Kindred Ventures

If you're a founder looking for deeply strategic and mission-oriented investors, Steve Jang and Kanyi Maqubela should be at the front of your list. These two and the Kindred Ventures team are an absolute class act - they play the long game and are in there with you through thick and thin. Super grateful for their partnership in building Color over the years. Oh and congrats on your zillionth listing on the Midas List ;).

Congratulations to Founder & Managing Partner Steve Jang on being named to the Forbes Midas List for the third time! This recognition speaks to Steve's continuing track record of early conviction, contrarian theses, and product/gtm acceleration, but more than that it reflects the caliber of the founders he's had the privilege of backing. The Midas List is ultimately a measure of what great founders build, and we've been fortunate to partner with some of the best. From early founding teams at Coinbase and Uber to Aravind Srinivas of the knowledge agent platform, Perplexity, and Burkay Gur & Gorkem Yurtseven from the generative media cloud, fal, and many others in the Kindred Ventures founder community, this honor is a reflection of the incredible visionary builders who Steve serves on a daily basis. Thank you to every founder who has trusted us to be part of their journey.

Commerce isn’t broken—but the infrastructure behind it hasn’t kept up with how people actually buy and sell today. For the past decade, founders faced a tradeoff: build on someone else’s marketplace and give up control, or stitch together a complex stack across storefronts, payments, logistics, and growth. That model made sense in an earlier era of the internet. It doesn’t anymore. And even though you can quickly vibecode a fun prototype app today using AI, stores, sellers, and brands need an AI platform that’s higher performance, sharply tested, and deeply integrated with data and tools. in order to make it their core business. We’re excited to announce that Kindred Ventures is co-leading District's $14.7M seed round alongside Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Jaren Glover, former Depop CEO Maria Raga, Gokul Rajaram, Dylan Field, Soleio, Deborah Liu, Imran Khan, Jacob Andreou, Peter Sellis, Josh Siegel, Per Sandell, 20VC and an exceptional group of operators and investors. District is built around a simple but powerful insight: commerce naturally emerges from communities. As CEO and co-founder Edward Koai puts it, “Whenever a group forms around a shared interest, commerce naturally follows.” The problem is that, until now, those communities have been forced to rely on makeshift tools or rigid platforms, and detached social platforms that don’t reflect how they actually engage and transact. District changes that complexity and chaos. Instead of forcing sellers into templates, District provides AI-native control, delivery, and infrastructure that lets anyone generate a fully customized, production-ready commerce experience—from storefronts to community features to live selling and auctions—just by describing what they want to build. It’s a shift from assembling tools to creating systems that adapt to the seller, not the other way around. This matters because the future of commerce won’t live on static websites. It will happen across communities, live streams, drops, DMs, and niche networks—environments where trust, identity, and participation drive transactions. It’s not enough to vibecode an app in the ecommerce world - the features, the stack, and the performance requirements are at a totally different elevation level. Edward Koai, Patrick M., and Khoi Tran saw this early through their work at Snap Inc., where they experienced firsthand how social behavior shapes commerce. They’re building District with that same product intuition: giving sellers ownership over their customer relationships, their brand, and their economics. We believe the next generation of commerce will be more personal, more participatory, and more reflective of how people interact in the real world. District is building the infrastructure to make that possible. Welcome to the Kindred family! :) Steve Jang Kanyi Maqubela

We are excited to welcome TCV to the cap table as we partner again with Corgi in their $160M Series B. Since our initial investment in the earliest days of the company, we have believed the promise of applied AI is not just to deliver faster software-as-a-service, but to redesign entire legacy industries. They are proving the case faster than we imagined. Glad to be on this journey with Oliver Jung, Y Combinator, Contrary, Seven Stars, Leblon Capital, and beyond. Nico Laqua Emily Yuan

Today, we’re introducing District to the world! District is an AI commerce platform that lets anyone build and manage a world-class commerce business. Create online stores, marketplaces, live selling platforms, and more, designed for how you sell today. More than a thousand businesses are already powered by District with top performers already generating millions in sales. We’ve raised $14.7M in funding to date led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kindred Ventures, with participation from Greylock Partners, 20VC, SV Angel, Jaren Glover, Maria Raga, Gokul Rajaram, Soleio, Deborah Liu, Imran Khan, Jacob Andreou, Peter Sellis, Josh Siegel, and others. Read more about us in @Fortune Magazine: https://lnkd.in/gEEG48X8

Last week, we welcomed 80 portfolio founders and many of our LPs to our annual Kindred Ventures Founder Summit and AGM, which we hosted back-to-back this year. For three days, we hosted inspiring conversations led by Steve Jang and Kanyi Maqubela together with founders and leaders from tech, science, research, and finance. Beyond the talks, the entire Kindred Ventures team and many of our portfolio founders facilitated tactical peer group sessions, shared deeply earned knowledge and anecdotes, and hiked the coastal mountains against the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge at Cavallo Point Lodge. Our off-the-record program also featured fireside chats and presentations focused on (1) raising early stage rounds to building a growth-oriented team to a public investor view of the IPO market, (2) AI super agents for knowledge work to multi-model agent harnesses to foundation models for physical AI, and (3) deep dives into the latest in compute infra, training models, and inference/RL. In addition, our portfolio founders gave demos of their products and models that are pushing the boundaries in robotics, agents, compute, inference, new bio, legal AI, and more. Community is at the core of Kindred Ventures. Building a company from scratch comes with challenges that only other founders truly understand, and there's no substitute for the bonds formed through shared experience. That's why creating an intentional space for founders to build a strong peer network remains a pillar of our community efforts. A huge thank you 🙏🏽 to the founders, operators, and company leaders who joined us on stage: Aravind Srinivas Burkay Gur Cristina Cordova, Jiajun Zhu, Jorge Reis-Filho, Tony Kim, Ming-Yu Liu, Aaron Ginn Shivani Siroya, Dar Mehta, Mike Henry, Matt Dean, Natalie Jin, Peter Walker, and Mike Heath. We are also grateful for the support and participation from NVIDIA Perplexity fal Linear Nuro AstraZeneca Parasail Causal Labs Hydra Host Serova BlackRock Carta Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP Brex Stifel Bank! 💫 We appreciate the time and the energy you brought to our Summit!

Praneet Dutta met Joe Cheuk on his first day at Google years ago. He was leaving orientation when they ended up in the same Uber Share ride. They were not on the same team; Dutta was in machine learning, and Cheuk worked in cloud infrastructure, but over the next few months, they realized they had similar career aspirations. That was roughly eight or nine years ago. Today, they are cofounders of AI startup, Pomo, which Business Insider exclusively reported has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. "Having the willingness to grind is a very important factor right now," Cheuk said. "We think that's one of the most crucial things in the AI era." Read more of the lessons they’ve learned from building their startup on Business Insider: https://lnkd.in/eh2tchfM (Credit: Dan Clark) #entrepreneurship #AIstartup #techfounders #techinnovation #AIera

Recently at Upfront Summit, Steve Jang sat down with Burkay Gur, co-founder and CEO of fal, to talk about “What’s Coming in Generative Media.” While much of the world focused on chatbots and LLM agents, a parallel world of infrastructure and inference demand in AI has been quietly taking shape. In the areas of design, product development, advertising, marketing, and entertainment, a multitude of state-of-the-art image, audio, and video models are rapidly transforming multiple industries. For the past century, human attention has become increasingly focused on video, images, and audio modalities, beyond textual information. This truth makes the opportunity for AI storytelling and creativity to put control, speed, and fidelity in the hands of everyone. A brave, exciting world. However, on a technical level, generative video simply demands a higher bar of inference quality and far more compute resources than text from LLMs, which could make generative media a dominant driver of NVIDIA GPU workloads alongside agents and robotics. At the same time, the conventional studios, agencies, and consumer brands are speeding up and amplifying creativity and production, enabling high-end output with less resources in an unprecedented compression of traditional timelines. Today, fal serves as the first true Generative Media Cloud, hosting and optimizing serverless inference for the world’s greatest video, image, audio/voice, and world models to serve developers, designers, marketers, studios, and large enterprises, such as Amazon, Adobe, Canva, and Shopify. Some highlights from their talk: ▪️ In the past 2 years since launch: fal has scaled from ~20 models to 1,000+, adding new models weekly ▪️ Today, their platform is used by close to 3M prosumer/consumer developers and servicing Fortune 100 companies ▪️ The areas of design, product development, advertising, and marketing are seeing the earliest adoption and growth ▪️ Entertainment studios are quietly and not-so-quietly using generative media models for internal production workflows ▪️ World models, gaming, and truly multimodal models are rising quickly on the platform ▪️ fal users have generated over 1B pieces of content last month alone using their platform Thanks to Mark Suster, Kerry Bennett, and the Upfront Ventures team for having us onstage and spotlighting the state of the surging generative media wave and @Fal’s fundamental work in the space. https://lnkd.in/gnRBMf2D