Matt Oberhardt

Evolution Equity Partners is thrilled to lead the $16M investment in Cytactic! Cytactic is building a game-changing platform to empower companies to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber crisis events. The platform allows all stakeholders to collaborate effectively and handle the complexity of a cyber event in a simplified and orchestrated way. Gartner forecasts that by 2025, 75% of companies will face cyber attacks. With the average data breach costing $8.64 million, regulations tightening, and CISO professional liability and insurance becoming critical issues, this underscores the need for effective cyber crisis readiness and management. Cytactic equips companies to do just that. #cybersecurity #cybersecuritypreparedness https://lnkd.in/dvVZbDZq

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Have a story to tell... Use Narratize AI Co-Authoring platform to tell your stories in an impactful manner. Katie Trauth Taylor, PhD and the entire team is committed to helping you in becoming amazing storytellers. Check out their impressive work at https://lnkd.in/gnNYHSSX Start telling your stories with Narratize AI as your co-author. #generativeai #storytelling #innovation #aicoauthoring #innovators #researchers #impactstories #startups #problemsolvers #AI #AIStartup

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Congratulations to Kern Venture Group portfolio company Cambium on being Named One of the Top 100 Venture Funded, Defense and Dual Use Start-ups by the Silicon Valley Defense Group. This annual ranking and report, sponsored by JPMorganChase's Aerospace & Defense Industry division, is SVDG's annual ranked list of the emerging US techno-security ecosystem of venture-backed companies. The ranking is the product of a proprietary, quantitative formula created by SVDG, in collaboration with Franklin Templeton and Balyasny Asset Management L.P., fortified by conversations with technology leaders across the US Government and allied partner governments, and categorized against the United States Department of Defense's 14 Critical Technology Areas. https://lnkd.in/gbCkssFy

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Thrilled to announce the launch of our inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks at Emergence Capital. This comprehensive report dives deep into the metrics and trends shaping the early-stage enterprise cloud market. A huge thank you to our VC partners and contributors for making this possible! Here's a sneak peek of our findings: --> 60% of companies have already integrated GenAI into their service offerings, with another 20% planning to do so this year. --> While most companies use OpenAI as their primary LLM, many are experimenting with multiple models. We’re seeing a trend toward intelligently routing GenAI inference requests based on cost, performance, and security. --> Companies that have implemented GenAI are showing promising results, with a 7% higher NDR compared to those that haven’t. Beyond Benchmarks goes further with more GenAI trends, insights on the current fundraising environment, and key performance metrics. Our goal is to provide founders and their teams with valuable benchmarks to help them make better-informed decisions. At Emergence Capital, we're committed to helping founders build iconic companies. Dive into the full report here: https://lnkd.in/g6bnvAZM

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🌱 For pre-seed/seed founders 🌱 The early stage vc markets have changed drastically -- but many founders don't truly understand how or how much things have shifted until its too late or they are deep into the fundraising process already. This recent Allocate pod lifts the veil on the pre-seed/seed 2024 markets. SO MANY GEMS are packed 💎 into the first 20 min, I had to listen twice. Key takeaways from pre-seed VCs I'm a big fan of Jenny Fielding of Everywhere Ventures, Kirby Winfield at Ascend (PNW represent!) & Nate Williams. 💎 The market in one word: 'turbulent' 💎 Fundraising bi-furcation; 2X founder building in AI (rounds take weeks) vs All Others (rounds take up to 6 months). 💎 "Leading VCs" (ie. first check in) are putting in a TON of work - building conviction & then helping founders fill the round. 💎 Up to 5 rounds pre-A; need lower early valuations to enable step ups 💎 Pre-seed entry valuations have corrected to $5-8M 💎 Round sizes have increased at pre-seed & seed for extended runway Many more insights in the full pod here: https://lnkd.in/gYf-DMr6 #venturecapital #preseed

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Super excited to be joining this amazing group of panelists at TechCon SoCal, the largest gathering of investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs in Southern California! With just 13 days to go, I can't wait to share insights and connect with fellow industry leaders. Looking forward to discussing investment strategies and entrepreneurial growth. See you there! #TechconSoCal2024 #InnovationSummit #Entrepreneurship #Innovation #InvestmentStrategies

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Earlier this year, we surveyed our fellow Los Angeles-based GPs to get a pulse check on the LA venture ecosystem. Here’s what we found: 💗 Deal flow is healthy, and most LA venture investors (68%) are seeing the same or more deal flow YoY. ✈ LA investors are spending time in a variety of markets, with NYC, Austin, and SF following closely on LA’s heels. 🔍 Innovation is concentrated in AI and machine learning, space, and commerce. 💸 Funding is happening, but it’s barbell-shaped, with deals concentrated at the early and late stages. Funding post-Series A has been challenging. 🚩 LA is differentiated, but not without its challenges. Key difficulties include not attracting enough AI talent (despite having the largest number of engineers graduating from our region over any other in the United States); talent relocated to more tax-friendly or less expensive locations; and the great SoCal / NoCal divide 🙏 Thank you to all our many respondents! I’m so glad to be part of a venture ecosystem that includes great minds like Anna Barber, Brent Murri, W. Christine Choi, Sarah Tomolonius, Rob Smith, Win Chevapravatdumrong, John Tabis, Jill Royster, Jesse Draper, Ashley Balla, Britt Danneman, Tram Lai, Carmen Palafox, Elaine Russell, Deborah Benton Amanda Schutzbank, Brian Lee, Petra Griffith, Minnie Ingersoll, Shamin Walsh, Gabe Greenbaum...wow, this list could go on forever...plus too many other exceptional humans to name. You know who you are! Explore our findings more deeply with our survey dashboard: https://bit.ly/3JsaLaB

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It is a great privledge to be backing Stella Garber for a second time, as well as her sensational co-founders Brian Schmidt and Justin Gallagher. It’s also great to working with Index Ventures again, too. One thing I have learned in my venture career is that humans are lazy, and software that does simple things can feel like magic. Hoop uses AI to automatically harvest to do items from all of your communication channels. Today it’s single player, and in the future it will be your whole team. Read more about why we invested: https://lnkd.in/geTy-kyZ

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Here’s a question investors are often asked: When evaluating early stage companies, how much time do you spend on due diligence around future exits? It’s not surprising we hear this question a lot. Also not surprising: it’s got a wide range of answers depending on the firm. Some don’t spend much time here at all. Others make it a point to put meaningful time in as part of their process. Our current thinking: take the time to do the work on public market comps. At Alpaca VC, we spend significant time understanding how public market investors will  realistically value a business based on margin profile, product, business model & TAM. In short, we want to know: how will this company be valued at scale when we get taken out? Yes, we can acknowledge that the journey toward exit is a windy road and that there may be pivots along the way, but there are still public market companies that have a business model similar to the early stage company you're evaluating. And you can always look at gross profit multiples if you think the margin profile will change over time. So we still do the work on the comps. Quantitative metrics we look at when making the comparison to public market comps include EBITDA multiple, revenue multiple, Gross Profit multiple or all of the above. As part of this process, it’s also important to factor in the public market company’s year-over-year revenue growth as this will also significantly impact the multiple it trades at. Simple example: if you have two public market companies with similar business models and similar margin profiles, but one's growing 100% year over year, and one's growing 50% year over year, then obviously the DCF (discounted cash flow) analysis is going to spit out a very different valuation for the one that's growing faster. Why this matters: When you take all of that information into account as you evaluate an early stage business, you can begin to create a realistic picture of how this company will be valued in the public markets at exit - or how an acquirer will value the company for an acquisition. Strategic acquirers may, of course, pay a premium, but we won’t underwrite for that. This allows us, for example, to form conviction around valuation based on revenue and gross profit predictions. If we think they can do $100M of revenue five years from now, we use this diligence process to form a thesis about whether the characteristics above (product, margin, business model, etc.) will cause the company to be valued at $200M vs. $500M vs. $1B at exit. Curious how other early stage investors think about underwriting an exit and how much time they’re spending on public market comps even though these companies are in their infancy.

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That’s a wrap for our annual AI summit! Really enjoyed moderating a panel about the evolving enterprise Gen AI tech stack and double clicking on topics like data pipelining, LLM evals, and model routing with Aman from Arize AI, Chris from Weights & Biases, Etan from Martian, and Joe from Datavolo. Another highlight was ad-hoc conversations with new and old faces, some of whom I've known for years in the Zoom world but met in person for the first time. Thanks to 2500+ attendees across Citi, AI companies, and investors for making the time and the team for putting in a lot of hard work behind the scenes. Anthropic, Cohere, Contextual AI, CoreWeave, Docker, Inc, Fiddler AI, Harness, Gentrace, Glean, Guardrails AI, Ikigai Labs, Lamini, Lexion, Norm Ai, NVIDIA, Patronus AI, Quantifind, Securiti, Together AI, ValidMind, Weaviate, and more Arvind Purushotham, Matt Carbonara ✅, Vibhor Rastogi, Sirisha Kadamalakalva, Arti Kuthiala, Olivia Zhang, Dana Wohlfarth, Maria Bodiu, Gabrielle Scapa, Raquel Ocon and everyone else who pitched in

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“Be quick, but don’t hurry.” John Wooden, the great UCLA basketball coach coined that phrase, and this week will offer interesting opportunities to watch pros applying it: the NBA Playoffs, yes, but also SF Climate Week. I’ve been thinking about how to apply the proper balance of patience and urgency to the climate fight. First, what does Wooden’s advice mean? Prolific basketball scorers will often talk about the need to “let the game come to you.” In other words be aggressive, move with purpose, probe for openings… but not to the point where you are hurrying into the teeth of the defense and in so doing making careless mistakes or missing the right play. The notion of patience also applies over time. Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers famously talked a few seasons ago (in a very impatient sports town) about trusting “The Process” in turning the league’s worst team into one of its enduring best. Back to climate. While hundreds of functional technologies/approaches are being deployed in thousands of ways across all industries to draw down emissions, it will take time we don’t really have — maybe a generation — to scale up these new methods enough to keep us under the warming levels above which really bad things happen. It can be depressing, and I’m certainly not alone in wanting to push harder. But it occurs to me that some of that urgency could qualify as hurrying in Coach Wooden’s sense. This (possibly contrarian?) perspective comes in part from an executive coach who once reflected that I sometimes struck him as having “both the gas and brake pushed down all the way.” He—and my team it turned out—experienced a grinding between my inner drive to quickly usher everything from decisions to workstreams through to conclusion and a desire to gather more information and make the perfect set of moves. Both “pedals” represented an exertion of control; and the solution to this inner tension was actually to practice patience by easing up with *both* feet. Point being this: amidst our ever-increasing incentives to ramp up velocity with decreasing margins for error, I wonder if being a bit more methodical each day could significantly improve the end result. In a realm as complex and fraught as climate, with so many entrenched defenses, could daily 1% improvements to our patience compound our effectiveness over time? Taking the extra breath to be more present in a conversation and learn more about another perspective. Sitting with the discomfort of ambiguity while waiting on more information. Trusting in the flow of things, the skills of colleagues, the angles that will appear and allow us to make outsized impact with more leverage than if we hadn’t allowed the game come to us. Think about it this week. As a hoops fans or climate warrior, a connector or caretaker — where and how could a little more patience help improve your part of the game? #ClimateChange #Sustainability #EarthDay #Improvement https://lnkd.in/gmyV3DYt

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Digital assets are meant to be used. Not hoarded. Not endlessly flipped in pursuit of speculative riches. They’re to be used—for the unique purposes for which they were designed. That’s why Ayre Group is the world’s largest venture capital investor in Metanet apps. What is Metanet? Metanet represents the vision of a better, more inclusive and dynamic internet, an economically integrated online system that enables cost-effective, instant micropayments. Metanet will restore the original promise of a peer-to-peer internet model. Silicon Valley giants hijacked the original internet model by forcing all traffic through their centralized (and proprietary) hubs. Metanet will undo this sabotage. Metanet will bring a global democratization of access to data and services. Creators will be able to engage in an economically feasible direct-to-consumer model—no middlemen—allowing them to succeed on their merits, unconstrained by bureaucracy. Metanet will upend cross-border transactions by eliminating intermediaries. Remittances will be cheaper and more secure, as Metanet’s decentralized nature will enhance trust in digital transactions and offer greater control over personal data. Metanet is the marriage of IPv6, AI and the BSV Blockchain. IPv6 is bringing an exponential rise in the number of IP addresses, with a similar rise in the number of unique devices connected to the internet, including an army of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. All of these devices are talking to each other, many of them autonomously. AI’s assistance will be required as a traffic cop, helping to ensure that all these digital messages arrive where and when they should. The final piece of Metanet’s puzzle is BSV. BSV can process a huge volume of transactions swiftly and securely, at a cost measured in fractions of a cent, allowing the monetization of every piece of online data. BSV is the base value transfer token of the future internet. Developers can build with confidence on BSV. BSV is legally-and regulatory-compliant, with a locked protocol that traces its unbroken lineage to Bitcoin’s Genesis block, so what’s built today won’t be undone by unnecessary protocol tinkering. Metanet’s potential is too great to ignore. Learn more about how AI, IPv6 and BSV—the only public proof-of-work enterprise blockchain that can scale to make Metanet a reality—are building the internet of the future. https://lnkd.in/gxFM_jrW

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We are excited to back EnFi, Inc in their first round of financing. They just came out of stealth and announced a $7.5 million raise from our good friends at Unusual Ventures, Boston Seed Capital, Argon Ventures and us at Impellent Ventures. Scott Weller spoke with me about his new idea around revolutionizing credit risk analysis through AI, begrudgingly bemoaning getting pulled back into yet another startup :) He and Josh knew there had to be a better way to get risk analyzed fast at the level of the enterprise after the great SVB failing occurred and left thousands of founders scrambling away from their multi-covenant loans. They needed to move their money but couldn't because other financial institutions still relied on a clunky, long process of assessing loan-worthiness. Enter Enfi. I asked him to invest. Scott was another one of those entrepreneurs we'd back no matter what they were doing. It took a while to get him and the indomitable Joshua Summers to make room for us. But they finally relented, because I'm annoying. Very, very annoying. Like a chihuahua with a kazoo, except worse. Ask anyone... EnFi’s platform is revolutionizing credit risk analysis, underwriting and portfolio management through advanced AI and real-time monitoring for complex credit instruments. Their innovative approach to Continual Risk Analysis provides institutional and private lenders with deeper insights and automation, enhancing decision-making and risk management. Congratulations to co-founders Joshua Summers and Scott Weller, and the entire EnFi team. We are proud to be part of your journey and look forward to your continued success! #Fintech #AI #Lending #CreditRiskManagement #Innovation

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Great episode for early stage VC's and capital allocators to check out. https://lnkd.in/ekz7JHJd #vc #fundraising #venturecapital

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Ross Haleliuk posted the fantastic article below. This is the world where I live day-to-day. At TechOperators, we invest mostly in early-stage cyber, but we do things a little differently, and we believe there are ways to invest successfully outside of pure Power Law math. The article argues that many security problems are too small for VC. I agree. I often try to convince bootstrapped founders not to raise venture because doing so can turn a successful, slow-growing bootstrapped company into a failed venture-backed company because, despite a large infusion of capital, it couldn't double every year. VC is not monolithic--not by stage, strategy, or style. Venture is often equated with "Tier 1 Venture". Ross argues that VC is not always great for early-stage cyber--and he is right. Bootstrapping AND VC work when incentives are aligned. Does it work for an early-stage VC with a <$200M fund to invest in several early companies at reasonable valuations, setting up the conditions for reasonable exits that pay off for both investors and founders? Yes. Does it work for $800M funds investing in seed stage at $100M+ valuations? Well, that depends! Power law says it does (for VC), but the unfortunate externality is that these rounds destroy companies and founder equity more often than not. There is a role for patient capital in this ecosystem to fuel successful companies that retain exit optionality as they scale--driving exit value for both founders and investors.

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Participating in Cohort 14 of the VC Lab has been an energizing experience so far. I am learning so much about the ins and outs of being an emerging fund manager and how to succeed in this space. Today they hosted a panel for Women in VC that provided some real world advice from some fantastic panelists. The curriculum is rigorous for sure, but rewarding. If you are curious about why this is such an exciting area check out this article. #venturecapital #vc #investing https://lnkd.in/gMMM_mwp

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I echo and a firm believer of Laurel Mintz take on Diversity - "Diversity in thought, diversity in boards, diversity in public companies, diversity in all of this is what creates a better culture. It's what creates better outcomes, both financially and emotionally. Ultimately, it's just a better approach to creating a more well-rounded society.” #ImpactInvesting #VentureCapital #PurposeDrivenInvestors

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This article by Forbes encapsulates the vision and drive of Shally Shanker and what we as a team at AiiM Partners are driving to solve. We focus on the untapped opportunities where capital remains scarce, the ‘missing middle’, the unclaimed territory between the early seed funds and the larger, institutional funds investing at later stages. As Shally highlights, "We invest in companies that are building products that solve a critical climate problem and are scaling through rapid commercial traction. Solving meaningful climate issues often requires deep or hard tech solutions. It has not been easy for such companies to raise capital recently as most climate investors prefer ‘asset-lite’ solutions to climate, particularly those centered around software. Climate is not only a software problem". Read the full article to learn more. https://lnkd.in/diW9VBaU Get in touch if you want to be part of the solution. #climate #startups #venturecapital #impactinvesting

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Grim news from Forbes last week. #Point72 Ventures (run by famous billionaire, Steve Cohen) has laid off their fintech team in an attempt to #pivot away from crypto and shift into more of a focus investing in #AI and defense technology startups. Five #investors, and a few rumored partners of the company including are also rumored to separate from Point72 as well. The initial wave of fintech #startups were intended to disrupt the old school banking system and allow modern technology to thrive. Now that AI is an #industry wide trendsetter, Point72 are making a dire mistake of using it as a replacement for human input and perspective instead of a supplement. Hopefully this won’t set a precedent for future companies to get rid of their fintech experts and #investors who use their skills to great success.

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