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I am a solo GP investor in early-stage B2B AI and Data companies, investing ~$400K-1M…
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Allison Pickens shared thisAllison Pickens shared thisSo proud to announce that Hightouch has raised a $150M Series D, led by Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), valuing the company at $2.75B The funding is not about the money. It's about the vote of confidence that our customers, our partners, our team, and our investors have put in us and in our business - to reinvent marketing with AI We started as a company that builds data pipelines. Then we made data accesible to marketers self serve. Now, we're giving marketers the ability to generate on brand creative for their ads and emails, and to orchestrate all of their campaigns intelligently with AI With the funding - we'll keep doing what we do best - listening to customers, and building Everyone asks "how does it feel?" - I feel nothing but ready to roll up my sleeves and work hard for the 400 people who have trusted Tejas, Josh, and I with their livelihoods and their careers L F G 🚀 🙏
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Allison Pickens shared thisHeard this from VCs? "You're great, but your category isn't." I invest in top-notch founders, not categories. Case study: Akash Raju, Anuj Mehta, and Kushal Negi at Glimpse. Started out in a completely different business. But got to know CPG companies well, and pivoted to AI deduction management. Even then, some VCs thought their ACV and market size were too small. But the best founders know better than the best VCs. And when they face obstacles, they iterate to figure it out. Bet on the founder, not the category. Congrats to the team at Glimpse for your Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz! Jack Moshkovich 8VCAllison Pickens shared thisI’m extremely excited to announce that Glimpse has raised a $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with continued participation from 8VC & Y Combinator bringing our total raised to $52M. We raised this round to accelerate our vision of bringing AI to the CPG & retail industry. We’ve been working with consumer brands for 6+ years now. After pivoting away from our last business, we saw first hand how hard it is for CPG brands to sell & scale in retail. As a consumer, all we see is our favorite brands on-shelf at retailers growing extremely fast. But the reality is that selling in retail is extremely tough. Brands lose revenue on every order to retail deductions - fees tied to their trade spend, supply chain fees, and more. To figure out if these deductions are valid, it requires teams to dig through 50+ retail portals, 100 page long documents, and navigate data silos in fragmented systems. AI is uniquely suited to solve this problem & that is exactly why we built Glimpse. At Glimpse, we’re building the AI-native infrastructure for CPG & retail brands. We started off automating the deductions workflow - recovering brands millions of dollars back into their P&L & saving dozens of hours every week. With this initial focus, we’ve also built the CPG data layer giving us the opportunity to continue expanding to more manual workflows that can be automated. We’re giving CPG brands real operating leverage in the world of AI. A huge thank you to Joe and David at a16z, Jack and Vivek at 8VC, and Gustaf at YC for believing in us & partnering with us to bring this vision to life. Thank you to the incredible Glimpse team - none of this is possible without your hard work & passion for our customers. To our 200+ customers including PLTFRM, Suave Brands Company, IQBAR, Fire Department Coffee, Alice Mushrooms, Better Sour, and more, thank you for your faith in us. We have more fuel now to keep supporting & scaling with you all. And finally to Kushal and Anuj, it’s been 6+ years since we started this journey together, but we’re just getting started. We’re hiring - come join us!
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Allison Pickens shared this"One investor told founder Grant Lee that Gamma was 'the dumbest idea he had ever heard'" --> Great example of why most early-stage VCs should not be in the business of thesis-driven investing. If you are investing in founders that fulfill your own vision of the world in a space that *they are supposed to know better about and have a differentiated insight in*, you're investing in the wrong people. Put ego aside and invest in incredible people who know better than you.Allison Pickens shared thisGamma is wild: - Just 50 people - Generating $100M ARR - Valued at over $2B - Profitable for 15+ consecutive months - With more cash in the bank than they raised - In a category that most VCs dismissed In fact, one investor told Grant Lee his idea was “the dumbest idea he had ever heard.” Today, Gamma is one of the hottest AI startups in the world, and unlike most fast-growing AI startups, it's a model for how to build a sustainable, profitable, and durable AI product and brand. In my conversation with CEO Grant Lee, we discuss: 🔸 How Gamma discovered product-market fit 🔸 Their process for building a “word-of-mouth growth machine” 🔸 How they leveraged more than 1,000 micro-influencers (instead of big names) 🔸 Why focusing on the “first 30 seconds” transformed their business 🔸 Their pricing strategy that led to profitability within months 🔸 How Grant thinks about building a durable “GPT wrapper” business Listen now 👇 • YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g8j6KTJJ • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gPb34cyn • Apple: https://lnkd.in/ghvQSEYq Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny 🏆 Justworks—The all-in-one HR solution for managing your small business with confidence: https://www.justworks.com/ 🏆 Miro—The AI Innovation Workspace where teams discover, plan, and ship breakthrough products: https://miro.com/lenny
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Allison Pickens shared thisWhich AI company has evolved their product most rapidly? Hightouch is the clear winner in my mind. When I invested in 2021, they were building *Operational Analytics.* A few months later, they broadened to *Reverse ETL* to meet customer demand and partner with all the modern data stack companies. They became the dominant player in an even broader market when announcing their *Composable CDP* last year. Now, they're launching the *Vertical AI Platform for Marketers*. I am perpetually awestruck by this team. Congratulations to Tejas Manohar Kashish Gupta Josh Curl and team for your endless pursuit to listen to customers and build what they need.
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Allison Pickens posted thisTwo of my portfolio companies announced blockbuster rounds today: Gamma ($68M Series B at $2.1B valuation) and Scribe ($75M Series C at $1.3B valuation)! What they have in common, besides incredible founders: a maniacal focus on the product and user experience that allows them to scale super efficiently. Excited to continue to be on the journey with Jennifer Smith and Grant Lee Jon Noronha! StepStone Group Andreessen Horowitz
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Allison Pickens posted thisCongratulations to Clarify on their Series A led by USVP! What's driving their success, you might ask? I was psyched to sit down with cofounders Patrick Thompson and Austin Hay to dive into their vision of the future of CRM in an AI world. In the realm of GTM AI tools, the landscape is bustling with options. From AI solutions tailored for cold-calling to those focusing on enrichment, research, upselling, and providing executive visibility, the market is brimming with specialized tools. This plethora of choices can be overwhelming for investors and revenue leaders navigating through the myriad offerings. Clarify's founders envisioned a grander scale from the outset, capturing my attention and leading me to invest in both their Seed and recently announced Series A rounds. In my podcast episode with them, we delved into their concept of "autonomous go-to-market" and their definition of "excellence" for founder-led sales and early revenue teams in the era of genAI. Some key questions addressed include: * What should founders expect from their CRM? * What does founder-led sales look like nowadays? * What should your GTM tech stack look like? Check out the audio + transcript in the link in the comments! CC Zachary Bratun-Glennon at Gradient Tim Porter Sabrina Wu at Madrona Venture Labs Somrat Niyogi at Recall Capital Kirby Winfield at Ascend Timothy Chen at Essence Venture Capital John Chen at Fika Ventures Tristan Handy from dbt Labs Ashley Smith at Vermilion Ventures #Clarify #SeriesA #GTM #AI #Founders #SalesLeadership #RevenueTeams
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Allison Pickens shared thisI have optimism about our healthcare system in large part because of the strides that I see Trey Holterman and his team making at Tennr. Inspired by you and your team! Psyched to be on your journey.Allison Pickens shared thisExcited to announce our $101M Series C, led by IVP with new participation from ICONIQ, GV (Google Ventures), and Frank Slootman—alongside continued support from the whole gang at Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Foundation Capital, and Y Combinator. Internally, we like to say that if a funding round signals anything, it’s that smart people—who spend their time studying our market, talking to customers, and surveying the field—have come to a shared conviction that we’re solving an important problem, and doing so decently well. We’re somewhat maniacal as is, but this round is about getting more aggressive in addressing the ‘black hole problem’ of the U.S. healthcare system. It means giving more providers the tools to create a world-class experience for their referral sources and their patients. It means continuing to maximize the percentage of patients who make it to their next service while minimizing the denials and delays that too often stand in their way. It means helping providers thrive in an environment of collapsing reimbursement rates. There’s a long way to go but it’s a small proof point that meeting providers where they’re at—by working with eFax, email and a myriad of legacy systems that have come before us is the right solution—even if not the ideal solution. Thanks to Fortune for covering our story.
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Allison Pickens shared thisCongratulations to the #CustomerSuccess winners of The GTM10 Awards 2025! When evaluating candidates, I was looking for folks who have demonstrated the ability to SCALE their teams -- a more critical skill than ever, given how quickly companies are growing nowadays. Scaling means: 🚀 Having a bias toward automating and productizing the CS team's work, instead of hiring more people to solve a problem. 🚀 Sharing feedback in helpful ways with Product & Engineering so that the company's most scalable asset - the product itself - can rapidly improve. 🚀 Understanding the Sales team's forecast and what that implies for hiring. 🚀 Coaching your team to adapt to change, which can be hard for anyone. Congratulations to the winners for exhibiting these skills and others! 🌟 Luke F., Global Head of Customer Success at Deel 🌟 Christine Lawther, Ph.D., Directr of Customer Success at Sprout Social, Inc. 🌟 Madhuri Narayana K, Senior Director Global Customer Success at Chargebee 🌟 Rodney Apura, Senior Director of Customer Success at Zendesk 🌟 Cait K., Chief Customer Officer at Airtable 🌟 Eman Abdel-Latif, CPA, Director of Customer Success at Mosaic Finance 🌟 Scott Cohen, VP Solution Engineering & Customer Success at Mixpanel 🌟 Nina Wilkinson, Director of CS at Apollo 🌟 Sarung Tripathi, VP Customer Experience at TogetherAI 🌟 Harita Salvi, CCSM, PMP, Senior Director at JumpCloud Stay tuned for tomorrow’s final The GTM10 Awards announcement of the Partnerships category winners! Great to be on the jury with Sasha Anderson at Canva, Josh Abdulla at Asana, and Nick C. at Databricks Thanks to Cello's Stefan Bader Philipp Neusser for organizing these awards to recognize great leaders in CS. #GTM10 #Award #CSAllison Pickens shared this🔊 Announcing The GTM10 Awards 2025 #CustomerSuccess Leaders In today’s software landscape, Customer Success isn’t just a function, it’s the engine of long-term business growth. These standout leaders are transforming the customer experience by blending empathy, operational excellence, and data-driven insight into every interaction. 🎉 Congratulations to this year’s winners, your work is setting a new benchmark for what great Customer Success looks like. Meet the 2025 CS Leaders: 🌟 Luke F., Global Head of Customer Success at Deel 🌟 Christine Lawther, Directr of Customer Success at Sprout Social 🌟 Madhuri Narayana K, Senior Director Global Customer Success at Chargebee 🌟 Rodney Apura, Senior Director of Customer Success at Zendesk 🌟 Cait K., Chief Customer Officer at Airtable 🌟 Eman Abdel-Latif, CPA-Latif, Director of Customer Success at Mosaic Finance 🌟 Scott Cohen, VP Solution Engineering & Customer Success at Mixpanel 🌟 Nina Wilkinson, Director of CS at Apollo 🌟 Sarung Tripathi, VP Customer Experience at TogetherAI 🌟 Harita Salvi, Senior Director at JumpCloud A big thank-you to our expert Customer Success Jury for their thoughtful selection: - Sasha Anderson, Global Head of Customer Success at Canva - Nick C., Global VP at Databricks - Josh Abdulla, Chief Customer Officer at Asana - Allison Pickens, Former COO at Gainsight Stay tuned for tomorrow’s final GTM10 Awards announcement of the Partnerships category winners! #GTM10 #Award #CS
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Allison Pickens shared this🏆 Excited to announce that I’ll be joining the jury for the GTM10 Awards! The GTM10 Awards, presented by Cello and Lightspeed, celebrate excellence in go-to-market leadership across five categories: Marketing, Customer Success, Sales, Growth, and Partnerships. As a jury member for the Customer Success category, I’m looking forward to recognizing the individuals who are setting new standards and driving impact in the field. 🔍 📢 Applications are open until April 24, 2025. If you know someone doing outstanding work in CS, encourage them to apply or nominate them here: https://lnkd.in/giiEhim9 Excited to celebrate the talent shaping the future of go-to-market strategies! #GTM10 #Awards #CustomerSuccess #Leadership
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Allison Pickens liked thisAllison Pickens liked thisIntroducing HydraDB. The graph native context infrastructure for agents. Purpose built to deliver precise context & observability into why agents act the way they do. We've always believed graphs are the best way to manage AI context, but they've been too expensive to scale or impractical for storing full context. Until now. HydraDB combines in memory, NVMe, and object storage into a single graph layer, making context delivery faster, cheaper, and more precise. We want context delivery to be extremely fast, 1000x cheap, and highly precise. Give your agents a brain.
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Allison Pickens liked thisAllison Pickens liked thisOver $400M raised across the AI-Native Services founders coming to our AINS Summit June 9th. $4B if you count OpenAI's DeployCo. It is the first time this many of the founders defining the category will be in one room. The SaaS playbook does not apply to what they are building. The consulting playbook does not apply either. Most of what they know, they have learned by getting it wrong first. We asked attendees what they most wanted to pressure test. The questions clustered into three buckets. Distribution and GTM. How do AINS companies crack relationship-heavy industries? When should you acquire vs partner for distribution? Is distribution actually the highest leverage function in a services business? Business model and economics. What do best-in-class metrics look like when inference is in COGS? How do you price for outcomes instead of labor? What will exit multiples look like, and is this market already frothy? Scaling and org design. How and when do you make the services-to-product transition? How do you balance customization vs productization without becoming a consulting firm in disguise? How do you structure FDE, CS, and product when the lines between them keep moving? The founders leading these conversations include Dakotah Rice (Harper (YC W25)), Ryan Daniels (Crosby), Timon Gregg (Strala), and Chris Hladczuk (Hanover Park). Plus a couple dozen others. Off the record. Small and intentional. We are mostly full, but a waitlist is open in the comments. We are also running a larger summit in the fall. If you are building in AINS and want a heads up on that one, sign-up link is in the comments too. We will update the AINS Playbook (link also in comments) with our learnings.
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Allison Pickens liked thisAllison Pickens liked thisFrom mass-producing satellites to developing agentic AI for the CIA, Stanford MBAs are building some of the most critical companies at the intersection of technology and national security. 🇺🇸 In that context, we’re proud to see 15 (‼️) GSBackers portfolio companies on this year's NATSEC100 presented by the Silicon Valley Defense Group in partnership with J.P. Morgan, which identifies the Top 100 venture-backed defense tech companies in the US. At GSBackers, we have been investing in defense and space tech before it was hot. With Anduril Industries (invested since 2022) and Saronic Technologies (invested since 2024), we're excited to have backed the current No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. 🥇🥈 While I try to keep a low profile with GSBackers (e.g., we still don't have a website), it's great to see that we're in good company of some of the world's best defense tech investors, incl. our friends at Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed, all of which we frequently co-invest with. Congratulations to 3 of our portfolio companies being recognized for the first time on this year's list: • Picogrid (co-founded by Zane, Martin, and Dan), • Vulcan Elements (co-founded by John and Piotr), and • Machina Labs (co-founded by Edward and Babak). And congratulations to the 12 mission-driven founders recognized for the 2nd, 3rd, and in some cases 4th time (full list in comments). The credit belongs to the men and women in the arena, but we’re proud that you chose GSBackers to join you on your important missions. If you're building in defense/space, please reach out!
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Allison Pickens liked thisAllison Pickens liked thisThe most expensive healthcare decision you'll ever make has nothing to do with your insurance plan. It's how you raise your kids in a country that forgot how kids were meant to be raised. My wife and I have two toddler daughters. We live in California. Our entire family is on the East Coast. We're lucky: we both work from home, we can afford preschool and a nanny when we need one. And it's still really, really hard. Not hard like "Instagram-relatable parenting is crazy" hard. Hard like: skipped meals, no exercise for weeks, chronic sleep debt, stress that doesn't have an off switch. Hard in ways that accumulate quietly in your body. Here's what I keep thinking about as someone who works in healthcare: In most of the world, childcare isn't a line item. It's a way of life. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors — they don't "help out." They raise children together. It's the default, not the luxury. In the U.S., we turned that into a service you purchase. And when you can't purchase enough of it, you absorb the cost with your body. Your 30s and 40s — peak parenting years — are also the years that set your metabolic trajectory for the rest of your life. The habits you build or break during this window compound. Sleep patterns, nutrition, physical activity, stress management — all of it is being shaped while you're running on fumes trying to do a job that was never designed for two people alone. We talk a lot about the childcare crisis as an economic problem. It is. But it's also a public health crisis hiding in plain sight. Parental burnout doesn't just feel bad. It drives chronic disease. It drives healthcare costs. It drives the exact outcomes we then spend billions trying to treat downstream. We demolished the village and then wondered why everyone's sick. Maybe the most important thing we can do for population health in this country isn't another drug, device, or digital health app. Maybe it's rebuilding the village. #Parenting #ChronicDisease #Healthcare #ChildCare
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Allison Pickens liked thisAllison Pickens liked thisFriday was a special day. I checked The Trevor Project website [link in comments] and we achieved my late daughter Summer's goal. Her last wish was to raise $1MM to eliminate LGBTQ+ suicide amongst young people. And thanks to the generosity of so many (including countless folks reading this post), we did it! More than 1000 people donated, with checks ranging from $10 to much more. If you were part of that group, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. You gave us a bright light during a dark moment. And if you are hearing about the organization for the first time, I hope you'll talk a few minutes to learn about its important mission. ❤️
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Allison Pickens liked thisAllison Pickens liked thisReally excited to share that Modal has raised our Series C. We’ve raised $355 million after growing fivefold since September, surpassing $300 million in annualized revenue. This brings our valuation to $4.65B post-money in a round led by General Catalyst and Redpoint, with Menlo Ventures and Accel joining as new investors. All our existing major investors participated as well, doubling down on their conviction in Modal. This is a huge milestone for us, and it feels like validation of the problem we set out to solve years ago: current infrastructure isn't built for AI applications (or more broadly, compute-intensive applications). We envisioned something else – infrastructure built for fast iteration, elastic compute, and developer experience from day one. That meant going deeper than most people thought was reasonable: building our own runtime, scheduler, filesystem, and orchestration layer from scratch. It's been super rewarding to see the wide span of things customers are building on top of it: from AI coding tools and biotech platforms to large-scale inference systems and research workloads. Over the last year especially, demand has accelerated in ways we could hardly have imagined, with sandboxes now being a third of our revenue. We're still very early in a generational technology shift, and it feels like the next few years are going to redefine how software gets built. And we're hiring! Check out https://modal.jobs if you want to be part of building the future of AI infrastructure.
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Allison Pickens liked thisExcited to announce Wing Venture Capital's investment in Dust! The enterprise market for AI agents will be one of the most substantial markets of our generation. Model capability is racing ahead; deployment inside real companies is not. Closing that gap is the defining enterprise software problem of the decade, and Dust is solving it. Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu are second-time founders who have been building together for over a decade, from their first company through Stripe, Alan, and OpenAI's reasoning team. I have followed Dust closely since seed, and what has always set them apart, beyond the team, is the taste: multiplayer from the ground up, quality that compounds with usage, and a level of usability that is rare in enterprise AI. Proud to back Gabe, Stan, Nico C. and the entire Dust team and thrilled to be working with Konstantine Buhler, Ramtin N. and Ross Fubini!Allison Pickens liked thisMultiplayer AI has arrived and we’ve secured $40M to make that obvious! To date, we’ve had the privilege to help teams at Vanta, Datadog, Persona, Decagon, 1Password, Clay & many more to rewire the way they operate. How we work with AI will continue to change massively. We’re excited to continue pushing the human <> agent collaboration frontier alongside strategic partners like Snowflake (h/t Stefan Williams Harsha Kapre Yogesh Gopal) and Datadog (h/t Asher Kinyon Gabriel Levy). Dust is fortunate to be backed by venture’s bright future (h/t Ramtin N. & Abstract), our day 0 partner (h/t Konstantine Buhler & Sequoia Capital), and an amazing set of supporters (Zachary DeWitt at Wing Venture Capital, Ross Fubini at XYZ Venture Capital, Léa Verdillon at AGLAÉ VENTURES, Reshma Sohoni at Seedcamp…). To our customers and angels, we couldn’t have done this without you. A massive thank you to Christina Cacioppo, Stevie Case, David Eckstein, Michael Grinich, James Underhill, Zach Abrams, Scott Woody, Charlie Songhurst, Mati Staniszewski, Jacob DePriest, Avi Itskovich, Rick Song, Ryan Wang!!
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