4Q25 Newsletter
👋 Hello, It’s BTV
Welcome back to our quarterly update! It was a busy quarter for thought leadership 🧠 here at BTV 😆
Nihar was on a roll and wrote a bunch of excellent pieces:
As a general rule, when Nihar writes, you should read.
Sheel and JC wrote a great piece checking in on the status of embedded fintech, and shared Sheel’s fireside with Justin, the CEO of Layer!
JC shared takeaways from our fireside with DocShield and our fireside with Relay.
Lastly, Jake shared his thoughts on fintech momentum heading into 2026 with Crunchbase.
🗓️ Coming Up - Where in the World is BTV?
Here’s where you’ll find Team BTV over the next quarter+:
Feb 19th - 21st Jake ➡ Boca Raton, FL ☀️ (Stepstone Summit)
Feb 25th - 26th Jake ➡ LA 😎 (Upfront Summit)
Mar 1st - 5th Sheel ➡ Vail ⛷️ (Cendana Summit)
Mar 22nd - Mar 24th Sheel ➡ Mexico City 🇲🇽
Apr 13th - Apr 16th Sheel ➡ NYC 🗽 (Vertex)
📈 BTV Portfolio Updates
💰 Fundraising (announced rounds)
Monnai (BTV II) raised $12 million in a new funding round led by Motive to expand their global identity and risk data platform.
Reflow (BTV II) raised $15 million in a seed funding round!
Reflow is a workforce and workflow intelligence platform that gives enterprises real-time visibility into how work moves across people, systems, and processes to identify automation opportunities and optimize operations.
Kaaj (Mint) raised a $3.8 million seed round led by Kindred Ventures. We led their pre-seed and invested in this round. If you want to learn more about why we invested, check out some thoughts from JC.
Ramp (pre BTV) hit a $32 billion valuation in a Lightspeed-led funding round. More details on their blog.
📰 In the News
Salsa (BTV I) shared their latest product update, featuring streamlined contractor onboarding, embedded MFA for sensitive actions, and automated tax rate notifications.
Monk (BTV II) launched Playbooks, their workflow system for intelligent collections.
Deck (BTV II) released an ad with NFL superstar WR Larry Fitzgerald! The BTV x Larry mashup probably wasn’t on your radar.
Plumery (BTV II) launched AI Fabric, a new platform that helps banks connect AI models to their banking data without custom integrations.
Rely (Mint) launched their product - an AI-powered platform that audits entire data rooms to close commercial real estate transactions up to 95% faster!
PostCredit (Mint) was acquired by Usio.
Ethic (pre BTV) hit $8B AUM.
Chipper Cash (pre BTV) hit their first quarter of profitability - a huge milestone!
📢 BTV in the Spotlight
Podcasts and articles featuring our portfolio founders:
- Yoseph (Relay) was on the Fintech Hustle podcast.
- Javier (Caplight) was on The Trading Places Pod talking about the state of private markets.
- Itai (Unit) was on The Architects discussing embedded finance.
Our BTV team also spent some time in the spotlight.
- Jake was on the Deluseional Podcast, talking about walking away from millions to become a VC.
- Sheel was also on the Delusional Podcast, sharing lessons from his entrepreneurial journey and how BTV wins deals.
- Sheel was on My First Million, talking about ideas that sound illegal but print money anyways.
- Sheel was on VC Uncovered, sharing his path and philosophy on investing.
🤙 Community
The past few months were all about getting in the room with founders, whether that room was in NYC, London, Brazil, India or SF.
In November, we brought our East Coast founders together for a dinner in NYC. That same month, Sheel was also in London for the Kauffman Fellows Mentor event.
December took us in a few different directions. Sheel spent time in Brazil with the Stay team, while Nihar was in India visiting OneCard and Agara (more on both soon 👀).
From left to right: Nihar hanging with the Agara team, Nihar hanging with the OneCard team, and Sheel hanging with the Stay team
We kicked off January back in event mode on both coasts. In NYC, we hosted a fireside chat with Yoseph West from Relay on building financial tools for working America. Then in SF, Jake and Sheel joined Mercury and Intercom for a packed house conversation on building fintech with world-class customer support. We closed out January by hosting MBA students from Wharton’s PE/VC Club for a roundtable discussion with the team. Always fun to spend time with the next generation of investors and operators.
📖 Reading
Matt Brown at Matrix wrote a great piece on context graphs in vertical software - worth a read.
From BTV (required reading):
- Nihar:
- Sheel and JC on Checking In on Embedded Fintech
💪 Talent
Hiring continued across the portfolio with a noticeable uptick in GTM roles. As our BTV portcos continue to grow, so do the types of roles and capabilities needed on their teams. We've leaned into building talent networks outside of evergreen Founding Engineer profiles, continuing to vet and add to our partner network for recruiting agency support, and are keeping our founders informed with market data as they hire across new functions. We've also seen key leadership and executive hires in Q4 - big wins that set the tone across these companies for the upcoming year. Notable hires include a GM of Lending, VP of Sales, and VP of Risk.
There are currently 200+ roles open across the portfolio! If your New Year's resolution was to find your next great role in fintech - let's talk!
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