boldstart 2025 recap

Founders and Friends,

2025 was a foundation-setting year for enterprise AI. The market matured, buyers became more discerning, and founders were forced to build with greater clarity around value, trust, and durability. As AI reshaped how software is built, sold, and deployed, we witnessed the fastest company formation cycle in our 15-year history. Founders returned to first principles, and we doubled down on what we do best: partnering with technical founders from Inception.

This year also marked a major milestone for boldstart: we announced Fund VII, a $250M fund dedicated to inception-stage investing in the autonomous enterprise. This brings our total assets under management to over $1B, affirming our unwavering commitment to being the first institutional partner for the next generation of category-defining companies.

We also closed the first exit in AI security history with Protect AI being sold to Palo Alto Networks for over $700M, backed 15+ new founding teams across cybersecurity, AI infrastructure, and agentic automation, and watched multiple portfolio companies cross the $100M ARR threshold. From San Francisco to Tel Aviv to New York to London, the boldstart Inception model continued to prove its edge in the most competitive market in a generation.

Looking ahead to 2026, we are more excited than ever about the opportunity set for the autonomous enterprise. At the same time, we believe the market is entering a decisive sorting phase. Too much capital flowed into too many companies across increasingly crowded categories, and the rising tide that once lifted early momentum is receding. In the year ahead, winners and losers will separate. Some companies once perceived as early leaders will face pressure, while others opt for early acquihires. The very best teams, those delivering real execution, real outcomes, and real revenue, will continue to attract outsized capital on compelling terms. In markets like this, discipline wins, execution compounds, and the foundation for the best companies is built from Inception.

A heartfelt thank you 🙏🏼 to our founders, limited partners, co-investors, and friends for making this one of our strongest years yet.

We’re just getting started.

Time to build 🏗!

The boldstart team

2025 was a breakout year for the boldstart portfolio, with major exits, follow-on rounds, ARR milestones, and product launches across the board. Here are the highlights:

🌎 Global coverage: 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 🇬🇧 🇨🇦

🤝 Inception rounds led: 15 new founding teams (mix of stealth and announced) spanning cybersecurity, AI infrastructure, domain-specific foundation models, and agentic automation

🏆 From Inception to Exit:

💰 From Inception to Follow-On Funding:

🏗 From Inception to Product Launch:

In 2025, we announced boldstart Fund VII: $250M dedicated to Inception-stage investing in founders building the autonomous enterprise. 

Read more from our launch here.

TL:DR 

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.

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.

The Wall Street Journal also covered the launch.

We published extensively in 2025, helping founders navigate the AI-native era.

Ed Sim continued writing his weekly newsletter What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC with standout posts such as:

“The Enterprise Agent Hunger Games #442” on the importance of delivering solutions for the last mile of the enterprise:

“And if you’re going in the enterprise, the demands are extremely high – you can’t vibe code your way into production – that last mile is everything – security, privacy, compliance, integrations, determinism and repeatability, accuracy, memory, cost, orchestrating swarms of agents, and even more security.”

“The $5M Line That Is Redrawing Inception/Seed Investing #474” on the clear line that shows your round size picks your investors, and your fund size picks your battles.

Team Podcast Appearances:

Ellen Chisa:

Eliot Durbin:

Ed Sim:

Ed also continued to receive industry recognition as one of the top early-stage investors in enterprise technology as he was once again named to Business Insider’s Seed 100 and made the Forbes Midas Seed List for the fourth year in a row.

Finally, Fast Forward, led by Ron Miller, continued to grow as a publication focused on how CIOs and CISOs are approaching AI adoption in the enterprise. Through profiles and analysis, it complemented our work with founders by providing perspective on how large organizations are evaluating and deploying new technologies with interviews with IT Executives from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, Salesforce and many more.

Charlotte Chapanoff, our Head of Marketing and Global Events, delivered another exceptional year of founder-first programming:

In January, we welcomed 75+ boldstart founders from the US, Israel, and Europe for two days of deep learning and collaboration. The theme: “Velocity is King” – in shipping, sales, and learning.

Key takeaways:

Read the full recap here.

Ellen Chisa led our inaugural Inception Bootcamp in partnership with SVB. Over two weeks, 14 teams worked together in person, learning from ecosystem experts, spending 1-on-1 time with boldstart partners, and helping each other navigate the journey from idea to Inception.

Participants praised the hands-on approach, peer learning, and access to the boldstart network. We’ll be expanding the Bootcamp in 2026.

We co-hosted our annual RSA event with IVP, featuring a standout panel with CISOs and security executives from:

The central theme: securing AI and the evolution of AI security from experimental to mission-critical.

Throughout the year, we hosted intimate dinners and events across:

As we close out 2025, we’re more convicted than ever in the Inception model. AI-native companies are redefining entire categories, and the technical founders building them need partners who understand infrastructure, security, go-to-market, and the unique challenges of selling into the enterprise.

With Fund VII, we have the resources and platform to support even more founders from Inception. 

Thank you again to everyone who made 2025 extraordinary. To our founders: your ambition, resilience, and execution inspire us every day. To our LPs: thank you for trusting us to back the earliest, hardest, and most important companies. To our co-investors and friends: we couldn’t do this without you.

Time to build 🏗!

If you’re a technical founder about to start a company and want a partner from Inception, DM boldstart or any one of us:

Ed Sim, Eliot Durbin, Ellen Chisa