Foundation Capital

For 30 years, we've backed extraordinary founders from day zero.

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

“You can be extremely ambitious while still being a good person.” —@ramkris, Co-founder and CEO, @HyphenateAI

Ram and his co-founder @ajkrish95 believe that building a successful company doesn’t require sacrificing human values. Learn more about the team in our founder profile: https://t.co/nkgudAsFy8

Join Ram and Ajay in building the autonomous finance platform for the office of the CFO. The team is hiring for a number of positions, including:

🧑‍💻 Senior Software Engineer → https://t.co/nEdjaSQfB4

🎯 Founding Sr. Product Marketing Manager → https://t.co/J03jfStYOF

🎟️ Founding Field & Events Marketing Manager → https://t.co/PPTf46xSeU

And more! Apply today: https://t.co/xeL1GJRQEi

[Jaya Gupta @JayaGup10]

Few people understand insurance better and have moved as fast as @ManglaArjun and @sambhav_anand

Congrats on signing yet another 7 figure deal and continuing to execute breathtakingly

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

Learn what’s happening at the earliest stages of building. In The Foundation this month, we explore how @HyphenateAI’s founders are bringing AI to the CFO’s office (and how they got where they are today), how insurance is getting automated, what it means to have one of America’s Greatest Living Optimists on our team, and much more.

New issue out later this week. Subscribe to The Foundation now to be the first to get it in your inbox: https://t.co/LcNNNQPqfh

[ashu garg @ashugarg]

@ramkris and @ajkrish95 are building AI agents that do the work of a full finance team. We’ve backed what they’re building at @HyphenateAI since their seed round, and last week they announced their $45M Series A.

In this month’s B2BaCEO, I share their story and how it aligns with our thinking on the opportunity in AI apps. In verticals like finance, where mistakes are costly and the work is heavily regulated, a smarter model alone won’t get the job done. We believe the winners will be engineers like Ram and Ajay, who know their customers’ work deeply and are building their apps with the technical depth of an infra company.

More on how they got here: https://t.co/GDAo1eLX97

[ashu garg @ashugarg]

https://t.co/BnfAusOUIe

[ashu garg @ashugarg]

Huge congrats to @ramkris and @ajkrish95. When @JayaGup10 and I first met them, it was “love at first sight”. We already had a prepared mind on Finance Automation and by the end of the dinner, we were completing each others sentences.

No CFO loves their ERP. And no company of consequence is going to rip out their ERP. Instead, they will wrap @HyphenateAI around their ERP and automate Finance Work.

Customers are already spending more on @HyphenateAI than on their ERP. And we are just getting started🚀

[ashu garg @ashugarg]

“Wait until you see a forest fire, then start a company.”
That’s how @munjalshah sold his first company to Alibaba and his second to Google.

His point is that most of the time, founders have to wait for a gap in the market - a patch of sunlight where a big tree fell. As soon as your tree grows, it runs into the ones still standing around it.

But once every 7 to 10 years, a technology shift burns the whole forest down. It happened with the internet, mobile, and SaaS. Now the opportunity is here again with AI.

I’ve known Munjal through all three of his companies. It was a pleasure to have him on B2BaCEO to talk about his latest, @hippocraticai, and his advice for fellow founders.

We cover:

- When to hold your product back, and when to ship
- How to size and structure a founding team
- Why he believes vertical AI apps will win
- When being 2% better as a startup wins the market, and when it doesn’t
- Whether to build on open or closed models

Our full conversation here: https://t.co/v1gltesFEb

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

“Run into the vertical as fast as you can.” 🏃💨 Four-time founder @munjalshah shares some of his hardest-earned advice for getting ahead in AI. Hear more from the CEO of @hippocraticai in conversation with @ashugarg in our latest podcast episode.

→ YouTube: https://t.co/JMzdRcpsCs
→ Spotify: https://t.co/EzOsqloJkb
→ Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/AEkalauwLl

[Hyphenate @HyphenateAI]

Led by @nexusvp, with participation from @BCapitalGroup and returning investors @FoundationCap, @boldcap and Gaia Ventures, this round brings our total funding to $54M.

Finance teams carry a long list of work because somebody has to do it.

Hyphenate’s self-learning agents take responsibility for that work across the systems companies already run, with evidence behind every action and finance teams involved where judgment matters.

The results are already building:
→ 86x revenue growth
→ 11x customer growth in 12 months, including six public companies
→ 40% of customers expanding within their first year

This funding will help us take our agents deeper across the finance function and into strategic finance, giving teams more capacity for the decisions that move their businesses forward.

Thank you to our customers, team and investors for building this with us.

Read the Bloomberg coverage: https://t.co/XmGc1ejsjK

[Ramnandan Krishnamurthy @ramkris]

@HyphenateAI just raised a $45M Series A at a $270M headline valuation.

We're bringing autonomous finance to every enterprise in the world. 🧵

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

Ahead of the curve 🏎️ We're in the top 50 VC firms in the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson AI venture ranking, as one of just a handful of firms that built AI positions before the current wave.

[Ilya Strebulaev @IlyaStrebulaev]

The Strebulaev-Jackson AI Venture Ranking of the top 50 VC firms is now live.

Andreessen Horowitz tops the AI ranking with 22,509 points, about 1.6 times the score of Lightspeed Venture Partners.

[Saarth Shah @saarth_]

We ran Sixtyfour on Exa’s people and company search benchmarks.

82.8% of our people search results matched the criteria. Exa’s published score: 63.3%.

That is roughly 20 more relevant people for every 100 results.

We came out ahead on all six measures in the chart.

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

Making today’s insurance processes faster is only part of the AI opportunity.

Fulcrum co-founder and CEO Arjun Mangla argues that today’s impressive automation gains could become tomorrow’s baseline. The bigger opportunity is to rethink how insurance works.

Take a business adding five trucks to its fleet. Today, updating its coverage means emails, forms, and repeated follow-ups between the business, its broker, and its insurer. Arjun envisions insurance connected to a company’s business systems, so coverage can adjust automatically as the business changes.

Hear more about what that future could look like on AI in the Real World, out now:

→ YouTube: https://t.co/akt2SHatfw
→ Spotify: https://t.co/HUMl7VH2Rf
→ Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/nhSmrCyZ0Q

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

Some entrepreneurs are born. Arjun Mangla, co-founder and CEO of Fulcrum, shares how his father’s passion for building a company gave him the foundation to start his own.

Stay tuned for our latest AI in the Real World episode, coming soon.

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

We're excited to have led IPID's $16M Series A! Today, payments have gotten much faster, but banks still don’t always have the information they need before money moves. IPID enables companies to verify who they're paying, whether or not the account is open, and what the account's currency is before any money is sent.

The company already reaches more than 4B accounts, covering 85% of the world's banked population, and they're continuing to grow. We're thrilled to partner with Damien Dugauquier and the IPID team.

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

None of our security systems today were built with agents in mind.

In our latest B2BaCEO podcast, @SkyflowAPI co-founder and CEO @anshublog joins @ashugarg to talk about what he’s learned securing sensitive customer data across data stores, models, and agents.

It aligns with a problem he’s been chasing for over two decades. “At some point you realize, you know what? There's probably a $100B company to be built just protecting the most sensitive data for customers at all these companies,” he shares.

Tune in to the full episode:

Spotify: https://t.co/8YSczlUORa

Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/elmqyWsSiw

YouTube: https://t.co/KS6CuILoF9

[Arjun Jain @Arjunjain1017]

We've raised $4.9M to build @tndminc - The AI system for hardware engineering.

Engineering ambition has outgrown the systems built to carry it. Tandem connects requirements, design intent, CAD changes, reviews, and validation.

The next great machine is waiting on its system.

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

The best way to understand new technology? Test it out for yourself.

@JayaGup10 is letting AI agents manage her life operations. The day Muse launched, she used it to successfully find and apply for a new apartment and kick off a bidding process for a parking spot in San Francisco.

Through hands-on learning, she's building insight about what the next great consumer AI agent will look like. For example, in her experiments with Instinct, the agent changed her passwords but didn't tell her. Communicating everything to the user—and being thoughtful about security and privacy concerns—will be key for adoption.

Watch the full interview with @theinformation: https://t.co/wWmAjIMqk9

[Foundation Capital @FoundationCap]

@maximor_ai is rearchitecting finance from the ground up.

Their co-founder and CTO, @ajkrish95, joined @JayaGup10 to unpack how they think about the models that power their automated finance platform.

Full episode of AI in the Real World dropping soon.

[Sasha Malysheva @aimalysheva]

meet @mostik_ai!

what happens when you put 12 PhDs in one room for four months? first place on the ARC-AGI leaderboard, which I can't say much about while the competition is still running. and this, which I can.

everyone's arguing about whether open models will catch up to frontier models. we think it's the wrong question. here's the one we pose: why does a frontier model have to generate your answer at all, when the only thing you need from it is the reasoning?

we do this by enabling models to communicate in latent space. through our protocol, hidden states pass straight from a frontier model into a small one running on your infrastructure -- no text between them, and neither model is fine-tuned. two models from different families, sharing reasoning, both left untouched.

how do we know it works? we tested it on a setup where a 753B model reads the problem, and a 4B edge-class model writes the answer. with this approach, we get results 80% as accurate as the frontier model, but at 20x faster performance.

we're committed to preventing frontier model lock-in and are already partnering with inference providers to accelerate open-weight adoption. we've done this between 15 of us, in four months, 12 PhDs and a Fields medalist, backed by @generalcatalyst

WIRED has the first external account of the company and the work: https://t.co/tP8nItCsDl
full writeup, the setup, and all the numbers: https://t.co/C9NZ5vtV1V