Quick Hits
- 📈 We made 13 investments this quarter: 10 new seed and 3 follow-on investments
- Flex is now AI-native, we have more agents than humans at the firm!
OUR ASK: We are investing in the best technical founders at the earliest stages, we would love to meet any top 1% entrepreneurs starting companies in your network!
Building the AI-Native Venture Firm
There’s a lot of talk about how AI is transforming startups. Less talk about how it should transform the firms that back them.
At Flex, we’ve rebuilt our entire operating system around autonomous AI agents. Our agents are always on, assisting across sourcing, due diligence, and portfolio support.
On the sourcing front, our agents scan 200+ sources weekly and flag founders (or future founders) we should chat with as early as possible.
On diligence, our agents scan our calendars, do research on all the companies we’re speaking with (product overview, market analysis, founder backgrounds), and pull in context within our emails and CRM.
On portfolio support, our agents think through how we can leverage our extensive networks to create valuable introductions to portfolio founders. This can range from future investors, customers, or even potential future employees.
We believe venture is about to undergo the same transformation hitting every knowledge-work industry. The funds building AI into their core operating model now will see deals earlier, evaluate faster, and show up more prepared than firms running the old playbook.
We predict the best-run firms will soon have 1,000 AI agents for every human, not because humans aren’t important, but the opposite. Agents compress the research and operational work so humans can spend their time on the things that actually matter: judgment, relationships, and building conviction.
We’ve learned a lot in this process as well:
- Build gates of approval. AI agents should be really good analysts, who proactively do a lot of work but bring a human back into the loop for approvals, whether it’s before an email going out or unblocking any ambiguity in a workflow.
- Fine tune aggressively. Agents can run in a lot of different directions. It’s important to invest the time to give feedback to agents so they can get more and more efficient and precise in their work. This creates real leverage.
- Collaboration is still hard. Agents still get confused, sometimes only follow the instructions of their “manager” and don’t always proactively create visibility on their work for the whole team. This will get fixed naturally as capabilities evolve.
We believe the best venture firms of the next decade will look more like startups rather than traditional funds. They’ll build lots of internal and external products to serve their customers (Founders and LPs) in new ways.
New Flex Investments this Quarter
- Agentscore: a trust score for your agents
- Daro: AI operating system for state and local governments
- Falcon Industries: Deploy and update LLMs seamlessly in the battlefield
- FancySauce: Instant visibility of AI costs across every function
- Italic Health: Reimagining healthcare data infrastructure
- Kin Health: AI summaries for doctor visits
- Kovari Industries: Robots built for hospitality
- Oxygen: Agentic data platform transforming how data teams work
- The Residency: Innovating the startup accelerator model
- Stealth Co.: a prediction market for narratives
Flex Portfolio in the News
- Protege raised a $30M round led by a16z to unlock access to data for AI. We’ve known Bobby for a long time, from his Liveramp days. We’re fortunate to continuously back him along this journey across every round.
- 🚀 Replit raised a $400M Series D at a $9B valuation, tripling its valuation in just 6 months. Amjad and the team also launched Agent 4, their most powerful AI coding agent yet. Incredible trajectory from a company we’ve been thrilled to back.
- 🔍 Perplexity reached a $21B+ valuation and partnered with Snapchat to embed AI search across nearly 1 billion monthly users. It’s remarkable watching this team redefine how the world searches for information.
- 📊 ClickHouse raised $400M in a Series D led by Dragoneer, valued at ~$15B. ARR growing 250%+ year over year with 3,000+ cloud customers. They also acquired Langfuse, the leading open-source LLM observability platform.
- 📈 Dome, a unified API for prediction markets, was acquired by Polymarket. The Dome team is exceptional and we’re fortunate to have backed them during YC.
- 🌱 Fern, instant docs and SDK for APIs, was acquired by Postman. Teams behind public APIs at companies like Square, Auth0, Adobe, Twilio, and ElevenLabs use Fern to deliver experiences that developers can rely on. We’re super excited for the Fern team on this next step.
Flex Community Meetups in SF!
We continued hosting our recurring events in SF: our founder breakfast and pickleball round robins. If you’re interested in joining the next one for either, please reach out to us.
Founder Breakfast
Pickleball Round Robin
Flex Team Feast
🌟 Join AngelFlow, a curated community of active angel investors. Only deals with personal backing are accepted.
Reminder of our Investment Sweet Spot
If you know amazing founders building ambitious companies, we want to meet them. We focus on early-stage companies that fit this profile:
- Stage: Pre-Seed/Seed
- Focus Areas: AI Applications, Dev Tools, Infrastructure, Middleware, Data, Consumer Software, Healthcare Technology, Defense Technology
Please send us the best founders in your network who are raising or might be raising soon.
