Matt Caspari

Tech Weekend June 2026 Recap: VC Panel: How VCs Make Decisions — From First Meeting to Term Sheet. @mat Gary Gardner, Founder & CEO of Lead Generation Hubs, moderated the session with a simple premise: most fundraising decisions are made in rooms founders never see, and a "no" often has far less to do with the pitch than with everything happening around it. The hour was about making that hidden process visible. Matt Caspari (@deeptechvc) Managing Partner at @alumniventures, leads the firm's Deep Tech and Strawberry Creek Ventures funds and invests from seed to pre-IPO. Having raised over $100M as a two-time founder himself, he walked the room through what actually happens inside the partnership meeting after you leave. His takeaway for founders was about the Champion: your real job in the room is to give the partner who believes in you everything they need to defend the deal when you're no longer there to do it yourself. Victoria Smith, Partner at @ZacuaVentures, focused on the earliest stages across PropTech, ConTech, and AI-native software. Bringing both an operator's and an investor's lens, she helped founders decode investor feedback that isn't direct — what "keep us posted" really signals — and how to run a process so multiple investors move at the same time. Her message was about Momentum: a round comes together when interest is concurrent, not when it's chased one conversation at a time. Allen Smith, Founder & Managing Partner at Musa Capital, invests in tech-enabled businesses built by diverse founding teams and brings a decade in go-to-market from LinkedIn and Microsoft. He spoke to what investors decide about you before you ever start pitching, and offered a practical playbook for international founders on how to set up, position, and build credibility when raising in the US market. From there the session moved into the term sheet — what genuinely matters to negotiate and what founders tend to over-index on. The panel's shared view was that the negotiation itself is the first real test of the partnership: how you handle it signals how you'll work together long after the money is in the bank. Thank you to Matt Caspari, Victoria Smith, Allen Smith, and Gary Gardner for pulling back the curtain on how venture decisions really get made, and for giving our founders the tactical tools to navigate the path to a "yes." Tech Weekend returns September 10–11, 2026 with more conversations like this one. Details and sign up at techweekend.org

Deep Tech Eats VC 🚀 Two years after publishing "Why Deep Tech Is Eating Venture Capital," Sam Vatcha and I went back to the thesis and looked at the latest data. The highlight: deep tech has jumped from ~20% of global VC funding two years ago to 36% today — and it's still accelerating. Full blog below with the data and our thoughts on opportunities in Defense, Energy, and Semiconductors.

🏌️ ⛳️ Want to join @alumniventures next golf outing at @Stanford Golf Course? Let us know! Interest form here: forms.gle/kggon3erXByKVK…

🚨 SF Deep Tech Week event! We're hosting The Future Is Built with our friends from @BoostVC , @DCVC , @VenturesVc , and @RadicalVentures . Meet deep tech startups across 🤖 Robotics, 🧠 AI Infrastructure, 🛡️ Defense, ⚡ Energy, 🚀 Space, and more... ⏰ 5 to 8 PM on Wednesday June 24 Request to attend 👇

Coming up at Tech Weekend June 2026: VC Panel: How VCs Make Decisions — From First Meeting to Term Sheet What really happens on the other side of the table when you're raising. This session covers: • What VCs decide about you before you start pitching • Why most good meetings don't turn into checks — and what changes that • What happens inside the partnership meeting after you leave the room • How to run a process so multiple investors move at the same time • How to read investor feedback when they're not being direct • What to negotiate on a term sheet, and what doesn't matter • For international founders: how to set up, position, and raise in the US Meet the Speakers 🎤 Matt Caspari @deeptechvc — Managing Partner, @alumniventures Investment Focus: Deep Tech from seed to pre-IPO Matt leads the Deep Tech and Strawberry Creek Ventures funds at Alumni Ventures, backing mission-driven founders across agriculture, AI, aviation, biotech, defense, energy, longevity, robotics, and space. A two-time venture-backed founder/CEO — including founding CEO of Aurora Biofuels (100+ employees, $100M+ raised, acquired by Reliance Industries) — and a former leader on Nike's innovation team. 🎤 Victoria Smith — Partner at @ZacuaVentures Investment Focus: PropTech, ConTech, AI-native software, marketplaces, consumer & enterprise SaaS Victoria was an early hire at both Jackson Square Ventures and Zacua Ventures, where she led pre-seed investments in software for the built environment and ran Launchpad, JSV's earliest-stage vehicle for student-led startups. A former founder of an acquired company herself, she brings both the operator's and the investor's perspective to the table. 🎤 Allen Smith — Founder & Managing Partner, @Musa_Capital Investment Focus: Early-stage, tech-enabled businesses built by diverse founding teams Allen is Founder and Managing Partner at Musa Capital, an early-stage firm investing in diverse founding teams building tech-enabled businesses. He brings 10+ years in go-to-market and sales operations from LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Waterstone Management Group, where he built and scaled major commercial initiatives. Moderator 🎤 Gary Gardner — Founder & CEO, Lead Generation Hubs Gary is a seasoned sales leader and Army Reserve Captain building a platform to empower sales professionals. With a PhD in Organization and Management and experience leading high-performing teams as VP of Sales at Hyqoo and Toptal, he brings both academic and practical expertise to business development. 📅 Date & Time: Thursday, June 18, 2026 | 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM 📍 Location: 75 Arbor Road, Menlo Park, CA Who should attend? If you're fundraising now — or about to start — and want to understand how investors actually decide, from the first meeting through the partnership discussion to the term sheet, this session is for you. International founders raising in the US will find it especially useful. Details and sign up at: techweekend.org

With a nod to @leopoldasch, we're releasing Biological Awareness - our musings on the next decade at the frontiers of AI and life sciences. Six ideas we explore: → Task-specific experimental tokens are the new gold in biology → Bio AI data factories will pioneer new business models → Smoothing out the jagged frontier for pharma enterprises is where fortunes will be made → Clinical trial intelligence will be financialized before it is operationalized → The bioweapons threat is real, accelerating, and underpriced → The BIOSECURE Act will fundamentally reshape supply chains 2026 marks ten years of Obvious investing at this intersection. A lot has happened. Even more is coming. Big thanks to: @kyosu, @syntenyAI, @GabriCorso, @inductivebio, @mithrl_ai , @instancebio , @strangemonad, @exnx and many others for their help!

Congrats to @hsu_jonny and the @blankbio_ team on their $7.2M seed and strategic collaboration with @PacBio! 🚀 @alumniventures is proud to participate alongside @definevc, @LeonisCapital, Nova Threshold, @ripple_ventures, @SignalFire, and @ycombinator. blank.bio/seed-announcem…

I'm super excited to announce our $7.2M seed round + a strategic collaboration with @PacBio! Together, we'll be generating long-read, bulk-RNA sequencing directly from patient tumours spanning multiple cancer indications. This is extremely rich data that will be used to further train and evaluate our models. @blankbio_, we are focused on training RNA foundation models that can learn and predict disease progression and treatment response in patients. These are the biological insights that will enable us to design smaller, more efficient clinical trials with higher success rates. Huge thank you to all of our investors who have been amazing supporters from the beginning. For more details, please check out the links below. Press release: blank.bio/seed-announcem… Blog from the team: blank.bio/accelerate-cli… We're hiring: ycombinator.com/companies/blan…

I've been posting less and writing more. I've found it helpful to slow everything down and take the time for proper reflection. Today I'm putting out a review of the last quarter: Growing AI Anxiety Turning LLMs into Computers Anthropic and the Department of War Iranian Conflict The Incoming Techlash It's easy to feel like the response to this is for tech to "get tough" But I want to encourage the next generation to do something simple: keep your soul

Silent Ventures is privileged to co-lead @SwarmAero's Series A alongside our friends at @TwoSigmaVC. We're happy to welcome @ScribbleVC @friendsfamcap and several others to this journey. Swarm has quietly developed one of the most advanced Group 5 drones in market, in addition to a leading autonomous command and control platform. These capabilities are critical for US defense and Western sovereignty. Congrats to the founding team on this achievement. Americans are safer because of the good people at Swarm. cc @foundersfund @khoslaventures @constructcap @MaCVentureCap @QuietCapital @alumniventures

Modern conflicts are decided in the air. Swarm Aero is building a radically effective way to scale air power. We're proud to share that we've raised $35 million in Series A funding, led by @TwoSigmaVC and @SilentVentures and joined by our seed investors @khoslaventures, @ScribbleVC, @friendsfamcap, @constructcap, @coatuemgmt, @foundersfund, @alumniventures, and @MaCVentureCap! This brings total capital raised to $59M to accelerate the deployment of our large UAV and the swarm software that enables drones to be controlled at scale. While smaller drones pack smaller punches and require assistance to get to the fight, our large, multimission UAV can cover long distances and defeat high-value targets. Designed to manufacture at unprecedented volume and cooperate with superhuman dexterity, our UAV achieves asymmetric impact at dramatically lower cost than traditional aircraft. The future world order depends on who controls air power. Swarm is building the technologies needed for deterrence and dominance in the 21st century. And we’re hiring! Read more in @axios' Future of Defense exclusive on the raise (thank you @demarest_colin!) and our press release: axios.com/2026/03/11/swa… businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

Sharing this publicly––hope it's not needed but helps you if it is. Lux team sent this memo to all Lux family founders yesterday "We send notes like this not because something is wrong, but because the COST of preparation is trivially LOW and the VALUE of being positioned well is asymmetrically HIGH. This isn’t a macro call. It’s a set of observations about correlated risks that are worth your attention. And a set of practical suggestions regardless of whatever happens next."

I'm hiring a Venture Associate to work with our team in Menlo Park. 👉 Learn more and apply here: grnh.se/0mi123b79us Please share this with anyone who might be interested! 🚀

Congrats @deepgramscott and the @DeepgramAI team on their $130M Series C at a $1.3B valuation! 🚀 deepgram.com/learn/press-re…

Some benchmarks for deep tech company fundraising across 900+ rounds raised by US startups in 2025. Scattered thoughts: Deep tech companies took in 36% of total funding this year to Carta companies. That's up from only 17% a decade ago. Deep tech is riding a wave. There has been a resurgence of interest into specific deep tech categories lately (American Dynamism, defense+aerospace, etc). Maybe some of that is the idea that moats in software are declining in the age of AI. Not every deep tech category had a good year. Medical Device funding continued to struggle in 2025 and IoT was flat. While deep tech is not quite as SF-centric as software startups tend to be, this data still reflects more rounds in the Bay Area than anywhere else. Deep tech companies, particularly Biotech, used to favor convertible notes over SAFEs. That has flipped in recent years, with every deep tech sector now solidly seeing more volume at early stages on SAFEs. AI is in this data but not to the same extent as in software-only companies. Deep tech startup fundraising is usually more dilutive at the early stages than software-only fundraising (meaning a founder will have to sell more of the company for a similar amount of money). Interestingly, the total amount of capital needed for a deep tech startup to make it all the way to IPO is not usually much more than the total capital needed for a software startup. So more dilutive upfront, but not always more capital-intensive. Regulatory concerns play a bigger role in many deep tech sectors than in pure software, but interaction with the government on state and federal levels is getting fractionally easier for some over time.

Join Us in Deep Tech Venture Capital! We're recruiting Venture Fellows to work with us throughout 2026. 👉 Learn more and apply here before the January 5 deadline: job-boards.greenhouse.io/alumniventures… Please share this with anyone who might be interested! 🚀

Congrats to the @GroqInc team on their $20B acquisition by @nvidia! 🚀 @alumniventures backed Groq in 2021 and it's been incredible to watch them build their AI inference solution. cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvi…