May 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 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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.