February 2025 Newsletter
The latest from Garuda Ventures, new investments, news from our portfolio, and a few tidbits!
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.
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.