Abhay Jain

We are doubling down on our investment in InstaSwitch and are excited to announce their $4.7M seed round, led by Chicago Ventures, with continued support from us at Panache Ventures and Better Tomorrow Ventures, as well as participation from 8-Bit Capital and angel investors from Unit, Square, PayPal, and Plaid. Every year, millions of SMBs try to switch banks and most never finish. Bank switching means updating 30-40 tools across payroll, payments, vendors, and more and this cumbersome process often means that although the account is opened, but the business never actually moves. InstaSwitch is building switching infrastructure that embeds directly into bank and fintech onboarding flows, enabling customers to switch in minutes. As the race to own primary relationships intensifies, InstaSwitch makes that transition seamless. Huge congratulations to Daniel West and the entire InstaSwitch team. Excited for what’s ahead! Check out our article below on why we decided to double down. Prashant MattaPatrick Lor 🚀Melaniia VolkodavGeneviève TanguayMelissa BelecMike CegelskiInshaal QadirAlejandro MarinDomenic Del Vecchio

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Seth Levine nailed it! The concentration problem isn't just a GP pain point... it's choking innovation. When capital pools around the same 20 funds, emerging managers and founders get shut out. Love that he's using his platform to call this out. Foundry has backed 50+ emerging managers. That's the diversification the ecosystem needs. This is exactly why Carta exists — making capital allocation visible and accessible. Capital Evolution hits at exactly the right moment. Thanks for having us Daniel Dart. Team Carta loves the community of FUTURE TITANS you have built 🚀

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I like Daniel Lewis' articulation of how LegalOn Technologies (AI contract review software) exceeds what’s possible with the lower plateau of legal AI startups. "We have more than 50 attorney-built playbooks, seamless integration into existing workflows, and our solution works out-of-the-box on day one,” + “a foundation in attorney-drafted, expert legal content”, Daniel says. It’s an equation for how an AI tool can gain purchase. Expert-built playbooks. Deep, specialized data. Doesn't break your workflow. Increase the value. Decrease the friction. https://lnkd.in/g9yu4Zzs

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I started as Chief of Staff at staXscale recently, and have gotten to be part of making some critical pre-launch decisions. Like how to bill. The industry is WEIRD about it and wholly unclear. We've opted to not try to trick anyone (which seems to be standard). Hear me out - in server administration, a 'site visit' isn't a unit of computing - it's a bullsht proxy metric. When hosts say they bill by visits, they're abstracting away what actually consumes resources - bandwidth, CPU cycles, memory, and I/O. A visitor reading a text page and a visitor streaming a 4K video are supposedly billed identically, despite vastly different resource demands. This works fine for simple sites, but it makes optimization harder and creates unpredictable costs as your traffic patterns evolve. At staXscale, you pay for what you allocate: RAM and CPU. No guesswork about whether your 'visits' will trigger an overage. You provision the resources your application needs, scale them when you need to, and pay for capacity, not traffic patterns. And if you DO go over, you're not permanently kicked out of your lower plan (spikes happen). If you want to optimize costs, you optimize your infrastructure, not your visitor count - it's meaningless. I LOVE IT HERE. Sign up for the launch alert at staXscale.com

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**Fubo and Hulu Live TV: A Strategic Fusion in Live Sports Streaming** The recent merger of Fubo with Hulu Live TV reflects a growing trend in the streaming industry—converging platforms to enhance viewer experience and broaden content offerings. As Fubo integrates its live sports features into a more comprehensive service, we at ElevenX Capital see the potential for this model to reshape competitive dynamics within the sector. How do you think this merger will impact subscriber growth and market positioning for both brands? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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More great insights from Montauk Capital and Evan Caron on the extraordinary risks, and opportunities, at the intersection of energy and the real estate industry.

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🦄 $150M to improve tutoring and education globally. Preply just announced a new round, putting the company on a clear trajectory to become an iconic global marketplace. In a world obsessed with fast wins and volatile growth, some companies quietly beat their goals year after year — for more than 6 years in this case (as long as we’ve at Acurio Ventures been partners). A few learnings from this journey, relevant for founders and investors: Pick a growing market with an unsolved problem. 2 out of 8 billion people globally are learning a second language. Despite many options, outcomes are still poor. Our original thesis was simple: if you build the reference platform, everyone who wants to learn will eventually come to you. Category leadership matters. When we backed Kirill Bigai and Dmytro Voloshyn back in 2019 (together with Rob Kniaz), there were dozens of similar startups. Small details showed Preply had already built a superior tutor base and a scalable growth engine. Build a product customers love. Speaking a language and teaching it are very different things. Preply transformed the learning experience by combining a motivated base of +100,000 tutors with tools that actually drive outcomes. Never stop experimenting. Few companies maintain a strong experimentation culture as they scale. Preply’s DNA reminded me of Booking.com — enabling them to execute 10x better than most marketplaces. Great companies turn every change into an opportunity. From riding the post-COVID shift to online learning, to betting early and heavily on AI as Dmytro Voloshyn has excelled at. What once sounded like sci-fi is now reality. Great companies become talent magnets A company maturity can't be addressed only by looking at the revenue, profit or product. I like to see how much better they become at attracting talent and retaining it. Proud that Acurio Ventures made this possible and the WestCap team saw things as bullish as we do and are now supporting the next phase of Preply’s journey. Huge congratulations to the entire Preply team!!

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Excited to share that Betty has co-led a financing round in 23 Broadway, an AI-powered user acquisition financing platform, alongside Will Ventures. 23 Broadway is reimagining user acquisition financing by not only providing capital but also deploying it through proprietary technology managed by a world-class performance marketing team. The partnership is key to unlocking Betty's decentralized "franchise" model that will scale us globally. Through its three-in-one offering (capital + team + tech), 23 Broadway will help scale OpCos, like Betty 🇬🇧 , that reach product-market fit. Why would Betty share 23 Broadway with the outside world? Doesn't that create a conflict? Yes and no. One of my three primary jobs, besides setting the vision and finding the best talent, is to continually decrease our cost of capital. 23 Broadway’s cost of capital will decrease as it proves its effectiveness beyond both Betty and the broader casino gambling sector—in turn, lowering the cost of capital for Betty OpCos. As a newly appointed board member at 23 Broadway, my priority is to maximize alignment between both organizations. https://lnkd.in/eCC5H5mN

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Thrilled to see our portfolio companies LayerZero Labs and Mesh named as inaugural infrastructure partners for Tempo, Stripe’s new payments-first blockchain. Tempo’s high throughput, sub-second finality, and compliance-first design mark a big step toward making stablecoin payments work at internet scale. With LayerZero Labs driving interoperability across chains and Mesh powering on/off-ramps for wallets and fintechs, this ecosystem is moving from experimentation to production. It will reshape the future of global payments.

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Ruthless velocity is our core cultural value. We will work more and more efficient hours than anyone. Nobody gets hired unless they were the psycho who outworked everyone at their last job. These hours become ever more efficient as the AI dev tools, such as Claude Code, continue to mature. Great feature here of Vulcan Technologies’s use of AI not only in product but in dev. Our completely non-threatening “opponents” still code the old fashioned way or worse offer only laughably slow and expensive non-technical consultants. We offer a team of consultant engineers, all trained at the top schools and firms, and now also equipped with the top tools.

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Founders, the metrics you use to tell your growth story need rigorous internal controls behind them because potential investors will scrutinize every claim. Nine years ago today, Snap Inc. completed its IPO at a $24 billion valuation, one of the largest tech IPOs in years. Snap built its growth narrative around "Daily Active Users" (DAUs), but reporting that number consistently required disciplined data infrastructure. How do you define an "active" user? How do you handle bots, duplicate accounts, or platform changes that affect measurement? Every variance in your methodology needs documentation, and any inconsistency raises red flags during due diligence. In today's market, where investors are more selective than ever about where they deploy capital, sloppy metrics are a deal-killer. VCs and growth investors don't just want to see impressive numbers, they want to see that you can prove those numbers, explain how you measure them, and demonstrate consistency over time. Build measurement discipline and internal controls early, not when you're preparing for a financing or exit. Strong controls aren't just about compliance, they're about building investor confidence in your growth story.

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A week after launching Avant, the news cycle wrote my pitch deck for me. Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and General Atlantic just announced a $1.5B joint venture. The mandate: deploy Claude across their portfolio companies — a dedicated consulting arm, purpose-built to embed AI into the operating businesses those funds own. A lot of GPs are about to read this and get it wrong. They will think, wow I can raise the valuation of my companies by embedding them with AI. They'll go straight to the companies they own and ask "why aren't you using AI?" — without looking in the mirror. Then they will dump thousands into unprofitable AI tools that are used poorly or not at all. AI tools without strategy and training are useless. The funds in this article have spent 3+ years and unlimited resources trying to implement AI internally, and they're only now reaching the point where they can create real value for their portfolio companies. So where is the value? Start with your fund's internal operations. Speed up your processes with automation to win more deals. Spend on the right tools and use them strategically. Then advise your PortCos and operators on how to do the same. It's what Avant helps customers do every day.

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In honor of #InternationalWomensDay, I wanted to take a moment to shout out just a few the awesome women investors and ecosystem builders in the Boston community. @David Chang of Via AI, Inc. has outdone me with a most thorough list of founders and funders - p.s. this is one way we keep the trusted human in AI. Here are just of few of these amazing women who have pioneered in venture in Boston or are currently investing. I am in awe of you, inspired by you and in many cases indebted to you for your support: Women running their own funds or Managing Funds: @Nicole Stata, Boston Seed Fund Katie Rae, The Engine Jennifer Lum, Biospring Partners Rudina Seseri & Kleida Martiro, Glasswing Millie Liu, First Star Maia Heymann & Nilanjana Bhowmik, Converge Melissa Withers, RevUp Lily Lyman, UnderscoreVC Maureen Stancik Boyce, PhD, Good Growth Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D. & Gabi Zijderveld, Blue Tulip Sarah Hodges, Pillar VC Awesome investors: Beth Porter, C10 Stacy Swider, MassVentures Holly Maloney, General Catalyst Brigid O'Brien, Planetary Health, RA Capital Jennifer Davis, Techstars Kerty Levy, Techstars Samara Gordon, Hyperplane Incredible Angels, Public Board Directors, Company & Ecosystem Builders: Jean Hammond, Anita Brearton & Sheryl Schultz, Shereen Shermak, Stefania Mallett, Jules Pieri, Emily Green, Sarah Fay, Sarah Biller, Sara Fraim, Jodi Goldstein, Jody Rose, Jodi Gernon, Jodi Collier, Jodi-Tatiana Charles, and so many more! We have come a long way, baby. Sisters are doing it with community.

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Most of VC money is based and invested on companies and entrepreneurs in the two coasts--what about all the opportunities to invest in founders in areas beyond that 2%? Stephanie M. Fowler, President, Capital Access at the Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership (IFEL) is working toward bridging that gap. https://lnkd.in/gXgtDxjs

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Today Arc announces our $10.76M Seed led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Adverb Ventures, Broadway Restaurant Group, LLC, United Talent Agency, Sarah Friar, Saumil Mehta, Henry Delouvrier, Mike G, and Josh Schwarzapel Ali Hussain and I started Arc to help local businesses harness AI in a way that benefits customers, employees, and the businesses themselves. This belief that all boats can rise with AI is the cornerstone of Arc. There are 200,000 drive-thrus in the US serving 15M meals a day and employing 3 - 5M people. We often think of them as giant corporations, but 70 - 80% are locally owned franchises that are important parts of their communities. Yet the drive-thru experience today is still powered by 1950’s technology that serves no one well. Long lines, rushed ordering, garbled audio, and multi-tasking employees all get in the way of these businesses delivering not just food, but hospitality. Today, alongside our fundraising, we are announcing the launch of Arc’s drive-thru platform. Powered by our proprietary AI voice ordering system, our platform lets operators manage their drive-thru with the precision, measurability and curated experience of a modern digital channel. The result: delighted guests, larger orders, and happier employees. And this is just the beginning.

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It's rare when you hear a startup idea and think to yourself - "good god, of course this is perfect and of course this is the perfect team to build it". It's rarer yet when you hear it both from a friend and former colleague (and their eventual VC partner too!). AI, small businesses, Voice, commerce - all combined into an excellent experience at the drive-through. Michael MacLennan and Ali Hussain are such a good combo of technical depth, analytical and strategic strength, consumer/SMB domain understanding and straight startup hustle. Very very excited about this one and am looking forward to trying the product in the wild!

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A new California law (FIP VCC) is forcing VCs to ask portfolio company founders about their sexual orientation, disabilities, and more – all so it can be reported to the state. We built a new system to help funds on AngelList comply without ever seeing individual founder responses. To preserve founder privacy everywhere, we've decided to make the system available to any fund for free, regardless of who they work with for fund admin. You can use it today: fipvcc.com

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