Quick Hits
- 📈 We made 17 investments this quarter: 10 new seed investments, 6 follow-on investments in existing portcos, and 1 opportunistic late-stage investment
- We really ramped up our Venture Partner program and onboarded 70 new members!
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!
Product is Still King 👑
The venture narrative of 2025 has been anchored around startups achieving massive scale very very quickly. We’ve been fortunate to invest in a few of these companies. That said, the narrative is also forming into: if you can’t get to massive scale incredibly quickly, this is probably not a generational company and not interesting for investors.
The truth is, we don’t know if the companies that get a lot of traction quickly will be enduring, generational companies in the long run. There’s a good likelihood they will be but their revenues could come down just as quickly as they’ve gone up.
What we do know is that having a great product that customers can’t live without and getting some traction early in the life of the company is still a reliable indicator that you have a shot at building a generational company.
In early-stage investing, hype comes and goes, but product endures. What ultimately separates generational startups from the rest is the quality of what they build and their ability to reinvent their product as the world changes around them over and over again.
In software land, there are two very different games, where product is still center-stage:
- Prosumer: Products that scale at lightning speed almost always have growth loops baked in. Acquisition, retention, and virality are part of the product itself, not just an afterthought bolted onto marketing. Every breakout consumer or prosumer company we admire has phenomenal product sense embedded in its DNA. Without it, even a well-funded company struggles to compound growth.
- Enterprise: Success here requires a different kind of rigor. Winning enterprise products deeply understand their users and workflows, solve for the most critical pain points, and make adoption a no-brainer. The best teams create products that feel indispensable, the kind of products a customer can’t say no to, because the value is so obvious. These companies have longer sales cycles, higher security requirements and generally a top-down sales motion which means their overnight success takes years.
Of course, market matters. You can’t win in a commoditized space with a great UX alone. But recognizing which features, part of the tech stack, and use cases are defensible over the long run is part of great product sense.
At the end of the day, capital, distribution hacks, and brand can all help, but they can’t rescue a weak product. The startups that win at scale, whether prosumer or enterprise, are the ones where product is the beating heart of the company.
🚀 New Flex Investments this Quarter
- Atmospheric: Platform to deeply understand your supply chain
- Blue: Voice assistant for every app on your phone
- Caledon: The data layer for Financial AI
- Giant: GenAI interactive storytelling for kids (Pixar meets Roblox)
- Gobi: A social map for exploring your city
- Onyx Security: Security layer for AI agents built for enterprises (shoutout to Venture Partner Omer Perchik!)
- Neon Security: AI coworker for Identity Operations (also sourced by Omer P.!)
- Simpli: Delivering excess inventory to local charities while generating tax savings
- Soxton: Next-gen full-stack AI law firm
- Uare.AI: The truly Personal AI: Present, Safe, and Human
Flex Ecosystem in the News
- Coderabbit raised a $60M Series B led by Scale Venture Partners, and the company is barely 2 years old
- Protege raised a $25M Series A led by Footwork
- HelloPatient raised a $22.5M Series A also led by Scale Venture Partners
- Replit raised $250M round led by Prysm
- Supabase raised $100M co-led by Accel and Peak XV
🎉 Welcome New Venture Partners!
We now have 105 venture partners and growing!
Below are some (not all) of our newest venture partners who are already helping with sourcing and diligence!
- Arvind Veluvali: CEO, Fresco
- Benedikt Ernst: CEO, Iceflower
- Chris Stanley: Founder, Patterns
- Graham Sabin: Co-founder, CopyCat
- Johannes Waldstein: CEO, PiLogic
- Justin Intal: Founder, Forage
- Lisa Yan: Co-founder, Argus
- Magnus Muller: Co-founder, Browser Use
- Nick Buehler: Chief of Staff, Holocron Tech
- Redouane Ramdani: CEO, Atorie
🌟 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
- Company Characteristics: Young companies (less than 2 years old) where Flex can be a part of the first $2M into the business
Please send us the best founders in your network who are raising or might be raising soon.
