Themint

Very excited to welcome @AmericanExpress Ventures to the @Palm cap table! We @btv_vc led the pre-seed back in July '24 and have never been more excited about the business than we are today 34M SMBs in the U.S. deal with a mess of filings and renewals to stay in good standing. Banks, fintechs, and vsaas cos need to verify these businesses, but every provider is built on the same scraped, third-party data. Palm flips this by helping SMBs handle compliance for free and collecting first-party authorized identity data in return The result? Portable business identity. AmEx will be an amazing partner for the business. If you have any SMBs as your customers and want better business data for underwriting, insurance, etc., get in touch with @alxgoode businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

Relay serves 100k+ businesses today but I clearly remember our very 1st one. It was 2019. The product had been live for less than a month, and I was at a @Xero accounting conference, with just a laptop and a Relay t-shirt, pitching to accountants and bookkeepers, getting feedback. Then, one bookkeeper tells me: “You should really meet my client, Sarah. She’s completely fed up with her bank and their fees.” So we get on a call. I show Sarah the platform, and she says: “Look, the *only* thing I will use you for is ACH payments, to avoid all the fees I usually have to pay.” “And…” she stresses, “I am NOT going to use you for anything else.” And so, we onboard our first customer. And yes, at first she uses Relay to only send ACH payments. But over time, she starts to like the platform more. It’s more cost effective. Visibility is better. And if something goes wrong, she texts me, and the problem goes away. And slowly, over time, she ended up transitioning the rest of her everyday banking to Relay. Years later, two things from that experience still shape how I think about building a business: 1 - Don't be too precious about how people use your product. As a founder, pride can get in the way of seeing what customers actually care about. You have to let them lead the way. If customers really only want one thing from your product or service, let them start there. The rest comes later. Or it doesn't. Either way, you learn something. 2 - When you're small, responsiveness is a competitive advantage that others can't always offer. At that stage, you can personally show up when something goes wrong. Use it.

As my usage of @claudeai Cowork increases, so too is my dependence on our existing (and new) saas providers. Not for their dashboards, but for their ability to serve enriched, workflow-ready context via MCP Makes me wonder if the MCP-layer is fat enough to build new companies and new product formats to gather the ever growing volume of context in our world? Some musings below...

Today, we’re proud to launch Relay Capital. ⚡ Meet term loans for businesses that need fast, flexible funding, without the friction. Over the years, we’ve heard countless business owners tell us how hard it is to get the financing they need, when they need it. Your business can’t pause for a lender's timeline. Every day, you're thinking about how to kick off your next stage of growth—whether that's hiring, inventory expansion, renovations or a new location. So, when the next opportunity pops up, you can’t afford to miss it because of weeks-long back and forth with traditional lenders (who could still reject you at the end of it all). Relay Capital is the lending small businesses deserve: easy access to capital the moment it matters most. If you’re an existing customer and you prequalify, a term loan offer will be waiting for you in your dashboard. Businesses can prequalify for loans between $1,000 and $250,000, based simply on their Relay account activity.* You choose your terms and decide what to draw. Upon approval, you can receive funds in as little as 1 to 2 business days. Most business owners know exactly where they want to go, but they need access to capital to realize their ambitions. Relay Capital term loans are our first step toward fixing that. We're just getting started. — * Relay Capital funding is provided by Fundbox, an external third-party provider, or its bank partner, Lead Bank. All financing is subject to credit approval of a completed application. Fundbox and its bank partners base loan eligibility on their respective credit and risk policies, applicable legal requirements, and other business considerations. Financing may not be available in all states and may be subject to local restrictions where applicable. All loans are subject to credit approval and applicable terms and conditions. Borrowing involves fixed repayment obligations and applicable interest and/or fees. Approval timing based on typical experience; actual decision and funding times may vary.

RT @jbahrdestefano: Sat down with my guy @JasonGrohowski from @RhoFinance to talk pre-seed + seed fintech. A few things that came up: 1- L…

spouting the usual about why now is the best time to build + invest in fintech (who knows how or why I got the mic over @nbobba) shout out to @adamn + @DezFleming at @FirstMarkCap for letting us co-host! NYC🤝fintech @btv_vc 🤝 @FirstMarkCap 🙏 @Orrick @SiliconVlyBank

Thank you @bhargreaves for the feature here. We're proud of where we've gotten and we're just beginning the journey

Lots of people, including me, are very excited about how AI is transforming services businesses. The idea is that (i) the services TAM is so much bigger, and (ii) margins will improve bc AI - so let's throw a ton of money at the seemingly obvious opportunity. But it's not that simple! Not all of the TAM is addressable by technology. A chunk of services spend (I have no idea how to size or quantify) is paying for liability, credentials, and trusted brand names. It's buying cover, not output. Not all margin expansion is durable. As competitors adopt the same AI, services re-commoditize on price. As clients realize AI replaced their junior staff, they demand savings passed through. Compression comes from both sides. Growth still depends on people. AI raises the ceiling on what each person can handle, but doesn't remove it. All in all, this was meant to be a call to examine the opportunity with a closer lens and be more thoughtful about which business models make the most sense for different opportunities and which are best positioned to capture lasting value.

Congrats to @InScopehq on their $14.5M Series A led by @NorwestVP w/ participation from @stormventures, @lightspeedvp, and us @btv_vc! We led InScope's pre-seed and have doubled down at every round since. The original thesis was clear: financial reporting is expensive, manual, and painful. Companies spend $30B+ annually on audits and the profession has lost 300K accountants in two years. Mary and Kelsey built a rules engine to automate GAAP-compliant financial statements and audit-ready docs. Since then, deeply integrating AI has fundamentally expanded what's possible, going from automating specific outputs to tackling the full spectrum of manual work that bogs accountants down. The results: 5x customer growth in 12 months, working with major firms like CohnReznick, a top 15 national accounting firm, and saving accountants 20%+ of their time. Just getting started. Let's go!! techcrunch.com/2026/02/20/ins…

Preparing financial statements is a complex & tedious. @InScopehq uses AI to automate it. Firms like CohnReznick & companies like Cursor are already customers, many more top firms and companies are onboarding. Stoked that they've got another $14.5M from Norwest & co!

Before a16z tries to ™ “last mile” you can read about “last mile defensibility” and our thoughts on vertical AI durability @btv_vc here x.com/nbobba/status/…

The @btv_vc Q4 newsletter just dropped! Another packed quarter - here are a few highlights: ✍️ @nbobba went on a writing tear, sharing his best thinking yet on the future of vertical AI 💰 @monnai_corp, Reflow & @kaaj_ai all announced their latest funding rounds 🚀 Rely launched their product, an AI-powered platform that audits entire data rooms to close commercial real estate transactions up to 95% faster Catch up on all things BTV + our portfolio with the link below 👇 better-tomorrow-ventures.ghost.io/4q25-newslette…

Vertical AI was supposed to be the application-layer opportunity for VC funds raising this cycle. After the week we've had with the end of saas and what not, should Vertical AI companies be worried? Of course, but not all of them equally. Some thoughts x.com/nbobba/status/…

.@pitdesi is the co-founder of @btv_vc , one of Silicon Valley's favorite fintech investors. Previously, he built FeeFighters [acquired by Groupon], Innovative Auctions, and Thistle while having angel invested in companies such as Ramp, Flexport, and Mercury.

5 yrs ago, @ycwest pitched us @bankwithrelay, a B2B neobank for smbs. It sounded brutal - market too crowded + model too hard - but @iamjakestream wrote the check anyway End of '25: $1B+ in AUM & 100k+ customers 🤯 Last week we hosted a fireside chat with Yoseph - awesome + candid convo with some great takeaways: - Treat your channel partners as customers. - What customers ask for vs. what they actually use aren't the same thing. - If customers stick through a sh*tty product, there's something there. - SMB failure rates don't matter if you target the right segment. - Fintech is hard because the systems are complex and you have to earn trust every day. Want to read more? Check it out! lnkd.in/gMh2k-Ru