Nick Davidov

Building Surround Ventures has been an entrepreneurial journey with a great deal of learning along the way, and I am very excited to launch our second fund. As a finance person at heart who shifted into the VC world centered around people, I always say that we are ultimately a derivative of the underlying asset, the entrepreneurs we are fortunate to work with. We look forward to continuing to work hard alongside the founders we partner with and help where we can in building some of the world’s most important deep tech startups emerging from Israel. I am truly grateful to the founders, investors, advisors, and everyone who chose to join us on this journey.

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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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Your growth chart might be lying to you. NRR won’t. Long term, the winners aren’t the ones who grow fastest. They’re the ones who keep the customers they’ve already earned. I was invited by Karen Dolva and 🇳🇴 startup Padeia to join their Expert Series—and we talked about one of the clearest signals of whether a business is building real growth: Net Revenue Retention (NRR). NRR doesn’t just tell you who left. It tells you whether the customers who already trust you are growing with you. 📖 Link to the full piece in the comment section below. Thanks to Padeia for having me—it’s always a pleasure to collaborate on resources that help founders turn metrics into action.

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Huge congratulations to the Mandolin team on raising $40M in Seed and Series A funding! At Maverick Ventures we’ve been investing in healthcare and technology for over 30 years, and we believe Mandolin is building one of the most important platforms of this next wave: AI that doesn’t just assist — it completes critical, high-friction workflows. Infusion and specialty therapies now account for ~75% of the FDA pipeline and over $250B in drug spend annually, with that number expected to grow significantly over the next decade. Yet accessing these therapies often takes more than a month and a mountain of manual work — a painful mismatch between medical innovation and administrative reality. Mandolin is changing that. Its AI platform acts as a digital teammate for infusion centers and specialty pharmacies, automating everything from referrals to reimbursements — accelerating time-to-treatment and improving access to life-saving therapies. Our investment reflects Maverick’s broader thesis around vertical AI: purpose-built solutions for industries where complexity, cost, and consequence are too high for generic tools. Specialty drug access is a textbook case. We’ve been fortunate to partner with Will Yin and Rohit Rustagi from the Seed stage and are excited to part of their journey alongside SignalFire and Greylock Partners. I am particularly lucky to continue working with Ambar Bhattacharyya and our co-investors Wayne Hu, Sooah Cho, and Sahir Raoof to support Mandolin’s next phase of growth!

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When I started going deep on AI and code gen in 2023, Shubho Sengupta was one of my favorite people to compare notes with!! A few years later he introduced me to Carina Hong and I could immediately tell she was building something that mattered. Also, given how he described her to me at the time, it was no surprise when he decided to team up with her. :) Carina has an insane math mind and has built a world class team around her. Congrats to the whole Axiom team on a well deserved $200M Series A. The thing that excites me most here: we're at a point where making models smarter isn't enough. We need models that can prove they're right. Formal verification isn't a safety checkbox. It's the unlock for trusting AI in domains where being wrong isn't an option. That's what Axiom is building, and it's a very important piece of what comes next.

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The future of corporate venture capital isn’t about optionality or one-off M&A wins. It’s about designing modular, industry-specific platforms that flex and scale with market needs. In this article, I share a playbook for how CVCs can move from cheque-writers to ecosystem architects, building future-ready platforms one module at a time.   Let’s stop acquiring the future and start assembling it. https://lnkd.in/gWSjg9fT

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Founder FOMO - how to navigate becoming an AI-native company We are doing something about it here at CRV, bringing leading speakers from AI-native for our founders We have speakers from each of these orgs: Sales Marketing CS Finance EPD orgs No vendors, just hands on keyboard work, the ones who are building truly internal agents Everyone has built their SDR agent, many have made strides in engineering, but who is innovating in recruiting? (again no vendors) If anyone has suggestions of Recruiting orgs that have built homegrown agents please dm! This is a CRV EXCLUSIVE event for our founders in SF in May

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When we met Ariel and Carter back in October, they were a 2-man team building next-gen accounting products at an insane speed with AI. By February, they were still a team of 2: however, they were supported by 80+ internal AI agents helping them build their company synergistically. This is the new way to build companies—small, lean, and most importantly at lightning speed⚡. We call these semi-autonomous organizations, where effectively human & AI employees collaborate across product, engineering, GTM, ops, and back office. And lo and behold, 7 months after we partnered up with Artifact AI in Pre-seed, top-tier investors like a16z speedrun, Motive Partners, Angel Invest, and execs from OpenAI, Anthropic, ElevenLabs, Mistral AI, Pigment, Zapier, Pennylane, and Sequoia Scout came in for Artifact's $4M Seed round. Proud of the team and excited for how Artifact will revolutionize the accounting world. 🌵

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The traditional view of venture capital as a passive source of funds is no longer sufficient in today's startup ecosystem. Active partnership models have emerged as the new standard, where investors engage deeply with founders—not just writing checks but contributing strategic guidance, operational support, and access to critical networks. Consider the rise of VC-as-a-Service platforms, which combine capital deployment with hands-on venture building. These models have demonstrated measurable impact: startups benefit from tailored growth strategies and faster scaling, while investors gain stronger alignment and long-term value creation. For entrepreneurs and founders, this shift means seeking investors who act as true partners—those who share risks, insights, and successes. It's not just about funding anymore; it's about collaboration that drives sustainable growth. How has your experience with venture capital aligned with this shift? Are active partnership models changing your approach to investment and growth? Share your thoughts below. #VentureCapital #VentureCapitalAsAService #VCaaS

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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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**Unlocking Startup Success: Insights from TechCrunch Disrupt 2025** As we gear up for TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, the focus is on practical strategies that drive real growth for startups. This year's Builders Stage features industry leaders sharing their insights on scaling effectively. At ElevenX Capital, we believe that the most successful ventures are built on a foundation of shared knowledge and actionable tactics. How do you prioritize learning from industry veterans as you navigate your own entrepreneurial journey? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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With RL techniques like GRPO, it’s become easy to fine-tune small models to outperform foundation models on vertical tasks. We’re open sourcing Osmosis-Apply-1.7B: a small model that merges code (similar to Cursor’s instant apply) better than foundation models. Links in comments! Using foundation models for high specificity, low complexity tasks like code merging can be overkill - instead, it’s better to use a specialized model instead for higher performance and latency. We fine-tuned the model on 100K real-world code commits where the model needs to merge a code edit snippet into an original code snippet. On the test dataset (subset of CommitPackFT), foundation model performance ranged between 0.77-0.93 reward score. In comparison, Osmosis-Apply-1.7B achieved a 0.98 reward score - while also being 3X-5X more affordable than the next cheaper model AND ~10X faster! Why this matters: the best AI agents use multiple models to ensure task specialization and reliability at scale - on top of cost and latency benefits as well. Links to the model and full write-up (with reward function, hyperparameters, etc.) are in the comments - reach out if you’re interested in using reinforcement learning!

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We are thrilled at Union Square Ventures to lead Isembard's $50M Series A as they build a decentralized, global network of factories and meet their mission of forging industrial acceleration. Isembard sits right at the center of 3 of the things we think are currently happening and most significant: 1/ A massively and quickly increasing demand for fast, flexible, and local manufacturing around aerospace, defense, and robotics. 2/ Increasing labor displacement fueling a resurgence in an SMB economy and individuals' desires to own their own destinies/run their own businesses. 3/ Agentic operating systems allowing for fast set ups, networked management, better results, and demand distribution. Isembard's franchise model and capital efficient approach is allowing incredibly fast scaling, with 25 factories by the end of this year across the US and Europe. Alexander Fitzgerald and his team are well on the path to delivering components 10x faster and 50% cheaper than current suppliers. If you want to jump all in with a team reforming manufacturing at a critical moment: https://lnkd.in/ekrEKzKf

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Antti Innanen - it was terrific to break a few spears with you for the greater glory of legal tech! Ted Theodoropoulos - thank you for the invitation, being on your podcast is invariably a delightful experience! For the legal tech community - I am not going to pretend like Antti and I have reached any definitive conclusions, but (spoiler alert!) it turned out that we had a lot more common ground than would have seemed based on our exchange in the comments. A well-conducted in-person debate (thank you again, Ted!) will do more to clarify positions and shine a light on possible compromises than a hundred comments.

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Today Isembard announced a $50m Series A fundraise led by Union Square Ventures, less than a year after Notion Capital led their Seed round. 💥This is a company right at the intersection of AI & supply chain sovereignty & they’re exceeding even our most optimistic expectations. By the end of the year they will have 25 factories across the UK, US, Germany, France & Ukraine. 💥Isembard is rapidly scaling its network of AI-first factories for precision manufacturing at the same time as market demand is accelerating. Macro forces (reshoring, rising defence spend, concentration risk in Asia, and the growth of neo-primes) are structurally increasing demand for fast, local, flexible manufacturing that the current industry is unable to deliver on. 💥The innovation is in the way the company builds and franchises factories as a product with tightly integrated units of machines, software, robotics, & process intelligence that turn design files into certified components with speed & reliability. 💥Their AI software platform, MasonOS, connects all sites into a single operating system, replacing fragmented shops with standardised, high-performance industrial nodes & enabling real-time quoting, predictable delivery, & low defect rates. By owning the full production stack, Isembard delivers premium manufacturing performance with the scalability & flexibility of a software platform. 💥We are at the top of the AI hype cycle and there are understandable concerns about the ROI on the vast sums of money being invested into this new super-cycle. But, the ROI for Isembard is both clear and compelling. They will deliver components 10x faster and at 50% of the cost of current suppliers. They will also build a de-centralised, global network of factories to meet the growing demand for national or regional sovereignty. 💥This is a company with a clear vision to disrupt a massive, fragmented $1.8tn component manufacturing market. Today marks another huge stride towards that vision. And they are only just getting started. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Alexander Fitzgerald & the team & we’re also excited to welcome Rebecca Kaden & USV into the investor base. Notion Capital Union Square Ventures Alexander Fitzgerald Rebecca Kaden Maximilian Eichler Stephen Millard Britt Mulder

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Today we launch MITO AI. 𝗠𝗜𝗧𝗢 𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝗜 𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. Music videos, films, high-end commercials, branded and social content, and more. We are opening the product to the public and announcing a $4.5M pre-seed round led by Paul Murphy at Lightspeed Venture Partners, alongside Sequoia Capital Scouts, Kibo Ventures, Kfund, LifeX Ventures, Everywhere Ventures plus several unicorn founders and execs. MITO is built by a team of filmmakers, designers, and engineers, together with my cofounders Danny Saltaren (former head of product design at 2 unicorns and National Design Award winner) and Arantxa Barcia (a well known art director). The intro video below (a funny story that shows how MITO makes video creation easier) shows what’s possible: Arantxa created it end-to-end using MITO from her 50 sqm apartment in Amsterdam. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗠𝗜𝗧𝗢 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 🎬 * An AI Director that executes creative actions in real time Video Projects can be AI-assisted, or fully generated by AI agents * All major AI image, audio, and video models in one place Nanobanana, Kling, Veo, ElevenLabs, and more * Storyboard as the backbone of production Scripts broken into scenes for full AI video creation * An infinite collaborative canvas Explore ideas across images, audio, text, and styles. Import assets, comment, and prompt together with your team * AI-native image, video, and timeline editing Control lighting, camera angles, lenses, color, and assemble everything in one workflow * Real-time collaboration and multi-format outputs Over the last month, a private beta group has been creating real, impressive work. AI is becoming a force multiplier for people with taste, vision, and stories to tell. Try it for free. Don’t have a story to tell, use our templates: * Have a Suno song? Turn it into a video. * Have a new feature to launch at your company? Announce it with a video.  * Have a folder of images and clips? Build a story around them, layering AI and iterating as you go. To celebrate the launch, new accounts this month get free access with additional credits to generate hundreds of images and videos. Thanks investors Paul Murphy Manuel Bronstein Aquilino Peña Miguel A. Jorge Lana Iñaki Arrola Amol Sarva Rika Christanto Scott Hartley Jenny Fielding Roxanne VARZA Felipe Navío Juan Urdiales Pep Gomez Dídac Lee Sonia Fernandez Jaime Novoa Marc Clemente Yeves Rubén Domínguez Ibar Guillermo Flor Luis S. Adrián Mato Gondelle Ignacio Moreno Pubul cc Keyvan Akbary Nacho González Patricia Matey Patricia Nadal López Mercedes Santalla Dani Latorre Marcio Barrios This is just the beginning 🚀 (Business Insider coverage out today)

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I’m happy to share that Greenfield Partners has led Exodigo’s $96 million Series B alongside Zeev Ventures! Exodigo has made significant, meaningful progress since we led their Series A in 2023. Underground uncertainty remains one of the most expensive and dangerous blind spots in global infrastructure. Exodigo continues to close that gap with AI-powered, multi-sensor mapping that delivers 99% subsurface accuracy without a single pothole or probe. From Partner Raz Mangel, “Exodigo is redefining AI for geophysics and unlocking a $500 billion market. Precise underground visibility can drive tens of billions in efficiency savings across global growth centers.” From Amtrak, Los Angeles Metro, to National Grid, more than 50 transit agencies, DOTs, and utilities already rely on Exodigo to keep multi-billion-dollar projects on time, on budget, and safe. This is the result of relentless go-to-market execution fused with excellent product velocity. To Jeremy, Ido, and the entire Exodigo team, you’re turning an invisible problem into measurable value. We’re honored to double down and be alongside this journey together - congratulations! Raz Mangel, Ortal Sasson Hendin, Lior Sulkin Levy

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HealthVC x Lusha: Unlocking Smarter Fundraising and Sales Workflows We’re thrilled to announce our newest partnership: HealthVC has teamed up with Lusha to bring next-gen data and prospecting tools to founders, fund managers, and operators across our community. Lusha recently launched a powerful suite of AI-powered features that redefine how go-to-market teams research, prospect, and convert. Now those capabilities are coming to HealthVC Pro subscribers. ✨ With this partnership, you’ll be able to: Surface real-time, accurate, and compliant B2B contact data Use AI Prospecting Chat to instantly uncover new investor or customer leads Tap into CRM-triggered recommendations to stay one step ahead Turn insight into action with Sales Streaming, Lusha’s smarter, connected selling framework. But Lusha’s superpower isn’t just the AI; it’s that the AI sits on top of best-in-class data. That means every signal, every recommendation, and every lead is not just fast, it’s trustworthy. At HealthVC, we’re building more than a newsletter; we’re building the operating system for venture, and this partnership helps our members move faster, pitch smarter, and close better. Available now to all HealthVC subscribers, link in comments.

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