Welcome to the latest edition of the Garuda Ventures newsletter!

• New Investments: It’s been an active start to the year as we’ve partnered with seven new founding teams:

  • 🏭 Foundry Robotics, building the “Everything Factory”, an AI+robotics first, assembly-focused, dual-use contract manufacturer to power the next century of American manufacturing. Adarsh is a veteran of Scale AI, Ghost Robotics, and Penn’s GRASP Lab, and Emmanuel led Tesla’s Model Y manufacturing. We invested in the seed alongside Khosla Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, Hanabi Capital, and others (read more here)

  • 📱 Mirai Labs, building models, runtime & infrastructure to make

    on-device AI interactive, ambient & continuous. We’re thrilled to be working with Dima and Alexey, and partnering with our friends at Uncork Capital, together with an amazing group of angels from ElevenLabs, HuggingFace, Snowflake, and more (read more here)

  • 🤖 Mind Robotics, building AI-native robotics-driven intelligence, dexterity, and adaptation to manufacturing, founded by RJ Scaringe, Founder and CEO of Rivian. We invested alongside our friends at Kleiner Perkins, Accel, A16Z, Eclipse, Greenoaks, Meritech, Redpoint, and others (read more here)

  • 🚚 Armada, building the hyperscaler for AI edge compute, founded by Dan Wright and Jon Runyan. We co-invested alongside Overmatch Ventures, 8090 Ventures, Blackrock, Johnson Controls, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Felicis, Shield Capital, Marlinspike, and others.

  • 🔬An autonomous AI scientist, founded by a team of PhD researchers out of a top research institute (unannounced)

  • 🛸 Deep space transport and data infrastructure, founded by a 10-year veteran of space technology (unannounced)

  • 🌊 Harnessing ocean thermal energy to generate affordable, off-grid electricity at sea to power off-grid AI data centers (unannounced)

• Garuda AGM: We hosted our 2026 AGM at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, followed immediately by our Spring Celebration on the rooftop. As always, it was a highlight of the year to bring together our growing community of LPs, founders, and friends of the firm. Special thanks to our founder speakers, our special guests Jonathan Roosevelt at Goldman Sachs and Rory O’Driscoll at Scale Venture Partners, and our wonderful partners Burkland, Citizens Bank, Fenwick, and Neutech for their support

  

Portfolio News

Arena Physica, building electromagnetic superintelligence, announced the underlying foundation model for electromagnetics, Heaviside-0. They also launched Atlas RF Studio, an interactive sandbox for AI-driven inverse RF design

Mastra, the modern Typescript framework for AI-powered applications and agents, raised a $22M Series A led by Spark. They also announced Mastra Platform and Mastra Observability

Mesta, the global B2B fiat + stablecoin operating system, announced a dramatic expansion of their product capabilities beyond a payment network into a full-blown operating system, from store to grow to pay. The also announced they have crossed $1.5B in TPV

Monark Markets, API infrastructure for private markets access, closed its $8.1M round led by F-Prime. Check out their feature article in Upstarts here.

OpsHelm, offering real-time enriched cloud inventory data across your entire cloud infrastructure, was acquired by Cribl, which recently announced it has crossed $300M in ARR.

Hiring Across the Portfolio

The Garuda Ventures portfolio is always hiring! If you’re in the market for an exciting new role at an early-stage business, head to jobs.garuda.vc or click the button below to discover opportunities across our network of companies.

Work at a Garuda Portfolio Company!

Garuda’s Bookshelf

In a world of bite-sized, easily consumable content, we love asking and getting the question, “Have you read any good books lately?” In this month’s bookshelf:

Non Fiction: The Power of Regret by Daniel Pink

A quick read on how to harness regret for good. Pink argues that by analyzing the four core types of regret - foundation, boldness, moral, and connection - we can identify what we value most and uncover lessons from past mistakes.

Fiction: James by Percival Everett

James by Percival Everett is a brilliant reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim, who is revealed to be a literate and intellectual man hiding his intelligence to survive. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2025.

Garuda Ventures is a first check fund that partners with relentless, ambitious founders. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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Armada Co-Founders Dan Wright and Jon Runyan.
Image credit: Armada

Inference Moves to the Edge

The first wave of the AI buildout has been about training frontier models — gigawatt-scale data center campuses, frontier labs, and centralized clusters in a handful of locations chosen for cheap power and permissive permitting. The next wave is an inference story, and inference behaves differently. It is latency-sensitive, it is mission-critical, and increasingly it is sovereign: workloads that cannot afford to round-trip to a distant hyperscaler region, and data that cannot legally or safely leave the site, the company, or the country where it was generated.

The numbers behind that shift are striking. Roughly three-quarters of the world’s data is now generated at the edge, yet almost none of it is processed there. Deloitte predicts that inference-specific workloads will account for roughly two-thirds of all compute (up from a third in 2023 and half in 2025). Twenty years ago, cloud computing created the hyperscalers. In the last five years, the neoclouds emerged to serve AI training. The edge is the next platform shift, and Armada is the answer.

The Only Full-Stack Edge Platform

Most companies attack a slice of this problem — connectivity, or hardware, or compute, or software. Armada built all of it as one product. The Armada Edge Platform brings together Atlas, an operating system for edge assets; Galleon, a family of ruggedized, mobile, hyperconverged data centers, to the megawatt-scale Leviathan. The result is a turnkey path from raw land and power to operational AI compute in weeks rather than years — deployable on an oil rig, at a mine, aboard a Navy vessel, or across the remote stretches of Alaska.

Leviathan: Armada’s megawatt-scale modular data centers built for high-density AI training and inference workloads, sovereign neo-cloud, and multi-tenant compute environments. Image credit: Armada

Today’s announcement raises the ceiling again. Alongside its Series B, Armada today unveiled a global framework agreement with Johnson Controls for Galleon Forge One — a dedicated modular data center factory in Arizona, spanning up to 400,000 square feet and expected to create more than 500 jobs, with continuous production of Leviathan beginning this summer. As Dan framed it, the AI race will be won not by one-off projects but by those who can manufacture and continuously deploy AI infrastructure “with speed, scale and sovereignty.” Armada isn’t running pilots. It is building the industrial base.

The Okta Mafia, Again

At Garuda, we start with founders. Armada is led by a genuinely seasoned bench — operators who have built and scaled at Okta, VMware, Amazon, Microsoft, and AuditBoard — and that operational maturity shows up in how quickly the company has gone from stealth to scale.

Arpan also had the privilege of working alongside Jon Runyan, Armada’s co-founder and COO, during his years at Okta. Jon is exactly the kind of operator you want building hard, physical, high-stakes infrastructure: rigorous, calm under pressure, and relentless about doing things the right way. He’s an operator’s operator.

It also makes Armada our latest investment in what we’ve come to think of as the “Okta Mafia” — the remarkable group of operators who came through Okta and are now building category-defining companies of their own. Jon at Armada, Alex Bovee at C1, Alex Salazar at Arcade.dev, and Jay Srinivasan at Stitchflow.

Let’s Go!

We’re proud to back Armada alongside an incredible group of investors including Overmatch, BlackRock, 8090 Industries, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Felicis, Shield Capital, Marlinspike, Silent Ventures, and new strategic investors Johnson Controls, Mitsui, and Singtel Innov8.

The world is waking up to the fact that latency-sensitive, mission-critical AI compute is moving to the edge. Armada is building this future for the United States and for our allies. We can’t wait to see what Dan, Jon, and the team build next. Let’s go!

For more on Armada, visit armada.ai and read the full announcement of the Series B and Galleon Forge One.

Garuda Ventures is a first check fund that partners with relentless, ambitious founders. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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The Work That Robots Still Don’t Do Well

Traditional industrial robotics has done one thing exceptionally well: repeatable, dimensionally stable tasks behind safety cages. Welding the same seam, torquing the same bolt, moving something from point A to point B. What it has never been able to do, and what represents the vast majority of value-add work on any factory floor, is the dexterous, adaptive work that still requires human hands. The result is a structural gap that widens every year, with hundreds of thousands of industrial roles sitting open today and that number projected to grow.

There has been no shortage of robotics startups chasing this opportunity, but most have started from the wrong end of the problem, focused on building for home environments and consumer use cases like laundry with cool demos but don’t really satisfy what manufacturing actually needs. As RJ has put it, “doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing.” The work happens in the hands. Everything else is just there to get the hands to the right place.

A Different Starting Point

In order to be successful at scale in a category as complex as this, a company needs to have access to data, quality and reliable hardware, an understanding of systems engineering, and the ability to launch at scale with a customer. Mind Robotics has all of those and then some. They are taking a full-stack approach to building, complete with foundation models, purpose-built hardware, and deployment infrastructure, designed from day one for use on the industrial floor: no stairs, no carpets, no kids or pets to navigate around. And Mind has a uniquely unfair advantage: Rivian.

A Founder Built for the Problem

RJ has spent the last decade and a half building one of the most complex physical products in the world. As the founder and CEO of Rivian, he and his team developed deep capability across batteries, actuators, motors, software, supply chain, and high-volume manufacturing, all the ingredients that go into a modern industrial robot. As he puts it, “the things to make a robot are remarkably similar to a car.”

The Mind team is solving a problem RJ has himself, born out of his own work studying the future of Rivian’s manufacturing footprint, evaluating every company working on human-skill robotics, and ultimately concluding none of them had all the ingredients to make this work at industrial scale. Rather than make Rivian’s manufacturing future dependent on companies that had never industrialized a product, he started Mind himself.

As Mind’s first customer-partner, Rivian provides to Mind what every other robotics startup has to spend years trying to manufacture: real manufacturing data, a live high-volume production environment, and the industrial systems expertise to make a robot useful on day one. Most companies in this category are still searching for their first real factory. Mind starts inside one.

Let’s Go!

Frontier AI models and robotics are reinventing enormous swaths of the real economy, and we have been actively deploying capital behind incredible founders building here for real use cases across assembly and manufacturing (Foundry Robotics), food automation (Velodex Robotics), warehouse automation (Mytra), and now Mind as they build the future of AI-powered robotics for industrial automation.

We’re proud to partner with RJ and the Mind Robotics team alongside our friends at Eclipse, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and the broader investor group as they build the AI-native robotics platform for industrial scale. Let’s go!

For more on Mind Robotics, visit mindrobotics.com and check out the company coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Techcrunch.

Garuda Ventures is a first check fund that partners with relentless, ambitious founders. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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A Builder Who’s Been in the Arena

At Garuda, we start with founders. As soon as we met Adarsh, it was clear his career has been building toward this company and that he had the potential to build a generational company to meet this moment when AI, hardware, and the national interest are aligning.

He was an early employee at Ghost Robotics (acquired for $400M), a core autonomy engineer who worked hand-in-hand with the DoD to deploy robots for defense and industrial applications. He then joined Scale AI as a software engineer and rose to Head of Robotics. And he graduated with degrees in robotics from Penn’s GRASP Lab. He’s a technical builder with deep robotics expertise, proven commercial execution at scale, defense credibility, and the will and drive to tackle a problem of this scale. And he’s already shown an ability to recruit A+ people - Tier 1 capital partners, ambitious early employees with no shortage of options, and customers - around the table to Foundry in a short period of time, a critical skill in the competitive world of hardware and AI startups.

Modular Domestic Manufacturing Powered by AI

The United States has a manufacturing problem. The country has steadily fallen behind Asia in production capacity, and our supply chains remain brittle. By some estimates, by 2030 China will increase its share of manufacturing, including for advanced technologies, to 45% vs. 11% for the United States. The defense industrial base is particularly strained — the DoD and its contractors need hardware produced domestically, at speed, but the infrastructure to do so barely exists for many critical components.

Traditional factory automation is narrow, expensive, and designed for single-product lines. Retooling a factory for a new assembly takes months and millions of dollars. For hardware companies that need low-to-mid volume production of complex assemblies — think drones, robot dogs, battery packs, satellite components — there’s often no good domestic option.

Foundry’s bet is that Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models, modern robotics, and manufacturing software expertise, unlock the ability to do generalized robotic assembly across diverse operations and different products at scale, and that the right business model entry point is to serve as a dual-use contract manufacturer.

If they are right, the implications are transformative: a factory that can assemble many different products, switching between them without the traditional retooling overhead. Modular, cell-based manufacturing powered by foundation models: the “everything factory.”

Dual-Use + Reshoring

We are particularly excited about Foundry’s focus on building a dual-use company from the start. The company’s initial assembly targets are products in high demand from both commercial customers and the Department of Defense, and are primarily manufactured abroad today.

The regulatory environment has also never been more favorable for a business like this. Between the CHIPS Act, Buy American policies, DIU funding for defense manufacturing, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, there is significant, bipartisan government appetite and capital to support domestic manufacturing reshoring. Foundry is well positioned to ride these tailwinds simultaneously.

Let’s Go!

We’re proud to partner with Foundry Robotics alongside Khosla Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, Embark Ventures, Zero Shot Fund, Recall Capital, Hanabi Capital (Mike Volpe), and other friends. We can’t wait to see The Everything Factory become a reality and are thrilled to be along for the journey.

For more on Foundry Robotics, or if you are a technical builder excited to build the future of American manufacturing, visit foundryrobotics.ai.

Garuda Ventures is a first check fund that partners with relentless, ambitious founders. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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Founders Who’ve Built at Scale Before

Dima and Alexey are repeat founders building from deep personal experience at the intersection of consumer AI and on-device inference. Dima previously launched Reface, a generative AI app that reached over 300 million users, and Alexey built Prisma, which hit 100 million MAU and was named App of the Year on both the App Store and Google Play (notably, Prisma was a pioneer in running convolutional neural network inference entirely on-device).

They know what it means to scale to hundreds of millions of people, and know the pains of shipping real-time AI systems along the way. And it is the hard earned insights from those experiences that guide them. Two of these stand out as key drivers as they build Mirai:

1. For technology to be truly accessible, it must be close to free and instant, on the devices people already use

2. People love when AI feels personal

The People Demand “Personal, Fast, and Cheap”

Everyone is talking about frontier AI models – billions of parameters, massive context windows, the race to AGI. But most people in the world will not interact with AI through a $20/month subscription to a cloud chatbot. They’ll interact with AI on the devices already in their hands, through experiences that feel instant, personal, and nearly free.

We’ve seen this pattern before. The internet became transformative not when it was powerful, but when it was everywhere and essentially free. Streaming didn’t win because of catalog size alone, it won because latency dropped to the point where you forgot there was a data center involved. AI is heading the same direction. The frontier will keep moving forward, but the distilled models, the “flash” variants, the smaller specialized models that carry the best of today’s capabilities into tomorrow - these are the models that will reach billions of people. And they need to run on-device.

For the first time, dedicated AI silicon - CPUs, GPUs, Neural Engines - is standard in consumer hardware. Every phone and laptop shipping today has meaningful AI compute built in. But accessing that compute is hard, at least in part due to Apple and Google’s stranglehold on what APIs to expose. The same model behaves completely differently on CPU vs. GPU vs. NPU. Performance is dominated by memory and bandwidth constraints. There is no such thing as “generic inference” on-device. It’s a “three-body problem” where model, runtime, and hardware must co-evolve. You only get predictable latency, cost, and privacy if you control the runtime.

In addition, as AI proliferates, cloud inference costs are accelerating, particularly for latency-sensitive workloads like voice and code completion. Running these on-device eliminates per-inference costs and improves latency.

That’s where Mirai comes in.

On-Device Inference

Customers already run AI in the cloud. By extending their pipeline to devices, Mirai provides execution infrastructure that lets model makers and developers bring their products to Apple Silicon without needing to solve the hardest low-level optimization problems themselves. Running on-device unlocks the ability to deliver delightful AI experiences that are low-latency, private, and by definition lower cost. At that point we will truly see an explosion in development, which will drive even more dynamic AI use cases on top.

The Mirai team - all deeply technical, and with on-device expertise that is incredibly rare - built their entire inference stack from scratch, and the results speak for themselves: Mirai outperforms Apple’s own MLX framework, delivering a 37% increase in generation speed, up to 60% faster prefill on certain model-device pairs, and a significant reduction in memory usage on supported models as well.

Early partners including Baseten are already integrating Mirai to bring text, voice, and multimodal models on-device, with more on the way.

Dima and Alexey have developed a hard-earned conviction that on-device inference isn’t a nice to have, but rather a foundational layer that will unlock AI for everyone, and we’re fortunate to be along for the ride with them.

Let’s Go!

We’re proud to partner with Mirai alongside our friends at Uncork Capital, and angels from OpenAI, Hugging Face, ElevenLabs, Stripe, Runway, and Snowflake as part of the company’s $10M seed round 🚀

For more on Mirai, check out the company’s website and their documentation.

Garuda Ventures is a first check fund that partners with relentless, ambitious founders. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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The Product Visibility Problem

Digital products scale across multiple vectors: languages, devices, user types, geographies and more. Product teams quickly lose sight of what customers are actually experiencing, with product and end relying on static screenshots, outdated Figma files, and fragmented analytics in an attempt to capture the full user journey. Has anyone got the latest demo login? Did we push that design update to mobile as well? What happened with the A/B test? Nobody has a complete picture of the live product experience across all its variations.

This isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a fundamental visibility gap that slows decision-making and creates blind spots in the product development process, and teams waste countless hours trying to reconstruct what their product actually looks like in users’ hands. In today’s increasingly competitive market, particularly with more non-deterministic software being built, this could mean losing a user or customer entirely.

Adora’s Solution

Adora solves this by automatically capturing and cataloging every screen, interaction, and user path across your entire product. The platform creates live, interactive visual maps of user journeys overlaid with analytics and session replays. Product teams see exactly what customers are experiencing and where to focus their efforts.

Adora provides journey mapping, a complete product screen library, session replays, and AI-powered insights in one place. Unlike static design files or siloed analytics tools, Adora shows what customers are actually seeing, with analysis on what to fix attached directly to the relevant screens and journeys.

Early customers including Canva, Notion, and Replit have used Adora to gain clarity on their product experience at scale. The platform creates a single visual source of truth accessible to every team, no analytics expertise required.

Building for a Problem They’ve Lived

What made investing Adora that much compelling for us is Omar and Nathan are building for a problem they experienced firsthand. Omar spent years as Head of Product Growth at Canva, where understanding how product changes impacted user experience across devices, languages, and user segments was a constant challenge. Nathan built systems at Amazon and knows the technical complexity of creating visibility into live product experiences.

Together, they bring the exact combination of product intuition and engineering depth required to solve this problem at scale. They’ve lived the frustration of trying to piece together user journeys from fragmented tools, and they’re building the solution they wish they’d had.

Let’s Go!

We’re proud to have partnered with Adora alongside our friends at Blackbird Ventures, Designer Fund, Skip Capital, and Co Ventures as part of the company’s $7M seed round (and special thanks to Cliff at Canva for the original introduction!) The platform is publicly available today at adora.so.

Product teams deserve complete visibility into what they’re building. We’re excited to support Omar, Nathan, and the team as they make that vision a reality.

For more on Adora, check out the company’s announcement and visit their website at adora.so

Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused, pre-seed venture firm. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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AI Belongs Everywhere, Including Sports

We have invested behind founders using AI to transform industries from logistics to compliance to manufacturing. But one massive market has remained surprisingly underserved: professional sports.

The global live events and professional sports industry exceeds $1.4T annually. Yet behind the scenes of even the most valuable franchises, you’ll find operations held together by spreadsheets, email chains, and disconnected point solutions. Marketing teams export CSVs to run campaigns. Game day planning happens across dozens of uncoordinated departments. Revenue projections rely on institutional knowledge that walks out the door when key employees leave.

This isn’t a technology access problem. It’s a technology adoption problem. Sports organizations have historically been conservative technology adopters, often run as family businesses despite their billion-dollar valuations. But several forces are converging to change this: the undeniable momentum of AI, new ownership bringing operational discipline, and the explosion of new leagues and sports demanding modern infrastructure from day one.

Arkero: The AI Executive Partner for Sports Teams

Arkero is building an AI system that serves as an executive partner for professional sports businesses. Rather than replacing existing tools, Arkero sits on top of the systems teams already use (ticketing platforms, CRMs, email marketing tools, data warehouses) and adds intelligent automation, planning capabilities, and insights.

Arkero initially targets two critical areas for their customers: event operations and revenue optimization. On the operations side, the platform centralizes cross-department coordination, automates task management, and provides insights on attendance and staffing. On the revenue side, it helps sales teams uncover hidden sales and upsell opportunities within their existing leads and accounts. And it’s working. Early partners including the Seattle Sounders and Seattle Reign project over 50% improvement in efficiency around matchday planning alone.

Operators Built for Operators

What sets Arkero apart is the combination of the team’s technology chops and their firsthand understanding of sports business operations. Founders Shivaas, Daniel and Vamsi spent nearly a decade together at Remitly, helping found and building the company from its early days through a successful IPO on Nasdaq. They bring the operational rigor and product discipline of a world-class technology company to an industry desperately in need of improved technology capabilities.

And they’re building for a problem they have themselves. After leaving Remitly, Shivaas acquired a stake in Southend United FC, a 119-year-old English football club competing in England’s National League. Helping run the club gave him an insider’s view of just how broken the operational infrastructure is across the industry and where teams stands to benefit. When the Arkero team sits across from a club executive, they speak the language. They’ve lived the chaos of coordinating across departments, the frustration of siloed data, and the challenge of driving revenue without adding headcount.

It's exactly the kind of team we love to back: world-class builders tackling a problem they know firsthand. And with the founders and early teams having built at Google, nvidia, Adobe among others, it is going to be an awesome team to join (psst, they are hiring in both Seattle and Orange County!)

Let’s Go!

We’re proud to be partner with Arkero and team alongside our friends Roger Ehrenberg at Game Changers Ventures, Alexis Ohanian at 776, David Tisch at BoxGroup, and strategic investors including Adrian Hanauer of the Seattle Sounders and Seattle Reign.

Given the breadth of technology adoption opportunity and the immense value of the sports industry, we’re excited to see Arkero help drive the industry forward.

For more on Arkero, visit their website at arkero.ai.

Garuda Ventures is a B2B focused pre-seed fund, most often leading a founder's initial round of financing as their first true believer. The firm aims to be a founder's first call as they navigate their way from a deck and a dream to building a category-defining company. To learn more, visit garuda.vc

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The Warehouse Automation Opportunity

Material handling and movement represent nearly 50% of manufacturing labor, yet the processes look fundamentally the same as they did a century ago (the first modern forklift was introduced in 1917 and hasn’t really changed!) The result is a massive labor challenge with hundreds of thousands of open industrial roles today, expected to 5x over the next 5 years, and not nearly enough people to fill them. Meanwhile, with over half of warehouse footprint is considered dead space, beholden to processes and systems that were developed decades ago.

Material flow is still largely manual and inefficient, and automation has not achieved mass market penetration: one research report suggests 80% of industrial facilities have zero automation thanks cost, complexity, and flexibility challenges. Most players in this space are constrained to new-build environments, unable to handle the existing warehouse builds, require complex maintenance, and take many months to deploy.

The industry needs a fundamental platform shift, not incremental improvements.

Mytra and a Software-Defined Approach

Mytra is redefining industrial automation by building modular, autonomous warehouse systems that can both retrofit existing infrastructure and handle new greenfield builds. The platform addresses the multi-trillion global warehouse labor market with a software-defined approach that makes material flow programmable and continuously optimizing.

The system offers several key advantages: simplified architecture for rapid installation and high uptime, retrofit-ready deployment that works in existing warehouses, full-pallet handling capabilities, and a flexible platform that adapts to different warehouse configurations. Early deployments have demonstrated significant improvements in storage density and reductions in material handling labor, with 32% reductions in material handling labor and 34% improvement in storage density.

A Team Built for this Moment

The Mytra team brings exactly the combination of hardware, software, and operational expertise required to tackle this massive infrastructure challenge. Chris led major automation and manufacturing programs at Tesla for 7.5 years, including Model 3 material flow automation and the Optimus humanoid robotics program where he managed a 50-person hardware and software team. Ahmad served as Director of Factory Systems at Rivian and as an engineering manager at Tesla. And with a team of 120+ people with experience at companies including Walmart, Google, Amazon, Meta, and GoPro, they ready to tackle this massive opportunity (P.S. they are hiring!)

Let’s Go!

We at Garuda Ventures are thrilled to have partnered with the Mytra team, and join our friends at Avenir, Eclipse, Greenoaks and more in helping the company reimagine supply chains in the AI era. Let’s do this!

Garuda Ventures is a B2B focused pre-seed fund, most often leading a founder's initial round of financing as their first true believer. The firm aims to be a founder's first call as they navigate their way from a deck and a dream to building a category-defining company. To learn more, visit garuda.vc

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It was also a year of accelerated momentum for the portfolio, as we saw many companies raising follow-on capital or being acquired on the back of strong execution and incredible product innovation.

Below is a quick look back at how the year unfolded, what we invested in, and what we’re seeing in the market as we head into 2026.

New Investments

In 2025 we were fortunate to partner with 9 new founding teams:

Announced:

• 🧑‍💻 Mastra, building the open source Typescript framework for AI agents

Unannounced:

• 🏠 An AI assistant for residential real estate agents and brokerages

• ✅ Embedded AI QA team that generates, authors, and maintains self-healing tests

• 🖼️ AI-native infrastructure for the appraisal and authentication market

• 🩺 Connected suite of AI agents that unifies and streamlines clinical workflows

• 🚨 Drone platform for first responders

• ⚽ AI-native operating system for live events and sports teams

• 🤖 AI-powered warehouse robotics

• 🤖AI-powered robotics for food prep automation

The unifying theme as always was finding and partnering closely with the highest-caliber founders - founders who are forces of nature, live at the frontier, are commercially minded, and aspire to build world-changing businesses.

Portfolio News

Along with our new investments, we also saw significant momentum in 2025 in companies we’ve had the fortune of partnering with from the earliest days. Here are just a few notable milestones from our portfolio:

• Arena AI, building foundational intelligence for modern hardware, launched Atlas, its AI hardware engineer, now deployed in production by companies like AMD and Bausch & Lomb

• Atero, building GPU memory optimization, was acquired by Crusoe while still in stealth, to accelerate the development of Crusoe Cloud

• ConductorOne, the leading security suite for human, non-human, and AI identities, raised a $79M Series B led by Greycroft with participation from Crowdstrike, Accel, and Felicis

• Mesta, building B2B cross-border payments powered by stablecoins, announced their $5.5M seed round led by Village Global with participation from Circle Ventures and Paxos, and crossed $2B+ in annualized payment volume within a year of public launch

• Metaview, the leading suite of AI agents for recruiting, raised a $35M Series B led by Google Ventures and opened their SF office

• Moonshot AI, building AI-powered conversion rate optimization for digital products, announced a $10M Discovery Round led by Mighty Capital

It is an extraordinary time to be a founder, early-stage investor, and allocator right now. AI is accelerating the frontier in software, hardware, cybersecurity, defense, and science, creating significant disruption and opening up new opportunities for category creation and company formation. Founders who have unique market and technical insights, can recruit world-class talent, and love to sell, are primed to win in this next era of startups we are entering.

We are grateful as always to our LPs, founders, and broader community for their trust and support. We’ve hit the ground running and can’t wait to see where 2026 takes us!

Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused, pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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Welcome to the Garuda Ventures newsletter, where we share the latest from us, news from our portfolio, new investments, and a few tidbits.

• New Investments:

  • We partnered with four founding teams in recent months (all still unannounced, so stay tuned):

    • 🩺 AI healthcare agents to handle key business workflows and give healthcare providers back more time with patients. We co-led the pre-seed.

    • 🏠 An AI-native operating system for real estate, founded by a team with deep domain expertise. We co-led the pre-seed.

    • 🚨Hardware + software platform for drones, to support first responders

    • 🏗️ An AI-first warehouse robotics automation platform

• Garuda on the Road: Over the last few months we’ve found ourselves meeting with founders, LPs, and fellow investors in San Diego, Dallas, and NYC. Special thanks to friends at Social Leverage, Primary Ventures, and our portfolio company APMC for the hospitality!

• Garuda Fall Fête 2025: We hosted our Fall Fete 2025 at La Mar in SF last week for an incredible evening connecting with our amazing - and growing - community. Thank you to everyone who joined us and helped make the event so special!

Portfolio News

Archive Intel, the AI-powered client communication archiving, record keeping, and compliance software platform for regulated industries, raised a $6.3M Series A led by Gray Line Partners.

Atero, building GPU management and memory optimization, was acquired by Crusoe, the industry’s first vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider.

ConductorOne, the AI-native identity security platform, raised a $79M Series B led by Greycroft, with participation from Crowdstrike, Accel, Felicis, and others.

Iconic Air, a platform specializing in GHG emissions tracking for energy-intensive industries, was acquired by Asuene Inc.

Moonshot AI, the AI-powered platform that turns websites into fully automated, self-optimizing living organisms, raised a $10M seed round led by Mighty Capital and Uncorrelated.

Mesta, the global B2B fiat + stablecoin payment network, announced their $5.5M seed round led by Village Global with participation from Circle Ventures, Paxos, and WTI.

Rocksalt, which turns B2B companies’ subject matter experts into an inbound marketing channel, launched out of stealth, announcing their $3.5M seed round led by Lightspeed.

Hiring Across the Portfolio

The Garuda Ventures portfolio is always hiring! If you’re in the market for an exciting new role at an early-stage business, head to jobs.garuda.vc or click the button below to discover opportunities across our network of companies.

Work at a Garuda Portfolio Company!

Garuda’s Bookshelf

In a world of bite-sized, easily consumable content, we love asking and getting the question, “Have you read any good books lately?” In this month’s bookshelf:

Non-fiction: Play Nice But Win by Michael Dell

Play Nice But Win is Michael Dell’s authoritative story of his own incredible life and career, interleaved with the dramatic story of his take-private of Dell in 2013 in partnership with Silver Lake. While much of the tech industry reads and fawns over the exploits of Silicon Valley-based and Ivy-league educated founders and CEOs, Dell’s life story and business career is decidedly Texan a UT Austin (almost) grad, who built Dell from his early 20s onward in the Austin area, and still resides there today. The book shares the story of Dell’s breakneck growth, through its IPO, their ultimate entry into infrastructure markets, and the eventual tie-up with EMC.

Fiction: Nuclear War, by Annie Jacobsen

Nuclear War presents a hypothetical, fictional scenario of nuclear war unfolding over 72 hours. Jacobsen’s deeply researched exploration of nuclear warfare is extremely unsettling. While the topic is grim, her ability to make complex scenarios accessible and engaging is remarkable. This minute-by-minute account of how a nuclear war might unfold is chilling, a major wake-up call we shouldn’t ignore.

Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused, pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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Atero, led by the incredibly talented Alon and Omer, operated in stealth for the entirety of its existence (hence this is the first time we at Garuda Ventures are writing about the company :) The team applied their expertise in memory utilization to build proprietary technology for GPU utilization, workload orchestration, and inference optimization.

As demand for GPU workloads continues to grow at an incredible rate, with no end in sight for both training and inference, technologies that can help GPU cloud providers optimize their performance become increasingly critical. This made Atero a strong strategic fit with Crusoe.

Crusoe is on the short list of critical AI infrastructure providers that are emerging to meet this overwhelming demand for compute as the great AI buildout continues. Crusoe is the industry’s first vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, powering the AI revolution with a unique energy-first approach. They are also developing the massive Abilene, Texas AI data center that will eventually be one of the largest computing clusters in the world, with capacity for 1.2 Gigawatts of power and designed to house up to 400,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs. Atero’s technology and team will enhance Crusoe’s inference services and build the foundation for differentiated managed AI services offering to maximize performance and efficiency.

We were fortunate to partner with the Atero team from the very beginning. It started with an intro from a trusted node in our operator network who was working with Alon back when he was building his prior company. We stayed close and supported him as he transitioned to focusing on Atero, and pulled together a round led by Tobias and our friends at Primary Venture Partners and top tier operators and angels.

Thank you to Alon and Omer for allowing us to partner with you on this journey. We are excited to continue partnering with you as you build Crusoe into the foundational AI infrastructure company of the future! Let’s go!

Garuda Ventures is a B2B focused pre-seed fund, most often leading a founder's initial round of financing as their first true believer. The firm aims to be a founder's first call as they navigate their way from a deck and a dream to building a category-defining company. To learn more, visit https://www.garuda.vc

For the last 20 years, B2B marketing teams could credibly rely on content marketing as a tried and true channel for customer acquisition: write high quality content, get indexed by Google and discovered via SEO, and drive search traffic to your website where customers can learn more or buy.

That compact is breaking down now in the age of AI. The AI search tipping point has arrived, with more than 50% of search results being AI results, across Google’s own AI results as well as newer “Answer Engines” (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc). AI generated B2B content has flooded the zone, leaving buyers searching for authentic content and insights as part of their buyer journey.

While still early, this AI-driven shift is pushing buyers to other places to discover and research B2B products, specifically social tools like LinkedIn, Slack, and Reddit, where the conversation is happening. Marketers are underprepared for this shift and need to adapt to this new reality.

Rocksalt: Helping SMBs Find and Engage with the Right Audience Online

Enter Rocksalt. Rocksalt helps businesses find and authentically engage with conversations among peers and industry experts who are actively discussing their market and products. These conversations are scattered across different forums, communities, and channels, and represent the new organic top of funnel for marketers.

By telling Rocksalt your areas of expertise, and the audience you are trying to reach, Rocksalt’s AI-powered solution goes out and finds the right people and discussions, helps you engage authentically, and unifies and simplifies your engagement across the disparate platforms out there – all in 15 minutes a day.

As a result, small and medium businesses can get discovered organically in this new era, by leveraging their own in-house experts to build credibility where their buyers are spending time, making it easy for busy execs and subject matter experts to raise their visibility in these forums.

Being in these forums not only builds awareness with the target audience, it also builds relevance for AI answers, as those AI Engines now often reference from these types of forum responses directly.

From Inbound 1.0 to 2.0

This problem space is one that Arjun and his co-founders are deeply familiar with. Arjun was a very early employee at Hubspot, where he helped build the definitive inbound marketing platform of that era. After selling his last business The Factual to Yahoo in 2022, and as he observed the tectonic shifts that AI was driving in the B2B marketing ecosystem, Arjun returned to his roots to build the next-gen inbound marketing suite for the AI era.

His co-founders Anita and Ajoy are perfect complements - Anita is an accomplished CMO herself, and Ajoy was Arjun’s right hand man and technical co-founder at Factual, where they grinded for years, exhibiting the grit and fortitude one needs to have a chance at building a special company. We stayed close to Arjun as he was ideating, and were fortunate to partner with Arjun in this seed round last year.

Let’s Go!

We at Garuda Ventures are thrilled to be partners since inception with the Rocksalt team, investing alongside friends at Lightspeed, Defy Ventures, and an A+ group of angels. Let’s go!

For more on Rocksalt, check out the company’s website.

Garuda Ventures is a B2B focused pre-seed fund, most often leading a founder's initial round of financing as their first true believer. The firm aims to be a founder's first call as they navigate their way from a deck and a dream to building a category-defining company. To learn more, visit https://www.garuda.vc

Welcome to the Garuda Ventures newsletter, where we share the latest from us, news from our portfolio, new investments, and a few tidbits.

• New Investments: We partnered with three founding teams in Q1 2025 (all still unannounced, so stay tuned):

  • ✅ AI Agents to help engineering teams automate end-to-end web flows—including dynamic or complex paths. We led the Pre-seed, backing a special team with both startup and growth stage engineering experience

  • 🪙 AI-native infrastructure for the appraisal and authentication market. We led the Pre-seed, partnering with a great founding team in a massively underserved market

  • 🌟 Mastra, The open source Typescript framework for developing AI agents. We invested in their seed round to partner with an A+ technical team and a special founder - Sam Bhagwat - we have known for years

• Back in the classroom: Rishi joined the faculty at Northwestern University's Engineering School and UC Berkeley's Haas Business School as an adjunct professor, teaching courses in Q1 on entrepreneurship and venture financing. Teaching the AI generation was an amazing experience! Click here to read more.

• AGM 2025! We hosted our 2025 annual meeting at the Commonwealth Club in SF last week. Someone commented that they love the “Fund 1 energy” — we are here for it! Some highlights:

  • We shared our thoughts on the private markets and where Garuda fits into the ecosystem (first check lead investors!), provided an update on our portfolio and the firm, welcomed three amazing Garuda founders to present (Aviv Frenkel at Moonshot AI, Sandeep Pyapali at Mesta, and James Richards at Evergrow).

  • We were fortunate to also host fireside chats with two special guests: Sandeep Peechu, Co-Founder of Felicis, who shared incredible insights from the founding days of Felicis to today, and Kunal Modi, Deputy Mayor of San Francisco, who discussed how he, Mayor Daniel Lurie, and the new administration in SF City Hall are delivering on their promises in their first 100 days in office. who shared incredible insights from the founding days of Felicis to today,

  • We ended the day on the rooftop for a celebration with the broader Garuda community of founders, operators, executives, and LPs. Thanks to everyone who came out!

    

• On the road: The next few months you’ll find us in LA, Sydney, Melbourne, London, Dallas and Montreal! Please reach out and say hi!

Portfolio News

Amperon, providing demand forecasts for the energy transition, raised $7M led by National Grid to accelerate the company’s commercial expansion across North America and Europe and further provide best-in-class AI-powered energy forecasting and market analytics to utilities, independent power producers, and energy market participants.

Archive Intel, building AI-driven archive compliance software for financial services firms, announced 350 customers and 4,000 on the platform after less than a year in market

Dashworks, an AI-powered workplace search assistant, was acquired by Hubspot. This acquisition will bring together Dashworks' deep search and reasoning expertise with Hubspot’s vision to give every go-to-market team member an AI assistant.

Monark Markets, an "Alts-As-A-Service" API platform providing broker dealers and wealth management platforms seamless access to private markets, announced a strategic partnership with ViewTrade, enabling the ViewTrade business community to access alternative investments from within their existing ViewTrade technology solution.

Stitchflow, providing instant SaaS user management for complex IT environments, released a suite of free tools including an Application Access Matrix, and IT offboarding checklist, and an IT job board tool for IT professionals.

Yrikka, the red teaming platform for computer vision models that ensures reliability in relevant contexts, came out of stealth and launched the APEX API, to make it easy for developers to easily integrate automated contextual testing into their visual AI workflows.

Hiring Across the Portfolio

The Garuda Ventures portfolio is always hiring! If you’re in the market for an exciting new role at an early-stage business, head to jobs.garuda.vc or click the button below to discover opportunities across our network of companies.

Work at a Garuda Portfolio Company!

Garuda’s Bookshelf

In a world of bite-sized, easily consumable content, we love asking and getting the question, “Have you read any good books lately?” In this month’s bookshelf:

Non-fiction: Who is Michael Ovitz by Michael Ovitz

Who is Michael Ovitz by Michael Ovitz is an amazing look at a titan of industry through his own words. A brisk tour of how he turned CAA into Hollywood’s power center. Deal vignettes - Jurassic Park, NBA TV rights, corporate tie-ups - reveal his playbook: out-prepare rivals, surround talent with 360° service, and use psychology as leverage. A masterclass in deal-making, accumulating power, and a seemingly relentless drive, it is almost certain that Ovitz would have been successful at whatever he put his mind to. It is also a cautionary tale - the same control that fueled CAA’s rise doomed his short, infamous run at Disney. An entertaining read!

Fiction: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov is a must read. You will walk away amazed it was published in the 1950s.

Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused, pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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Kia Khezeli, Ph.D., John Kalantari, Ph.D., co-founders of YRIKKA, and Arpan on a visit to the YRIKKA office in NYC

Why Test and Evaluation for Computer Vision AI Models Matters

While the dramatic breakthroughs in large language models have been the ones making headlines over the last couple of years, computer vision models have been advancing rapidly in parallel. Generative AI vision models, and newer breakthroughs that apply the transformer architecture to vision tasks like image classification and object detection are just two such examples. And the impact of computer vision - or “Visual AI” models are by nature “real world” in nature - verticals like defense, healthcare, automotive, and agriculture are all huge markets that benefit from visual AI breakthroughs.

But deploying visual AI in real-world, mission-critical settings remains hard – not because the models aren’t good enough, but because no one’s quite sure how good they are in the contexts that matter most. In high-stakes scenarios like defense and healthcare, you have to be sure you’ll get it right, or you just won’t push to production.

As a result, while testing and evaluation tools have emerged in the context of language models, the analogous frameworks in visual AI are still lacking. The current state of the art here consists of brute force - throwing expensive ML talent at the problem - or wiring up generic MLOps tooling that isn’t tailored to visual AI.

YRIKKA replaces these approaches with something faster, more focused, and more holistic.

YRIKKA’s AI Evaluation and “Red Teaming” Capabilities

By integrating synthetic data generation, adversarial red teaming, and fine-tuning capabilities, YRIKKA significantly reduces the time required to validate AI models – from months to minutes. YRIKKA’s approach ensures that breakthrough visual AI models are safe, reliable, and as performant in real-world scenarios as they are in benchmarks.

YRIKKA’s core idea is simple but powerful: "contextual red-teaming" for visual AI models. YRIKKA automates the painstaking work of evaluating visual AI models under real-world constraints. Instead of testing models in broad, abstract settings, YRIKKA evaluates how a model performs in the exact context it’s meant to be deployed in. That includes everything from identifying edge cases to synthetically generating images that mirror the specific challenges a model might face in production. The result: a platform that helps teams pick the right model, test it thoroughly, identify failure modes, and fine-tune it—all in a fraction of the time it currently takes.

YRIKKA’s platform enables AI developers to automatically “red-team” a visual AI model to uncover vulnerabilities and biases that would impact reliability and accuracy

This allows AI teams to move beyond general-purpose benchmarks and into tailored, confident deployment. In other words, YRIKKA helps them go from “this model seems good” to “this model is good for us.”

Deeply Technical Founders with Commercial Aptitude

YRIKKA was co-founded by Kia Khezeli and John Kalantari, both of whom bring deep technical experience and domain expertise to this problem space. Kia earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell, focusing on safety in AI systems, and later joined Mayo Clinic as a Principal ML Scientist in their Biomedical Artificial General Intelligence Lab. John holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and has worked as an AI consultant at NASA and across the Mayo Clinic’s AI teams.

Together, they’ve designed YRIKKA not just as a research tool, but as a product that can slot into real-world workflows. From our early conversations with the team, it’s clear they’re not trying to build an academic curiosity—they’re going after a commercial opportunity with real urgency and clarity.

Kia and John’s backgrounds reflect the product’s focus on high-stakes verticals such as defense, healthcare, autonomous systems in manufacturing, and agriculture. These are sectors where failure is expensive, regulation is meaningful, and trust is everything. As a result, YRIKKA is well positioned to help accelerate the deployment of all of the visual AI innovations that are emerging, and thus have a significant impact on the broader adoption of AI into society and the global economy.

Let’s Go!

We at Garuda Ventures are thrilled to have co-led YRIKKA’s pre-seed round alongside our friends Pascal and Daniel at Focal.

The company’s “APEX” (Adversarial Probing and Evaluation of Exploits) API is publicly available as of today. Reach out to us if you’d like to be connected with the team!

Garuda Ventures is a B2B focused pre-seed fund, most often leading a founder's initial round of financing as their first true believer. The firm aims to be a founder's first call as they navigate their way from a deck and a dream to building a category-defining company. To learn more, visit https://www.garuda.vc

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Alex Salazar and Sam Partee, Co-Founders of Arcade.dev

How Do You Enable Agents To Do Anything?

If the ChatGPT moment in late 2022 was the starting gun on this latest technology phase shift being fired, and 2023-2024 was the AI “co-pilot” era, 2025 is the year of the AI Agent (with a frenetic degree of GPU and data center innovation driving it all underneath).

So what exactly is an Agent? Using Anthropic’s definition, AI Agents - in contrast to more deterministic Workflows - are “systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.” In the enterprise, agents promise to augment and automate work, and dramatically expand the surface area of work that software can address.

Agents acting autonomously or semi-autonomously to accomplish tasks without significant human oversight is a potential revolution in business application software. But getting agents to achieve this promise isn’t just about having ever-more intelligent frontier models and applying traditional “pre-AI” infrastructure and tooling to harness their power. A new developer tool stack must emerge, to address new problems that arise as builders seek to harness the power of frontier large models.

One of these critical roadblocks is enabling agents to interact in a safe, secure, and reliable manner with the myriad 3rd-party applications or “tools” that they need to, in order to actually take actions in those services. This is a classic example of the new world colliding with the old: the existing paradigm of SaaS applications colliding with the new world of AI agents.

It’s also at its root an authentication problem, one that the special team at Arcade is perfectly suited to address.

Arcade: The AI Agent Tool-Calling Platform for Developers

Arcade.dev is the solution to this problem. They have built an AI tool-calling platform for AI app builders, one that solves the core authentication problem inherent to enabling agents to interact with any third-party product where work gets done, including email, Slack, Github, Twilio, Atlassian, and doing so in the easy and fast way that developers demand. Arcade offers a suite of pre-built connectors and an SDK to connect to any API, dataset, or codebase to unlock the ability for AI developers to quickly help their apps do more than chat, but actually make agents useful in the real world.

Authentication is a gnarly problem in application development, with so many different approaches, protocols, and attack vectors, and the classic tradeoffs between usability and security. It’s an example of a problem that crosses technology paradigms, such as the moment we’re living in right now as the software world embraces AI.

It’s also a problem that the founder/CEO Alex Salazar is uniquely positioned to address, and one that Arpan has spent a lot of time on previously as well. Alex previously was the founder of Stormpath, a developer authentication platform that Okta acquired in 2017, just before the company’s IPO in April of that year. Arpan had the good fortune to work on that acquisition from the Okta side, which is when he first got to know Alex. They stayed close over the years as Okta continued to accelerate post-IPO, with Arpan spending time building out Okta’s M&A program and Alex taking progressively more senior leadership of various key new product initiatives.

As they both moved on from Okta and continued to connect on a regular basis, Alex shared a few ideas he was playing with. He found his way back to authentication and to developer products, but this time for the emerging world of AI agents. The early customer and user feedback was powerful - there was a gaping hole in the new AI developer ecosystem, and Alex was the perfect founder - from a product, team, and developer-centric GTM perspective - to launch this company.

When he introduced us to his co-founder Sam Partee - a special talent in his own right and an AI-native builder - and we saw that he was bringing back Nate Barbettini, one of the star engineers at Stormpath / Okta (and author of a viral explainer video on the OAuth protocol), we knew Garuda had to invest.

Let’s Go!

We are thrilled to be partnering at Day 0 with Alex, Sam, and the entire Arcade team, investing alongside amazing investors like Laude Ventures, Neotribe Ventures, and notable angels like Andy Rachleff, Mike Volpi, and others.

Check out the platform, and reach out to us if you’d like to be connected with the team!

For more on Arcade, check out the company’s website, Github repo, and YouTube video demo with LangGraph.

Brick by Brick is presented by Garuda Ventures. Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused pre-seed fund that aims to earn the right to be a founder's first call as they get started on their journeys. To learn more, visit https://www.garuda.vc

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Welcome to the Garuda Ventures newsletter, where we share the latest from us, news from our portfolio, new investments, and a few tidbits.

• New Investments: We partnered with three founding teams in Q4 2024 (a couple are still unannounced):

  • 🔍 Archive Intel, building AI-driven archive compliance software for financial services firms. The company was founded by Larry Shumbres and Shea Werner. We led a $1.5M Seed round and are thrilled to be partnering with our friends at Social Leverage. Read our post here!

  • 🖥️ A test and evaluation suite for computer vision models in high-stakes situations (stealth). We co-led a pre-seed round into a super-talented technical team. More to come!

  • 🌟 The unified memory operating system for GPU clusters (stealth). We participated in a seed round to partner with an A+ technical team. More to come!

• 🧱 Brick by Brick: We published new episodes of our podcast Brick by Brick, including Sid Sridhar, Head of Business at Wave, Shreyans Bhansali, Employee #1 at Venmo, and Raj Chopra, SVP Security Products at Cisco and early Netskope employee. Take a listen and let us know who else’s stories we should be sharing!

• 🤝 2024 Year In Review:

  • AI in Action: As one would expect, AI was a dominant theme in our investment activities throughout 2024, reflecting the broader technology phase shift taking place across industries. And while AI has generated significant hype, we focused on backing founders who demonstrated a "customer-out, not technology-in" approach to leveraging these transformative capabilities. 8 of our 10 new investments in 2024 were AI-native companies, building either at the application layer (like Starboard’s AI-native software for freight forwarders) or at the infrastructure layer (like Arcade’s authentication and tool-calling platform for Agents). What united these investments was not just the underlying technology, but the founders' unique understanding of their customers' pain points and their thoughtful approach to applying AI to solve real business challenges.

  • We go early! 77% of our investments out of our current fund to date have been pre-revenue and pre-product at the time we invested. It has been incredible to see the portfolio’s growth and execution from Day 0 to product, customers and revenue, and ultimately more follow-on capital!

  • Community: Beyond our investment activity, we also invested heavily in strengthening the broader Garuda community and deepening our presence in the ecosystem. Between the two of us, we took 30 trips across the US and Canada, connecting with founders, LPs, and co-investors through a variety of engaging formats. From founder-focused events and small group dinners to portfolio dinners - and even a latte art class with some of our favorite GPs and LPs! - we were intentional in creating spaces for meaningful connection

  • Fall Fete: The year culminated in our second annual Fall Fête, where we were able to bring together over a hundred friends of the firm to celebrate our shared journey. Thank you to everyone - founders, co-investors, LPs, vendors, advisors - for being part of the continuing Garuda story!

    

Portfolio News

APMC, providing streaming and monetization solutions for some of the world’s biggest brands, announced that its Victory+ sports platform struck a multi-year streaming deal with the Texas Rangers, hot off the heels of the previously announced Victory+ streaming partnership for the Dallas Stars and the Anaheim Ducks, allowing fans to stream the content to their television, phone, or device, and get live games and content anywhere.

Flexpoint, the modern payment and software stack for the IT channel, launched AI-powered Same-Day ACH for 5x faster payments on the back of a record-breaking year.

Mesta, the faster, cheaper, cross-border B2B payment network, came out of stealth, announcing their cross-border payment network in beta and $14M in payments volume in just 14 weeks

Metaview, the AI assistant for recruiting, notched an incredible year, and published its 2024 “Year In Interviews” report.

Starboard, building AI-native logistics solutions for freight forwarders, raised a $4.5M Seed round led by Eclipse Ventures

Hiring Across the Portfolio

The Garuda Ventures portfolio is always hiring! If you’re in the market for an exciting new role at an early-stage business, head to jobs.garuda.vc or click the button below to discover opportunities across our network of companies.

Work at a Garuda Portfolio Company!

Garuda’s Bookshelf

In a world of bite-sized, easily consumable content, we love asking and getting the question, “Have you read any good books lately?” In this month’s bookshelf:

Non-fiction: eBoys by Randall Stross

eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work by Randall Stross is a fascinating look behind the scenes at one of the best firms of all time, Benchmark. Time and again we found ourselves smiling at how familiar some of the discussions felt to those we have had at Garuda. The more things change, the more they stay the same! This is definitely required reading for anyone interested in venture capital and, more specifically, how firm decisions get made.

Fiction: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolve

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is deserving of all its acclaim. It is a gripping reimagining of Dickens’ David Copperfield, set against the backdrop of Appalachia. This poignant tale delves into the opioid crisis and the foster care system, following Demon as he battles addiction after a football injury. A must-read for your list.

Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused, pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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Amy Fox and I go back almost 15 years. She and her husband Chris were some of the first people I met when I moved to the Bay Area. Amy was working at an early stage startup at that time called Zimride, a carpooling startup designed for universities and colleges. And while you may not know Zimride, you certainly will have heard about what it morphed into: Lyft.

This is a very special episode of Brick by Brick not only because Amy is one of those “ideal guests” that we had in mind when we started the pod, but because it is the very first in person episode we’ve recorded (shoutout to the All The Hacks Media team for hooking it up!)

In this episode of Brick by Brick, Amy and I talk about:

• Lyft's origin story and Amy's unexpected recruitment and subsequent 10 year journey

• The hackathon that launched Lyft

• The ride sharing wars between Lyft and Uber

• Did competition ever go too far?

• Building Lyft's unique culture

• Advice for companies considering remote or hybrid work models

• Building with "swagger"

• Working with your spouse

and more! A sneak peek below why founders shouldn’t cave to pressure from investors:

If you’re interested in hearing about the ride sharing wars, how to strike partnerships with large companies as a startup, or scaling cultures this episode is definitely for you!

To get more Amy follow her on LinkedIn and check out the All The Hacks podcast.

I hope you enjoy the conversation! Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube!

If you have any comments on this episode, ideas for future episodes, or any feedback on the podcast, hit reply or email brickbybrick@garuda.vc!

Brick by Brick is presented by Garuda Ventures. Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused pre-seed fund that aims to earn the right to be a founder's first call as they get started on their journeys. To learn more, visit https://www.garuda.vc

The Cross-Border Payments Challenge

Cross-border payments, a $44 trillion market, remain plagued by inefficiencies. Traditional systems are slow, with transactions settling in 2-3 business days. Moving money overseas is costly, with businesses averaging 5% in fees. Companies face further complications from the lack of interoperability between banking systems across countries, making it difficult to track payments and know exactly where money is at any given moment.

Making matters worse, the complexity of building payment infrastructure is staggering. There isn't a universal API to enable businesses to easily transact worldwide. Ask any payments expert who knows how the sausage is made, and they will likely admit that the back-end infrastructure for global transactions is held together with duct tape and bubblegum—a patchwork of tools, providers, and systems that fail more often than desired and desperately need an update.

A Next-Generation Payment Platform

Mesta is solving these challenges by combining traditional payment systems with blockchain-based stablecoin rails to enable faster, cheaper, and more reliable cross-border payments.

The company is building a unified, API-driven payment network that blends real-time fiat settlement with blockchain technology. The platform offers instant global payments, end-to-end tracking, and significant cost reduction. By combining traditional and blockchain-based payment rails, Mesta enables all customers to benefit, not just those that are crypto-native. The Mesta Payment Network accepts both FIAT and Stablecoins as sources of funds, while maintaining full compliance and transaction transparency across multiple jurisdictions.

Today, Mesta allows customers to move money across 50+ currencies and 100+ countries. Thanks to Mesta's APIs, customers can process cross-border payments for bill pay, payroll, supply chain payments, and global remittance at the speed of thought. Companies have launched on Mesta in as little as a week! Since launching in beta a few months ago, Mesta has already processed $12 million in Total Payment Volume (TPV), highlighting the platform's quality and the team's incessant focus on building a product that just works.

Built to Solve Their Own Problem

We strongly believe that tackling a big, complex infrastructure problem—particularly in money movement—requires a special team with deep domain understanding to build it the right way. That's why we're believe Sandeep, Kiran, and Nitin are the team to tackle this opportunity.

Sandeep lives and breathes payments, having spent 15 years in the industry at BILL, PayPal, and most recently Uber, where he led the core payment platform and helped scale from $20B to $100B in volume across 70 countries. It was at Uber, while coordinating money movement between riders, drivers, and HQ across multiple continents, that he recognized the inadequacies of existing infrastructure. This began a multi-year exploration of how to solve cross-border payments simply and elegantly. The team is strengthened by Kiran, who has built products serving tens of millions of users at both Salesforce and SLAC Accelerator Laboratory, and Nitin, who brings a decade of financial services and crypto experience from PayPal, Mastercard, and OKX. Together, they possess the domain expertise, connections, and understanding of technology at scale required to succeed in this ecosystem.

In a rapidly evolving market, Mesta is setting a new standard for cross-border payments. We're proud to have led Mesta's $2M pre-seed round, investing alongside our friends Anand at Canonical, Scott and Jenny at Everywhere, and Kevin at Inventum Ventures. It’s the beginning of the Mesta journey and we’re excited to be along for the ride!

For more on Mesta check out the company’s blog post, press release, and visit their website at mesta.xyz

Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused pre-seed fund, leading a founder's initial round of financing as their first true believer. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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The Changing Nature of Compliance

Compliance with regulatory scrutiny is not a new challenge for financial services firms. Communications monitoring and archiving is done in large part to protect customers from bad actors selling false promises and to prevent insider dealing. And when communications channels between wealth advisor and customer were limited to email and phone calls, monitoring and archiving was relatively straightforward. But, as we all know, digital communication channels extend well beyond email. Today’s consumer sends texts via iMessages, voice notes via WhatsApp, DMs on social media platforms. And more importantly, today’s consumer expects replies in those same channels.

Hence the conundrum: how do finance professionals seamlessly serve their clients across diverse platforms while maintaining strict regulatory compliance? Try and force a client to engage with you on a communication channel that is well monitored and archived and the client might leave. Engage with a customer in “off channel communication” on iMessage and now you open your firm up to joining the $3 billion in fines levied by the SEC against various financial firms for non-compliance related to "off-channel communications" over the last 3 years!

Thanks to Archive Intel, financial firms no longer have to choose. By integrating cutting-edge AI with omnichannel communication coverage, the platform delivers a seamless solution to help financial institutions meet compliance standards without sacrificing the client experience or operational efficiency.

Compliance for the modern era

Archive Intel has built an AI-native platform that reimagines compliance for today’s communication and compliance operations landscape. It was built from the ground up to ensure full compliance with the alphabet soup of rules (SEC Rule 204-2, 17A-4, 17A-3, FINRA and CFTC rules to be precise) while also seamlessly archiving communication across iMessage, WhatsApp, and social media in addition to traditional communications channels. The product leverages AI to automate data capture, management, and retrieval and give compliance professionals back countless hours they would otherwise spend gathering data to meet the stringent SEC and FINRA requirements. And that’s just what has been built over the last year!

At Garuda Ventures, we believe exceptional teams build category-defining companies, and Archive Intel is no exception. Larry is a repeat founder with over two decades of experience in fintech and financial services, having previously founded and exited Totum Risk and eVestment. Shea has spent a career in financial services across companies including Oppenheimer, Personal Capital, and Tifin. They and the rest of the team bring the perfect complement of technology and product prowess and domain expertise required to reimagine this large and growing market. You need to look no further than the amazing progress the company made in 2024 for proof — 220 customers after only six months in market!

We’re proud to have led Archive Intel’s $1.5M seed round, investing with our friends at Social Leverage. Customers have been clamoring for a platform like Archive Intel, and the opportunity has never been more ripe for the taking. We’re excited to partner with Larry, Shea, and the team and help build the category-defining solution. Let’s do this!

For more on Archive Intel check out the company’s press release, article in Citywire, and visit their website.

Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused pre-seed fund, leading a founder's initial round of financing as their first true believer. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.

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Our final Brick by Brick episode of 2024 features my friend Rajneesh Chopra, SVP and Chief Product Officer of Cisco's Security business unit. Raj and I met in 2014 when I was new to Silicon Valley and to tech. I was a BD Manager at Okta building our security partner ecosystem from the ground up and he was leading products at a then very nascent Netskope, now worth $7.5B and a juggernaut in cybersecurity.

In this episode of Brick by Brick, we talk about:

• Platform shifts like on-prem to cloud and now AI, and how transformative they are for startups

• Taking a non-traditional route to product leadership from engineering (via M&A/Strategy at Juniper)

• The tight relationship between product management and product marketing in enterprise software businesses

• When joining a startup is a "no-brainer" (special leader like Sanjay Beri + clear market pull)

• How the founding of Netskope was born out of direct conversations with Juniper and Cisco customers telling the founders the future

• How he leads teams today

• How Cisco is thinking about AI both internally and in its product strategy

If you’re interested in how a special enterprise security product leader who has been a leader at all three phases of the tech world - early stage, scale-up, and large incumbent - thinks and leads, this one is for you!

I hope you enjoy the conversation! Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube!

If you have any comments on this episode, ideas for future episodes, or any feedback on the podcast, hit reply or email brickbybrick@garuda.vc!

Brick by Brick is presented by Garuda Ventures. Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused pre-seed fund that aims to earn the right to be a founder's first call as they build their companies. To learn more, visit https://www.garuda.vc