2Q26 Newsletter
👋 Hello, It’s BTV
Welcome back to our quarterly update! As always, it was a very busy quarter for Team BTV.
In early June, we co-hosted the first Vertical AI Summit with Ramp and Greylock. We had over 1,000 applicants and it was a huge success. The summit featured:
- Opening remarks from Eric Glyman (Ramp CEO)
- How to get your company AI-pilled with Packy McCormick (Founder of Not Boring) + Geoff Charles (Ramp Head of Product)
- Building defensibility against the foundation models with Mitch Troyanovsky (Basis Co-Founder) and James Cadwallader (Profound CEO)
- Product demos from Unit and Monk
- Selling to buyers in highly regulated industries with Rahul Rekhi (Rogo President), Max Brenner (WithCoverage CEO), and Will Lawrence (Bretton CEO)
- The economics of AI growth with David Eckstein (Legora CFO) and Varun Anand (Clay CEO)
- JC wrote about this session here.
We took a quick break to celebrate Jake’s wedding in Hawaii!
Then, in a fast follow to the Vertical AI Summit, we hosted a fireside with Crosby and Pace on building the neofirm.
🗓️ Coming Up - Where in the World is BTV?
Here’s where you’ll find Team BTV over the next quarter+:
- Sep 9 - 12: Jake + Nihar in Argentina 🇦🇷
- Sep 13 - 17: Jake + Nihar in Brazil 🇧🇷
- Oct 18 - 21: Team BTV in Vegas for Money20/20 🤑
📈 BTV Portfolio Updates
💰 Fundraising (announced rounds)
Caplight (BTV I) raised a $16 million Series A co-led by BlackRock and Fin Capital.
Nebex (BTV III) raised a $30 million seed round led by GV.
📰 In the News
Unit (BTV I) crossed $100 billion in annual transaction volume!
Coast (BTV I) launched Bill Pay, expanding beyond fleet cards into full payables for fleet businesses.
Layer (BTV II) partnered with CapitalOS, so that transactions from CapitalOS now sync directly into Layer's accounting, allowing SMB platforms to offer their customers a real-time view of their spend.
Basis (BTV II) partnered with Braintrust to launch an open standard for supervising long-horizon agents. Sheel explained what this means here!
InScope (Mint) launched Agentic Disclosures, using AI to produce disclosure checklists for financial reporting teams.
Palm (Mint) launched Comply, embedded business formation and ongoing compliance for platforms that serve small businesses.
InstaSwitch (Mint) partnered with Swaystack to give Swaystack's bank and credit union customers a built-in way to move deposits and operational activity into newly opened business accounts.
Ethic (pre BTV) hit $10B in AUM.
Albert (pre BTV) became the official patch partner of the Los Angeles Lakers.
📢 BTV in the Spotlight
Podcasts and articles featuring our portfolio founders:
- Yoseph (Relay) was on the Creator Money Moves panel, talking about goals and accountability.
- Daniel Simon (Coast) was on The Payments Strategy Show talking fleet payments and embedded fintech done right.
- George (Monk) was on A Product Market Fit Show, talking about how he went from shutting down his last startup to $1M ARR in 6 months and was on Not Another Podcast, talking about the real mechanics of building an AI company in 2026
- Ezra (Caliza) was on Bits and Borders, sharing why he left Visa to build Caliza.
- Matt (Basis) was on Upstarts Media, talking about why AI won't replace accountants but instead will make them richer.
- Mitch (Basis) was on The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck, talking about how to build long-horizon AI agents: behavior specs, ontologies, process supervision.
Our BTV team also spent some time in the spotlight.
- Sheel was on:
- The DPI podcast, talking about how the VC obsession with contrarianism is overrated.
- Something Ventured, talking about the last decade in fintech.
🤙 Community
It was a packed quarter on the community front. We kicked things off with a BTV + SVB gathering in Napa 🍷, bringing together founders and friends of the firm for a day in wine country.
Then came Tech Week: the Vertical AI Summit with Ramp and Greylock, plus dinner for vertical AI operators and founders with Basis the night before.
To follow up the Vertical AI Summit, we hosted a fireside alongside Crosby and Pace on building the neofirm - what it looks like to build a professional services firm AI-natively from day one.
And then we closed things out co-hosting a fintech founder dinner with SignalFire and Rho!
📖 Reading
From BTV (required reading):
💪 Talent
This quarter we made candidate introductions into more than 20 portfolio companies. We sourced engineers, GTM hires, and risk/ops talent directly from our network, leading to 6 new hires across the portfolio. Beyond sourcing, we coached founders through recruiting-firm economics, PEO and benefits setup, and workforce structuring – including visa sponsorship for early hires.
Whatever your role or function, there’s a job for you in fintech!
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
