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1Q26 Newsletter

1Q26 Newsletter

👋 Hello, It’s BTV 

Welcome back to our quarterly update! As always, it was a very busy quarter for Team BTV.

Some exciting news to kick things off - we're co-hosting a Vertical AI Summit with Ramp and Greylock in NYC in early June. Invite-only, 100 to 150 people, focused on vertical AI in fintech and professional services. The audience is operators building in the space. The goal is to plant a flag in New York as the center of gravity for vertical AI. Format is fireside chats, product demos, and a happy hour. If you know operators or founders who should be in the room, send them our way.

Also, more content to consume from Team BTV!

  • Can new companies be built as MCPs? (Nihar) - as harnesses like Cowork consume more of our workflows, the MCP layer becomes a genuinely valuable position. Nihar breaks down Read-MCP vs. Write-MCP businesses and where the moats actually live. Paired with his X thread on a potential SMB/midmarket approach to context graphs (Glean for everyone else).
  • Services Won’t Become Software (JC) - where AI-native services firms actually work versus where trust, brand equity, and cover-your-a** dynamics push against them.

🗓️ Coming Up - Where in the World is BTV?

Here’s where you’ll find Team BTV over the next quarter+:

May 25th - May 28th Sheel ➡ Toronto (Tech Week) 🇨🇦

May 30th - June 2nd Team BTV ➡ NYC (Vertical AI Summit BTV x Greylock x Ramp) 🗽

📈 BTV Portfolio Updates 

💰 Fundraising (announced rounds)

Basis (BTV II) raised a $100M Series B led by Accel at a $1.15B valuation. Basis is now used by 20% of the top 150 accounting firms and continues to chart a path forward as the leading company to help accountants and the accounting industry at large harness the power of AI and long horizon agents.

Monk (BTV II) raised a $25M Series A led by Footwork and Acrew Capital. Monk is already managing over $1B+ in AR for companies like Eleven Labs, Profound, and Unify. On average, Monk customers see 40% lower DSO, 24% higher collections response rate and 25+ hours/month saved. We led the seed and were excited to double down in this round - if you want to learn more about why we invested, check out some thoughts from Nihar!

Outpost (BTV II) raised a $17.5M Series A led by Ribbit. 

Outpost is cross-border commerce infrastructure that handles local payment processing, tax compliance, and regulatory obligations through its Merchant of Record and Tax of Record products, using an AI engine trained on trade regulation data to apply the correct tax treatment and customs classifications across markets.

Its customers are subscription platforms, consumer software firms, and cross-border e-commerce businesses operating across Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia.

BRKZ (BTV II) raised strategic capital from SIDF's investment arm.

Roomiy (BTV II) announced their pre-seed round, which we led. To learn more about why we invested, check out some thoughts from Nihar!

InScope (Mint) raised a $14.5M Series A led by Norwest to automate the pain of financial reporting for accountants - growing their customer base 5x in the last year! If you want to learn more about why we have invested in every round since we led the pre-seed, check out some thoughts from JC!

InstaSwitch (Mint) raised a $4.7 million seed round led by Chicago Ventures! To learn more about why we led their pre-seed and invested again in this round, check out some thoughts from JC.  

Rely (Mint) raised a $4.5 million seed round led by 2048 Ventures. If you want to learn more about why we led their pre-seed round and invested in this round, check out some thoughts from JC!

Palm (Mint) received an investment from Amex Ventures to advance portable business identity.

📰 In the News

Unit (BTV I) reached 5,000,000 accounts on their infrastructure and had Saumil Mehta join the board!

Clubbi (BTV I) merged with Yandeh, combining forces to accelerate the digitalization of Brazil’s food retail market.

Coast (BTV I) launched Coast Rewards, bringing cashback and perks to the fleet and fuel card built for real-world businesses.

Relay (BTV I) launched Relay Capital, expanding beyond banking to offer financing for the small businesses they already serve, and announced that they raised $50M in growth funding from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund.

Roomiy (BTV II) launched their NOI-as-a-Service platform, helping hotel operators drive operating income with embedded tools.

Primo (BTV II) came out of stealth and shared more about the work they've been doing to solve the drudgery of insurance operations in LATAM.

In the past year, Primo has deployed AI agents within carriers such as AXA Keralty, Life Seguros, Afirme Seguros and several more to manage over $150M in written premium and run critical workflows end-to-end: collections, commissions, reconciliation and customer service.

Collective (Opp) acquired Open Ledger, a company that built AI-native accounting infrastructure for the next generation of financial products.

Kaaj (Mint) was featured in Equipment Finance Advisor on why underwriting throughput hasn’t scaled despite more data, tools, and APIs.

Rely (Mint) was featured on Thesis Driven, a newsletter focused on the future of real estate and the people creating it.

Palm (Mint) launched the Onboard Suite, their identity search across 125M U.S. businesses and 150,000 jurisdictions, in a single API call. The product allows fintechs, banks, insurers, payments, and vertical SaaS that serve small businesses to replace the sign-up form or application with an instant business search where the applicant types their name and then the rest fills itself: entity, address, jurisdiction, status & more.

Ethic (pre BTV) hit $9B in AUM!

📢 BTV in the Spotlight

Podcasts and articles featuring our portfolio founders:

Our BTV team also spent some time in the spotlight. 

  • Sheel was on:
    • Work in Fintech, talking about what separates great founders from the rest
    • The Information's TITV, breaking down why PayPal would make sense for Stripe and analyzing potential buyers after Bloomberg reported Stripe was eyeing the acquisition.
    • My First Million, talking about the biggest life lessons from investing, who wins in the AI race, plus AI-proof business ideas.
    • The Dart Board, talking about why the contrarian and right trope only tells half the story of how venture actually works, how Sheel thinks about portfolio construction after going from 80 companies to 30, why specialization lets you win deals you have no business winning on price alone, what 2021 did to emerging markets and whether it ever comes back, and the mentor who told him that doing hard things and writing about them might just be the greatest hack in the game.
    • Business of Money, talking about what happens when you mix fintech, AI, venture capital, Taco Bell weddings, and a failed attempt to buy the Breaking Bad house.
  • JC was on Venture Grounds, explaining why the best fintech companies aren't leading with AI but with the problem they solve.

🤙 Community

Q1 was a great quarter for getting the community together. In NYC, we teamed up with FirstMark for a BTV x FirstMark happy hour that pulled together a sharp mix of founders, operators, and investors from across the fintech and AI ecosystem. We followed it up with a Canvas + LiveOak happy hour.

Vertex was the other big moment this quarter. We co-hosted a dinner with Unit bringing together vertical SaaS founders and operators for an evening of real talk about what it takes to build embedded fintech into a product. Nihar also moderated a Vertical AI panel at Vertex.

We also co-hosted a Happy Hour + fireside with Unit at Stripe Sessions. Sheel moderated a great panel with Itai Damti (Unit CEO) and Thomas George (Housecat CEO, ex Monzo). We shared some takeaways here.

Tell me about BTV events!

📖 Reading 

Our friend Matt Brown wrote Fintech’s Moats Don’t Compile - worth a read.

From BTV (required reading):

💪 Talent

With a number of portfolio companies having raised new funding late last year and into Q1, we've been busy talking through headcount plans, org design, and compensation changes. As companies mature, the talent market shifts under them in ways that aren't always obvious from inside the company. Comp benchmarks reset against a more senior peer set, and the data founders relied on at seed is no longer the right reference. Decisions about geo bands, percentile targeting, and refresh grants for early employees start to matter. Flat orgs that worked at seed often start to strain into the A, and conversations turn to leveling, career ladders, and how to calibrate performance without losing the speed and ownership that got the team here. Hiring also tilts from generalists to specialists: the first real platform engineer, the first PMM, a controller in place of a fractional CFO. When teams make their first senior hires, they often compete not only with other Series A peers but also with later-stage companies. 

We've also been exploring AI tooling to help our founders leverage technology in their hiring processes. Sourcing, candidate assessments, and fraud prevention are all hot topics across the BTV community.

Interested in exploring something new? Check out our jobs board and join our Talent network.

Explore BTV job opportunities!

Made it this far? We appreciate you. Feel free to hit reply and tell us what you want from this newsletter so we can be better tomorrow (and next quarter).

Until next time,

Team BTV