Nnamdi Iregbulem

Yesterday, Anish Agarwal, CEO of Sequoia portfolio company Traversal, weighed in on a growing issue with AI-generated code: it can lead to outages. More code is shipping faster without engineers fully understanding how systems behave in production. Companies have instrumented everything: petabytes of logs, metrics, and traces - but observability still only shows correlations. As the The Wall Street Journal piece highlights, we’re starting to see the consequences: AI-generated code behaves unexpectedly in production, leading to real outages that take hours to troubleshoot. When systems break, you still can’t explain causality (the why). Until now. Traversal identifies the root cause in minutes at petabyte scale, leveraging over a decade of AI research in causal reasoning from Anish Agarwal and team.  Already running in some of the world's most complex production environments: American Express, PepsiCo, Kraken, DigitalOcean, and more. If AI writes the code, it should fix it in production too!

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🔔Announcing the 2025 Vertical SaaS 50!🔔 Today, Avid Ventures, Headline, and Bain Capital Ventures recognize 50 new emerging vertical SaaS companies. 🏭 This year, over a third of the honorees are solving problems in the physical world including Caspian, DocUnlock, and Revenue Vessel in logistics, Complement, DiploAI, and Forgepoint in manufacturing, Ichi in construction, and GridStrong, Lumora, and Strobe Power in electricity/utilities. 📝 As in prior years, several honorees are building in the broader professional service landscape including &AI, Crosby, and PointOne in legal, Mako AI in financial services, and Foundation, Novella, and Strala in insurance. 🩺 Most notably, we've seen an increase in healthcare companies like Charta Health, Ferry Health and RoVR as well as Zoomlogi in pharma, Corner Health and Duet in nurse practioner practices, ExaCare AI in senior care, Onos Health in behavioral health, Grove AI in clinical trials, and Lassie and Rondah AI in dental. If you are building a vertical SaaS company or have recommendations for our 2026 list please reach out - we'd love to hear from you!

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While there has never been a more exciting time to be a founder building dev tooling or next-gen infra, it has also never been less investable at seed/pre-seed. I'm either really missing something or a lot of my peers are lost. As someone who has not just written, but also SHIPPED, about 75k lines of code in the past 6 months I can tell you that the evolution of how to build products has changed as much in the past year as it did in the entirety of 2007-2017. The complete rise and fail of frameworks, platforms, methodologies, etc... paved over and forgotten... that is of course except for the 1 company that gets a 1000x return from a wildly overvalued hyper-scaler or drunken growth stage investor obsessed with compounding at scale. Imagine a world where any seed investor in trends like Openstack, Hadoop, PaaS, etc all took a full loss on their investment. That's what we're looking at right now. I personally know of over a dozen well-funded seed-stage companies building in these spaces, with years of runway, scrambling to get acquired for a return of capital + several million personally while they're still relevant. If you're not seeing this unfold in front of you, you either aren't paying attention or you're satisfied playing the lottery instead of investing.

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VC is notoriously black boxed. So we published our data. Real numbers. Actual decisions. Our thinking on ownership, reserves, and recycling, stress-tested in the open. There are many ways to make money in venture. The answer isn’t copying someone else’s model. It’s knowing your superpower and building the fund around it. Portfolio construction won’t save bad investments but it will make or break your fund on the good ones. Our resident VC nerd Geoffrey Bernstein with all the tea below 👇

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Great piece by Alex Konrad on what this week’s OpenAI and Anthropic healthcare announcements really signal for founders and the ecosystem. Thanks for including my perspective. As I shared with Alex: healthcare has always been a massive opportunity, but what feels different now is ecosystem readiness. Patients and providers are finally prepared to adopt AI in ways that fit real workflows, with serious enterprise partnerships acknowledging that healthcare change doesn’t happen in isolation. These launches feel less like an overnight disruption and more like a formal declaration of intent—raising the bar for startups while underscoring how critical trust, privacy, and deep domain relationships remain. AI will increasingly be a primary interface for analysis and decision-making in health, even if it doesn’t ultimately create a single “master” access point for patients. Worth a read: https://lnkd.in/ebYp_U7D

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A big milestone today for Grow Therapy, which just announced a $150M Series D led by TCV and Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with BCI and Menlo Ventures joining Sequoia, Transformation Capital, and SignalFire. When we led Grow’s Series A in 2021, it was rooted in a belief that mental health access in the U.S. isn’t hindered by supply, it’s a systems problem. To win, Grow needed to be deeply integrated into the healthcare ecosystem, not operating as a point solution. In just 5 years, more than 2 million people have used Grow, with over 10 million therapy and medication management visits delivered on the platform. What stands out is the infrastructure the team has built: Grow now partners with 125+ health insurers, including Medicare and Medicaid across most states, reaching 220 million covered lives. At the same time, tools like its clinically-guided AI notetaker are reducing provider documentation time by nearly 70%, helping clinicians focus more on care. This is what durable healthtech looks like: deep payer integrations, measurable outcomes, and technology embedded directly into existing healthcare workflows. Excited to continue partnering with Jake Cooper, Manoj Kanagaraj, MD, Alan Ni, and the entire Grow team as they build trusted mental health infrastructure for insurers, employers, health systems, and most importantly, patients.

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An often overlooked, yet highest-impact reality in venture capital right now: Software moats are near dead. AI-native tools and open-source models have removed much of the advantage from owning proprietary code or deploying complex infrastructure. A strong team can now quickly duplicate an existing software product or even stitch together a working product using off-the-shelf components and a week of hacking. This is changing everything. If software itself is at its least defensible position in history, then where does lasting value come from? We believe it now lies in things that are much harder to replicate: • Distribution channels with direct access to buyers • Network effects where each user improves the product's utility • Proprietary data that can't be easily sourced elsewhere • Deep customer relationships and trust • Strong brands that build community and emotional loyalty • Software-plus-hardware stacks creating complex technical moats Let me show you how this plays out in our portfolio: 1. 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Cloaked reached scale through a contrarian wedge into privacy-conscious Gen Z users who now onboard their entire households, flipping the legacy top-down model and powering growth to 130K paying customers with a path to $30M ARR. 2. 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬: Whop built a two-sided marketplace where every new creator listing brings more buyers, and every purchase draws more creators, creating a self-reinforcing flywheel that's powered billions in transactions across hundreds of thousands of listings. 3. 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚: Pogo captures first-party purchase behavior and intent signals directly from users that are inaccessible to new entrants, positioning them to power the next generation of personalized AI commerce with a lean team. 4. 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭: Chainguard's CEO spent years earning the open source community's trust at Google, turning that reputation into the foundation for commercializing hardened enterprise-grade code and a company that is valued at over $3 billion. 5. 𝐃𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐬: Dandy's fully-digital lab delivers crowns with such low remake rates that dentists save 30-45 minutes per patient and route their entire lab budget to them, tightening churn to under one percent. 6.𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲: Superhuman's invite-only onboarding and white-glove support forged such emotional loyalty that users behave as volunteer sales reps, leading Grammarly to acquire them citing "cult-level engagement" as the real asset. 7. 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐨𝐚𝐭: AIM combines advanced software with proprietary hardware to transform earthmoving, embedding itself as mission-critical infrastructure that improves as it collects real-world data across mining and construction fleets. This shift is especially relevant in early-stage investing, where traditional software benchmarks like ARR or gross margin may no longer predict long-term strength. The venture playbook has changed.

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A whammy of a simile from the inimitable VC Sammy Abdullah, on the abominable phenomenon of "let's vibe-code an in-house version instead of buying the SaaS solution": "Trying to build your own enterprise class software solution is kind of like BBQ: ask any pit-master how they make their BBQ and they will tell you exactly what to do. They'll tell you the type of wood, where the get their meat, how to make and maintain the fire, etc Why? Because you either won't do it (you're talking 18+ hours of monitoring a smoker), will screw it up, or simply won't have the fortitude required to do it again and again. So, while enterprise software companies in this environment are going to receive the "we're building this in-house" refrain, it's going to be your job to explain exactly what you do, and re-pitch the value of your solution." [Blossom Street Ventures update email, 2026-03-18]

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The old SaaS pricing playbook doesn’t work for AI. Madhavan Ramanujam and I partnered with Emergence Capital and Jake Saper to write a new one—built for where AI is going, not just where it is today. We lay out what state-of-the-art AI pricing looks like now—and what it will look like: ✅ Hybrid pricing (seats + usage) is the current best practice 🎯 Outcome-based models are the future—pricing tied directly to impact 💰 The best AI companies already capture 25–50% of the value they create As autonomy and attribution improve, outcome pricing will go from rare to expected. Founders who move early will win. Full read here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gwp6tDtp

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Thrilled for OVNI Capital to be backing RIFT in a pre-seed round led by AlleyCorp (Luc Ryan-Schreiber). Rift is building the first real-time aerial intelligence network, a new layer of infrastructure for persistent, on-demand visibility where it matters most. This funding will scale production of their autonomous stations, accelerate deployment in high-stakes environments, and expand the team leading the next phase. 🗞️ Explore the full story: - StartupMafia: https://lnkd.in/dARrg25N - BFM Business (FR): https://lnkd.in/eADSUsn7 - Les Échos (FR): https://lnkd.in/eFG3zAy5 👨‍🚀 Join the mission → https://lnkd.in/erm_SrTG

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Excited to share that Trustible has just raised a $4.6M Seed Round to accelerate AI governance for enterprises. The round was led by Lookout Ventures with participation from Eric Schmidt, Tau Ventures, Inner Loop Capital, Alumni Ventures, and former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, With 91% of executives feeling unprepared for AI-related risks and regulations, Trustible's platform provides essential tools for enterprises—38% of which are Fortune 500 companies—to manage AI governance seamlessly across compliance, security, and ethics. Congratulations to Gerald Kierce-Iturrioz, Andrew Gamino-Cheong and the Trustible team! Press Release: https://lnkd.in/etzFVc63

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Founders often scramble to prep materials *after* a VC shows interest. That’s backward. You should be ready for diligence before your first meeting with a VC. Smart founders: 🗂 Have their data room ready 📊 Can share a clear KPI dashboard if asked 💸 Keep clean, up-to-date financials 📣 Track and communicate metrics Flailing around getting your files in order can erode investor trust. Put in the work ahead of time and it will build confidence in you and your company. #FundraisingAdvice #StartupTips #RSCMFounderFriday

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AI is changing what “scale” actually means. In CTech by Calcalist’s 2026 VC Survey, Haim Bachar and Lee Ben-Gal share how we’re seeing the scaling metric shift - from headcount growth to output per person. This isn’t about doing more with less. It’s about building companies differently from day one - and rethinking how success is measured. See the full article below 👇

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Thrilled to share the launch of Criticality, a $65M fund built to back founders solving hard, high-leverage problems at the intersection of technical complexity and real-world urgency. Criticality builds on the foundation we’ve laid at Antler - applying our conviction-driven approach to companies at Seed & Series A. The fund is sector-flexible but applies a deep tech lens to each opportunity, targeting non-obvious, high-leverage problems from the earliest stages of company formation. Grateful to the New Mexico State Investment Council for their support in anchoring Criticality. More to come soon from Cash Allred & I.

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We just shipped a few big upgrades to our VC/PE document management system at Standard Metrics. 📁 What started as a simple hub for board decks, financials, and cap tables has evolved into a standardized source of truth, with filtering, search, and custom labels built in. In light of the upcoming Aumni shutdown, we moved quickly and worked closely with new customers and prospects to design a more robust system for their documents going forward to support audits and more. (If that shift is affecting your firm too, we’d love to chat.) Check out the upgrades in action in the video below. We also wrote a quick blog post on why we built this, what’s launched, and what’s coming next: https://lnkd.in/dBmkD-Y5

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Two weeks ago on Swimming with Allocators, we sat down with David Clark, CIO at VenCap, to talk about what decades of venture data can teach allocators. One takeaway that stood out: discounts don’t matter as much as people think in venture secondaries. Because venture is such a power-law asset class, outcomes are driven by exposure to a few massive winners. Whether a stake is bought at a small discount, or even a premium, often matters far less than the quality of the underlying company and its upside. Great conversation on venture returns, manager selection, and the nuances of how allocators should think about secondary investments. 👇 Link in the comments.

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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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Big milestone for Firmable. We’ve raised $14m Series A led by Airtree. Sales has moved through a few big waves: intuition-led, CRM-led, data-led. We’re now entering the next one – intelligence-led sales. The opportunity isn’t just better data. It’s turning that data into clear direction and action, without adding more work for sales teams. That’s what we’re building at Firmable: a foundation of trusted external data, layered with intelligence that helps sellers know who to focus on and when. Led by Airtree, this round supports our expansion across Asia and into the US – and accelerates the build-out of AI agents that take the admin work off sales teams so they can focus on what they do best. Proud of the team, grateful to our customers and investors. We’re just getting started. Read the exclusive in the AFR. https://lnkd.in/gr66uknb Leigh Jasper | Tara Salmon | Karthik Venkatasubramanian| Chester Thompson| Chath Widanapathirana

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Orange Health Labs has always been committed to six-hour reporting. Not "as fast as possible" but specifically six hours, no exceptions. This one constraint made them build everything differently. They couldn't use standard labs designed for average daily volume - they had to build for peak hourly capacity. They couldn't have doctors at each location, so they built remote pathology, where one doctor reviews slides from multiple cities. They couldn't rely on traditional logistics - so they created dedicated networks covering four times the area of competitors. Now incumbents can't copy it without scrapping their existing infrastructure. They have hundreds of labs built the old way, doctors hired locally, and established logistics. Retrofitting would cost more than starting from scratch, and starting from scratch means abandoning their existing business. I like how Orange Health's edge is that matching their model means incumbents must treat their current infrastructure as sunk cost. This is the kind of advantage that compounds.

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