Array Ventures invests $250K–$3M at inception in companies transforming the world’s largest industries. If that’s you we’d love to hear from you deals@array.vc.
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We have had a busy summer. We set up a new office and have made some new investments. Scroll to the end for information on past and upcoming events.
Exits
Congratulations to three portfolio companies on their acquisitions.
Portfolio Announcements
HappyRobot raised $150M and appointed Microsoft Spain president for growth and expansion
Wabi.ai launches a multiplayer assistant that helps families and friends plan their lives together
Rasyn launched Synthon 350M, a single-step retrosynthesis model for chemistry tasks across scientific tools
Hilt can stop breaches caused by abnormal human/agent behavior in realtime
PerspectiveAI released 57 agents for retail, hospitality and banking
Zingly announced partnership with Pegasus Airlines and Transamerica
Oro Labs raises $100M for procurement orchestration & announces SAP partnership
MoksaAI on building AI retail security
FlamingoAI announced funding led by Vertex Ventures to help IT and MSPs
Runable raised $21M to help small business run autonomously
CandorIQ announced partnerships with HiBob & BambooHR for workforce planning
Blumira introduces an AI command center for investigations across existing security tools
With Capsule you can now make a professional brand approved video with one prompt
Sapiom raised $50M to let your agents transact
Blaze launches automated marketing platform for small businesses
Tellen introduced AI audit quality expert inside Excel and Word
Wokelo launched Akta intelligence API for private companies,
Pictures from Recent Array Ventures Events
We have been very busy. We have had pickleball tournaments, voice research meetups, hikes, pizza & pitch events, and even had a fun office warming party! We had a highly successful event for SF tech week with over 1200 RSVPs!!
For future events follow Array Ventures page on Luma here.
Our social media has been very active but a recent highlight was a viral tweet that was featured on TBPN. It was a commentary on Instinct and generally ad placements in personal agents.
We are also lucky to make the Business Insider Top 40 Seed list again this year!
Market Observations
Solo Founders are on the rise. We had a panel with Ilan founder of our portfolio company Sapiom and Ben Cera of Polsia talk about pros and cons of starting a company solo and it was a full house. Full post here (LI & X) and below are a few take aways:
-We are in a unique time when solo founders can start and grow very fast in the early days.
- Solo founders surround themselves with many agents, contractors, and senior executives.
-Most successful solo founders are high functioning self starters
-Solo founders live in founder mode at all times
-Delegation / time off is tricky. They feel guilty taking time off
-You do need capital to hire good talent around you
-Without strong intuition you can keep launching failed products & never know when to pivot or what PMF is and noone to push back on you
-Marketing as solo founder is tough and lot of experiments
-You have to do all jobs at the company to learn how to hire
-If you figure this out you can run a well oiled machine, make fast decisions, and change directions really fast.
We recently discussed what it takes to raise preseed capital in today’s market here. We cover answers to the following questions in this post:
1/ How much traction do you need to raise pre-seed?
2/ What are VCs looking for now that is different from before?
3/ What is a moat now?
4/ Is being a solo founder better?
At AI Assurance & Governance Summit at Stanford, we discussed why security and governance must evolve alongside AI.
At Array Ventures, we’ve invested in three security companies this year: Hilt, Reflex Security, and Crosslayer Labs. We believe there’s still significant infrastructure to be built to make the agentic era secure and trustworthy. Here is the full video of the panel.
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