Eric Crowley

Haast is one of the few AI companies with a live product that's solving real problems for global enterprises. Kunal Vankadara and Liam King have assembled a team of weapons, they have a war chest, and they're hiring to go global.

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Why some of the most established LPs are increasing their exposure to emerging VC managers It’s interesting what you hear when you talk to some of the world’s largest and most successful endowments and foundations. I’ve recently been meeting with several major allocators, and they had all reached a similar conclusion. After decades of investing, they determined that some of their best venture returns were coming from the smaller, emerging managers. Obviously allocation to established managers with strong track records remains critical. But smaller funds are hungrier and more focused. They have to prove their edge to survive. Their smaller size means they can make high-conviction bets, build deep relationships with founders, and move fast when great opportunities appear. The data supports it. Cambridge Associates has found that emerging managers, typically Funds I to III under $250M, have historically outperformed established firms by around 3–5% net IRR over the past two decades. PitchBook’s 2023 analysis showed that Funds I and II deliver the highest average TVPI of any fund sequence. And research from the Kauffman Fellows program found that smaller funds generated higher DPI compared larger funds. Many of the world’s most established LPs have quietly increased their venture exposure toward emerging managers - in some cases more than half of their venture allocation. They’ve seen first hand that in venture, the smallest funds often deliver the best outcomes. #emergingmanagers #venturecapital

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Calendar → Planner → Projects → AI employees. Motion is rebuilding the SMB productivity stack for an agentic world.  Stacey Bishop and I are thrilled to share our investment in Motion. They raised $60M, powered by an oversubscribed $38M Series C led by Scale Venture Partners. Harry Qi, Ethan Yu, and Omid Rooholfada are at the heart of it, driving the change every SMB has been waiting for. AI is reshaping business at a speed we've never seen. But for most SMBs it’s still out of reach: too complicated, too expensive, and way too much overhead. The Motion team is breaking down those barriers by replacing the productivity suite with a set of out-of-the-box AI employees, ready to work on day one. A 25-person accounting firm in Kansas City can now have AI teammates handling client follow-ups, prepping docs, updating records, scheduling meetings - the tedious, time sucking stuff that gets in the way of actual work. The team has built a single platform where humans and AI genuinely collaborate. Motion is following a GTM playbook that has led to some of the most significant business outcomes in SaaS: start with a wedge, win the SMB market, then expand across categories and upmarket. We’ve seen this across SaaS giants and within our own portfolio. Box defined content, HubSpot defined inbound marketing, and BILL defined Accounts Payable. They all began with focused products that evolved into comprehensive suites. Motion’s agentic productivity platform is already reaching 10k+ SMBs and is just getting started. The future of agentic work is here, and I can’t wait to see what this team accomplishes! Read more about the story here: https://lnkd.in/dvwkazfK

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Ayr Energy announces its $25M Series A, led by Energy Impact Partners. We shared Anirudh's belief that the renewable transition, AI infrastructure buildout, and the overdue renewal of America's aging grid were converging into a power equipment supercycle. Lead times had tripled. Prices had nearly doubled. And the incumbent supply base, shaped by decades of boom-and-bust caution, wasn't expanding fast enough to meet the moment. This wasn't a problem you could solve by adding shifts at existing factories. It required building a new global OEM from the ground up. I still remember a conversation early on with the former CEO of an Indian transformer manufacturer. He chuckled at the irony: enormous but disparate manufacturing capacity sitting underutilized, yet no clean path to serve a US data center or utility customer. The bottlenecks weren't exactly technical but were structural: Access, quality frameworks, speed of customization. It needed the right team to solve this.. What Anirudh, Rahul Arora, and Yashashvi Takallapalli built is that team and they built it around a radically different premise. In an industry where changing a spec mid-order means restarting a design cycle or losing your production slot, Ayr's modular transformer architecture absorbs specification changes without breaking stride. Proposals go out in days, not months. Grid-scale units ship in 40–72 weeks against an industry average north of 120. In an industry where responsiveness is the exception, Ayr has made it the standard: 15 field service locations, 150+ NETA-accredited technicians, 24–48 hour nationwide response, and the kind of deep engineering partnership that turns first-time buyers into repeat customers. The results speak loudest: $500M+ in contracted orders, 20GW+ of US power capacity in the pipeline, and a customer base that keeps growing and expanding. Excited to welcome Anil Achyuta and Energy Impact Partners as they lead the Series A. We were proud to write Ayr's first check. Even prouder of what this team has built since and super excited for what's next as we deepen our partnership in this round. ⚡ General Catalyst Neeraj Arora Paul Kwan Siddhi Kasliwal Genevieve Kinney

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Santa Barbara Venture Partners has raised a $25M second fund to invest into software and AI, as covered in The Wall Street Journal Pro, Axios Pro Rata, and here in Pacific Coast Business Times. Fund II builds on the success of six successful exits (full and partial) in five years, Fund I’s top quartile performance, and a major competitive advantage in offering extensive customer acquisition and marketing expertise to SBVP portfolio companies. Fund II extends the firm’s unique strategy of generating continuous returns for investors in an asset class otherwise plagued by illiquidity challenges. Five years in, all fourteen SBVP portfolio companies are performing well. SBVP generally invests in companies with $2M to $50M in recurring revenue which are growing 75-200%+ that have outstanding client retention metrics. The firm typically participates in Series A through C rounds, or SBVP buys stock directly from existing founders or other shareholders. Many of SBVP’s 150+ fund investors (from across two funds and fourteen SPVs) are top marketing and sales executives from leading tech firms. They provide the portfolio with expertise in over 25 different marketing and customer acquisition channels and methods to accelerate revenue growth. Limited Partners include leaders from Adobe, Google, Procore Technologies, AppFolio, Snowflake, Salesforce, Zoom, RingCentral, CBS, Pinterest, and various other top firms. LPs work with portfolio companies on demand generation, sales, and marketing, and accelerate product marketing, revops, audio/TV marketing, content, social media, SEM, media buying, account-based marketing, customer success, sales enablement, branding, strategic alliances, trade show marketing, and other areas. https://lnkd.in/gkwaxivz

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From the beginning, we believed Lumana was building much more than a smarter surveillance tool. Lumana's platform reflects the next evolution in video intelligence — physical AI. This approach enables systems to go beyond basic detection capabilities to understanding context, infer intent, and deliver real-time insights that improve safety and operations at scale. Further, we decided to take the longer and more difficult direction of building a whole new generation and fully featured Video Management System (VMS). With the company’s $40M Series A, led by our friend Peter Wagner from Wing Venture Capital and our seed partners from SCAPITALVC, we’re doubling down on a platform that’s already proving its value in the real world. We are serving now close to ten thousands enterprise cameras in production! Founders like Sagi Ben Moshe bring a rare mix of vision and execution to the table. From our earliest conversations as an EIR at Norwest, it was clear that Lumana had the potential to reshape how organizations use video. Congratulations to the team on this well-deserved milestone. https://lnkd.in/gwHdaGPZ

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Middle market deal activity continues to tell a very clear story: where you operate matters just as much as how you perform. Business services are leading volume, averaging ~6.2x EBITDA. Valuation is no longer just about size or profitability, it’s about positioning within a broader platform strategy. Companies that fit into consolidation themes or operate in resilient, non-cyclical sectors are seeing outsized premiums. At Minerva Valuations, we’re seeing this play out in real time across mandates. Let’s talk! #MergersAndAcquisitions #BusinessValuation #LowerMiddleMarket #RollUps #MinervaValuations

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This is an excellent report on the #VC activity in Florida for the first half of 2025, put together by our partner,s eMerge Americas. 💡 5 Takeaways from the eMerge Americas 1H 2025 Florida VC Insights Report: 1. Startups across Florida raised $2.85B across 270 deals, putting 2025 on pace for the strongest year since 2022. 2. AI dominates, 33% of all funded startups are AI-focused, with $830M raised in South Florida alone. 3. Cybersecurity and defense tech are booming, with Tampa emerging as “Cyber Bay” and major new AI-cyber programs launching. 4. Fintech, climatetech & Web3 continue to shine, with record funding and renewed investor confidence in Miami. 5. “If you’re not investing in AI, you’re asleep at the wheel,” says Me! https://lnkd.in/eVb-eYA9

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💡Emerging GP Fundraising Insight #8: Rolling Closes Keep You Moving Small funds can't always afford to sit still until the target is hit. Rolling closes let you start deploying earlier, build a track record, and show momentum to prospective LPs. One GP told me that for Fund I ($5M target), he took capital as it came, signed, wired, and got to work. It wasn't perfect, but it kept the lights on and the deals moving. Sometimes the "sign and wire as it comes" approach is the only way to get moving. Takeaway: Momentum is a fundraising asset and rolling closes can help you keep it. Has anyone here used rolling closes as a strategic advantage?

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I recently started analyzing growth rates across the ENR Top 400 over the last 15, 10, and 5 years. What stood out was the gap between the broader industry benchmark and Ediphi’s top enterprise customers. Approximate ENR benchmark growth rates: ~4–5% CAGR over 15 years ~3% CAGR over 10 years ~6% CAGR over 5 years Approximate average growth rates of Ediphi’s top enterprise customers: ~10–12% CAGR over 15 years ~9–10% CAGR over 10 years ~10–12% CAGR over 5 years Obviously software alone does not explain that difference. But I do think there’s an important pattern underneath it. The best-performing contractors tend to build cultures around continuous improvement: they stay curious they modernize systems they evaluate new ideas seriously and they create organizations designed to keep learning One thing I’ve learned over the years in construction technology is that tech adoption is rarely just about technology. It’s usually a signal about culture.

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Before the ink could dry on this latest Insights piece on how deal making is shaping the future competitive landscape of AI, the two power houses, Nvidia and Open AI, set a new high water mark with Monday's $100 billion announcement. This was shortly followed by yesterday's Apple-Intel announcement, with its own AI angle. Click through to see how we have built up to these notable headlines. Following is a teaser on what is inside: The AI Nation is Coming   According to Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, AI will be like an entirely new state of geniuses appearing on the global stage by 2027.   This isn't sci-fi speculation. It's happening now, and the numbers are staggering: -$100B+ in VC funding flowed into AI in 2024 alone -$300B projected Hyperscaler AI infrastructure spend in 2025 -$10 trillion potential contribution to global GDP   The race is intensifying: -OpenAI's $40B private market raise shattered Saudi Aramco's public market record -Anthropic tripled its valuation from $61B to $183B valuation in 6 months -Meta pivoted from "build for the future" to "buy for the future" with Scale AI -Even rivals like Meta & Alphabet are forming $10B partnerships   But here's the question keeping us up at night:   How do we balance fiduciary duty to generate returns with responsibility for the societal transformation we're funding? The companies we back today aren't just building products—they're architecting the foundational systems that will potentially govern commerce, creativity, and human interaction for decades. This isn't just about claiming territory. We're literally building new continents. The future isn't coming. It's being constructed right now, one billion-dollar deal at a time.   What role should investors play in shaping this "AI nation"? 🤔 Read my full analysis on how private markets are navigating the most transformational innovation cycle in history: https://lnkd.in/eTrHpE_k before-the-future-interpreting-the-present-state-of-artificial-intelligence-in-private-markets/ #AI #PrivateMarkets #VentureCapital #Innovation

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Greenfield Partners is proud to be deepening our partnership with Capitolis as they announce today a $56M strategic round. If you’ve spent time in market infrastructure, you know how rare it is to see deep market insight paired with real product velocity. The team at Capitolis has both, and the result is infrastructure that makes capital markets safer and more efficient. We’re increasing our investment alongside Barclays, BNP Paribas, J.P. Morgan, fellow investors Canapi Ventures, 9Yards Capital, and existing investors Citi, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and UBS to fuel the next stages of Capitolis’ Capital Marketplace and Portfolio Optimization solutions. https://lnkd.in/exK8nQYx Kudos to Gil Mandelzis and the entire Capitolis team!

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Building companies in heavy industry calls for a particular kind of resilience: sustained technical iteration, disciplined capital allocation, and leadership teams capable of executing as projects move into full-scale construction and operation. Rodi Guidero shares what that journey has required from our founders, and why the real measure of value creation is the capacity to build businesses designed to operate and lead for decades. 

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🔔Announcing the 2025 Vertical SaaS 50!🔔 Today, Avid Ventures, Headline, and Bain Capital Ventures recognize 50 new emerging vertical SaaS companies. 🏭 This year, over a third of the honorees are solving problems in the physical world including Caspian, DocUnlock, and Revenue Vessel in logistics, Complement, DiploAI, and Forgepoint in manufacturing, Ichi in construction, and GridStrong, Lumora, and Strobe Power in electricity/utilities. 📝 As in prior years, several honorees are building in the broader professional service landscape including &AI, Crosby, and PointOne in legal, Mako AI in financial services, and Foundation, Novella, and Strala in insurance. 🩺 Most notably, we've seen an increase in healthcare companies like Charta Health, Ferry Health and RoVR as well as Zoomlogi in pharma, Corner Health and Duet in nurse practioner practices, ExaCare AI in senior care, Onos Health in behavioral health, Grove AI in clinical trials, and Lassie and Rondah AI in dental. If you are building a vertical SaaS company or have recommendations for our 2026 list please reach out - we'd love to hear from you!

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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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I’m stepping more directly into interim and operating CFO work. Over the past decade, I’ve consistently been brought into sponsor-backed and growth-stage platforms at inflection points — acquisitions, liquidity pressure, lender negotiations, audit remediation, capital raises, or operational scale. I build institutional-grade financial infrastructure fast. That means: • Liquidity visibility and covenant discipline • Clean audits and lender credibility • Transaction-ready reporting (QoE, data rooms, integrations) • Repeatable forecasting and KPI frameworks I work where capital and operations intersect — ensuring companies are positioned to access funding, execute deals, and scale without losing financial control. I’m open to select interim and fractional CFO mandates where execution speed and clarity matter. If you’re a sponsor, CEO, or investment partner navigating one of those moments, let’s connect. — Ken Anthony Stanford MBA | CPA | Growth Infrastructure CFO

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