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For Bold Technical Founders Building the Future.
Before you build your team, before you write your first line of code, before you even take your first check—that’s when boldstart gets to work. We collaborate with technical founders well before company creation, lead pre-product rounds at Inception, and rally our early adopter network to help turn bold ideas into category-creating iconic companies.
From AI-native infrastructure, security, apps, and models, we back the builders reimagining how businesses operate.
We’ve been in the trenches with Snyk, Clay, Protect AI, CrewAI, Tessl, Stealth (robotics model), Stealth (bio model) and so many more from Inception.
The Latest
boldstart technical founder summit — AI giveth and AI taketh away + other 
learnings »
Clay boosts valuation to $1.3 billion – “a secret weapon for Anthropic and OpenAI” »
Baz – Your AI Code Review Agent – Welcome to boldstart! »
Grepr – Next Generation Reliability Platform for an AI-Powered World – Welcome to boldstart! »
boldstart 2024 recap »
Welcome Ron Miller, our new Operating Partner and Head of Editorial, FastForward Launch Day »
Turpentine VC: E66: Why Inception Investing Beats Traditional Seed with Ed Sim of Boldstart Ventures »
Tessl worth a reported $750 million after latest $100 million funding to help it build ‘AI native’ software development platform (Fortune) »
Snyk Code’s $100 Million Milestone: AI-Driven Growth (Forbes) »
Web3 security firm Hypernative raises $16 million in Series A funding (The Block) »
CXOTalk: Ed Sim + Investing in Early Stage Enterprise AI »
Driving Alpha Podcast: Inception investing in technical enterprise founders with Ed Sim »
Ed shares 28 years of lessons as an enterprise inception investor on The Peel Podcast »
Forbes Cover Story on Ed for Midas Seed List 2024 »
The Midas Seed List 2024: Congrats Ed on 3rd Annual Top 10 ranking of Top 25 Seed Investors worldwide »
Congrats Ed for #1 on “The Seed 100: The best early-stage investors of 2024” for 2nd year »
20VC: The Three Types of Seed Rounds (aka “Inception Rounds”), Why Seed Has Never Been More Competitive… »
Ed Sim got into VC by answering a newspaper ad. Today he’s the industry’s No. 1 seed investor (Insider). »
There’s not just one playbook.
Getting from idea to Series A is a tangled path. There’s no prescription. You need a true believer in what you are doing, to help you figure out what’s next and be with you when it’s hard to see the path ahead. That’s what boldstart does, and we’ve done it repeatedly for more than 10 years now.
Beginning of timeline
02.12.2025
xNilio: boldstart leads inception round
Read more about xNilio »
01.30.2025
Clay: Announces new round: "Clay, A Secret Weapon For Anthropic And OpenAI, Boosts Valuation To $1.3 Billion" Forbes
06.27.2024
Clay: Announces $46M Series B led by Meritech and prior rounds (Bloomberg). Read more on our investment (Medium).
Read more about Clay »
01.29.2025
Baz: Baz announces $9M Inception round co-led by boldstart ventures and Battery Ventures for automating code review with AI-context. More on why we invested
08.14.2023
Baz: boldstart partners with Baz and co-leads Inception round with Battery Ventures
Read more about Baz »
01.27.2025
Agentuity: Agentuity, cloud infrastructure rebuilt for AI agents, announces $4M Inception round led by boldstartvc with Bloomberg Beta, Southern Equity, and 161ventures
01.17.2025
Agentuity: boldstart leads Inception round
Read more about Agentuity »
01.22.2025
Grepr: Grepr announces $9M Inception round with Andreesen Horowitz and boldstart ventures to lead the next wave of reliability (more on why we invested)
05.18.2023
Grepr: boldstart partners with Grepr at Inception with Andreessen Horowitz
Read more about Grepr »
12.18.2024
dylibso (MCP.run): Announces the extensible MCP Server: mcp.run: an "app store" & registry for servlets. Search, install & manage secure & portable tools for AI, wherever it goes - desktop, mobile, edge, server, etc.
03.24.2023
dylibso (MCP.run): Announced $6.6M Series Seed round (TechCrunch) led by Felicis with participation from prior investor boldstart. Read more about our investment on Medium
Read more about dylibso (MCP.run) »
11.14.2024
Tessl: Tessl announces $125M of total funding with $25M Seed round led by boldstart and GV and $100M Series led by Index and including Accel and previous investors boldstart and GV (TechCrunch) and Tessl blog. More on why we invested into Guy Podjarny for a third time and why we're
up for Tessl!03.08.2024
Tessl: boldstart partners with Tessl and co-leads Inception round with GV
Read more about Tessl »