Announcing boldstart Fund VII: Inception Reloaded — $250M to Build the Autonomous Enterprise
We’re fired 🔥 up to share that Boldstart Fund VII is live: a fresh $250M Inception fund to back the boldest technical founders reimagining the enterprise from first commit to category leader.
When João Moura showed us multi-agent collaboration (CrewAI, Jan ’24), Ian Swanson called out the need to secure AI (Protect AI, Oct ’22), Guy Podjarny pitched self-maintaining, spec-driven code (Tessl, Jan ’24), and Kareem Amin envisioned intelligent data engines (Clay, July ’17) — they were all bleeding f***ing early*.
Their visions felt more myth than market, solving problems the world hadn’t even recognized yet. That’s exactly where we live and lead.
That’s inception. That’s what happens when you back technical founders before the world believes, they turn myth into new markets.
It All Started With a Simple Mission
Back in 2010, “pre-seed” didn’t exist. Seed wasn’t even mainstream. But we believed deeply in starting with the people, in backing raw conviction long before product, traction, or even a deck.
From a $1M fund in 2010 to over $1.1B of assets under management (AUM) today, the journey has exceeded anything we imagined. While AUM isn’t our north star, it gives us the firepower to double down on our core mission: helping founders build, wire, and secure the autonomous enterprise. With our largest fund to date at $250M, our lead initial checks range in size from $500K to $15M. And as you scale, we can continue investing out of our $175M Opportunities III fund which still has plenty of dry powder.
A Decade and A Half. One Playbook: Inception-Only.
For 15 years, we’ve partnered with technical founders from the very beginning; often before there’s a product, a pitch deck, or even a company name.
🙏🏼 To the founders who trusted us as your first believer
🙏🏼 To the LPs who backed our inception-only model
🙏🏼 To the co-investors and friends who’ve been in the trenches with us
This isn’t just venture. It’s a philosophy:
- No pitch deck required
- No metrics, just obsession and grit
- Just a bold technical founder and a future only they can see
We’ve spent decades working side by side with technical founders. We speak your language, respect the craft, and know what it takes to turn raw conviction into real momentum. When you take our check, you’re getting one of the hardest-working partners in your corner.
We will help you shape the narrative, land the first design partners, recruit early key hires, and accelerate your path to product market fit. That’s inception. That’s boldstart.
From Inception to Breakout
We’ve been fortunate to partner from inception with founders who’ve gone on to define entirely new categories, before the world believed:
We were there before the pitch deck. Before the product. Before the hype.
The Autonomous Enterprise: A Generational Rewrite
We are in the earliest stages of a platform shift that will surpass both cloud and mobile, and it is already beginning to reshape the enterprise. This next wave is not just about automation. It is AI-native, agent-powered, and autonomous by design.
It will not happen overnight. But over the next decade, humans will do less and less, while software, agents, and machines will think, plan, and act on our behalf.
We are backing the core primitives of this shift:
AI-native infrastructure, orchestration layers, secure identity, optimized compute, and semantic interfaces.
But we are not stopping there.
The autonomous enterprise will require entirely new business models, robotic execution layers, and AI-native workflows built without a traditional back office. Crypto and smart contracts will unlock programmable money and permissionless automation, enabling trustless coordination across systems at scale. Systems will run at machine scale, continuously learning, reasoning, and operating in real time.
We have already partnered with teams like Generalist AI and several stealth startups tackling massive real-world problems and rethinking how intelligence moves through the enterprise stack.
This is not about retrofitting SaaS. It is about building the OS for the intelligent enterprise from scratch and securing it from the start. And it will come from founders bold enough to rethink everything.
The Next Wave: Wiring the Autonomous Enterprise
We’re proud to have already backed a new generation of bold founders building the foundations of this new world – companies like Clay, creators of GTM Engineering valued at $3.1B, CrewAI, the leading multi-agent platform with >60M agent runs per month 📈, Protect AI, the AI security platform acquired by Palo Alto Networks for >$700M, Tessl, AI native software development platform valued at $750M, Hypernative, real-time security for crypto, and many more…
These teams aren’t just building software. They’re wiring the autonomous enterprise from the ground up.
Fund VII: Inception Reloaded — Let’s Build the Autonomous Enterprise
With Fund VII, we’re reloaded and more fired 🔥 up than ever to back the next generation of bold technical founders from Inception and beyond. We’re ready for the myth makers who are building, wiring, and securing the autonomous enterprise.
If you’re sketching the future on a whiteboard, we want to be your first call.
If your vision sounds like sci-fi, you’re in the right place.
If others think you’re slightly crazy, we got your back.
We don’t follow categories or market maps. We’ll help you create them.
💥 Let’s build the autonomous enterprise. From Inception. Before the rest of the world catches on.
Ed, Eliot, and Ellen
News Coverage:
Thank you to Newcomer for the Exclusive story here which goes in depth on scaling from $1M to $1.1B in AUM and how the Fortune 500 expects to only see the “bleeding edge” of enterprise tech from us
And to the Wall Street Journal for its story “Boldstart Ventures Raises $250 Million AI Fund, Looking to Move Fast”