Adverb Ventures

Today is THE DAY. BIG DAY for us at Accend (YC S23)! I’m VERY excited to announce our seed round 🚀 Last year Yutong Pei and I left Brex, and Joseph left his startup to start Accend. We were thrilled to join the Y Combinator S23 batch—thanks to Aaron Epstein, Nicolas Dessaigne, Dalton Caldwell, and Pete Koomen for believing in us 🙏 . Being part of YC completely changed our lives. But, the startup life is far from predictable. Early into YC, we pivoted from our initial concept. Drawing on our rich experiences from the Risk team at Brex and engaging with hundreds of brilliant Risk & Compliance professionals, we identified a critical inefficiency: the extortionate amount of manual, repetitive work to onboard new businesses in fintech and banking. So, we decided to go all-in on the idea of accelerating business onboarding using AI. Fast forward to today: 🤩 We landed marquee customers in the US and Europe, including Pleo, Slope, Rho and others who trust Accend to speed up their risk & compliance operations.  💰 We’re sharing that we raised $3.2M from amazing investors we’re grateful to have in our corner, including Adverb Ventures, Y Combinator, General Catalyst, 645 Ventures, and angels from Brex, Stripe, Carta and many more. 📣 Our funding announcement was featured in Axios: (linked in comments!) I’m incredibly grateful for the trust our investors and customers have placed in us. But what excites me the most is what lies ahead. We're just getting started and there’s much more to build. Thank you for being part of this journey. Here’s to continuing to innovate in AI x Finance, and push boundaries together 💪🏽 🙌 Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Yasmeena Faycurry, Nnamdi Okike, Meredith Tibbals, Tamanna Khemani, Nathaniel Levy-Westhead, Niko Bonatsos, Erica Dorfman, Sam Stone, Ambika Acharya, Flora Z., Prabhav Jain, Jesika H., Max Segall, Juan Abundes, Brandon Ballinger, Will Larson, Kelley Rivoire, Uma Chingunde, Amy Yin, Orange Collective...(continued in the 1st comment - list is too long and LinkedIn won't let me tag more people)   Alright… time to get back to building now 💻

Some announcements from Particle! Particle has raised $10.9mm in Series A funding, led by Michael Mignano at Lightspeed, fueling our mission to deliver the best, personalized news experience. We are also thrilled that Axel Springer has also joined this round, underscoring how important strong partnerships are to Particle. We are also excited to announce that we have established a deal with Reuters to be a source of news content for our service, helping deliver current information about topics in the news. Last year, we raised a seed fund from lead investor Kindred Ventures, alongside Adverb Ventures, Ev Williams, and Scott Belsky, and we deeply appreciate their continued support in this new round. In this round, we are deeply grateful to have support from angels, including Jason Goldman, Vijaya Gadde, Bruce Falck, Shane Mac, Lakshmi Shankar, Jill Fisher Bowen, Mohamad Fayez Taha, Roger Sippl, and Max Mullen. Integrating their deep expertise at the intersection of news, social, and tech, we are also welcoming Tony Haile and David Brinker as official advisors to Particle. See all the details here:

In our work with founders, a frequent question is “how do I get tech press coverage for our fundraise / launch / milestone?” In my own experience – in dozens of interviews during my roles at Slack, Twitter, for #ANGELS and now Adverb Ventures – engaging with journalists can be a force multiplier for companies already under the spotlight. But for early-stage founders the question remains as to how to break through in an incredibly noisy ecosystem in the first place? That’s why we asked two friends to dinner to share some real talk with founders: Aaron Zamost (who led Comms at Square through hypergrowth) and Lauren Goode, senior writer at WIRED who recently moved to the business reporting desk after years of writing about the technology sector. My biggest takeaway from the evening: it all starts with compelling storytelling, and like all things, empathy for the person on the other side of the table (in this case, a reporter). It turns out that reporters are humans, too – understanding their interests and how to develop the kind of rapport that results in the press founders dream of is a long game. Read on below and sign up for our newsletter:

This week, Adverb Ventures hosted a founder dinner with our friends at Stellation Capital. Convening with founders in their earliest stages is so fun and rewarding. The following evening we hosted founders, builders, and investors from our community for a spring happy hour - and it was a treat to see so many familiar faces and many new folks too. This week we also committed to our 13th investment since launching Fund 1 last summer during this second-annual jam-packed week in NYC in May. This year was extra special, as we got to spend time with our 3 portfolio companies based in NYC, and 2 more portfolio founders who happened to be here! NYC is turning out to be an important hub for us which is no surprise given the incredible founder and startup community here, and our own amazing colleague Liza Gurtin who is based here! If we didn’t see you this time, please sign up for email updates from us (https://lnkd.in/gfB584Mi) so we can add you to our list for future NYC events. As a reminder, we (Adverb Ventures) invest in founders aspiring to build massive businesses from preseed to Series A. Our growing portfolio includes B2B, consumer, fintech, and frontier bets - and we are just getting started!

This spring, we're teaming up with our friends at Adverb Ventures to bring founders together in-person. If you're a founder or senior operator and want to meet our team and fellow builders, join us in the sunshine at Presidio Social Club on May 9th! RSVP here: https://lu.ma/a70rrmq2

This spring, we're teaming up with our friends at Adverb Ventures to bring founders together in-person. If you're a founder or senior operator and want to meet our team and fellow builders, join us in the sunshine at Presidio Social Club on May 9th! RSVP here: https://lu.ma/a70rrmq2

Helping founders access capital is a mission near and dear to us as investors — but beyond venture capital, there is a massive source of non-dilutive capital many business owners overlook: the US Government. Felicia Chen and Jennifer Jang, co-founders of GrantScout, have set out to make it easier than ever to find, apply for, and win government grant funding. We’re delighted to announce we’ve co-led their seed round and are partnering with them on this mission. At Adverb, we back extraordinary founders in the earliest stages of building breakout companies. We met Felicia and Jennifer in the Fall 2023 HF0 incubator batch, a program where repeat founders live together in SF for an intensive period of early company development. Their combined experience at companies like Waymo, Anduril, and Apple and the company’s early traction with grant applicants stood out to us. Typically, applying for a government grant is tedious and time consuming. It can take hundreds of hours and even require hiring a specialized grant writer to complete the cumbersome government driven process. Grantscout leverages AI to simplify this. With a basic description of a company, their AI powered search engine can identify specific grants which may be applicable for a given company. And with additional company information, their fine tuned LLM can draft the application while still leveraging the expert final review of an in-house grant writer. GrantScout is starting with a focus on Small Business Innovation Grants (SBIRs) — a source of $3.5B awarded annually and ultimately aims to tackle the much larger government grant and contracting opportunity. GrantScout is already being used by customers building innovative products in healthcare, defense, climate, robotics, etc from early stage to growth stage. And 95% of early customers have already come back for a second grant application. Check it out yourself to see if your team might scout a match! https://lnkd.in/gBJkRrKM

We've been doing a series of ✨ Founder Fireside Chats ✨ for Adverb Ventures and one topic that keeps coming up -- how do startups stand out in such a noisy (AI) market? Who is the best at Comms / PR? What's the new playbook? So we decided to dig in! We're pulling together two experts 🏆 --  Aaron Zamost (comms exec from Square, Google, Solv, etc) and Forbes Senior Editor Alex Konrad -- and a small group of founders for a dinner in SF on Tuesday, April 23. We'll discuss why the old PR playbook no longer works (i.e. why reporters aren't writing you back), what actually makes news in 2024, and how to stand out in a crowded field when everyone thinks they are thought leaders, and more. If you'd like to stay in the loop on events like this and many more, sign up here 💚 : https://lnkd.in/geNSqrFW