XYZ Venture Capital

The next play community is growing worldwide in a BIG way We have in-person gatherings for top talent who are openly / secretly exploring starting / joining their next thing coming up in 30+ cities! Full list here: ??Bangalore: early March hosted by Pavithran ??NYC: mid-March by Dan Schreter ? San Francisco: mid-March by Lucy Wilmot, Camille Ricketts ? London: mid-March by Shreman Shrestha ? Los Angeles: mid-March, mid-April by Andy Apple ? DC: mid-March, mid-April by Amu Fowler ? Tel Aviv: mid-March by Rachel Kastner, Avigail Levine ? Houston: mid March by Darshan Honale, ? Quito: mid-March by Pablo Pinto ? Sydney: late-March by Rohit Ghosh ? Warsaw: mid-March by Kacper Zambrzycki ? Barcelona: late March by Brian Weisner ? Paris: late March by Julia Denoly, Hugo Mendes ? Brussels: late March, late April by Lorenzo D'Auria ? Istanbul: early April by Oz Silahtar ? Lisbon: early April by Jenny Romano ? Amsterdam: early April by ?? Greg Denton ? Toronto: mid-April by Vivek Gandhi, Isha Hans ? Dallas: mid-April by Peter Phillips ? Dublin: mid-April by Matteo Grassi ?? Lima: mid-April by Pablo Pinto ? Miami: mid-April by Adrian Calderon ? Copenhagen: mid-April by Asbjorn Holmlund ? South Bay: late April by Nalina Murthy ? Singapore: late April by Arjit Bhargava ? Delhi: April by Pavithran ? Mumbai: April by Pavithran, Shreevar ? Atlanta: April by Harris Osserman ? Boston: early May by Dan Allon ? Austin: early May by Tal Shmueli Huge thanks to our hosts who hand-curate each event ?? Will share the link to apply to join next play gatherings in the comments. Space is unfortunately limited. Reach out if you're interested in getting involved in hosting!

Today, we announced our $190m Series C at a 2.5B valuation led by Sequoia Capital. We started Peregrine when I was 26 years old. I didn’t know what “go to market” was. I didn’t know what an “MQL” was. I didn’t really know what “Series A/B/C/N” was. I did know how to code, and I had a passion for building mission-driven software. Below is my ID card for the San Pablo Police Department when we first embedded with them years ago. They jokingly put “Head of Technology” on it. While I was there, I built the initial versions of Peregrine. I also resized many PDFs to fit under the email limit, restarted routers, and ensured case files could be printed. Reflecting on this milestone, I’m most proud that the DNA of this company is rooted in the desk side presence we had in San Pablo. We continue to believe in taking radical ownership of the challenges faced by our public servants. This investment in Peregrine represents a continued commitment to delivering the best possible technology to the most important institutions. Thank you to our customers who do the hard work day in and day out to make our country a better place. Thank you to our investors who have supported this mission through financing and thought partnership. I look forward to many more years working together. Thank you to every teammate at Peregrine who makes this possible. You have chosen to spend your time furthering this mission, and I am deeply grateful for that. Thank you to my co-founder Nick for working side-by-side with me since the beginning. You’ve always understood the importance of building durable, powerful, and user-friendly software. Thank you to my wife, Claire, for her (mostly) unwavering support of this dream from day one—back when it was just Nick, me, and an idea. Wouldn’t have been able to do it without you.

Babe wake up!! Community DRIVES growth!! ?? Introducing Plot's Community Hub where teams collaborate to turn superfans into your most powerful growth engine. Here's the problem: Community management requires consistent nurturing—building relationships, engaging, rewarding, gifting and making people feel seen regardless of their follower count. But teams work in silos. Influencer marketing sends PR packages. Community managers engage on social. Rewards teams handle perks. CX jumps in when needed. No one sees the complete picture, and brands struggle to show ROI from these fragmented efforts. Yet we know every touchpoint matters. When brands nurture their community, they get more UGC, brand loyalty, and sales. In fact—this is Plot's main GTM. So I called Gabriel Gomez (one of our early social listening users) about proving community ROI. The idea hit me: we already help MCoBeauty spot their fans in untagged content, what if we connected those insights to actual relationship building? Here's how we bring it all together with Community Hub: ?? Spot your true superfans powered by our social listening (based on brand engagement, not just followers) ?? Spot moments to surprise and delight superfans with our peeking feature ?? See brand partnership history before proposing new collabs ?? Track every team interaction in one place We'll continue building the tools to prove what we've always known: community isn't just nice to have, it's your growth strategy. ?? Peek here: https://lnkd.in/e4d9GbSu

Today we announce Rune to the world and the closing of our $6.2M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz with investments from Point72 Ventures and XYZ Venture Capital. Rune is grateful to have such incredible investment partners, all of whom have deep experience in the defense technology space. Rune is here to revolutionize military logistics, bringing to bear elite Silicon Valley tech talent solely focused on innovating for and with our military logistics warfighters. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/e-aquwPK

Excited to announce our $21.5M Series A and rebrand to Venn ?? We launched Venn 2 years ago Our mission is to build the best financial platform for Canadian businesses to manage their money. For decades, Canadian businesses have struggled with outdated banking systems that are slow, expensive, and rigid. High fees on basic transactions, in-branch visits to send payments, poor FX rates, and a lack of modern financial tools have made managing money a constant headache. Venn changes that by offering a modern, seamless, and cost-effective banking experience—built to save businesses time and money. I’m most excited about the impact we are making on our customers. We’ve built a great product that is serving more than 4,000 businesses — including Sherpa, MedEssist, and Alan. This fundraising round and rebrand mark a pivotal turning point for us at Venn. We are deepening our commitment to empowering Canadian businesses, and providing the specific financial tools needed to grow, thrive, and compete on a global scale. ? A warm welcome our investors joining us in this round: - Dan Ahrens from Left Lane Capital (joining our Board) - Ross Fubini from XYZ Venture Capital? - Ben Belec and Michaela Hirsh from Intact Ventures - Zachary Bratun-Glennon from Gradient who was our earliest supporter and is making his third investment in Venn to date Special shout out Charley Ma and Nik Milanovi? who are always a text or phone call away whenever needed and have backed us when this was just an idea. Learn more about the fundraise and our future (blog post and media linked in comments)

Each year, the startup landscape shifts and founders adapt to a new climate of investor sentiment, regulatory pressures, and sociocultural phenomena. So, to get a sense of what early stage startup founders can expect in 2025, we spoke with investor JeanClaude Dorsainvil from XYZ (https://www.xyz.vc/), an early-stage B2B, enterprise software and public sector focused investment fund. XYZ does their best work at the pre-seed and seed stage and invests deeply in a handful of founders each year. Before JeanClaude could share his thoughts on 2025, we first had to debrief 2024. “My view of 2024 is that it was a year of a great tectonic shift.” For the large incumbent, JeanClaude explains that entire business models were attacked by market conditions or regulation or startup bureaucracy, with no recourse. He continues, “Then there were folks who were waiting for their moment, saying ‘You may have had ownership of this idea but we figured out new tactics to take advantage of the rubble, the new infrastructure, this shifting landscape.’ and so it really was a year that nimble teams started to lean into their expertise.” We spoke at length about the benefits of nurturing a founder’s deep sector expertise. But what if this expertise is not available? JeanClaude responds, “Being a sector expert is not always the thing that carries you through a successful fundraise or through the successful evolution of a business.” Alternatively, there is so much potential in the complete novice, someone who “sees an opportunity where deep sector experts are overlooking another possibility of how something can be done.” For the complete novice, he concludes, “if your superpower is, ‘I can out-hustle people’, go do that.” One thing we know well at StartupOS, is that for novices and veterans alike, access to capital resources is still one of the greatest focuses for startup founders. So we asked JeanClaude about the increased competition we’re seeing for venture dollars and the greater emphasis on startup traction in the fundraising process. Traction is important, JeanClaude acknowledges, but “People are innovating at such a rapid speed that the duration to get from idea to prototype to first set of customers has drastically reduced.” In other words, consider leveraging new innovation in your approach to the product development process itself, in order to facilitate traction in the absence of that early capital which might previously have been required. “Innovation cycles are the very nature of the industry that we work in.” This is how JeanClaude began our discussion. To close our call, he remarked “Everybody is figuring out how to address the velocity of company evolution.” “That's really where I'm optimistic. Who's going fast, who wants to go faster, and how can we help them do that?” To listen to our full one hour conversation with JeanClaude and to position your startup for success in 2025, join our StartupOS newsletter (https://lnkd.in/ewTjQ5tF).

Today, I'm thrilled to announce NationGraph is live ?? A bit of background on why we are building NationGraph. 5 years ago, I founded Buyer with a simple question: How can we make the uncommon knowledge of software pricing, common? This idea was inspired by Rich Barton, who built Expedia, Glassdoor and Zillow by empowering consumers with better, more transparent information. Buyer was later acquired by Ramp, where we scaled it to tens of thousands of customers, all eager to save money on one of their biggest expenses: software. Seeing how transformational this was, and so many different vendors, I started wondering - what if the same pricing intelligence could be applied to the things we interact with every day? Why is DMV software so bad and how much did it cost? Why can’t I just text a number to renew my license? Why doesn’t the DMV have Calendly? Who are the vendors powering our daily lives? How much does a traffic light cost? (A standard four-way intersection signal costs $207,300, by the way.) So my co-founder, Eden Ding, and I dug in. He has this great line: "If you trace where the money goes, you'd have an accurate view of how the world works". Following the money revealed that there are incredible companies that could transform services like the DMV overnight, but they either don’t know they can sell to the government or have no idea how to navigate the process. And here’s what else we found: While modern B2B sales teams have AI tools that practically do their job for them, government vendors are stuck with the worst tools, still using spreadsheets, archaic portals, and messy CRMs—just to understand where the opportunities are. Selling to local governments feels like driving down a dark highway without your headlights on. And with the Launch of NationGraph – that ends today. NationGraph tells you everything happening at any public sector entity: ? Who bought your competitor’s product ? What issues might trigger a vendor switch ? When contracts are up for renewal ? Where the real decision-makers sit ? Why there was no RFP (and how to win anyway) And we don’t just surface insights—we give you unified workflows to act on them. Why now? Federal agencies are becoming gateways, not gatekeepers. A massive portion of federal dollars (from DOT, FEMA, ED, etc.) flows straight to local entities. As agencies get reshuffled, these funds will still move—just with even more spending power concentrated at the state and local level. And I’m proud to share that we’ve partnered with the best investors in the public sector to better serve the vendors who power the nation. XYZ Venture Capital, Reach Capital, and Go Global Ventures (Diede), as well as builders of iconic public sector companies - Dan, Tyler, Rafael of Clever Inc. and Nate, Mike (OpenGov and Camino). If you sell to the public sector, we’d love to show you how NationGraph can save you time and level up your sales process ?? https://lnkd.in/e4gU6KNM