2025 Year In Review
2025 was a defining year for us here at Garuda Ventures. Themes we’ve been writing about and investing behind for the past couple years - AI as a platform shift, services meets software, vertical AI, the accelerating impact of AI on the physical world, and the unique role that first check partners play in the work of early stage company building - were all prevalent in our work and portfolio.
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.