Good Things Come in Threes - it comes with great joy to announce defy III, our latest $300M venture capital fund!! Thank you to @crunchbasenews@geneteare https://t.co/wV3AadUhqi
Thrilled to announce our investment in Champ AI!
Built by @Instacart veterans, Champ's AI agents automate the back-office busywork that slows companies down. $8.5M raised alongside Redpoint, SV Angel, Max Mullen. 🏆 https://t.co/oWHhzEYgoW @BusinessInsider#AgenticAI@mkhandel
Healthcare must be a theme, congrats to Synthpop's Series A! We’re proud to continue supporting this exceptional team as they execute on their important mission of scaling AI that makes healthcare more human.
https://t.co/FWhkXPeTGL @axios@thekcpr@mkhandel#HealthcareAI
Our biggest product launch yet!
We started with one goal: build automated security that works like a real security engineer.
We are closer than ever to that reality
In a world where code moves at superhuman speed, security can't be the thing that slows it down — or it will be neglected.
Bad actors now have much more powerful weapons, but now, so do defenders.
Welcome to Almanax v2!
🚀 Excited to share that @defyvc is leading the $3.5M seed for Interface, an AI platform transforming industrial safety + compliance — one of the most complex, high-stakes problems in heavy industry.Industrial operators rely on millions of pages of SOPs, technical manuals, and regulatory documents.
Auditing them manually is slow, expensive, and often impossible to do comprehensively. Mistakes don’t just cost money — they cost lives.
Interface’s AI “safety copilot” changes that. It’s already 10× faster and 4× cheaper than traditional review, and is being piloted today with some of the world’s largest oil & gas companies.
This is AI enabling workflows that simply weren’t possible before.What made us lean in quickly was the founder–market fit, captured so well in @Cookie's @TechCrunch profile (linked below).
CEO, @thomasleeyoung, grew up in Trinidad & Tobago around rigs, saw the impact of safety failures firsthand, and later worked in human factors engineering at Jaguar Land Rover.
His co-founder, Aaryan Mehta, brings deep technical expertise — AI + Math from Imperial College London, and ML pipeline + fault-detection work at Amazon.
Together, they have a rare combination of domain depth + AI rigor that this category demands and this is the right product at exactly the right moment.
Thrilled to partner alongside @PrecursorVC, @RockYardVC, and exceptional angels on this journey — and grateful to @Cookie + @TechCrunch for telling the founders’ stories with such nuance. Thomas + Aaryan — we’re all in. Heavy industry needs what you’re building. This is only the beginning. 🚀
I’ve always believed the best founder–VC relationships start before the pitch.
Years before investing in @noviconnect, I worked with its founder @kimberly_shenk at Eventbrite — she led data science, I led growth. That trust built in the trenches made backing her next company, Novi, feel full circle.
Novi is the trusted data layer helping brands win in the AI-driven commerce era.
We talked about how AI is becoming the new search interface — and what it means for brands to be found by machines, not people.
🎥 Marketing to Machines: How AI Shopping Is Changing SEO, Trust & Brand Growth
YouTube: https://t.co/lvjOzKzlg6
Apple: https://t.co/z7AOt9I3j8
Spotify: https://t.co/PT0nintTmx
Thanks @VCFMpodcast for hosting!
cc @defyvc
🔍 Proud moment — our Analyst, Noah Lin, was featured in the @WSJVC newsletter. He replied to @marcvarta questions last week on AI startups and lasting revenue: https://t.co/6WwdggXjjG
👏 Congrats Noah!
@thekcpr#startups#AI#ROI#revenue#WSJ#value
Congratulations to @BirchesHealth for their Series A and bringing to light the need for advancements in behavioral health, namely, gambling addictions. https://t.co/YusDGPYvY5 @axios@thekcpr@mkhandel
When AI deals move at 2AM, there’s no such thing as “slow summer.” Our founder @neil_sequeira is featured in @WSJ "VCs Had No Time Off This Summer. Blame AI" as he tells us what happened at 2AM where we chased https://t.co/c2xDP9MT8O
https://t.co/bQGNSKQElN @marcvarta@thekcpr
Want to make smarter startup moves? Think like a VC. @bmrothenberg dives into:
• False signals vs. real traction
• Defensible business models
• How to pitch & why job seekers should think like investors
▶ https://t.co/jPN6PQJvM7
Fund/Build/Scale Podcast with Walter Thompson