About
I'm an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. NextView invests across software & AI…
Articles by Lee
Activity
6K followers
-
Lee Hower shared thisFambot has both come out of stealth and announced their pre-seed round, and we're thrilled for NextView to co-lead it. My household includes two working parents and a 5th grader. On a daily basis, I encounter situations where I'm trying to coordinate, gather information, schedule, or complete some other task where Fambot is an incredibly helpful agentic ally.Lee Hower shared thisToday we announced Fambot's $3.5M pre-seed round, co-led by NextView Ventures and Baukunst 🚀 We also announced that, for the first time, our platform is available to the public on iOS and Android If that weren’t enough, we just launched WhatsApp integration and Shared Family accounts - along with a dozen new killer features. This isn’t just a big day for Fambot, it’s a big day for parents everywhere. Two years ago I was getting 40+ kid emails a week, juggling 10 WhatsApp groups, two Girl Scout apps (cookie season 🤯), and newsletters with deadlines buried on page 7. I wasn't the "always on it" parent. I was the parent who missed the early release day more times than I’d like to admit. The problem isn't that parents are disorganized. It’s that what parents are expected to get done on any given day isn't kind of hard - it's literally impossible. So we built the tool we wished existed. Fambot reads the school emails, newsletters, calendar invites, and WhatsApp groups - so parents don't have to - and sends one clear daily plan by text. Both parents get the same plan, so coordination stops defaulting to whoever happened to open the email. If AI can write code and run businesses, it can handle permission slips and practice schedules too. And we’re proud that some of the best venture investors in the world believe in our vision: that every parent deserves an AI Chief of Staff and that AI should be a tool that gives parents time back to be present with their kids. Thank you to the teams at NextView Ventures, Baukunst, Correlation Ventures, Karman Ventures, Founders Network and to Stephanie Palmeri, Lee Hower, Kate McAndrew, Wesley Barrow, Amr Al-Shihabi, Amit Sharma, Bob Meese, Kevin Holmes, Yoichiro Taku, for believing families deserve industrial-strength tools. Thank you to my co-founders Greg Karlin and Jason Morrow, and the incredible Fambot team and advisors, and to TechCrunch and Fast Company for covering today’s announcement. And, above all, thank you to the 1,000+ families who’ve already welcomed Fambot into their daily routine to help turn the chaos into moments that matter. To the parents out there - this one’s for you! We're just getting started. Press coverage and App download links in the comments. 👇 #Family #Parenting #AI #Fambot #ConsumerAI
-
Lee Hower shared thisVery excited to be a significant investor in Walden, albeit in a larger than typical seed round. My partner David goes into some of the background here in his post. Here at NextView we've been investing in robotics / physical AI for many years now (Ultra, Dexai Robotics, Seneca, Skyways, Navier, Optimus Ride etc). Psyched to add Walden to this group and continue building this part of the portfolio.Lee Hower shared thisWalden Robotics launches today with a $300M seed round at a $1.1B valuation, and NextView Ventures is proud to have leaned in with a meaningful check. Here's why we had the conviction ⬇️ It started with Dave Johnson, a founder we backed once already as early investors in Dexai Robotics before his exit in 2024. Dave could write his own ticket, and instead of starting another company he's joining Walden as Chief Product Officer. When a founder of that caliber builds inside someone else's company, that team has to be world class. That team is led by co-founder and CEO Russ Tedrake: Toyota Professor at MIT, creator of the Drake open-source framework, and most recently SVP of Large Behavior Models at Toyota Research Institute. The core idea: instead of being programmed by hand, these robots learn new physical skills from human demonstration, the same leap LLMs made for text. Russ's team showed pretrained models learn new tasks with 3 to 5x less data, and the approach already drove Boston Dynamics' Atlas through multi-step jobs with no new code. Walden is spinning that work out of TRI. My partner Lee and I spent real time at their Cambridge HQ watching the robots work, and seeing it in person turned interest into conviction. They're already deployed alongside people at one of the world's largest manufacturing plants, going from first pilot to full deployment in under two months. The round is co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital, with NVIDIA and Samsung as strategic partners. It also brought a familiar face: Deviation's Colin Beirne, a longtime collaborator from our WHOOP co-investing days. The last few years of AI were about knowledge work. The next few are about the physical world. Excited to back Russ, Dave, and the whole Walden team.
-
Lee Hower reposted thisLee Hower reposted thisEvery monopoly in history has ended the same way: someone figured out how to build the same thing for a fraction of the cost, and had the conviction to price it accordingly. Credit Union software is next. For decades, deploying a member-facing Point of Sale meant a multiyear contract signed on projections nobody could verify. Credit Unions were not buying software. They were placing a blind bet with their members' money. Today Fuse launched AI POS, the first Point of Sale and Account Opening solution generated by AI: → Enter a Credit Union's URL → AI pulls the logo, brand colors, and loan types straight from the website → A branded, mobile-first member portal is live in 5 minutes The core product is free for every Credit Union. Permanently. No contract, no implementation fee, no scoping call. Automation add-ons (Plaid connection, AI document reading, direct deposit switching) run a few dollars per application: turn one on, test it on real loans, keep it or drop it. Earlier this year, the $5M Credit Union Rescue Fund proved that when financial barriers disappear, Credit Unions move fast. AI POS applies the same conviction to an entire category. For thirty years, technology vendors charged Credit Unions a premium to serve the people banks overlooked. The math has changed. The price just followed. Try it: start.fusefinance.com
-
Lee Hower reposted thisLee Hower reposted thisToday we are very excited to launch Morpheus, the world’s first real world Reinforcement Learning environment. Every Reinforcement Learning environment operates in the game world. Benchmarks like Atari, OpenAI Gym, MuJoCo, and Procgen are all small, game-like worlds that reset every few minutes. But the real world never resets. A business keeps running and evolving everyday. Customers churn, suppliers fall through, and yesterday's decisions become today's bottlenecks. Therefore we built Morpheus. It is a simulator and benchmark suite for training and evaluating reinforcement learning agents in structured, evolving enterprise environments. It models persistent worlds with realistic processes such as routing, inventory, and resource allocation that change over time rather than resetting between tasks. We tested the leading RL algorithms : - Standard Reinforcement learning - Experience Replay - Weight Regularization - Latent-Context Models. All of them failed horribly. This proves that RL algorithms are not ready for the real world. We also tested how frontier LLMs would perform in realistic and dynamic enterprise environments on Morpheus. The main conclusion was that LLMs are not continual learners. Do you want to build out your RL agents in the real world? Links: Website: https://lnkd.in/g-whug6v Environment Hub: https://lnkd.in/g4VqBnQt Blog: https://lnkd.in/gw5A4X6r HF: https://lnkd.in/gwQMUddt
-
Lee Hower reposted thisLee Hower reposted thisEveryone you work with just got promoted. Today we're launching Proxon, the management layer for the AI workforce. Across every company, people are quietly building AI workflows around themselves. They assign tasks, review outputs, offer feedback, and decide what goes live. Anyone doing that is becoming a manager: not of people, but of a new kind of workforce spreading faster than the systems around it can adapt. Meanwhile, the systems companies run on were built for a world in which humans did all the work. Org charts, budgets, security policies, and approval chains can tell you who owns a team or an application, but they cannot tell you which agents are operating, what data they touch, what they cost, or whether they’re producing anything useful. The consequences are already public. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months, and its own COO admitted he couldn't draw a line from the spend to anything customers would feel. We heard the same story in dozens of executive conversations: model invoices arrive every month, and nobody can say which teams create value or where the waste and risk are hiding. Proxon is the system of record for AI work. It gives companies a live view of the tools and agents operating across the business: what they do, who owns them, what data they touch, what they cost, and which ones are producing results. Leaders can finally see what exists, govern what matters, and invest in what works. After having built and exited several businesses, I’ve rarely felt market pull this strong this early. I’m grateful to be building it with David Hersh, Claudio Pinkus, Santiago Aparicio, Marcelo Bukowski de Farias, Dillon Sellars, Jeff Strinko, @briancanzanella and investors, and early believers who helped us get here: Pioneer Fund, NextView Ventures , PJC, Freddy Vega and many more. If you are leading a company through an AI transformation, book a demo with me, or start at proxon.ai. And if you know a CEO, CTO, CAIO, or CFO wrestling with it, an intro means the world today. Everyone you work with just got promoted. Time to give them a manager.
-
Lee Hower shared thisLast week saw the largest IPO in history and this week saw the announcement of largest M&A transaction for a VC-backed company in history. Welcome to the megacap moment for venture capital. Here are some of the implications for VCs, LPs, and founders as the market potentially segments along capitalization strategies.
-
Lee Hower shared thisMy partner David has been writing online about VC for many years. Today he's launched a new post / newsletter about the fundamental ways AI may truly disrupt the actual work of venture capitalists. I continue to enjoy collaborating with (and learning from) Dave in this brave new world for VC.Lee Hower shared thisWhen I tell my fellow VCs in private I believe that AI is going to take our jobs, I'm usually laughed off. So today I'm launching Carried Away, a new blog making the case in public. We pride ourselves on knowing the difference between sustaining and disruptive innovation. We are misreading it about ourselves. Almost everyone in venture is treating AI as sustaining: same craft, better tools, faster sourcing, sharper analysis, the partner freed up to do the parts that supposedly matter. That is real, and worth doing. It is also precisely the move the comfortable incumbent always makes. The more challenging possibility to accept is that AI is fundamentally disruptive to the work itself, reaching every function of a venture firm: sourcing, diligence, decision, support, even the relationship itself. Followed far enough, it doesn't just improve each function; it reimagines what a firm even is once those functions no longer need us. "You cannot innovate away what makes me special" is, almost word for word, what an incumbent says on the way down. The first post, "The Disruptors' Blind Spot," is live now. Link in the first comment. A new post (almost) every week for the next several months. Most welcome to push back, agree, or tell me where I'm wrong.
-
Lee Hower shared thisA great post by my partner Melody Koh, on how the ceiling and floor of human capability with AI are moving at different rates. For the record she is closer to the ceiling and I am closer to the floor at this present moment, though she's been a thoughtful coach as I build my facility with AI coding.Lee Hower shared thisA portfolio founder thinks I'm wasting my time. I had shared with him some of the work I've been doing: building on top of agent harnesses, codifying how I work in markdown files, getting the muscle memory you only build by working with models and agents closely. His take: "this is like 'prompt engineering' a year ago — temporary workaround until the models just anticipate all needs and fill all gaps." "NOT YET! talk to me in a year." He's not wrong that the floor is rising. The question is how fast. I think his position only holds if the floor is rising faster than the ceiling, fast enough to wash out any specialized practice before it pays back. There's a version of the bet where the floor and ceiling rise at the same speed; the practice is still temporary, you just trade today's gap for one that re-opens as the floor rises. What I'm actually betting on is different: the ceiling is rising faster than the floor. The reason is structural. The underlying intelligence of the models is improving faster than the user-facing UX, and we genuinely haven't figured out how to teach most people to use AI well. The product surface lags the capability frontier, and that lag is where personal competitive advantage lives. The people closer to the ceiling don't experience it as ceiling work. They call it raising ambition. His "talk to me in a year" is partially right. In a year, both the floor and the ceiling will be higher, and my bet is the ceiling keeps rising faster. The question worth sitting with is whether you're the kind of person who pushes ceilings or waits for them to be lowered. The gap is where the practice pays off. That's the bet I'm making in the meantime. The full essay (with the text exchanges, why I think a Claire Vo write-up and an MD at a distressed-credit fund I started my career with are at opposite ends of the same shift, and the body of work I've built to test the bet) is in the first comment. Are you investing in learning how to leverage AI for your work (or home) life, or do you think all the skills will be obsolete in a year?
-
Lee Hower shared thisLarge scale construction projects involve a myriad of drawings, specfications, and other documents. Primepoint is bringing intelligence to this world, and you can read more in this WSJ article. Excited for them to close this large seed round.Lee Hower shared thisExcited to share that Primepoint raised a $10M Seed led by Navitas Capital, Penny Jar Capital, and NextView Ventures, with participation from GS Futures, AGLAÉ VENTURES, and angels including Yann LeCun. Thank you to Matthew Strozier at The Wall Street Journal for covering our story. Construction drawings contain the most important information about a project. Scope, coordination, conflicts, design intent. But in reality, that intelligence is buried across hundreds of pages of PDFs. Teams spend hours searching, comparing revisions, and manually connecting information just to understand what is going on. We started Primepoint to change that. Primepoint reads construction drawings, connects them to specs, RFIs, and submittals, and prepares the work teams normally have to do by hand. That includes identifying conflicts, drafting RFIs, and reviewing submittals against project documents. Every result is grounded in the source documents, so teams can trust what they are working from and move faster. A couple of years ago, I co-founded WaveOne and later sold it to Apple. That experience pushed me to think more about where technology has not yet had the impact it should. Construction stood out immediately. It is one of the most important industries in the world, and yet so much of the workflow is still manual and fragmented. I feel incredibly lucky to be building Primepoint with Hamid Palo, who brings a strong product lens to everything we do, and Kamran Azarbal, who has spent years in the field and understands exactly where construction workflows break down. Grateful to our investors, our team, and everyone who has supported us along the way. We’re just getting started, and we’re growing our team! Feel free to reach out to learn more about open roles. Link to the full exclusive: https://lnkd.in/d5pf2j7VExclusive | Startup Targets New Frontier for AI: Construction DrawingsExclusive | Startup Targets New Frontier for AI: Construction Drawings
-
Lee Hower liked thisLoved it! You guys are building something very special at AI House ! Go Yifan Zhang and team!Lee Hower liked thisThanks to Rob Go from NextView Ventures for coming to Seattle and sharing so many great insights for founders during a VC AMA chat with Yifan Zhang at AI House this week. Some quick takeaways: — Be clear, fast. If an investor is 15 minutes into your deck and still can't say what you do, they can't champion you to their partners. — Be the "heat-seeking missile" in the right zip code. Rob says there's more uncertainty about where AI is going than at any point in his career. Instead of fitting companies to a market thesis, investors are asking two things: is the company in roughly the right space, and is the founder someone who will find the opportunity as it emerges? — Authenticity lets founders see around corners. Founders who have lived the problem spot what others miss. There's also a practical benefit: recruits and customers prefer to bet on authentic people. — Raise to an inflection point. Letting the market set your round size is "tail wagging the dog." Raise enough to reach a clear jump in value or drop in risk. Remember that your round size signals your valuation. — Four things matter: hire great people, build a great product, get more customers, don't run out of money. We've got another VC AMA coming up with Jordan Wan, CFA 🇨🇦 of CoFound — sign up here: https://lnkd.in/gCJ24XA7
-
Lee Hower liked thisLee Hower liked thisNextView backed WHOOP in its seed round a dozen years ago, and it's unexpectedly led me to a test for how AI-native a VC firm really is. I've worn the fitness band every day since, which turned me into a health and longevity obsessive, relentlessly listening to the podcasts and reading the bestselling books of the genre. Here's the connection. Every longevity expert has a favorite number. Grip strength, VO2 max, gait speed, resting heart rate. In one study of 140,000 people, grip strength predicted death better than blood pressure did. None of those numbers actually causes a long life. The dead hang isn't why the strong survive. Each one is a proxy for whole-system health, the thing you actually care about and can't read directly. You track the number because it moves with the hidden variable underneath. AI-nativeness is a venture firm's version of that whole-system health, and it's just as invisible. So venture needs a proxy too. Instead nearly every firm just calls itself AI-native, and since nobody measures it, everyone gets to say it. Here's mine. VC Grip Strength: the share of a firm's senior partners who personally opened an agentic coding tool like Claude Code or Codex on three or more separate days last week. The partners themselves, with their own hands. Not the associate who runs the AI initiative, not the consultant who demoed at the offsite. A partner in the tool that often has almost certainly reorganized part of how she works. The partner who only hears about it secondhand is running a paint job, admired from across the room. The tool is the tell. Six months ago I hadn't opened one of these tools once. Now I clear my own bar nearly every week. How many others are promising themselves they'll start next Monday, after the partner meeting? Full Carried Away blog post link in the first comment. Tell me which number you'd pick instead.
-
Lee Hower liked thisLee Hower liked thisEarlier this month I praised Codex for working seven hours without bothering me, and then I realized that it did very minimal valuable work. Around the same time I told a junior colleague when to ask me and when not to. It turned out these two experiences share a similar rule, and OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be tuning it into their models from opposite ends. Persistent and independent is often a good trait, but when you're persistent and independent without having good judgment, that is a bad trait. The problem with an agent that runs like this is that sometimes it's diligently chugging along without realizing that it already got lost and doesn't know where it's going. From the outside, an agent that is working and an agent that is lost can look the same. Unless it asks, you only find out which one you had when you inspect the output, and "not having to babysit it" is the false comfort that stops you from looking. I recently took over managing a junior colleague at NextView, and the rule I gave her has two halves. First, don't ask me questions you can get answers to with your own effort; that is the half I value most. If it's something that would take thirty minutes to dig around with the tools and resources you already have, you should not be asking me. That is a lazy question. On the flip side, there are questions you hit a wall on (because you don't have the right context or priorities). If it would take me thirty seconds to tell you but might take you a few hours, then you should just ask me. Knowing when to ask is the type of judgment I value in someone. When Anthropic's Claude Code regroups with me about something it could have figured out on its own, that is the lazy question. When Codex kept going for seven hours on a problem it wasn't solving, that is the other failure, the question it never asked. So I now ask the same two questions about a junior colleague and an agent. Do they ask me things they could have figured out themselves, and do they fail to recognize that they were getting stuck and not ask me the question I can answer in thirty seconds? Between the two, it's hard to pick, and I think that's the challenge, but I'd rather get asked to regroup and confirm than spend seven hours of clock time and get nothing useful. I think the balance we want from our colleagues is precisely the one OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to figure out, and agency is actually the right word for it. People with agency, when given a problem statement or objective, use all the tools they have at their disposal, talk to all the people they can talk to, and then figure it out, or, even better, ask for context. This is probably why we call these things agents. Agents are useful because they can use tools and drive a computer, but an AI agent still needs the objective and the directive from someone who knows where the work is going. Which costs you more right now, the lazy question or the one that never gets asked?
-
Lee Hower reacted on thisLee Hower reacted on thisWe had a blast watching the Red Sox take on the Guardians at Fenway last night ⚾️ It's always great to bring our Boston founder and builder community together, and a classic fall night at the ballpark was the perfect excuse 🍂 Thank you to everyone who joined, and a special shoutout to our partners at Stifel Bank for helping to make it all happen. Here's to more nights like this, and Go Sox! 🧦
-
Lee Hower liked thisLee Hower liked thisOver the past few years, I've been working very quietly with the equivalent of a housing supergroup on a new approach to buying a house, making homeownership more attainable. Today, I can (finally) be less quiet! Homeownership remains one of the most powerful ways to build stability and create opportunity. I believe innovative solutions like Estately Land Lease can help open the door for more families to achieve that dream. I look forward to sharing more soon about Estately's progress and the impact we hope to make.
-
Lee Hower liked thisLee Hower liked thisFor years I was the remote work guy. I built a company where 200 people worked fully remote, and I defended that model in every debate about the future of work. Now I'm building my second company, and my cofounder Alex and I don't just work together, we literally live together. With our 14 to 16 hour days it turns out to be extremely convenient: my commute to our morning sync is about four meters. So yes, I'm officially an offline work evangelist now. It's not that remote doesn't work, it's that at this stage nothing beats turning around and saying "look at this".
-
Lee Hower reacted on thisLee Hower reacted on thisJust returned from an epic weekend in Monza with our partner Scuderia Ferrari. There are few places where you can feel the history and passion of racing quite like this. From the garages to the grid, the energy was electric - and it was incredible to see how present WHOOP has become across Formula 1. Congratulations to Kimi Antonelli on a historic win from 19th position to 1st. An incredible weekend for the sport. #whoop #partnerships #ferrari #f1
-
Lee Hower reacted on thisLee Hower reacted on thisI’m very excited to announce that we have raised Volition Fund VI with $950M in capital. With this new fund, we will continue to do what we’ve always done at Volition which is to invest in high growth, capital efficient technology companies that have aspirations for greatness. I’m very grateful to our LPs, portfolio companies, and Volition team members for all of their dedication. We would not be here without everyone’s support. More thoughts to come next week on the fundraise, but for now, congratulations to the Volition Capital team! Article: https://lnkd.in/gwG_jBuw
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
-
Board Member
Capital Good Fund
- 5 years 1 month
Economic Empowerment
Capital Good Fund is a non-profit that provides microloans and financial coaching to low-income clients.
Projects
-
Vintage Racing
-
Vintage cars are my hobby, including historic racing. I hold an FIA international historic racing license and an SCCA full competition license.
Recommendations received
5 people have recommended Lee
Join now to viewExplore more posts
Explore top content on LinkedIn
Find curated posts and insights for relevant topics all in one place.
View top content