True Ventures

Big news from ICEYE today! Perfect time to re-up our favorite story about the team and their rooftop experiment. 🛰️ We backed ICEYE in 2015, when SAR satellites cost over $500M and only governments had them. Rafal Modrzewski and Pekka Laurila thought they could build a microsatellite at a fraction of the cost, but needed to test their prototype without a rocket. So they did something scrappier and much cheaper: they hauled their radar onto a Helsinki rooftop, put it under a tent, tied the whole thing to scaffolding, and pointed it at the sky. SAR imaging works by using motion: normally the radar moves and Earth holds still. Instead their radar stayed put while the ISS, flying overhead at 7.6 km/s, supplied the motion. If their little radar could reconstruct an image of something moving that fast, 400+ km away, the technology worked. They couldn't go to space, so they brought space to them... simple and brilliant!

Some people wait until it feels safe to take the leap. Puneet was taught the opposite.. 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝗮 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗸𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗹𝘆 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲. His lesson? No one likes a complainer. Puneet. Stanford, class of 1997. A partner at True Ventures. Four to five hundred companies backed. Early checks into Fitbit, Peloton, Duo, HashiCorp, and Ring. Worth tens of billions today. But ask what he is proudest of, and he will not point to the exits. His father immigrated from India in 1969. The first in the family to ever board a plane. Eight dollars in his pocket and no way back. What he passed down wasn't money. It was optimism. They say you have to sacrifice your family to get ahead. He feels sorry for the people who believe that. Twenty years married, and still saying let's go. Because family is the one thing you actually take to the grave.

What's the best advice Puneet Agarwal has ever received? It's something his grandfather told him: “Only a person who risks is free. If you don’t go and take a chance, you’re never going to find the treasure at the end.” Go, take risks, and build a company. Thanks to Viraj Ala!

Imagine talking to the customers you're building for without it taking six months. That's what Mayank Mehta is building with Gather and a big reason why eight months in, the company is ten times the size it started at. Emma, Gather's AI teammate that sits in your Slack, runs real interviews with whatever audience matters, including segments that would be nearly impossible to recruit any other way. What made us back it: Emma doesn't shortcut the research process, she just makes it cheap enough to run all the time. Teams used to ask one question and wait months. Now they go down rabbit holes. gatherhq.com

True Partner Puneet Agarwal at Connected Stack 2026: "We’ve seen unprecedented revenue growth, but AI infrastructure is outpacing enterprise demand. Only 10% of enterprises have seen full-scale deployment of AI." He makes the case that closing the gap means building the context and controls that let agents work inside a real business. Read more from Puneet on the day's most compelling insights, including the keynote conversation between True Partner Michael Montano and Anthropic's Kate Jensen about what deployment looks like, and what's worth building next: https://lnkd.in/gpA6JX_J

True Ventures's Michael Montano has managed everything from a six-person team to a 3,000-person engineering org at Twitter. Now, he invests at inception, where getting as close as possible to the work matters. For him, that means building alongside founders we back. What surprised him is how much of what actually makes him fast right now is taste and fundamentals. His advice to founders: look at managers, directors and VPs as IC hires. Some of the best builders out there may be sitting in management roles - some maybe on your team already. And to the folks managing teams today: your experience doesn’t disappear when you go back to doing IC work. It becomes your edge. Mike’s full argument: https://lnkd.in/gJd8UBis

A lot of enterprise AI is still framed as a technology problem. Increasingly, it is an operating model problem. That was one of the clearest themes from Connected Stack 2026. At the event, Anthropic’s Kate Jensen and True Ventures’s Michael Montano talked about what enterprise adoption actually takes: a committed business owner, a clear outcome, and the willingness to change a process. That last part is easy to underestimate. Access to powerful technology is only one part of the investment. Companies also have to change how they work: how decisions get made, where context lives, how permissions are handled, and which workflows need to be redesigned rather than simply automated. That has implications for what gets built next. The opportunity is not just to make AI more capable. It is to make organizations capable of using it. A look back at the day:

The simple cycle of our founders introducing us to founders they respect is a key element of our work as early stage investors. Before technology matures, before there is a product, there must be trust and alignment between the founders and investors. And there is no better test of that trust than the introductions they make to their trusted networks. In the summer of 2020, as we learned to live and work with COVID, we were introduced to Viswa Colluru, PhD and Enveda by an existing True Ventures portfolio founder Ashley Zehnder, cofounder and CEO of Fauna Bio. Viswa founded Enveda to discover better medicines by learning from nature's chemistry. The idea was simple to describe and hard to execute. Nature’s chemistry at work with plants and microbes has spent millions of years encoding information into molecules, and most of them have never been characterized. Enveda built an AI platform that reads that chemistry, understands that chemistry, and translates that chemistry at scale with speed into a drug discovery platform. There was power in that idea of learning from life itself. And though the hard work still lay ahead, the promise was clear and so was the path Viswa described. True Ventures is designed to back founders at that very moment, when uncertainty is greatest and the difference they hope to make may still be an idea. Our responsibility is to help them take those first steps and partner with capital and care through the years of hard work that follow. Now, a mere six years later, Enveda has three oral drug candidates in human trials, with encouraging early clinical readouts already and many more in the pipeline. The team's new funding round will help advance those candidates and develop many more potential treatments for inflammatory and metabolic disease. The purpose behind their work has always been deeply human: Viswa has lived the saying that science and research is service to humanity. We are thrilled to have played a small part in it by leading that seed round and investing in multiple rounds since including this financing. Here’s to Viswa Colluru, PhD and the Enveda team, to their commitment to innovation powered by life on earth, for life on earth. https://lnkd.in/gY4WNjPp

Today, Basecamp Research announced their$140M Series C. Their data now spans partnerships in more than 30 countries and powers EDEN, the largest biological model ever trained with 9.7 trillion nucleotides that translates evolutionary data into therapeutics. Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince's idea for Basecamp Research took shape in a tent on an Icelandic icecap. They sought to collect and sequence life in the field, and kept finding how much was missing from existing databases both in depth and scale. That gap looked like an opportunity to build a deeper understanding of nature, and use it to expand what scientists can design as well as the certainty with which they can tackle the complexities of biology. Their aim from the beginning was to design the models as well as medicines. Enveda Founder Viswa Colluru, PhD introduced us to Glen and Oliver in 2021. When a founder we've backed points us to another founder, we’re honored, and we pay attention. That for us is the greatest signal we’re doing something right to earn true trust.  Funding a hypothesis asks three things of us: conviction before all the answers are clear, curiosity as the science develops, and a commitment to the people doing the work. We're thrilled to continue that commitment to Glen Gowers, Oliver Vince, Phil Lorenz, and the entire Basecamp Research team. More here on their recent announcement: https://lnkd.in/p/gMFCXsDE And a brief story from Rohit Sharma on how it all began: https://lnkd.in/p/gcJBDyiM