Eniac Ventures

From our first fund in 2010 at $1.6m to announcing $220m today, we remain steadfast in our mission to serve founders at the earliest stages. We are grateful to our founders, LPs, co-investors and the community for letting us continue doing what we love. techcrunch.com/2024/04/24/see…

Thank you to our dear friend @fnthawar, Head of Engineering at @Shopify, running an org of some of the world's best 3000+ engineers, for speaking with our founders yesterday at @EniacVC in SoHo. Six lines stuck with me: 1) Pairing an engineer with a weak model is like starting Bellingham over Messi. Shopify uses zero open source models for code. Only frontier. 2) They distilled one workflow down and cut costs from $30M a year to $1M. 3) Top engineers are up 2 to 3x. The bottom third is up maybe 15 percent. The gap is widening fast. 4) He wants teams of 12 to become teams of 4. Product, design, data, and eng, collapsed into one role. 5) Every interview now has three rounds. No AI. AI optional. AI mandatory. 6) Every PR still has one human name on it. That hasn't changed. The floor is rising but the ceiling is infinite. Even more bullish on the future of software. Thank you Farhan!

I met @tejpaul in New York in the early 2010s. We were both building startups. Two guys figuring it out as we went. Half the time we had no idea what we were doing. We learned together anyway. Then he left for Google. Years later, on a @PitchandrunNYC, we were a sounding board as he worked his way into space. We always knew he was special. But watching him command thousands of people for that operation was purely magical. June 2025. Cape Canaveral. A Falcon 9 carrying four astronauts to the ISS, including Shubhanshu Shukla, just the second Indian astronaut ever to reach space. As a kid of Indian immigrants, watching that rocket climb hit different. Tej was CEO of Axiom Space, and he ran that mission. We happened to see him literally the same day he was leaving Axiom. And before he told his wife, before there was a company, before he even knew he wanted to build again, we told him we were in. No deck. No name. No plan. Just Tej. An N of 1 human with the most epic space network and passion on the planet. An undeniable fervor to create space access's first marketplace and fintech platform. Today, Nebex announces its $30M seed. @EniacVC co-led with @GVteam. We've said it before. We back founders doing their life's work. We've had a front row seat to Tej doing his for more than a decade. To the moon! 🚀 (Article link in comments)

nir zicherman (@NirZicherman), co-founder and ceo of Oboe, joins us as the next guest in our series spotlighting creative leaders building in AI. nir taught himself to program in law school, co-founded Anchor, sold it to Spotify, and went on to build the audiobooks business there (thank you nir, i use it every day). now he’s building Oboe, a consumer learning platform rooted in the belief that billions of people already use the internet to learn, and yet none of the tools they reach for were built to teach them. Oboe stands out as one of the rare consumer AI products going broad and global rather than narrow, built by a founder building for the ambitious, long term. link to full interview in the thread.

These guys have been badly out-executing the rest of the category since we led their seed round. No wonder Ramp's data ranks them the fastest-growing AI GTM product, and they just announced their Series B. Super excited to keep backing them!

Today we're thrilled to announce Attention's $30M Series B, led by RTP Global with participation from Aglae, Alven, Eniac Ventures, and Linea. We started Attention with the goal of automating work out of your sales conversations, and analyzing calls to fill the CRM was only the beginning. Insights-only tools aren't enough - AI shouldn't just watch the call, it needs to take action. By not only automating admin work, but also running the next play, we give revenue teams a closed-loop system that gets smarter every time. This funding takes us to the next step: an autonomous action engine that surfaces and executes your rep's highest-impact next moves. We've 4x'd our ARR over 12 months, grown our ACV 10x, and now run over 20 million agent actions a month for 500+ customers, including incredible companies like BambooHR, Lovable, Scale AI, Abridge, and Elise AI. A special thanks to all of our customers (including the founders and operators who angel invested in this round!) for your continued trust, our team for your hard work, and our existing and new investors for all your help. So much more to come! ⚡️

"The next billion-dollar companies won't look anything like the SaaS companies you know." That's @jakesaper, GP at @emergencecap — one of the firms that backed the SaaS era in the first place (Salesforce, Zoom, Veeva, Gusto, Doximity, Bill etc). So when he says the playbook is changing, I listen. We just dropped Human Unicorn 🦄 EP33 and Jake didn't hold back: → The one trait that separates good founders from great ones (most people get this wrong) → Why AI is quietly rewriting how startups get built from day one → What "founder-market fit" actually means when real money is on the line → The fundraising advice he'd give founders right now If you're building or investing in this market, this is 34 minutes well spent. Link in comments below. 🦄

Founder mistake: board meetings become status updates. Send the deck early, require everyone reads it, then spend the time tackling the 1-3 biggest questions facing the business.

not too late to join over 150+ RSVP'd founders for the grand finale @PitchandrunNYC X @Techweek_ run tomorrow AM, starting from Chelsea NYC!

team dinner at ambassadors clubhouse. curry > carry ???

Thrilled to welcome @mikeyyyzhao to @EniacVC! Michael spent 8 years as co-founder & CTO of @vimcal, a deeply technical, AI-native builder who shipped product at the edge of what’s possible. Now he’s bringing that founder’s instinct to the other side of the table. He’s also woven into the YC, Berkeley, and SF founder communities, and has been quietly writing first checks and helping founders go 0→1 long before it was his job title. Founders backing founders is how we started at Eniac. Couldn’t be more excited to have him continuing that tradition. Welcome, Michael 🎉

Some personal news: I'm joining @EniacVC ! I’ll be investing in founders at pre-seed and seed with a focus on applied AI, vertical SaaS, and agent infrastructure. I stepped away from @vimcal earlier this year after eight years as co-founder and CTO. Building, scaling, and leading Vimcal has been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my career. I'm so thankful for my co-founder @jaylbird11 , our customers, investors, and the entire Vimcal team. I'm staying on as an active advisor and board member, and remain incredibly bullish on what the team is building ahead. Why venture? When John and I started Vimcal, we got an unbelievable amount of help from the @ycombinator community and beyond. Since then, I've tried my best to pay it forward, helping founders with everything from YC apps to product, GTM, and recruiting, sharing the lessons and mistakes I've made along the way. Over time, I started to support founders beyond just giving advice. That often meant writing the first check into a company, before they’ve even incorporated. I want to take what I’ve learned and make supporting and backing founders my full-time mission. Why Eniac? Eniac was one of the first seed-only firms, backing founders since 2010 when seed was barely a category. The founding partners (@Hadley , @nihalmehta , and @timy0ung ) were all former founders themselves, with a conviction that founders need partners who understand the 0-1 stage and are willing to roll up their sleeves alongside them. It says something that repeat founders with successful exits, who could raise from anyone, keep coming back to Eniac for their first check. I can't wait to continue Eniac's tradition of being the first believer in founders. If you or someone you know is building something new, I'd love to chat! Don’t hesitate to DM me!

Excited to have so many people here for NY Tech Week, here's my latest tips on being a real New Yorker this week: 1) You heard real New Yorkers ride the subway or Citi Bike. Wrong. We ride the top deck of the big bus to go from meeting to meeting. To look extra legit wave at the people on the street. 2) Want a Knicks hat for that Chalamet courtside MSG look? Wack. The insta girls of Williamsburg and the West Village wear Jets gear head to toe this season. 3) Need dinner after a long day of networking? Skip the tiny spots with no sign and a line out the door, that's where confused tourists eat. Real New Yorkers go straight to the Times Square Bubba Gump and ask for the window table so the city can see you crushing life. You’re welcome

Hot take - I don’t really worry about model cos competing w/ enterprise AI startups Yes, they are now doing FDE work, but: (1) AGI/models are ultimate priority; and (2) they won’t build out integrations, workflows, etc for the long tail of use cases (especially vertical ones!)

🌟 Judges announced for our Vertical AI Pitch Competition 🤖 Vertical AI • June 2 • @BrownRudnickLLP Joining the panel: - @Hadley (@EniacVC) - @hayleybay (@firstround) - @jefielding (@EverywhereVC) - @jordanrcrook (@betaworks) Looking forward to an exciting day of pitches and conversations across Vertical AI!

The traditional VC fund org structure produces slow decisions, politics, and consensus-driven strategy. The current environment is moving way too fast for an org to operate with multiple CEOs. The biggest firms are moving to structures that look more like 500 person corporations. We on the other hand have organized ourselves like an 11 person startup, which in my experience is the most dynamic type of organization.

Companies are revolting against their AI bills. @coworkerapp just launched the cheaper path: same frontier quality, one-fifth the cost.

If the next decade’s value really is concentrated in a handful of hyperscalers and model companies worth tens of trillions each, where do you think their next hundred multi-billion-dollar acquisitions come from? Companies building value around AI infra, tooling, and end-user adoption at the edges right now, fundable today at seed valuations. That’s where I’m focused, and it’s exactly why small funds still matter.

IPO at 29. Sold to Yahoo for $270M. Built one of the world's top CDPs. Sold to Rokt. Then built a digital trading card marketplace. With his brother. That's @mkatz0630. When you've spent 20 years mastering how brands reach consumers at scale, you develop a rare instinct for where attention and identity are heading next. @Trovexyz is the marketplace for digital trading cards — and it's already killing it. Because the best founders don't follow the obvious path. They follow the obsession. That's the Human Unicorn thesis in one career arc. 🎙️ EP32 of the @HumanUnicornPod is live. We go deep on: → The Interclick IPO & $270M Yahoo exit → Building & selling mParticle to Rokt → Why he left data infra for digital trading cards → Building a marketplace — and building it with his brother → What Trove is building and why now 🔗 Link in comments 🦄

We have gyms today because, after the Industrial Revolution, people’s jobs became much less physically demanding. We’re now on track to remove the cognitive friction associated with jobs too. Therefore a new muscle gets weakened: the brain. Once all the research is definitive, people will realize that they need to strengthen that muscle just like any other. And we’ll all be waking up early to get some reps in at the brain gym.