2Q25 Newsletter

👋 Hello, It's BTV

Welcome back to our quarterly newsletter!

We’ve got a busy fall coming up and some very big news dropping soon. Keep an eye out for that 👀

🗓️ Coming Up - Where in the World is BTV?

Here’s where you’ll find Team BTV over the next few months:

• August 25th-30th, Sheel will be at Burning Man, duh
• September 5th-12th, Jake will be in Brazil
• October 4th-9th, Team BTV will be in Mexico for a Team Retreat
• October 20th, AGM in San Francisco
• October 23rd-25th Camp BTV (with our founders) in Santa Cruz, CA

🚀 The Mint, our pre-seed platform

In May, we finished the 4th cohort of The Mint. It was energizing to work with such driven founders every day in NYC! The 5 companies pitched their startups to >150 investors at Demo Day, and they all made us proud.

Introducing…the fourth Mint cohort!

How to learn more about these 5 companies:

1. Quick links to their websites, founder info, and contact info: click here.
2. Check out Sheel’s Demo Day recap here
3. Watch their pitches at our Demo Day: click here (private link, do not share).

📈 BTV Portfolio Updates

💰 Fundraising (announced rounds)

Layer (BTV II) raised a $6.6 million seed funding round led by Emergence Capital. Want to learn more about why we invested? Check out some thoughts from Sheel!

We led Layer's pre-seed to help Justin Meretab and Daniel O'Neel build an embeddable accounting infrastructure to allow any platform serving SMBs to truly become a comprehensive financial system of operation and system of record. As the number of SMBs served by Vertical Saas and Vertical AI continues to grow, Layer will be the mission critical accounting + bookkeeping backbone for these businesses, a role once played by Quickbooks.

Ramp (pre BTV) raised $200 million in a growth funding round led by Founders Fund at a $16 billion valuation. That was in June. In July, Ramp raised another $500 million in a Series E-2 funding round led by Iconiq at a $22.5 billion valuation!

📰 In the News

Relay (BTV I) 

• Announced that they crossed $1 billion in deposits, $1 billion in annualized card spend and $3 billion in monthly processing volume! 
• Launched Invoices, helping SMBs create and manage invoices right from the platform they already use to handle cash flow.

Unit (BTV I) 

• Went live with Wix, who announced the launch of their Wix Checking and Wix Capital products. Wix Checking gives users a fully integrated business checking account directly within the Wix platform at no extra cost and Wix Capital is a Merchant Cash Advance service designed to help businesses address cash flow gaps and unlock growth.
• Announced their ready to launch solutions, which will help software companies offer a full money dashboard to their customers: Capital, Banking and Bill Pay.

Selfbook (BTV I) partnered up with PayPal to bring hotel search and booking directly into the PayPal app. 

Salsa (BTV I) shared their July product update.

Coast (BTV I) launched an expense management platform, expanding beyond their smarter fleet and fuel card, to help improve the financial operations of businesses in plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping, construction, transportation, and other industries that operate in the real world. 

Layer (BTV II) published a case study, sharing how they partnered with Duet, a financial platform for independent Nurse Practitioners, to launch Duet bookkeeping, an embedded accounting and bookkeeping service designed specifically for NP-led practices.

Navro (BTV II) acquired a Delaware Money Transmitter License, its first license in the US.

Monk (BTV II) published a case study, sharing how they partnered with Profound, a technology platform that empowers companies to understand and control AI visibility, to turn their manual account receivables workflow into a cash engine that frees up the sales team to close more deals. 

Basis (BTV II)

• OpenAI published an article talking about how Basis’ AI agents help accounting firms save up to 30% of their time and expand capacity for advisory and growth. 
• Was recognized in the Next Billion Dollar Startups List for 2025!

InScope (Mint) launched Quinn, an AI agent designed specifically for accounting teams working through financial reporting tasks.

Silver (Mint) published a case study, sharing how they work with the TPA Sentinel and are now automatically adjudicating about 30% of their healthcare claims.

Indagari (Mint) was featured in an article by The Information titled Which Coding Assistants Retain Their Customers and Which Ones Don’t. Their credit card transaction data from more than 25 million U.S. consumers was used to show that developers that pay on a monthly basis are fairly loyal to specific coding assistants. 

Clearco (Opp) launched a new feature for their Invoice Funding product, Early Payment Option.

📢 BTV in the Spotlight

Podcasts and articles featuring our portfolio founders:

• Marty (Agree) was on TBPN! 
• Alex (Meroka) was on the Going Direct Podcast, talking about his mission to rebuild independent medical care in the U.S.
• Will (Agree) was on Tech Finance with Sash Orloff, talking about Agree’s rapid growth, recent $7.2M seed round, and how AI and user-centered design are shaping the future of finance tech.
• Utsav (Kaaj) was on Future AGI, talking about how to design modular AI systems, balance autonomy with human oversight, and build the infrastructure needed to ensure reliability, safety, and compliance in mission-critical applications.

Our BTV team also spent some time in the spotlight:

• Sheel was on Non-Consensus Investing, talking about the evolving venture capital landscape, the impact of AI on startups, and recent online controversies. 
• Sheel was on Consumer Lending Perspectives, a show hosted by Upgrade, talking about building fintech-banking partnerships.
• Sheel was on TWIF, The OGs of Fintech, talking about what it was like building before infrastructure existed, the bets he wished he made sooner, and why he believes fintech is still one of the most promising sectors to build in today.

🤙 Community

During NYC Tech Week, we were busy! We co-hosted a builder-and-backer hang with our portfolio company, Deck, returning to one of our favorite venues: a tucked-away carriage house. As always, it was a lovely evening. Nihar also had a blast hosting and moderating a Vertical AI panel with Stoyan (Tony) Stoyanov, Co-founder/CTO at EliseAI, and Mitchell Troyanovsky, Co-founder at Basis. You can check out some of the key takeaways here.

Jake hosted a fireside chat with BTV portfolio company CloudTrucks, while Nihar served as a judge for the Draper startup pitch competition. And in July, Jake and Sheel both made the trip to NYC, giving us the perfect excuse to gather our East Coast founders for a great meal.

💪 Talent

Hiring remains a top priority across the portfolio. You can opportunities across the portfolio on our job board or join our talent network to be kept in the loop for future roles! 

Q2 was hands-on with our Mint cohort, and it was energizing to spend time with founders in person in NYC. That focused collaboration paid off as several founders made key hires during the program, a reminder that putting in the work drives results. Founding Engineers remain one of the most sought-after roles in the portfolio, with a particular focus on the SF and NYC markets. On the GTM side, demand for Founding AEs is growing, and we’ve been supporting founders not just in meeting strong candidates, but also in navigating early-stage hiring questions like compensation design.

We’re also keeping a close eye on emerging tools in the talent space. For ease of use and a great price point, Gem’s startup package has been a hit with many of our companies. It’s also the platform we use internally for candidate sourcing and network building. At the same time, we’re seeing a wave of AI-first recruiting products hitting the market. It’s an exciting time to be in talent acquisition.

Reading 📖

Our friend Matt Brown at Matrix wrote a great piece - embedded fintech in 1,000 words. Check it out!

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