boldstart 2024 recap

Last year, we anticipated that 2024 would be a landmark year for launching and founding startups — and it exceeded all expectations. With the era of ZIRP behind us, founders are once again building with first principles, and we are in the early stages of one of the most significant platform shifts in history with GenAI. Against this backdrop, we at boldstart had one of our most active investment years since 2021.

We continued to meet exceptional technical founders reimagining the enterprise stack, creating new categories, and reinventing existing ones. We partnered with 14 new founding teams at Inception, significantly up from 9 in 2023! Our initial check size ranged from $500k in smaller Discovery Inception rounds to $12.5M, our largest ever, into Jumbo rounds like Tessl. We also pushed the boundaries of “enterprise” by leading Inception rounds in new areas such as domain-specific foundational models in robotics and biology. Stay tuned as we announce these new portfolio companies in 2025. One caveat: while we don’t label ourselves as “AI” investors, it is inherently understood, as nearly every existing portfolio company and new founding team is infusing AI into all they do.

Our existing portfolio also achieved significant milestones 📈, with Snyk surpassing the $300M ARR mark and several portfolio companies raising substantial up rounds, resulting in over $3.5B of additional market cap created across our funds.

As we navigate the early stages of the GenAI wave, we must remain vigilant about the inflated valuations of some AI companies and the necessity for these startups to deliver tangible ROI in the enterprise. Fortunately, we are already seeing pilot applications transition into production in some of the largest enterprises, and we expect this trend to accelerate in 2025 as agents and agentic workflows tackle more complex processes.

A heartfelt thank you 🙏🏼 to our founders, limited partners, co-investors, and friends for your continued partnership, support, and encouragement.

We look forward to a peaceful, healthy, and prosperous 2025.

Time to build 🏗️!

We had one of of our most active years partnering with new founders as well as experiencing new milestones with existing portfolio companies — here are some stats from the past year:

🌎 Global coverage: 🇺🇸🇮🇱🇬🇧🇨🇦

🤝 Inception rounds led: 14 new founding teams (all in stealth) from San Francisco, New York, Boston, London, and Tel Aviv with initial check sizes ranging from $500k to $12.5M.

Cybersecurity: 4, AI Infrastructure: 2, Domain-specific foundational models: 2, DevTools: 3, App Layer: 3

Discovery: 4, Classic, 4, Jumbo 6

🏗 ️From Inception to product launch: new product/company launches out of stealth: CrewAI ($2M Inception — the leading multi-agent platform), Tessl ($25M Inception — platform for AI Native software development), Noded ($4M Inception — AI-powered workflow automation for customer success), Rally (visual storytelling for product demos & updates), TestDriver (automate and scale QA with agentic users), Kustomer (relaunch of new agentic platform + work-based pricing) 

💰 From Inception to follow on funding: Protect AI ($60M Series B at $460M Post), Tessl ($100M Series A at $750M Post), BigID ($60M Series C at $1B), Spectro Cloud ($75M Series C at $750M Post), Clay ($46M Series B at $500M Post), Hypernative ($16M Series A), CrewAI ($18M Series A + Inception), Steadybit ($6M Series A)

🏋️‍♀️ From Inception to scale: Snyk crossed the $300M ARR mark in November 2024, BigID crossed the $100M ARR mark in 2024, Security Scorecard also crossed the $100M ARR mark

🏆 From Inception to exit: Optic acquired by Atlassian • Stellate acquired by Shopify

We added a new team member in 2024 as Ron Miller joined us as our Editorial Director and Head of our CIO/CISO network. Ron joins us from TechCrunch where he was an Enterprise Reporter for over 10 years covering startups, cloud and CIOs. Ron will continue much of that work from TechCrunch with the launch of a new boldstart powered publication called FastForward where he will not only write about technology trends that the largest enterprises care about but also profile some of the leading

CIOs, CISOs and tech executives who are building at these organizations and partnering with startups. Check out some of Ron’s initial profiles with the CIOs of Salesforce, Juniper Networks, and Bill.com along with the CISO of Blackstone and SVP Consumer Engineering at Paypal.

You can also sign up here for Ron’s weekly newsletter and updated profiles.

Our team once again received recognition this year as Founder Ed Sim was selected as the #1 Seed Investor on the Insider Seed 100 for the second year in a row as well as to the Midas Seed List (#10) for the third consecutive year. In addition, Forbes wrote a profile on Ed and boldstart’s vision on Inception Investing.

This is a testament to the work of the entire team and more importantly our founders!

We also had an active year publishing content that’s useful for our founders (and future founders). Shomik Ghosh’s podcast Software Snack Bites continued to dive deep into the world of technical founders building with recent guests like the CISO of Vercel and Datadog and one of leading AI Engineers from Replit. It’s a must listen!

Ed continued to publish some bangers on What’s 🔥in Enterprise IT/VC like this one on “BLG as the new PLG” with a deep dive into Palantir’s Bootcamp Led Growth Model and another one on the State of VC and Inception Investing in What’s 🔥 #422.

Our Partners also joined several podcasts this year— here are just a few highlights:

Ellen Chisa:

VentureFizz #328, a profile on Ellen and her journey from PM to founder of devtools startup to Partner at boldstart ventures

Scaling DevTools #87: Ellen shares what she looks for, North Star metrics for founders…

Shomik Ghosh:

Total Rekall #12: The Startup Landscape in 2023 and Beyond

Ventures with Grace, Navigating Enterprise Software Ventures

Eliot Durbin:

Ventures with Grace: on SaaS, Security, and AI

Ed Sim:

Turpentine VC “Why Inception Investing Beats Traditional Seed”

Turner Novak’s The Peel “Building boldstart ventures from $1M to $850M with Ed Sim”

World Class with Chris Vasquez: Investing Masterclass & Startup Tips from #1 Seed Investor — AI & VC Trends 2024 — Ed Sim (also on YouTube)

CXO Talk: VC Update, Investing in Early Stage Enterprise AI

Finally, we’re thrilled to announce that Ernest Addison has been promoted to Senior Associate! Many of you know Ernest and the great work he does connecting with founders and helping us on our diligence. Ernest recently moved to San Francisco to help us reach more founders building in AI so please make sure to reach out!

Charlotte Chapanoff, our Head of Marketing and Global Events, amped up the in-person events this year with AI dinners in NYC, founders’ dinners across the west coast, and our headliner, our first, soon-to-be annual, Enterprise Founders Day! In March, we were thrilled to host over 60 founders from across the US, Israel, and Europe with specific founder-led discussion topics. The central theme was “Back to Basics: Building Startups from Inception”, urging us to tune out the noise and return to fundamental principles. It was amazing to get so many founders together from around the world to share their lessons and tips and tricks building a startup for the first or fourth time. You can read our Top Ten Takeaways from Founders Day 2024 here.

We will host Founder’s Day once again in 2025 and look forward to sharing those lessons with you as well.

Finally we hosted our annual RSA Founders and CISO event with our friends at IVP. Shomik ran a stellar panel with CISOs/security execs from Anthropic, JPM Chase, and Adobe. 

As you can imagine one of the central themes on the CISO panel revolved around securing AI and AI security in general. More to come in 2025!

Thanks again to all of our founders, coinvestors, and LPs for a wonderful 2024!

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, Shomik Ghosh, Ellen Chisa