NextView Ventures

Congratulations to NextView portfolio company WHOOP on their incredible $575M raise and $10.1B valuation! 🎉 🔥 When we invested in WHOOP's seed round back in 2013, Will Ahmed was running the company out of a dorm room. Today, waking up to a $10B+ valuation is an extraordinary moment - and yet, as Will put it, "it feels like we're still just getting started." NextView is honored to have been part of this journey from those earliest days. As Partner Lee Hower reflects, "It's been remarkable to watch the growth of WHOOP, as both a company and a user community." What makes WHOOP so special? It's both a product and a movement. Millions of people across the globe use WHOOP daily to optimize and improve their health - and the business behind it is experiencing accelerating growth while being cashflow profitable. That combination is rare and powerful. We've been proud backers - and proud users - every step of the way. The sky is the limit for WHOOP, and we can't wait to see what's next. 🚀 More from The New York Times linked in the comments below ⬇️

Fast Company's 2026 Most Innovative Companies List is out and we are proud to say that FIVE NextView portfolio companies are featured: ⚕️ Form Health 🍼 Bobbie 🪷 SamaCare 🔋 Euclid Power 👥 Opus Training Congrats to the hardworking founders and teams on this fantastic achievement!

"Every LLM is, at its core, a consensus machine. Your entire job isn't necessarily being automated. Your consensus work is." NextView Partner Melody Koh digs into 140 years of automation history and finds the same pattern every time: consensus work gets automated, the non-consensus frontier expands, and how much of your work falls into each category determines whether you get displaced, liberated, or just face a higher bar. Link to Melody's blog post in the comments ⬇️

"Most of us have a mental model of how we're perceived. Most of us are at least a little wrong." NextView Partner Rob Go explores an underrated use case of AI in venture that changed how he shows up in founder meetings: not screening founders, but evaluating yourself. Link to Rob's full post in the comments ⬇️

Congratulations to portfolio company Fuse. Today they announce $25M in funding to build the AI-native loan origination system and account opening platform for credit unions 🎉 "Legacy platforms create a widening gap between what members expect & what the system can deliver: hidden fees, glacial change cycles, restricted data access, and zero path to automation. That gap is where fintechs are winning. Fuse exists to close it.” - Fuse Co-founder, Andres Klaric But the funding announcement is only half the news. Today, Fuse is also launching the Fuse Rescue Fund - a $5M initiative aimed at helping credit unions break free from long-term contracts with legacy vendors. The first 50 qualifying institutions get free access to Fuse until their current contracts expire 💥 We're honored to back Andres Klaric, Marc Escapa, and the entire Fuse team alongside friends at Footwork, Primary Venture Partners, and more. Congrats, Fuse — let's go! 🚀

Come hear NextView Partner Melody Koh and Mike Wilner (OpenAI) speak about building defensible AI companies at the Lynx AI Frontier Summit in NYC on April 2nd! Registration link in the comments ⬇️

Early stage venture is somewhat in disarray for multiple reasons. I've written other posts about this, so I'm not going to belabor the point now. But one thing that folks seem confused about is how to think about the different strategies within seed investing. Is one a remnant of the past? Is one clearly better or more desirable from a founder of LP perspective? Does seed investing even matter? There was a time when each style of investor would argue passionately about why their model was correct. They would cite incentives, fund math, or other reasons why a particular model was clearly the right choice for founders. The reality is that each model has its own distinct strengths and weaknesses, and certain founders will naturally gravitate towards one or the other. The good news is that I believe the pie is big enough for all four to co-exist. Different models will fall in and out of favor at different times among LPs, but all four can be successful—and all four can also have a pretty serious failure mode. Here's the quick version: Classic Institutional Seed — Dedicated seed funds that lead rounds and go deep with a focused portfolio. Strong alignment with founders, strong fund math. But they're vulnerable when markets shift hard to consensus investing. If only 10 AI companies matter, these funds can get caught flat-footed because they weren't in those deals early enough. Specialist Seed Funds — Same investment model as classic seed, but narrowed to a sector or geography. LPs love the pitch right now when complemented with mega-fund exposure. But the best companies are rarely in the verticals that are hot—which means specialists often miss the biggest winners. Multi-Stage Megafunds — Big brands stretching down to seed. They can pay the highest prices and bring the biggest networks. But the seed is often just an option on a later, larger check. I've heard too many of these firms describe a past seed investment as "well, it was just a seed." Some founders won't care. Many will. Accelerators — Batch-based, standardized terms, huge portfolios. The best ones offer founders a genuinely less dilutive path. But if you're not in the top tier, adverse selection is brutal. And returns get diffused fast across hundreds of companies. The thing I keep coming back to: no single model dominates all the time. They cycle in and out of favor. What matters is knowing which game you're playing—and being elite at it. For founders, this means understanding the bargain you're making when you pick an investor. What do you really care about? Alignment? Brand? Specialization? Access to follow-on capital? There's no universally right answer. For anyone building or managing a fund, the failure mode isn't picking the wrong model. It's constantly chasing your tail and not committing to the one that's native to you. The opportunity set is vast enough for all four to exist. But none of them are easy. Full post in the first comment – curious to hear your thoughts!

"Something people often seem confused about is how to think about the different strategies within seed investing. Is one a remnant of the past? Is one clearly better or more desirable from a founder or LP perspective? Does seed investing even matter?" NextView Partner Rob Go maps out four approaches to early stage venture, and what founders, LPs, and managers should keep in mind about each of them. Link to Rob's post in the comments ⬇️

"The skeptics aren't wrong that AI was useless for them. The enthusiasts aren't wrong that AI is transformative for them. They're sitting at different points on the same curve." NextView Partner Melody Koh introduces the trust-utility curve: why your experience of AI isn't a capability problem, it's a permission problem. The gap between "useful chatbot" and "transformative assistant" is determined by how much context and access you're willing to grant. Link to Melody's full post in the comments ⬇️