Erik Rannala

Big milestone for Doppler Finance: Doppler just raised a $3M seed round led by Reforge, with participation from DCG, Maven 11, HashKey Capital, GSR, CMCC Global and others. Their goal? Unlock institutional-grade yield infrastructure on the XRP Ledger, something that’s been missing since day one. Here’s the opportunity: -> XRP’s ~$200B market cap has less than 0.1% in DeFi. -> Ethereum, by comparison, has ~20% of its market cap active on-chain. That’s hundreds of billions in idle XRP and Doppler is building the rails to activate it. With custody integrations (Fireblocks, Copper, Bitgo), verifiable proof-of-reserves, and plug-and-play APIs for wallets/custodians, they’re building for regulated capital but with open access. Their $500M+ capital pipeline speaks volumes. This is a major unlock for #XRPFi and one of the most promising attempts to bridge compliant yield infra with an underserved but globally significant asset. Excited to see how this one plays out.

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"So what exactly is a venture studio?" I'm not sure how many times I've had this conversation over the last few years. At least a few times / week. For aspiring venture builder - especially those in institutional settings, 'getting' the model - and understanding how it differs from others - is critical. So, we're starting at the beginning. On March 19, I'm sitting down with Matthew Burris for the first session of the The Venture Studio Forum's University Track Speaker Series. Matt is widely credited for helping to define the venture studio asset class - he co-authored the Venture Studio Index and built the Three-Role Framework that the industry uses to classify studios. He's spent more time researching what makes a studio a studio than anyone I know. If you're at a university, research institution, or economic development org trying to figure out whether a venture studio makes sense for you, this is where to start. Note, this event kicks off a five part-series we're running through the VSF, all focused on helping institutions understand and evaluate the model. Here's the full program: Mar 19: What Is a Venture Studio? Apr 16: University Studio Examples May 21: Funding Mechanisms Jun 18: Finding & Working with Studios Jul 16: Sourcing & Evaluating Founder Talent Registration link in the comments!

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Procode is at the forefront of pairing AI with services businesses to transform legacy industries. We're incredibly excited to back Jeff Cripe, Kameron Rezzadeh, James Baez-Silva, and the whole Procode AI team. The speed with which Procode has entered the market, transformed the margin of the underlying operating company, AND created a better customer-facing product is special. As the son of a surgeon, I am grateful to the Procode team for creating a product that finally gives doctors visibility into how they're paid. Looking forward to a great journey together.

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Check out the latest funding news from across the Techstars portfolio. → Zipline (Techstars 2011), a drone delivery and logistics startup, raises more than $600M in new funding, boosting its valuation to $7.6B, as it expands commercial deployments. → Language learning startup Preply (Techstars 2015) raises $150M and becomes the 23rd known unicorn from Techstars accelerators. → Hydrosat (Techstars 2019) raises $60M in Series B funding → Tive (Techstars 2017) receives a $20M investment, valuing the shipment-tracking systems developer at slightly more than $500M. → Parambil (Techstars 2023) raises an additional $6M in seed funding ($8M to date). → Seasats (Techstars 2021) receives $24M in Department of War APFIT funding to accelerate the fielding of its autonomous surface vessels. → Hawaiian Airlines’ newly announced $600M Kahuʻewai Hawai‘i Investment Plan features a strategic investment in Ampaire (Techstars 2018) to support hybrid-electric aviation in the islands. → Fintalo (Techstars 2025) secures $500K+ in oversubscribed Pre-Seed funding. → PraxisPro (Techstars 2024) closes an oversubscribed $6M seed round. → Samara Aerospace (Techstars 2024) closes $10M seed round to help bring more stability to sats in orbit. → MyARC (Techstars 2022), a platform that enables fitness creators to train their communities at scale, secures £1.5M investment. Massive congratulations to these incredible portfolio companies!   🔗  Read more at https://lnkd.in/dxtCTvrg 

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What is a "buyer-builder"? It's the founder archetype we back at Daring Ventures. Buyer-builders have lived experience and domain expertise on the industries they are building in. They've felt the friction and know which problems to address and who to build for. They don't need to do customer discovery because they've experienced it first-hand. Outsiders spend years and millions figuring out what buyer-builders already know. We started The Builders Series to profile the ones doing it right. This edition: Ara Mahdessian and Vahe Kuzoyan of ServiceTitan. Ara and Vahe did not need to be told that contractors were underserved. They grew up watching it. Their fathers, competent skilled operators, losing hours every week to paper invoices, missed calls, and work that software should have absorbed years earlier. Full piece on Forward This 👇

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🚀 Meet PACT, simplifying SBA-backed acquisitions with investors. Think YC’s SAFE, but built for Main Street M&A. 📘 What is PACT and why we built it PACT (Partnership Acquisition Commonsense Terms) is a free, balanced starting point for the agreements used in SBA-backed acquisitions with outside investors. For too long, SBA-backed acquisitions with outside investors have been the wild west: every deal is different, inefficient, and confusing, especially for first-time searchers raising capital. PACT gives everyone a common baseline so reviews are faster, expectations are clear, and operators can focus on acquiring the business. 🧩 SAFE for ETA Y Combinator’s SAFE gave startups a shared template that made early investing easier to execute. PACT brings that same idea to ETA. It teaches the key concepts in plain English, aligns searchers and investors on the economics, and sets a fair place to start. Our goal is for PACT to become the default baseline for investor-backed small business acquisitions using SBA loans. 🤝 Who contributed 🏛️ Legal input from top SMB M&A attorneys: Joseph Spina (Cullen and Dykman LLP), Mark Dittrich (Groundswell Advisors, LLP), and Eric Hsu (Clear Focus Law, PLLC) provided feedback on drafts. 💼 Early investor adopters: Jordan F. (Shareholder Ventures), Grant Hensel (Entrepreneurial Capital), Jason Ehrlich (Fruition Capital), Sean Smith (Search Fund Ventures), Adam Kaplan (ETA Funding Partners), Jacob Hall (Kando Capital), Tony Cappaert (Workbench Capital) and Adam Markley (PROX Search Capital) have adopted PACT on new deals. 🎓 Community support: Chelsea Wood and Walker Deibel at the Acquisition Lab and Buy Then Build have committed to start educating the community on how investor deals work using PACT. 👉 What to do next 🔍 Searchers: download the docs and ask your lawyer to start from PACT. ⚖️ SMB M&A Law firms: review the templates and send feedback so the next version is better. 💸 SMB investors: adopt PACT as your starting point and share redlines from real deals. This is a community-led standard, and we will keep versioning PACT as feedback comes in from all sides. 📝 Thanks: Special thanks to Joseph Spina for leading the legal drafting with me and helping shape a true middle ground. 🔗 Download PACT and see the key terms: ETAPACT.com (link in the comments) Let’s make investor-backed acquisitions clearer, faster, and fairer for everyone. 🚨 DISCLAIMER: PACT is not legal advice. Searchers must engage experienced SMB M&A counsel to review and tailor these documents to their deal.

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It's been a pleasure partnering with Jeff Cripe and Kameron Rezzadeh on this journey. A board-certified surgeon turned founder brings a different lens to RCM. While many talk about AI "roll-ups", fewer spend a year quietly building the AI, acquiring the right asset, and proving out op + health IT integrations, translating into a 3,000 bps expansion in EBITDA. Excited to see Procode AI come out of stealth with dozens of customers already live! 🤞 🚀 📈

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**Figma's Imminent IPO: A Game Changer for Design Tech** Figma's potential $1.5B IPO highlights the growing demand for collaborative design tools. With impressive financials and CEO Dylan Field's strategic moves, Figma sets a strong precedent in the SaaS space. At ElevenX Capital, we recognize the importance of scalability and market adaptability for long-term investment success. How do you evaluate the readiness of a tech company for IPO? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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40%+ of Seed and Series A funding in 2026 is flowing into $100M+ rounds, as Zachary DeWitt recently highlighted. The market is making a big bet on mega rounds. I'm taking the under on their performance--I'd bet heavily on an index of regular-sized seeds vs the megas.   Here's what I think is happening. Ambitious founders surrounded by AI hype see Anthropic's and OpenAI's returns and think they need to do something similar. In their minds, this means raising huge rounds to fund NBA-level salaries for the most legible AI talent at Meta, Google, other AI labs, etc.   The problem is that this approach is fundamentally derivative. This is not how Anthropic, OpenAI, or any of the other most disruptive AI companies started. Disruption requires doing something that experts dismiss. If a startup requires raising mountains of cash to hire legions of expensive experts, it might have some degree of success, but it will not be disruptive.   Look, this is tricky. Anthropic raised giant early rounds and seems very mission-oriented, so I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here. That said, Anthropic's $124m Series A in 2021 was actually very unconventional in many respects, even in the context of a frothy 2021.   Besides being derivative (and thus not disruptive), this approach also selects for mercenary over missionary culture. And all things being equal, companies with missionary culture outperform. Because if you really care about solving a problem, you're willing to make sacrifices and do non-consensus things—not just copy what worked for the last wave.   So, why does this pattern persist despite these concerns?   The most economically dominant point is that the investors doing the big rounds make a lot of money on management fees. When partners at funds enjoy massive compensation from management fees, investment performance becomes a "nice-to-have."   To be fair, many of these partners are post-economic and are arguably more interested in hiring huge teams and building "platforms." The fees justified by mega rounds align nicely with the expense structure of empire-building. On the other hand, the smaller rounds are done by firms where the principals are making much less on management fees and have much more incentive to see a return on the capital via carry.   The mega firms would surely retort that many of the smaller rounds are done by firms that are here today, gone tomorrow. And there's truth to that. Mega firms with billions of assets are inherently more stable. At the same time, those firms are fundamentally targeting much lower returns. It's trade-offs all the way down.   So when I look at that 40%+ number, I see capital flowing into a pattern that selects for derivative thinking and mercenary culture, with an underlying incentive structure that ensures it keeps happening.   And that's why I'm taking the under on the performance of that 40%.

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Seed Stage Venture Debt? Most early founders think venture debt is something you raise at the Series B.  It’s seen as something you layer on once the business is fully “bankable”. But what if this paradigm is limiting growth for early stage companies? And what if founders can utilize a flexible product to reduce dilution? At Top Corner Capital we see it differently… ✅ We underwrite The Founder and to enterprise value, not formulaic metrics ✅ We believe debt can work much earlier, typically right after product-market fit (Seed/Series A) ✅ Our debt is designed to support founders, not constrain them ✅ Our structures are flexible, with none of the traditional debt mechanics that weigh down early stage founders (financial covenants, MAC defaults or investor support clauses) ✅ Our process is fast (think weeks, not months) ✅ Our capital is significantly less dilutive than equity, but can be used just like a dollar of equity: to hire, build, experiment and scale When used for growth (not survival), debt can help teams hit more milestones and empower founders to raise their next round on stronger terms…all while preserving meaningful ownership for both founders and early investors. A recent example… Top Corner partnered with NxLite in February 2025, providing Seed-stage debt capital that allowed the company to acquire critical equipment and fully prepare its production facility prior to raising additional equity. NxLite’s advanced coatings for windows and transparent barriers dramatically reduce energy consumption and support a more sustainable built environment. With this early capital, NxLite achieved production capacity to serve a strong roster of Fortune 500 enterprises, creating a strong foundation for its next phase of growth. NxLite closed a $9.2M Series A in September 2025 at a meaningful valuation increase. We’re excited to support David Mather and the NxLite team as they build on this momentum.

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When it comes to selling your business, what role do patents really play? In this podcast clip, Kurt shares why patents are often underestimated and how they can make a real difference to buyer confidence and valuation. It raises an important question: are business owners thinking about IP early enough in their journey, or only when it’s too late? 👉 We’ll share the full podcast in the comments.

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My investment framework centers on 7 layers. CASIMIR fits into the first layer which is the Observation Layer. Out of 22 billion IoT devices on earth and ~10k satellites in space in 2026 we may have a 6 billion (and growing) ultra low power devices on earth and space that can one day run on MicroSparc 👍🏼 -> Eternal power chip Harold “Sonny” White + Capital Factory #HardThings #deeptech

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Most founders treat warm intros like a nice-to-have. They think if the deck is strong enough, the right investor will notice. They’re wrong. Investors don’t have a filtering problem. They have a trust problem. Every week, they see hundreds of decks. Some great. Many decent. A few even brilliant. But that’s not the bar. The real question isn’t “Is this startup promising?” It’s “Do I trust this founder enough to take the call, stake my reputation, and possibly invest?” That’s what a warm intro solves. It reduces the trust gap. When a credible founder, respected operator, or trusted LP vouches for you, you’re no longer a stranger in someone’s inbox—you’re a filtered signal from someone they already believe in. • Without that credibility transfer, the burden of proof falls entirely on your deck. And no matter how strong it is, most investors won’t roll the dice if no one is standing behind it. But here’s the part most people miss: You don’t get warm intros. You earn them-long before you need them. Because warm intros aren’t just about access. They’re about shared experience, long-game relationships, and quiet reputational equity. The founders who raise well are the ones who tend the garden: They help others before asking for help. They’re kind when no one’s watching. They make time for feedback, referrals, second looks. They show up generously—and consistently. Fundraising isn’t a visibility game. It’s a credibility game. And credibility isn’t built in the room. It’s built over time. This post is a primer on that blind spot: What warm intros actually signal to investors. Why founder-to-founder intros beat cold outreach every time. How to turn a “no” into long-term trust. Why using brokers or “fundraising middlemen” almost always backfires. How to build a reputation that makes capital feel like a shared bet—not a leap of faith. If you want to raise smarter-and faster-understand this: Warm intros aren’t about playing favorites. They’re about reducing friction in a world where trust is scarce and time is shorter. And the best time to start building trust? Before you need it. #startups #fundraising #venturecapital #warmintros #founderlife #networking #trustdriven

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More than half of the cost you pay for electricity is for distribution (moving that electron around) rather than generating that electron. We’re paying more for shipping than for the item we’re buying. Yet all the effort in bringing down the cost of energy is focused on making generation cheaper. As demand skyrockets, we’re sleepwalking off a cliff. If we can’t generate sufficient electricity to meet this demand, we’ll either have to cede ground on AI development or throttle energy usage and lower our standard of living. Fixing the grid isn’t an optimization, it’s a national priority. There is no alternative: we have to fix the grid.

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Revolutionizing Art Stewardship: Strobe Ventures portco Winston Artory Group (WAG) is using blockchain and unique data to redefine trust in a $3 trillion industry A core Strobe thesis is that specialized vertical marketplaces (particularly those underpinned by blockchain rails) will serve to 'unbundle Sothebys' and provide better user experiences for cheaper, as compared to the expensive, gated and inefficient generalized incumbents WAG is a technology platform operating at the forefront of intelligent art and collectibles stewardship. They count 30% of the world’s top billionaire art collectors as clients, and have a legacy of appraising over $100 billion in art and have tokenized another $2 billion With new collection management software and a right-to-win in the art-lending space, WAG is just getting started -- read our full piece here: https://lnkd.in/ez4r9Gxc

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Seed Stage Venture Debt? Most early founders think venture debt is something you raise at the Series B or later. It is seen as something you layer on once the business is fully “bankable” and later stage. But what if this paradigm is limiting growth for early stage companies? And what if founders can utilize a flexible product at the early stages to reduce dilution? At Top Corner we see it differently: - We underwrite The Founder and to enterprise value, not formulaic metrics - We believe debt can work much earlier, typically right after product-market fit (Seed/Series A) - Our debt is designed to support founders, not constrain them - Our structures are flexible, with none of the traditional debt mechanics that weigh down early stage founders (financial covenants, MAC defaults or investor support clauses) - Our process is fast (think weeks, not months) - Our capital is significantly less dilutive than equity, but can be used just like a dollar of equity: to hire, build, experiment and scale When used for growth, debt can help teams hit more milestones and empower founders to raise their next round on stronger term, all while preserving meaningful ownership for both founders and early investors. A recent example: Top Corner partnered with NxLite in February 2025, providing Seed stage debt capital that allowed the company to acquire critical equipment and fully prepare its 45,000 squarer foot production facility prior to raising additional equity. NxLite produces advanced coatings for windows and transparent barriers that dramatically reduce energy consumption and support a more sustainable built environment. With this early capital, NxLite achieved production capacity to serve a strong roster of Fortune 500 enterprises, creating a strong foundation for its next phase of growth. NxLite closed a $9.2M Series A in September 2025 at a meaningful valuation increase. We’re excited to support David Mather and the NxLite team as they build on this momentum. https://lnkd.in/g-Fipd9K

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Another missive from Chuck Cotter and Daniel Faierman. Thanks guys for continuing to help to ecosystem. If you've not seen their posts, peek at https://lnkd.in/gPiu9Z4z. Topics include: · CPG Co-Manufacturing Contracts · Early Stage VC Terms to Rarely Accept · More Dividends (and Dividend Recaps?) · 5 Raises, 5 Takeaways · A Founder's Guide to Secondaries · Standing Out Pre-Traction · The State of VC · Corporate Governance 101 · Anti-Dilution Provisions · Primer on QSBS · 4 Fund Raising DON'Ts · Liquidation Preferences · Understanding SAFEs · Understanding Convertible Notes · Understanding Prorata Rights · Founders & Athletes · Employee Stock Options Demystified · The Art of Start-Up Valuation · What Is A Term Sheet Anyway? Check it out ...

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Interesting insights about AI (you never learn enough) by Blair Garrou of Mercury Fund at the Plug and Play Tech Center Fall Expo 2025 here in Sugarland Texas Key Insights: 1) B2B over a 10 year span was more favorable towards middle market and SMBs. AI However, is now all in on enterprise 2) Revolutionizing/Modernizing older industries is where AI will be seamless (in construction, certain types of engineering and older processes in energy) 3) It's better to invest in AI that equips workers with another skillset than ones that result in layoffs #startups #venturecapital #ai #emergingtech

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