Ela Madej

Humbled to be named one of the 5 Hottest Stealth Founders this month by DataDrivenVC. It got me thinking about a question every founder in this position asks: when do you actually come out of stealth? Boris Sofman and Bedrock Robotics came out last year with $80M and autonomous excavators ready to deploy. Charles Soll launched Moab launched out of stealth with $16M to build the OS for construction rentals. Benedikt Kisner and conmeet in Germany took two years in stealth, shipped to paying customers first, then announced with a €1.3M pre-seed. Three very different companies. Three very different timings. All valid. Which strategy is best? For us, we're past our alpha. 6 design partners and counting. The team is growing and good people are noticing. We're building and deploying fast, and the platform is improving by leaps and bounds. So when is the right time? Maybe you come out when the product speaks louder than the pitch. Maybe you come out when hiding starts costing you more than it protects you. Or maybe you just wake up one morning and realize the stealth label stopped being useful three months ago. For now, we're heads down building. But if you know the optimal out-of-stealth strategy, let me know! More soon.

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One of the reasons early-stage fundraising feels inefficient is that founders are forced to figure out investor fit through trial and error. Different investors back different stages, sectors, and levels of traction. And when that alignment is off, conversations either stall quickly or never really get off the ground. This is one of the pain points that we’re focused on closing at ThatRound. We help founders see which investors actually make sense for their business before they start applying for funding. Fundraising works best when alignment comes first, and this review shows how we’re simplifying the process for UK founders.

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There’s a growing narrative that AI creates mostly downside for vertical software companies. We think that view is too simplistic. At Las Casas, we believe that if you buy the right kind of software business, AI can be more of an accelerant than a disruptor. We're not looking at software companies where customers can easily rip out the product, build an in-house substitute, or switch to a cheaper AI-native competitor overnight. We're focused on businesses with a few specific characteristics that, in our view, materially reduce downside: - 90%+ gross retention over a long period of time. Customers have stayed for years, often even when the product wasn’t best-in-class. That usually tells you the software is deeply embedded in the workflow. - Low customer concentration. We want to avoid situations where a handful of customers can meaningfully impair the business if they churn. - Low ACVs. If the software is relatively inexpensive, it is far less likely that customers will invest the time and resources to rebuild it internally. It also makes it harder for a new entrant to undercut on price. - Mission-critical workflows. If the product sits at the center of day-to-day operations, switching risk is much higher. Failed implementations or downtime can create real disruption for the customer. This matters because the market is increasingly pricing many software businesses as though AI only creates risk: risk to retention, risk to pricing, risk to relevance. But in the right assets, AI can create the opposite. If you own a trusted, deeply embedded product with long-standing customer relationships, you have a real opportunity to build and ship high-ROI AI functionality faster and more cheaply than ever before, and sell it into an installed base that already knows you. That can do two important things: - Increase ACVs and improve growth - Make the product even more sticky over time This is also where we think our strategy differs from more traditional software investing playbooks. We are not buying software companies with a heavy dose of leverage, cutting R&D, and trying to optimize short-term EBITDA. In this new AI era, that is a dangerous approach. If you underinvest in product, you risk getting run over by innovative competitors. Instead, we believe the better path is to use limited leverage, keep investing in innovation, and use AI to improve the product enough that revenue growth inflects meaningfully. In our view, many of the future winners in software will be the companies that already sit in the workflow and use AI to become even more valuable for their customers.

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Two trends in fundraising that I’m seeing on a daily basis: 1/ The "we'll monetize later" era for infrastructure startups is dead "We'll figure out revenue once we have users" / "we're focused on adoption first"/ "monetization comes later" This worked in 2021. It doesn't work now. Today’s market won’t reward research organizations or companies that believe in perfection over getting it in users' hands. If you don't have a clear path to revenue… you won't get funded. period. VCs aren't writing checks hoping you'll figure it out later. 2/ "Vibe ARR" is everywhere Remember Jasper? hyper growth, but the model companies ate them alive. We're seeing this again. Companies growing really quickly on point-in-time technology that isn't defensible These companies look amazing on paper. Growth charts going up and to the right. But if you think models are getting better and becoming platform companies, many solutions become obsolete. 

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It goes by a lot of names: MSO, synthetic rollup, business-in-a-box. But earning a right to sharing in customers' upside is unique vertical strategy. Shopify, Honor, Compass, DoorDash, TaskRabbit, OpenDoor, Grow Therapy. What does it take to win that level of customer trust early? Sometimes, it means doing things that don't scale. Services can play a big role. We asked Dan Friedman, founder of another champion of the model: Moxie Get Dan's take in this clip from our latest episode.

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AI has changed what one person can do. It frees people to focus on judgment, creativity, and speed. But that only matters if founders redesign their companies around this new reality. My colleague @peteflint on what new company design should look like: 

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Most tech leaders I meet want to start angel or LP investing. They just don’t know where to begin. Feeling around in the dark and learning by doing with community is exactly how I got started. After making 64 early-stage investments as an angel - and now as a VC fund manager - I realized how steep the learning curve can be without the right structure and community. So we started organizing what I’d learned into a practical playbook for The Council’s private operator-angel community. Our goal was simple: accelerate the path from “curious” to “confident.” We’ve compiled hard-earned lessons, decision-making frameworks, templates, and resources for leaders who are ready to move from thinking about investing to actually doing it. Because without a clear framework, it’s easy to let analysis paralysis stop you from writing that first check. In this upcoming session, I’ll share: • How tech leaders can leverage their operator superpowers in early-stage investing • The key differences between being an angel and an LP • The risks, rewards, and what to realistically expect 📅 Tuesday, February 17 @ 9 AM If you’ve been considering investing but haven’t taken the leap yet, this is a great place to start. RSVP link in the comments.

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PSA to seed and early-stage founders: stop worrying about competition. I’ve spoken to hundreds of late-stage founders, and they all say the same thing. The biggest mistake they see at the early stage is founders obsessing over who else is in their space. When you are pre-PMF, comparing yourself to other buzzy AI startups is a distraction. They already have a defined GTM motion, some level of product-market fit, and a playbook to execute. Their “big new feature” might just be about expanding revenue or building parity. You’re still trying to land your first 10 paying customers. Here’s the truth: 1. Worry about competitors only when you actively lose a deal to them. THESE ARE THE COMPETITORS TO WORRY ABOUT. 2. When a customer chooses someone else, they will usually tell you why. Nine times out of ten it’s not the reason you think. It’s rarely a missing feature. More often it’s pricing, brand trust, or timing. 3. Competitors often move in completely different directions. OpenAI went after consumers, while Anthropic leaned into enterprise and APIs. Playbooks diverge fast. 4. The only real roadmap at the early stage is customer pain. Every conversation, every demo, every user insight. Talk to as many customers as possible. If you spend your time trying to copy what competitors are doing, you will always be a step behind. If you spend your time talking to users, you’ll know exactly what to build next. The path to PMF isn’t found on Twitter threads about “AI competitors.” It’s found in the feedback from the 5 people actually using your product every single day.

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30+ VCs Backing Marketplace Startups Below is a cross-stage, cross-sector mix of firms that back marketplace and platform companies early and support them as they grow. Consumer and platform investors Upfront Ventures 1752vc (Formerly Pegasus) BAM Ventures Forerunner Brand Foundry Ventures Maveron BoxGroup Greycroft Alumni Ventures Marketplace natives and network effects specialists FJ Labs NFX Great Oaks Venture Capital RiverPark Ventures Left Lane Capital First Round Capital Lerer Hippeau Precursor Ventures Seed partners building two-sided platforms early Founder Collective NextView Ventures Uncork Capital Slow Ventures Bling Capital Gaingels Initialized Capital Felicis Multi-stage firms backing marketplace winners at scale Accel Bessemer Venture Partners Lightspeed General Catalyst New Enterprise Associates (NEA) Kleiner Perkins Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) Founders Fund

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💥 2.3%. That’s how much global VC funding went to female-only founding teams in 2024. And Carina Abreu and I are part of that 2.3%. While $289 billion in venture capital was deployed globally last year, only $6.7 billion reached women building companies from scratch. Meanwhile, 83.6% went to all-male founding teams. Yes — the numbers improved slightly from 2023. But at this pace, the world won’t see gender parity in venture funding until 2065. As two female tech founders building C-MORE — a European AI-native intelligence company — we feel these numbers deeply. Not as statistics, but as lived reality. Every milestone takes more resilience, more proof, more traction, more “show me again.” And yet, we keep building. We keep scaling. We keep proving that greatness has no gender. Because innovation is not male or female — it’s courageous. Carina Abreu and I didn’t enter tech to fit into an existing system. We entered to redesign it. To build a company that makes intelligence accessible to the 99% of businesses who get left behind — the same way female founders often do. So here’s to the 2.3%. To every woman building something that statistics say shouldn’t exist. To every founder rewriting the norms. To every team proving that excellence doesn’t need permission — it just needs a chance. And may we accelerate the path so the next generation doesn’t have to wait until 2065. See the study here: https://lnkd.in/dB9AS4rH #WomenInTech #FemaleFounders #AI #StartupLife #Leadership #Innovation #Sustainability #RiskIntelligence #Entrepreneurship #NoPermissionNeeded

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Incredibly proud of the BlueLayer team for building the digital infrastructure that supports carbon project developers to deliver quality credits to the market 💥 Our partnership with Senken is another step toward that mission. By connecting project data and inventory directly with a trusted network of active buyers, we’re removing friction and making the carbon market more transparent, accessible, and efficient for everyone involved. It’s exciting to see this partnership lay the groundwork for a truly digital, scalable, and trusted carbon market. #BlueLayer #Senken #CarbonMarkets #ClimateTech

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Friday Fun - As a VC I was investing for Angels, Family Offices, UHNW, (you name it), and one thing everyone has in common is a genuine urge for comprehension. They want to understand the action. So I decided to put something I've done in meetings for years locally on my machine (and give it to you too). Good Founders are the deepest expert in any room they walk into. They've lived inside the problem long enough that the causality and implied vector of motion is just obvious to them. A happens, then B and C kind of collapse, and D emerges or B1 becomes viable — and they've watched that cycle enough times that it feels self-evident. But when they say it out loud to a room of people with different reference points... the explanation needs to become materially more like Tetris. Just like languages with nuance and context, the problem becomes translation. Landing metaphors and analogies so context is gained even while learning the fundamental concepts. The mental models Founders have are genuinely irreducible. You can't compress years of domain experience (or literally created knowledge) into a brief pitch. Before I'd bring a founder to our LPs, I'd spend time explaining who'd actually be in that room — what they'd built, what sector their intuition lived in, who was going to ask sharp questions and who was going to call me or find me in the hall afterward with their questions. And then I'd work with the founder on how to get their logic to land for that audience, not a generic one. Not reducing it or simplifying it — but taking the version of the idea that already exists in someone else's mental model and drawing a line between the two — just a bridge built from their side. Anyway — I made a little HTML thing a few days ago that basically does that prep work. Single file, lives in your browser (although I did make it a skill file too if you prefer). You (add your api key) put in a concept you're pitching (the hard part, not the whole pitch), tell it something about who's in the room, and it helps you find the analogy that'll actually land for them. It's not polished, but it's the kind of thing I spent hours doing with founders when they met with our LPs. It's a small thing that isn't small at all. Suddenly the context is served on a platter, and they get the base for free — they can stack their own ideas from there. They're present. Here you go. https://lnkd.in/gdjXVhWF

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From CTV Specials: Most venture capitalists are still using software company playbooks to evaluate climate tech ventures. Climate tech companies need to pour concrete, weld metal beams, and navigate complex regulations - but VCs are looking for the next Facebook instead of the next breakthrough in carbon capture or renewable energy. Learn More: https://lnkd.in/gA96TnRK  

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Fascinating thing about Google's AlphaEarth project: They built exactly what nonprofits have been begging for. Open data platform? Check. No vendor lock-in? Check. Works with existing tools? Check. Doesn't require a PhD to use? Getting there. MapBiomas in Brazil is already using it to track Amazon deforestation faster than ever. The UN's using it for food security. Over 50 organizations tested it before launch. But here's what kills me, this is what innovation looks like when it's not trying to extract value from social problems. Google didn't build this to "disrupt the nonprofit sector" or create a "social impact unicorn." They built it for science. For research. For understanding. And accidentally created the exact opposite of every nonprofit tech platform I've seen pitched: Simple, open, powerful, and not trying to own your data. The irony? A virtual satellite that maps the entire planet is somehow more accessible than most donor management systems. Maybe that's the lesson: The best technology for social good isn't always built FOR the social sector. It's built for solving problems, then shared freely. #TechForGood #OpenSource #DataScience #Innovation #EnvironmentalTech

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Deep tech is no longer a niche corner of the market; it now accounts for 28% of all VC funding in Europe, more than any other sector (Dealroom 2025). This includes areas like AI, clean energy, semiconductors, and quantum — but the bigger lesson is how investor appetite has shifted towards technologies and business models that can fundamentally transform industries. At Rex Capital, this resonates strongly. We back companies working in advanced areas like AI and biotech, but also those developing innovations that might seem simple yet have the power to disrupt entire industries. For us, it’s not about complexity for its own sake — it’s about the ability to change markets and scale impact. https://lnkd.in/eFfjFukF

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Last time I mapped five structural wedges in Brazil—Pix, WhatsApp, and the fragmented market dynamics in food delivery, real estate, and hiring—and profiled three companies exploiting them. This article goes somewhere different. Not consumer tech, not B2B SaaS. Private credit. At first glance an odd fit for a Swiss investor. Back home, rates have been near zero or negative for years, banks are well-capitalised, and credit is a commodity. Brazil is the mirror image: interest rates are high, spreads are enormous, incumbents extract rents—and the market is starting to crack open. That is not a bug. It is the investment thesis. https://lnkd.in/dXXv6PAp

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They both left lucrative positions to join two young Brazilian Founders starting a credit card company for startups. Now Michael B. Tannenbaum is the CEO of Figure, a Pre-IPO Company, and Art L. is the Chief Business Officer at Brex. In a Change Order first, I sit down with Michael and Art to chat about: -How Michael was able to recruit Art to Brex -The changing dynamics of their relationship over time -How saying ‘no’ becomes the hardest part of success -Why financial services should focus on Blockchain over AI -Why AI is still being used as an experimental tool by enterprises And SO much more. If you want to listen to a fun, animated and tactical conversation with two successful friends check out the Episode below.

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For the first time in US History, it's now possible to search for land based on exactly what you intend to develop. Introducing SearchAI Intentions, by Prophetic. When we started building Prophetic, one of the things that frustrated us most about land search was the invisible prerequisite: before you could find a site suitable for your townhome, hotel, data center, warehouse, etc. project, you had to already intimately know the market. You had to know the zone codes. You had to know which municipalities allowed what uses. You had to translate your vision into zoning language and then go hunting. If you didn't have that local expertise, you were starting from scratch or waiting for a broker to call you. That has been true for every developer, in every asset class, since the beginning of the industry. We just changed how the industry works - nationwide. SearchAI Intentions now lets you search by exactly what you want to build with 120+ development type categories, any market, any jurisdiction, and results in seconds. A hotel developer searches "Hotel - Full Service". A data center developer searches "Data Center". A senior living operator searches "Senior Living - Active Adult" or "Senior Living - Assisted Living". SearchAI reads the actual zoning codes across every zone and jurisdiction in your search area and returns every viable parcel, ranked by fit. It cites the specific municipal code section behind every result so you can act with confidence. What this means practically: for the first time, hotel developers, energy companies, warehouse and logistics operators, data center site selectors, cell tower companies, senior living operators, medical facility developers, commercial and retail developers, economic development agencies, and major brokerages have a land search tool built for how they actually think about acquisition. They can find sites that meet their exact criteria, in any market, in seconds - instead of literal weeks. If you have ever spent days in county GIS systems trying to find viable sites for a project, I would love to show you what this looks like now. For a deeper look at how it works and how Prophetic unlocks development across all verticals, read the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gPzJbt3w #PropTech #LandAcquisition #RealEstateDevelopment #SearchAI #Prophetic #DataCenters #SeniorLiving #EnergyInfrastructure #IndustrialRealEstate #HospitalityDevelopment #homebuilding #cre #realestate #commercialrealestate #realestatebrokerage https://lnkd.in/gz-zrt2P

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Venture‑scale climatetech is hard. We’re asking founders to hit three moving targets at once: 🌎 Real climate impact (measured in tons, not tweets), 🌎 Compelling unit economics in markets that are often regulated, slow, or both, and 🌎 Scalable go‑to‑market that can attract institutional capital before you run out of time, money, or patience. Too many promising climatetech teams get stuck in the gap between prototype and project finance: the tech basically works, but the scale‑up story isn’t investible yet. The capex is heavy, sales cycles are long, customers are risk‑averse, and the “venture math” looks fuzzy to people who don’t live inside this space. If we want more fundable climatetech companies, we need to help founders design for bankability, deployability, and venture readiness from day one—not as an afterthought when the runway is already short. That’s exactly why we’re running the Venture Mechanics ClimateTech Scalathon at 9Zero Climate Innovation Hub in Seattle (May 1-3): a hands‑on, working session focused on turning promising climate ideas into scalable, financeable businesses with credible paths to venture scale. If you’re a founder, operator, investor, or corporate partner who wants to help more climatetech startups actually clear the funding bar, I’d love to see you there. Early bird tickets are live now — grab yours while they’re still available and help us build the next generation of truly investible climatetech companies. Only the time format is borrowed from hackathons, otherwise coding is not part of this exercise. It's more of an MBA business plan pitch competition rolled into one intensive weekend. Join a founder's team or build your own team from scratch on Friday evening (May 1st). Existing startups with only one or two founders can also join in a separate bracket, if they want to level up their strategy for scalability and fundability with the help of other experts and mentors from the Catapult Accelerator. https://lnkd.in/gTQhhXb7

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