Flex Capital Q1 Highlights
Quick Hits – Q1 was very active for us:
We’re thrilled to welcome Paul Johnson as General Partner (more here)!
📈 We made exactly 20 investments this quarter.
🇺🇲 Flex Capital former COO Dan Driscoll gets sworn in as 26th Secretary of the Army! Huge congrats to Dan on his return to serving the American people.
OUR ASK: We are investing in the best technical founders at the seed stage – we would love to meet any top 1% entrepreneurs in your network!
What’s top of mind for us: AI Agents are eating the world
With the proliferation of AI, startups are launching faster and in greater quantities than ever. Seed round valuations appear to be higher than ever, with VCs willingly paying premiums for the prospects of explosive growth in AI businesses.
In our prior newsletter, we referenced our portfolio company Stackblitz which launched Bolt.new and went from $0 -> $20M ARR in 8 weeks – dubbed the fastest growing startup in Silicon Valley. The astonishing thing? They’ve 2x’d since the last newsletter!
We continue to hunt for phenomenal founders who are building the future at a rapid pace.
Accelerators continue to impress
The Y Combinator Winter 2025 batch was an inspiring bunch. This quarter, we spent a week meeting with >80% of the batch and were blown away by the products being built, and ultimately invested in three companies (more on Browser Use, Confident AI, and CopyCat AI in the Flex investments this quarter section).
We also spent time with the latest A16Z Speedrun batch and were astonished by how quickly that program has scaled. Kudos to the Speedrun team who is finding phenomenal founders pursuing creative ideas and building amazing products. We invested in Nilo Tech and another investment that’s unannounced out of Speedrun.
There were a handful of takeaways having spent a lot of time with above accelerators:
Everything is about AI: Most of the companies we spoke with are building AI products or leveraging AI meaningfully in their products; Vertical AI agents seem to be taking over
Valuations are trending higher: AI companies, whether autonomous agents, infra, or copilot, are commanding a premium
Uptick in Open-Source: Many companies in the batch are pursuing an open-source approach and getting lots of users fast
Flex ecosystem in the news
Mercury raised a $300M Series C at a $3.5Bn valuation led by Sequoia – we participated in the round
Ribbon Health merged with H1! Nate Maslak (Ribbon CEO) and Ariel Katz (H1 CEO) are both Flex Venture Partners and are now joining forces
Stackblitz (bolt.new) continues to grow meteorically – check out CEO Eric Simons on Lenny’s podcast to hear the full story
Tailscale CEO Avery Pennarun sits with Stratechary’s Ben Thompson for an interview about building a new internet
🚀 New Flex investments this quarter
Blueplan AI: AI copilot for construction code compliance (e.g. egress, accessibility)
Browser Use: Leading open-source web agent project (like OpenAI Operator) with 50k github stars
Confident AI: Open-Source Unit Testing for LLM Applications
CopyCat AI: Next-Gen RPA, Powered by Browser Agents
DL Software: Web-based financial terminal offering real-time charting, live market quotes, news, analysis, cofounded by Martin Shkreli
FinTe: Insights & collaboration platform surfacing infrastructure spend details and cost-saving opportunities to Eng and Finance teams – shoutout to Venture Partner Ayan Barua for partnering on this investment
Legislytics: AI copilot for government affairs professionals focused on legislation changes
Mercury: the best banking product for your business (the one non-seed deal we did)
Nilo Technologies: the future of gaming; create 3D worlds in seconds and play with friends
Optery: Data rights management software for removing personal information from data brokers
Primetime: Platform + marketplace to manage and hire vertical AI agents
Somo (Stealth): Upscale control system that can be installed across hotels / new multifamilies
String AI: End To End Web Extraction Platform
TownHome Health: New type of urgent care for mental health episodes – shoutout to our venture partner Ariel Katz for partnering on this investment
Uniti: AI agent for lead management (email/sms/chat), starting with selling to Commercial Real Estate leasing teams
Yield Club (stealth): "Robinhood for DeFi", starting with a high-yield crypto savings account product
In addition to the above, there are 4 other unannounced investments we’re super excited about! We’ll be sure to include them in the next newsletter.
🎉 Welcome New Venture Partners!
This quarter, we’re excited to welcome:
Erik Zahnlecker: Product at Sierra
Omer Perchik: Founder & CEO of Any.do
Rajiv Ayyangar: CEO of Producthunt
Of course, we can’t forget to mention the 12 venture partners we onboarded in H2 2024 who introduced us to and helped us diligence hundreds of companies.
The Flex Venture Partner community is growing – stay tuned for more details here as we’ve got exciting updates coming soon!
🌟 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 Age & Valuation: Young companies (less than 2 years old) priced at reasonable valuations (ideally <$25M)
We want to meet the best founders (or soon to be founders) in your network.