Lak Ananth

🧠 Are you the visionary *and* operator? That might not be the best idea. CAMERON HEROLD, founder of the COO Alliance, breaks down why *every* high-growth firm pairs a visionary CEO with an execution-driven COO. This “yin and yang” relationship is a HUGE growth accelerant. 👉 Stay tuned. The full episode drops soon. #GrowLaw #Podcast #LawFirmGrowth #LegalMarketing #EntrepreneurMindset

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Why SPVs Are Taking Over Secondaries 💼📈 In this clip from the trading places VC podcast, Dave McClure is joined by Javier Avalos of Caplight to break down the rise of SPVs in late-stage secondaries, where they work, where they break, and how fee structures are evolving. SPVs have become a dominant structure in private market liquidity. When used correctly, they solve real problems. When abused, they create opacity, layered fees, and misaligned incentives. Key themes they unpack: - Why SPVs exist: Aggregating demand so companies can raise large rounds without adding dozens of small check writers to the cap table - GP incentives: Allowing fund managers to participate beyond their core fund allocation while maintaining exposure - Investor access: Giving LPs and qualified buyers entry into high-demand names like SpaceX and OpenAI - Where it breaks: Multi-layered vehicles, lack of transparency, and sponsors extracting fees without owning the underlying - Fee-only structures vs carry: The difference between true alignment and broker-style economics with no skin in the game - Beta vs alpha pricing: Paying a small one-time fee for access to widely trafficked late-stage names versus paying full venture fees for differentiated deal sourcing They also explore how long-term durability of revenue, not just headline growth, will ultimately determine whether today’s secondary pricing holds up. Follow the trading places VC podcast, a Practical Venture Capital production, for grounded conversations on venture capital, secondaries, and private markets across cycles and geographies. #VentureCapital #Secondaries #SPV #PrivateMarkets #AI #TradingPlacesPod

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Allocate, a San Francisco-based company founded by CEO Samir Kaji, has raised $30.5 million in a Series B round led by Portage Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, M13, and Fika Ventures, bringing its total funding to $64 million. Allocate provides an operating system for private market investing, enabling wealth advisory firms and institutional family offices to seamlessly build and manage portfolios through AI-driven investment management, workflow automation, and integrated infrastructure. With over $2.5 billion in assets on its platform, the company plans to use the new capital to accelerate development of its AI and automation capabilities and expand integrations to drive broader adoption. INVESTORS: Portage Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, M13 & Fika Ventures ROUND: Series B AMOUNT: $30,500,000 HQ: #SanFrancisco #California #VentureCapital #Allocate #SamirKaji #PortageVentures #AndreessenHorowitz #M13 #FikaVentures #TradedVC

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The thing we love about "vertical SaaS": it's just another way to say that you're building for (and only for) specific customer outcomes. Customs brokers have long been a foundational block in the global economy. Recently, they've gotten (some) of the recognition they deserve. As the trade landscape increases in complexity and... lets face it... confusion, CHBs only become more critical. We're just excited to keep doing our part.

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Logistics is shifting fast, and AI is at the center. San Francisco startup LuminX has raised $5.5M in seed funding to bring edge-based AI vision systems to warehouses—devices that track products, read labels, and spot damage in real time, without expensive infrastructure. Co-founded by Alex Kaveh Senemar and Mohammadreza Javanmardi, LuminX uses vision language models (VLMs) to boost accuracy and efficiency in supply chain operations. Their tech is already in use at Vertical Cold Storage, helping cut errors and improve productivity. As major players like DHL and Blue Yonder double down on AI, McKinsey says 70% of supply chain leaders plan to shift to real-time, AI-driven operations by 2025. LuminX joins a growing wave of AI-first logistics firms betting on faster, smarter, more transparent supply chains.

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RSCM is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm founded in 2012. RSCM targets capital-efficient tech startups, typically investing at valuations between $1.5 million and $4 million in companies with monthly recurring revenues (MRR) ranging from $5,000 to $30,000 or more.

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Many people assume a business exit is the finish line, but for a lot of founders, it's a new start. Andreessen Horowitz recently wrote about this from a VC lens - and there are parallels we see every day across every segment of business owners, when "What's next?" becomes “What would I build differently, with the knowledge and resources I have now?” We broke down why so many business owners choose to do it all again, and what’s different the second time around. https://lnkd.in/e_x9DTBQ

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Sequoia Capital Partner Andrew Reed on starting a career in VC: "It doesn't matter what you did before venture. Nothing you do prepares you for the multi-faceted, long-term nature of success in venture." "There are four jobs in venture: sourcing, picking, winning and company-building. We look for people who are good at one thing and have the potential to max out on all of them if there's enough time." "We invest in young people. A lot of folks at Sequoia started in their early 20s and were nobodies for 5-6 years." From his appearance on the show in March.

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What if the real opportunity isn’t in existing demand, but in creating it? Sometimes the market only becomes obvious after someone builds for it. At Peak XV & Surge Immersion, Vanta Co-founder & CEO Christina Cacioppo spoke with Rajan Anandan about building in a space where startup demand for SOC 2 compliance was practically non-existent. Vanta realized compliance was broken: the process was slow, complex, and expensive. Addressing these thoughtfully helped create a new market. And in the early days, the company didn’t even have a website. Much of the growth came through word of mouth as they scaled. Here's a short sneak peek from the session. We'll be sharing the talks soon.

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With $160M+ in orders, VSI raises capital from strength. "We already have enough purchase orders to make the company profitable," says CEO Mathu Rajan. Investors aren't funding hope, they're backing proven demand: https://buff.ly/dzl9RFu #InvestmentOpportunity #TechInvesting

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Fluidstack is advancing its fundraising efforts with talks of a $1 billion financing round at an $18 billion valuation. This follows shortly after it achieved a $7.5 billion valuation and secured a significant $50 billion deal to construct data centers for Anthropic, highlighting strong growth and investor confidence.

Fluidstack is advancing its fundraising efforts with talks of a $1 billion financing round at an $18 billion valuation. This follows shortly after it achieved a $7.5 billion valuation and secured a significant $50 billion deal to construct data centers for Anthropic, highlighting strong growth and investor confidence.

What if fast-growing markets need plug-and-play infrastructure more than another point solution? Emerging-market commerce is not short of energy. It is short of connected infrastructure. Kwik Now is focused on the infrastructure layer below the transaction. The Friction Not just logistics. Not just identity. Across six verticals, Kwik Now is working on the services merchants and operators need to move, verify, store, lend and locate. The Expansion Logic The address layer reaches beyond one region. NeverMissRoad covers address intelligence across 250 countries. That gives Kwik Now a portable infrastructure angle across emerging markets. The value is in the rails. Kwik Now is building the layer merchants, couriers, lenders and operators can use as they grow. Kwik Now is raising capital and looking for investors. See company website https://www.kwik.now/ and then DM me for more info. What if the strongest moat is built by connecting logistics, identity, lending and location into one stack? Company LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/eGrBGC44 CEO LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/e-79PKc4

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Traza has raised $2.1M in pre-seed funding led by Base10 Partners to deploy AI workers that run procurement operations for industrial companies. Not dashboards or copilots - autonomous agents that handle vendor outreach, RFQ generation, order tracking, supplier communications, and invoice processing without continuous human supervision. The founding team - three Spanish entrepreneurs who came to the US through the Exponential Fellowship - carries relevant weight. CEO Silvestre Jara Montes worked operations strategy at Amazon and CMA CGM. Santiago Martinez Bragado built agentic AI at Clarity AI and was a founding engineer at Concourse. Sergio Ayala Minano was a founding engineer at StackAI. They are building for physical industry specifically, where procurement runs on email threads, spreadsheets, and phone calls, and where 80% of the supplier tail goes largely unmanaged. Early deployments show 70% reduction in human hours and procurement cycles running 3x faster. The product sits on top of existing ERPs and enterprise tools - no rip-and-replace. That pragmatic integration approach and the vertical focus on manufacturing and construction differentiate Traza from horizontal procurement AI platforms like Coupa, SAP Ariba, and Zip, which have layered AI on top of systems of record without fundamentally changing how procurement work gets done. Quick facts👇 ● founders: Silvestre Jara Montes; Santiago Martínez Bragado; Sergio Ayala Miñano ● total capital raised: $2.1M ● HQ: New York, New York ● Investors: Base10 Partners; Kfund; a16z scouts; Clara Ventures; Masia; Pepe Agell

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The two questions every founder must answer before entertaining an acquisition offer. Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures, early backer of Datadog and Wiz, behind the $32B acquisition. In this Divot clip with Derek Andersen, Shardul breaks down why the best companies are bought, not sold, and how those two questions shape every founder's reaction when an offer arrives. Watch the full conversation, link in the comments. #venturecapital #founders #startups #indexventures #divotpodcast

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A platform built to last. Ron Heinz of Origami Capital Partners' Oquirrh Ventures explains why 1Kosmos stood out as an investment opportunity, with its defensible architecture, real-world traction, and the ability to scale with demand. Read the full announcement: https://lnkd.in/dmme7nNX

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