Greg Consiglio

This week Tulip Interfaces became Acequia Capital's 23rd unicorn company. When we made the first investment into Tulip in 2015, it was clear to Hank and I that we were early. It was going to take some time, but that massive legacy industries had no idea the amount of innovation and value was out there, waiting to be won by companies that could master software and machine intelligence. These observations and others led us to develop two investment theses we’ve been executing on since; what we termed “New Industrials.” Fast forward 10 years and the idea that a broader industrial reinvention is underway is now almost a given across the capital markets and leading companies. A movement has sprung up around us. It’s much more in vogue to back physical technology startups now, but most investors misunderstand what great ones look like, and how numerous the barriers to adoption are. We’re fortunate to benefit from a decade of lessons and insights from watching up close as incredible founding teams have built immensely valuable organizations, these include Stoke Space, Radiant, Formlabs, Atomic Industries, Applied Atomics, Harbinger, Dirac, Inc., Rainmaker Technology Corporation, AnySignal, EthonAI, Flow Engineering, Milvus Advanced, Rivelin Robotics, Adaptyv, KMB Telematics Inc., Tactian, Nimble Precision, sensmore, Hyperdrives, Ethos Space Resources, Antaris, TransAstra, Rightbot Technologies, Provectus Algae, Arctoris, Flexe, Coronal Technologies, Exapto, Visolis, Vorticity Inc., XENOPS AI, and many others. My takeaway from 10 years of investing in industrial reinvention is that we are still at the beginning. We have a long way to go and the next 10 years will move a lot faster than the last. Thanks to our founders for the continued trust and partnership.

153

13 Comments

🔥 Why We Built MVP — and the Power of Collective Investing When Elan Adler 🩻, Founder & CEO of OneImaging, asked why we decided to build MVP… the truth is simple: Working with Jason Parrott and Manny Menendez Menedez has been a blast 🙌 —and we’re constantly on the lookout for founders who drive real cost savings for employers. 💼💡 We raised $850K from 80+ investors across the digital health industry for Oneimaging. That collective support wasn’t just financial—it came with deep industry knowledge, intros, and strategic insight. 🤝📈 Our MVP members helped evaluate the opportunity and delivered incredible intel. 🧠✨ Watch Here: https://lnkd.in/d5AnVx8n Listen here: https://lnkd.in/ga_TNNnZ

19

73% of all LP capital raised in Q1 2026 went to just 5 venture firms. Not the top 20. Not the top 10. Five. If your fund is not one of them, LPs are not finding you through your deck. They are finding you through your reputation. And reputation in 2026 is built in public, not in pitch rooms. Here is the problem most VCs refuse to say out loud: 2025 is on pace for the lowest VC fundraising year in a decade. Capital is not disappearing. It is concentrating. And the managers sitting outside the top five are fighting over 11.5% of the market with the same tools they used in 2021. Cold outreach. Conference dinners. Warm intros through the same five mutual connections. Meanwhile, funds with at least three touch points per quarter with LPs recorded 15% higher re-up rates. Three touch points. Per quarter. Most VCs are lucky to have three per year. The managers closing the gap between themselves and the top five are not doing it through better pitch decks. They are doing it through something most of their competitors have written off as a vanity exercise. A personal brand. And more specifically, a podcast. Here is what a positioned podcast does for a VC that nothing else can replicate: It creates a touchpoint every single week without asking for anything. An LP in Singapore hears how you think about a market dislocation. A founder in London watches how you stress-test a thesis. A co-investor in New York sees how you handle being wrong about a bet. None of that happens in a quarterly update email. All of it happens in a 40-minute episode that they chose to press play on. LPs invest in lines, not dots. They want to see consistency over time, not just a single moment of conviction. A podcast is the only asset that builds that line in public, at scale, before a single LP relationship formally exists. Funds with long-tenured LP syndicates generated net IRRs 400 basis points above public market equivalents over the past decade, partly because predictable capital lets GPs time exits for value and not for optics. Predictable capital comes from trusted relationships. Trusted relationships come from consistent, visible proof of how you think. The VCs winning LP loyalty in this environment are not the ones with the best CRM. They are the ones whose thinking is already familiar before the first formal conversation starts. That familiarity is not luck. It is infrastructure. And right now, most funds outside the top five are building everything except that. If you are a GP or a fund principal thinking seriously about what your market presence looks like in a concentration era, I am happy to have a direct conversation. Drop a comment or send me a message.

2

Welcome back to #MathMonday. It's pretty clear to us at Veteran Ventures Capital that we're back in conflicts of attrition—something many of us thought was buried in the dustbin of history after the "precision" war against #Iraq in 1991. Two things drove that home this weekend. 1. The exchange rate is breaking #math. Robert #Magyar Brovdi, Commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, recently put a price tag on the new way of war: roughly $878 in matériel to kill a single Russian soldier. The exchange ratio is a staggering 400 Russians lost for every one Ukrainian (according to Brovid). Drones now account for 70–80% of all battlefield casualties on that front, and FPVs alone struck 33,019 Russian troops in December 2025—the first month verified Russian losses from Ukrainian drones exceeded Russian recruitment. Some context on how unprecedented those numbers are: - #WWII U.S. Army Ordnance estimates: ~25,000–50,000 small-arms rounds per enemy combatant killed. - #Vietnam: cited figures climbed past 200,000 rounds per kill. - #British heavy AAA early in the V-1 campaign: roughly 2,500 shells per rocket downed—before the proximity fuze collapsed that ratio to around 100. The cost-per-casualty curve has been bending the wrong way for eight decades. #Ukraine just bent it back—violently. That's why it's a good thing the U.S. is sending more soldiers into Ukraine to learn from them firsthand. 2. Even the "losses" are wins. Ukrainian milbloggers have begun counting it as a kill when an FPV is destroyed by an incoming missile—on the logic that both pieces of hardware are gone, and the exchange still favors them. Makes sense when the Russians have to expend a $100K missile to take down a $1K drone. They're right, and the self-reflection of that math is sobering. We're firing $3M+ Patriot PAC-3 interceptors at $35K Shaheds, resulting in us running a ~100-to-1 deficit—and the Middle East burned through 800+ PAC-3 MSEs in three days in last year's engagement. Unknown what a good unclassified estimate for the current conflict, but it's a big number. Two takeaways: 1) As I've said often, the old adage needs an update. "Amateurs talk tactics, experts talk logistics" should now read: Amateurs talk war, experts talk supply chain. Ukraine is producing over 8 million FPVs per year. Russia claims up to 19,000 drones per day. Whoever scales their factories—and protects them—wins. 2) Cheap defense at single-digit percentages of offense cost is a brand-new kind of deterrent. Being on the wrong side of the cost curve may look good in the short term, but it's really a depletion race to the bottom of your own checkbook. The strategists, operators and investors who internalize this shift first will own the next decade of defense. #MathMonday #VeteranVenturesCapital #DefenseTech #DroneWarfare #AsymmetricWarfare #DefenseInvesting #NationalSecurity #FutureOfWarfare #MilitaryInnovation #SupplyChain

14

Fun discussion today on the potential of this VC vintage—will it be one of the best or the worst? **Bull Case:** Companies are achieving $1B+ valuations with significantly fewer employees, leading to larger exits driven by AI. Much bigger outcomes + less ESOP dilution = better vintages. **Bear Case:** We face high entry prices, but also an increasing number of companies struggling as they navigate the AI landscape, so you have a higher failure rate. You also still have "giant" winners for VCs but less 3x's - think more 0's and 10x's.  Also lots of value accrues to the frontier labs and S tier companies but they burn so much capital in the competition that we see insane dilution and compressed returns because of higher entry prices & more capital needs

45

3 Comments

Every #VentureStudio GP knows some portfolio bets won’t hit. That's expected - and it's one of the reasons studios are such a powerful vehicle for innovation. And while a venture's failure might be what's visible to the outsider, what keeps them up at night isn’t failure at the venture level — it’s failure at the systemic level within the studio. One bad entity design. One IP misstep. One governance gap. That’s how studio operations fall apart. We break down how to spot (and fix) these cracks before they turn into fault lines in our latest paper, "The GP Dilemma" - DM me and I'll send you a copy!

4

Excited to share that Miravoice has raised a $6.3M seed round — and we’re proud to partner with Nishant Jain, Danny D. Leybzon, Shreyas Tirumala, along with the whole Miravoice team. From the beginning, what drew Unusual Ventures to Miravoice was how clearly they saw a problem most organizations have simply learned to live with: collecting structured data through voice conversations is still manual, expensive, and slow. Despite all the progress in AI, large-scale phone surveys and interviews are still largely powered by call centers. Earlier voice AI solutions struggled with reliability and accuracy, making them difficult to trust for high-stakes data collection. Miravoice takes a fundamentally different approach. Read our full post below: https://lnkd.in/e8yJEeDS

131

6 Comments

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

6

Will the secondary markets ever become a traded market like the bank loan market? We sat down with private markets veteran and Partner, Global Head of Vintage Strategies, External Investing Group (XIG) at Goldman Sachs Asset Management Harold Hope to discuss the rapid growth and evolution of the secondary market. In the latest Alt Goes Mainstream AGM Unscripted podcast, Harold and I had a fascinating conversation about the nuances of the secondary market and what the future of secondaries might look like: ➡️ Perspectives from Harold’s early days in secondaries 25 years ago, when Goldman had raised its first $400M fund in secondaries and when the secondaries industry was doing around $2B per year in transaction volume. ➡️ The evolution of innovation in the secondaries market. ➡️ Why problem-solving is a defining feature of secondaries. ➡️ What is the right skillset required to be a great secondaries investor? ➡️ Why secondaries is fundamentally a valuation oriented business. ➡️ Are secondaries returns driven by buying high-quality assets or by buying at steep discounts? ➡️ Misconceptions about continuation vehicles and how the trend of private companies staying private longer impacts CVs. ➡️ The how and the why behind Goldman’s recent acquisition of Industry Ventures and why Goldman is excited about the opportunity set in venture and growth secondaries. ➡️ Why scale matters in secondaries. ➡️ Why secondaries might not become a traded market like the bank loan market and why secondaries may not fully achieve standardization because managers may not want completely uniform standardization. ➡️ Why secondaries can be an on-ramp to private markets for private wealth investors. Thanks Harold for sharing your wisdom, expertise, and passion about secondaries and private markets. https://lnkd.in/evTHaVDG

16

I am excited to announce that Shine Capital has led AudioShake’s $14M Series A. Our investment represents the culmination of two years of searching for a company that will define the next generation of audio. Since 2023, we have been asking ourselves the question, "What technology will be used pervasively across the totality of the audio landscape?" Then we met Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, founders of AudioShake. AudioShake makes a suite of AI-powered tools for processing audio that include stem-splitting, voice isolation, speaker separation, and more. These primitives are critical infrastructure for almost any task involving audio, as evidenced by the breadth of use cases that the company serves. The Walt Disney Company and Downtown Music use AudioShake to make tracks available for sync licensing. Film studios and post-production houses use AudioShake to clean up sound from microphones to prevent re-recordings and manual audio engineering. Sports leagues and broadcasters use AudioShake to separate stadium noise from commentary to enable clean captioning and crisper audio. And Big Tech and frontier labs use AudioShake to prepare their audio data for multimodal AI training. We believe that audio will be the most important medium in the age of AI, defined by explosive growth across three categories that are even better with AudioShake: 1) Audio-as-AI-Interface: For the first time, people can perform complex compute operations using their voice. Conversing with AI will propel voice assistant usage well beyond its current ~50% adoption. 2) Explosion of Content: The rate at which user-generated content is made continues to accelerate, which will be further amplified by the possibility of AI-generated content. Audio is a superset of video — nearly every video uses sound to convey meaning, message, or emotion. 3) Voice Agents for Business: More than $100B of phone labor is performed annually in the United States. While some of it sits in call centers, most of it is fractional work. Businesses across finance, healthcare, and beyond have rapidly adopted phone agents. We are fortunate to partner with Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, passionate entrepreneurs and audiophiles dedicated to making audio as easy to work with as images or text. Audio contains vast amounts of information and creative possibility, and AudioShake will help unlock it. Thank you to our friends at Indicator Ventures for connecting us to Jessica. We are thrilled to support the AudioShake team with them, alongside Origin Ventures, Thomson Reuters, Precursor Ventures and Background Capital.

75

7 Comments

Today, we backed founders building in industries most people overlook because they use them every day. Restaurants. Nightlife. Food delivery. Huge markets, broken systems. One team is helping restaurants grow without giving away margins to marketplaces. Another is rebuilding nightlife distribution through community and events. Another is creating the infrastructure layer for India’s home kitchen economy. All three already have real traction behind them. That’s usually the signal we pay attention to most. If you’re building something ambitious with momentum already happening… 👇 Comment below and we’ll DM you how to apply #Startups #VentureCapital #FoodTech #RestaurantTech #AI #CPG #ConsumerTech #FounderLed

47

5 Comments

Emerging VC Manager's who are Fundraising? Here's What Steffen Risager Would Say As a 1st-time emerging VC manager raising your fund, one of the best pieces of advice comes from Steffen Risager (former LP/CIO, now with FundFrame). Here's what he'd likely tell you: 🎯 Raise on Credibility, Not Excitement LPs aren't buying your pitch deck—they're buying trust in your process. Steffen's framing around private markets emphasizes structured decision-making and reducing bias, which means your fundraising should reflect discipline, not improvisation. 🔑 4 Questions LPs Need You to Answer Clearly Why you? What's your track record, network, and unique edge? Why now? What's the market opportunity that justifies this fund today? Why this market? What's your thesis and how is it focused (not broad)? Why is your edge durable? What can you do consistently that others can't copy? 🏗️ Show Process, Not Just Hustle Your sourcing advantage Your decision-making process How you support portfolio companies post-investment Reserve management and follow-on strategy Speak in evidence, not adjectives. Prior outcomes, network quality, founder access, pacing discipline, and a believable follow-on plan matter more than grand claims. 💡 The Executive Summary Steffen's core insight: your job is to prove you can create value at the ownership level—not just source interesting deals. LPs care about execution, discipline, and repeatable decision-making. For a first-time manager, that means: ✓ A narrow, focused fund strategy ✓ A tight, repeatable process ✓ Explicit boundaries on what you won't do ✓ Clear explanation of post-investment support ✓ Institutional, simple, consistent materials Bottom line: Raise on credibility. For an emerging VC, that means fewer grand claims and more proof you can make good decisions consistently.  

1

Spent time with David Nussbaum at the Proto office and it was truly exciting The entertainment industry is at an inflection point, and most people haven’t felt it yet. Presence is becoming programmable. Experience is becoming scalable. The wall between an artist and their audience is getting thinner every year, and AI agents are about to make it disappear entirely. We’re moving from tools that assist to agents that act. That shift changes everything about how talent gets discovered, booked, and experienced. The best founders in entertainment right now aren’t asking how technology fits into the existing model. They’re asking what becomes possible when the old model is gone. Exciting time to be building. Thank you David for having me !!

40

2 Comments

Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

71

3 Comments

Hexcel Adds Independent Director in Deal With Activist Investor "Hexcel added a new independent director to its board in a move that avoids a potential proxy fight for the aerospace materials company with activist investor Vision One Fund. "As part of an agreement between the two sides, Vision One will withdraw their nominees to the board that were to be voted on at the company's annual shareholder meeting. Vision One will also support Hexcel's board nominees, and agree to certain standstill restrictions and mutual non-disparagement provisions, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. "The new director, former Kaman Chief Executive Officer Neal Keating, was appointed effective Tuesday." Keating's experience in aerospace may make him an ideal director choice. Yet from a bigger picture perspective, I wonder if this settlement is the right move for investors. More and more activist campaigns are settling rather than running the full process of a proxy fight with typically a greater number of directors nominated by the activist. Hopefully, activists are becoming like the public company boards they battle, i.e. more focused on reaching consensus than big results. #governancearbitrage #proxyfights #corporategovernance #activistinvesting #valuecreation https://lnkd.in/gazBUGFp

4

From the beginning, we believed Lumana was building much more than a smarter surveillance tool. Lumana's platform reflects the next evolution in video intelligence — physical AI. This approach enables systems to go beyond basic detection capabilities to understanding context, infer intent, and deliver real-time insights that improve safety and operations at scale. Further, we decided to take the longer and more difficult direction of building a whole new generation and fully featured Video Management System (VMS). With the company’s $40M Series A, led by our friend Peter Wagner from Wing Venture Capital and our seed partners from SCAPITALVC, we’re doubling down on a platform that’s already proving its value in the real world. We are serving now close to ten thousands enterprise cameras in production! Founders like Sagi Ben Moshe bring a rare mix of vision and execution to the table. From our earliest conversations as an EIR at Norwest, it was clear that Lumana had the potential to reshape how organizations use video. Congratulations to the team on this well-deserved milestone. https://lnkd.in/gwHdaGPZ

65

4 Comments

The number of influencer-backed brands raising large rounds continues to grow. But is the # of followers an indicator of long-term success? My wife is a published author, and in the book world, it’s been the case for many years that publishers can be more drawn to the number of followers an author has than the quality of their writing. It’s sad, but it’s the reality. Followers = awareness and distribution. It seems like consumer investing is heading in the same direction. A few recent examples: - Khloud protein popcorn by Khloe Kardashian just raised an oversubscribed $12M round. It’s not the first protein-infused snack product – we’ve seen protein chips, protein cookies, protein pop tarts. Would a protein-infused popcorn not founded by an influencer be able to raise $12M in today's market? - Prime sports drink, backed by Logan Paul and KSI, exploded out of the gates. But after its breakout first two years, sales have been on a steady decline. On the flip side, other influencer-founded brands like Once Upon a Farm and Skims have taken off and sustained growth. But I’d argue that both of those brands have really strong product-market fit with great products, not just great followers. Here’s where I land: Followers can massively accelerate a brand and short-circuit trial/awareness (hugely valuable), but the quality of the product still matters more in the long run. Because at the end of the day, it's difficult to build a sustaining business and get to a big exit on trial alone. You need repeat purchase. People might buy something once because an influencer suggested it, but they buy it a second, third and fourth time because they love the product. Curious to hear others’ take – is follower count or product quality a better determinant of long term success? #consumerbrands #investing #productmarketfit #founders #growth

18

10 Comments

**Fubo and Hulu Live TV: A Strategic Fusion in Live Sports Streaming** The recent merger of Fubo with Hulu Live TV reflects a growing trend in the streaming industry—converging platforms to enhance viewer experience and broaden content offerings. As Fubo integrates its live sports features into a more comprehensive service, we at ElevenX Capital see the potential for this model to reshape competitive dynamics within the sector. How do you think this merger will impact subscriber growth and market positioning for both brands? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

1