkuhl and Sarah Ascherman.

Max Junestrand had no legal background. So he cold messaged 100 lawyers on LinkedIn, took them to lunch, and paid their hourly rate just to learn. That was three years ago. Today, Legora serves tens of thousands of lawyers across 800 customers in 50+ markets. We're tripling down on Legora's Series D with one of the most ambitious teams we've seen, now accelerating their U.S. expansion.

Individual investors deserve better. Markets close right when working people want to invest, brokers can take huge cuts from trades, and other inefficiencies can force costly renewals that eat into returns. That's why we're leading QFEX's seed round as they use modern technology to give individual investors the same tools as institutional traders. Founders Annanay Kapila and Joshua Wharton are building a platform where investors can trade directly with each other, 24/7, without paying broker fees. Their mission is to create a fairer market while eliminating unnecessary costs for traders. "QFEX is cracking the code on 24/7 traditional asset trading, while aiming to solve rollover problems that can plague futures traders. Not only that, but QFEX is expanding access to traditional market participation. When Cambridge mathematicians who've built systems for Citadel and Tower Research decide to build the exchange layer from scratch, we pay attention. Some opportunities require you to rebuild the entire stack—this is one of them." -GC’s Yuri Sagalov

The old world needed 50 engineers to test one hardware system. Nominal is building toward one engineer testing 50. As allies around the world race to rebuild industrial capacity, hardware speed and relevance is the decisive advantage. Global resilience is built in hardware and Nominal is the infrastructure for teams building in the physical world. We led Nominal’s Series A and are doubling down on their $80M acceleration round at a $1B valuation. Congrats to Cameron McCord, Bryce Strauss, Jason Hoch, and the entire Nominal team. All systems Nominal. Watch Paul Kwan's full conversation with Cameron in the comments.

Satya Gopal spent a decade at National Instruments watching India's defense operators go to battle without indigenous electronic warfare systems. Avinash Chenreddy was deep in signal processing at a startup. They met through an NGO, started solving problems on whiteboards, and couldn't stop. By 2017, those sessions had become CONSTELLI. They spent years building what India's defense labs needed: radio frequency simulators, telemetry systems, precision test equipment built for real operational constraints. Modern electronic warfare is decided by software as much as hardware. Constelli's edge-AI systems bring that capability home, built on years of signal processing work that India's defense labs have come to depend on. We're proud to lead their Series A as they expand into counter-drone systems and India builds the capabilities essential to its resilience. More from Neeraj Arora, Paul Kwan, Siddhi Kasliwal, and Akarsh Shrivastava in the comments.

A health crisis doesn't only happen to the patient, it happens to the whole family. It's a moment millions of American families know too well. With more than 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day, it's only becoming more common as they age into a healthcare system that wasn’t designed to help them navigate it. Connor Sweeney saw this issue firsthand, and it’s why he built Baba. The challenge with patient advocacy today is that it disappears when the crisis does. Baba aims to change that, pairing seniors with dedicated human advocates and using AI to keep that relationship alive between emergencies and through them. Every senior deserves an abundance of care. Baba is building toward that. Baba’s seed is led by Vedant Suri along with Caitlin Donovan—more in the comments.

We're committing $5 billion to India over the next five years. One of the largest dedicated venture capital commitments to India. Indian founders solve for billion-person complexity first: cost sensitivity, linguistic diversity, infrastructure constraints, massive scale with thin margins. That ambition produces business models the rest of the world will follow. We believe India's greatest AI opportunity is diffusion, deploying AI at population scale in ways no other market can match. Neeraj Arora leads this as CEO of India & MENA, backed by the full GC platform: seed through growth, company creation, policy engagement, and global connectivity. This is India's moment. We’re here to build it.

Europe's most ambitious founders are building what the continent needs for its strategic autonomy. Many of these founders are repeat entrepreneurs who built companies abroad and came back for this moment. From orbit to the factory floor, what connects these companies is a shared architecture of sovereignty: ICEYE gives Europe persistent, independent observation from orbit. Helsing built Europe's software-first defense prime, embedding AI into military operations. Their €600M Series C cemented a model Europe was missing. Hypersonica is building Europe's sovereign hypersonic strike system, delivering its missile prototype for flight testing at unprecedented speed. Onodrim Industries is restoring Europe's industrial depth in mission-critical systems, bringing together fragmented suppliers across defense components. It’s happening in manufacturing too. PhysicsX is compressing industrial design cycles from months to days with AI-driven simulation, a living example of how Europe's deep engineering heritage can evolve through AI rather than be replaced by it. Europe has the talent, institutions, and research. What founders tell us they need is access to the people who deploy their technology. That is what we are doing through the General Catalyst Institute and EU AI Champions Initiative. Our updated European Resilience thesis from Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, Robin Dechant, and Gosia Majczak lays out why this is Europe’s moment to build. Link in comments.