On Risk TINA has overtaken the venture market. There is no alternative. As long as the music is playing, you've got to keep dancing. You've got to play the game on the field. If a founder isn’t raising a $10m seed round, they're not ambitious
Building Agents: Panel with Jean-Denis Greze (Town) & George Kurdin (Monk) To continue our series of AI events here in NYC, I moderated a fireside on building agents with Jean-Denis Greze (JDG), the Mayor and CEO of Town, and George Kurdin, the CEO of Monk. Town and Monk have two very different approaches: building agents that work across many different
What We're Thinking About (Excerpt from BTV LP Update) Seed valuations are flying. Per Carta, the top 5% of seed rounds are now getting done at $200m+, up 177% in a single year, and the median is around $24m. What we have spent many years calling seed is now labeled pre-seed, and what's now labeled seed
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
Vertical AI Summit: The Economics of AI Growth To close the inaugural Vertical AI Summit a few weeks ago, I moderated a panel on the economics of AI growth with Varun Anand of Clay and David Eckstein of Legora. Varun is a co-founder of Clay, where he runs go-to-market. David is the CFO of Legora,
My Compliance Conundrums Where This Started Before I was a VC, I spent three and a half years at Promontory Financial Group, a risk and compliance consulting firm that advised many of the largest financial institutions in the world. It was a great business, particularly in the wake of the 2008 crisis. It
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
Why We Invested in Rely Excited to Announce Our Investment in Rely! We are thrilled to share our investment in Rely! We led their pre-seed round and invested in their $4.5M seed round led by 2048 Ventures. Every time a multifamily asset changes hands or gets refinanced, thousands of unstructured documents need to
Fireside Chat with Itai Damti of Unit + Thomas George of Housecat It was a pleasure to host a fireside on AI and fintech last week with Itai Damti and Thomas George. Itai is the Co-Founder and CEO of Unit and has spent years building one of the most important pieces of embedded finance infrastructure out there. Thomas spent 10 years
Why We Invested in InstaSwitch Excited to Announce Our Investment in InstaSwitch! We are thrilled to share our investment in InstaSwitch! We led their pre-seed round and invested in their seed round led by Chicago Ventures. 5.4 million U.S. small businesses try to switch banks every year. Most never finish. The story
Can new companies be built as MCPs? As I route more and more of my time and workflow through Cowork, I've found myself asking our software + saas providers to offer MCPs (if they haven't already). Their existing dashboards are observable interfaces, but between their MCPs and my Cowork harness, I now have an
Podcast: JC on Venture Grounds ⬅️Originally published by Rho here. In this Venture Grounds episode, JC Bahr-de Stefano from Better Tomorrow Ventures explains why the best FinTech companies aren't leading with AI — they're leading with the problem they solve. He breaks down why AI is enabling technology, not the product
Services Won't Become Software There's a growing consensus in venture right now that AI is transforming services businesses into software businesses, so much so that services companies are now considered venture-backable in ways they never were before. Several prominent VC firms framed it as a $4.6 trillion "service as
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: * Will Vertical AI Survive? * Team or TAM * AI-Native Systems Are The Default As a general rule,