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…

Today, it was announced that @EniacVC portfolio company @call_hyper has been acquired by Motorola Solutions (NYSE: MSI). @8ENs previously co-founded Clearco, which reached a $2B valuation and became one of Canada's most prominent fintech unicorns. He also ran for federal office in Canada — against the same Congressman he used to bring water to as a teenage Page in the Canadian House of Representatives back in 2001. His co-founder @DamianMcCabe built and scaled Connected to 200 people before ThoughtWorks acquired it, after product leadership roles at Xtremelabs (part of the original @sundeep and @avarma mafia!), Uber, Meta, and Instagram. But what made us say yes wasn't the resume — it was the mission. Ben wanted to be a cop as a kid. He literally had his mom sew yellow stripes on navy sweatpants so he could wear the uniform. His whole career has been building at the intersection of tech and public safety. When he read that his hometown was looking to use AI to reduce 911 wait times, he dropped everything. That's founder-market fit you can't fake. From a cobbled-together prototype in fall 2023, to their first live 911 call in December 2024, to being acquired by the global leader in public safety communications — in under 3 years. Hyper's voice AI handles up to 75% of non-emergency 911 calls autonomously, reclaiming capacity for real emergencies at a time when most PSAPs are staffed at only 75%. Now that technology will reach every corner of the country through Motorola's Command Center portfolio. Congrats Ben Sanders, Damian McCabe, and the entire Hyper team. You built something that literally saves lives. Proud to have had your backs from day one and (after you take a weekend off), very excited for your next chapter! 🚀 PS- thank you @boardyai for the original introduction to Ben!

Thanks to so many of our Bay Area coinvestors and LPs for coming out to hang with us this morning, and grab those authentic NYC popup bagels! 🥯 #bagelsandbanter

New York is about to make a massive mistake. The NY State Senate is advancing a proposal to decouple from federal QSBS (Section 1202) — the tax provision that lets startup founders exclude gains on qualifying exits. If this passes, founders would owe 10-13% in combined state and city tax on exits that are tax-free at the federal level and in nearly every other major tech state. Even worse: it's retroactive to January 1, 2025. This comes right as the federal government just expanded QSBS benefits and New Jersey moved to full conformity. New York wants to go in the opposite direction. As a seed investor in NYC who has backed hundreds of companies, I can tell you: founders are mobile. If New York becomes one of the most punitive states for startup exits, the best founders will simply build somewhere else — and the jobs, tax revenue, and innovation will follow. NYC has built something special over the last two decades. This proposal puts it all at risk for a short-sighted revenue grab. If you're a founder, investor, or anyone who cares about the NYC tech ecosystem — please sign the TechNYC open letter before Monday below 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾 Keep building, NYC 🗽

@Hadley @BadleyHarris We’ve seen worse

@BadleyHarris Not that bad of a take

Bezos quietly raising $100B to acquire manufacturing firms and retrofit them with AI. Project Prometheus is the clearest signal yet that the real AI value capture is moving from software into atoms. The race to own the physical layer just got very expensive.

AI is automating every VC function. Sourcing, diligence, portfolio support. All of it. The last thing standing is real relationships. Deep trust with the startup community. Post-ASI the last VC standing will be @nihalmehta. No one has built deeper relationships in this industry

The latest Carta data on $70B+ invested into Seed through Series C startups in 2025 highlights something many of us in NYC see every day. NYC is now: • #1 in Fintech • #1 in Consumer • #2 overall startup ecosystem • Top 2 in AI, SaaS, Biotech, and Healthtech But the most interesting takeaway isn’t the rankings, it’s the supply and demand imbalance. Founder demand in NYC still significantly exceeds early-stage VC supply. Which makes NYC one of the largest structural arbitrage opportunities in venture today. 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

What do you get when you put the best founders you can find in one room? At least $192 billion in value created (!!) and some really good pasta. Last night, @dhaber and I cohosted an @a16z and @EniacVC "Human Unicorn Dinner' at the acclaimed Torrisi in NYC — an intimate gathering of founders and operators who have built billion-dollar companies, navigated acquisitions, and rebuilt from scratch. In the room: Operators who scaled Axiom Space, ZocDoc, Maven, Databricks, Notion, Stripe, Reddit, Muse, Bond, Bluecore, mParticle, Moloco, Metaplane, Wealthsimple, Slice. Founders now building the next wave — Upscale, PlanZ, Octogen, Crossterra, Trove, Sitelevel, and more. But the number that hit me hardest wasn't the valuation figure. It was the quality of the conversation. We went deep on AI — the real stuff, not the headlines: → Has AI lowered the bar to build a unicorn, or raised it? → What does it mean to be a 'technical' founder when AI can write the code? → How do we take care of humans after the AI job disruption? We also talked about when to sell and when to keep going. What it really means to 'win.' And laughed about the failures nobody writes about. Here's what I keep coming back to: building community with founders is critical, especially at the highest levels where it can often be the loneliest. That's why rooms like this matter so much. No pitches. No performance. Just people who've actually done it, being real with each other over (really) good food. Thank you to every founder who showed up and helped build this community of founders operating at the highest levels, right in our backyard in New York City. Can't wait until the next one! 🗽🦄🍝

Many LPs still don’t understand one of the biggest advantages of seed-focused funds. It’s much easier for us to sell secondaries compared to large multistage funds. We’ve returned entire funds to LPs solely from selling secondaries in rounds where the larger funds who followed us couldn’t sell for signaling reasons. When a multistage fund sells, the market notices. When a seed fund takes chips off the table alongside the founders, it’s expected. Real returns to LPs, not just markups on paper.

At @EniacVC we’re investing in companies built for a world of abundant intelligence. At the agentic layer, that means leaning into regulated industries like healthcare, government/defense, and financial services, where data friction is the moat, not the obstacle. The companies that will win here aren’t just building smart products. They’re willing to take on liability, to stand behind the output, own the outcome, and put skin in the game alongside their customers. At the tooling layer, it means things like security, privacy, and compliance. The model companies can’t be the ones solving this. You don’t grade your own homework. These need to be independent layers, and the need only grows as agents move deeper into mission critical environments. In the age of abundant intelligence, the hardest areas to build in will likely be where the most durable companies emerge.

Fantastic @nytimes feature (s/o @eringriffith!) this week on @eniacvc portco @evertune_ai - helping brands navigate marketing in an increasingly AI native world: "The change has also meant new opportunities for entrepreneurs like Mr. Stempeck, who co-founded Evertune in April 2024. Since then, the company has raised $20 million and has more than 200 clients.... Chatbots are insatiable for detailed information, particularly in areas where there is a void, Mr. Stempeck said. So businesses that want to influence what the programs spit out can flood the zone with minutiae. One luxury fashion brand went from publishing five pieces of content a month to around 100, he said, while automakers made sure to publish their entire owner manuals."

Today marks the 80th anniversary of ENIAC, the namesake to our firm and one of the most important milestones in computing history. The co-founders of @EniacVC including myself met at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, where ENIAC was built and unveiled in 1946. At the time, it was about 1,000x faster than prior mechanical computing methods and could perform roughly 5,000 calculations per second. What once took days could suddenly be done in minutes. Some wild perspective on that machine: • ~18,000 vacuum tubes • ~30 tons of hardware • ~1,800 square feet of space • ~150 kW of power consumption • Millions of hand-soldered joints And yet it started the digital age. Fast forward to today and a single NVIDIA GPU is estimated to be 25 billion times faster than ENIAC. The slope of computing progress since 1946 is almost hard to comprehend. What inspires me most is not just the speed gains, but the mindset. ENIAC’s creators were pushing the limits of what seemed possible, building for a future they could barely imagine. As investors focused on the next generation of builders, it feels fitting that our firm carries that name. A reminder that today’s breakthroughs can become tomorrow’s infrastructure. Here’s to the pioneers who started it and all of you founders pushing the insane frontier of AI today. 🚀

At @EniacVC, we do one thing: lead seed rounds and then help founders find product-market fit. Everything we build as a firm is optimized around those outcomes. That's why I'm really excited to share that @_dorianruth has joined us as our Head of Platform. Dorian brings a great mix of venture experience and GTM execution, exactly the combination that matters at the seed stage. He'll be working directly with our portfolio founders on business development, fundraising prep, customer intros, and the kind of strategic support that actually moves the needle early on. If you've built a company, you know how much of the hard stuff happens between the seed and the Series A. Having someone like Dorian fully dedicated to helping founders navigate that stretch is a big deal for us. Welcome to the team, Dorian!

The highest form of NPS in venture is when a founder you’ve backed chooses to work with you again. Proud to back Chieh again. We were fortunate to seed him at Boxed and excited to support him now as Pelgo, an AI-powered career transition agent helping people reskill and move into AI-first roles

Proud to have been part of this 🙏🇺🇸

While most VC firms are hiring “Heads of AI” to build internal tooling, at @EniacVC everyone on our team builds. Nobody knows your pain points better than you do. And if you’re investing in AI, you need to feel what’s changing, not just read about it.

Some founders don’t slow down, they reload. I’ll never forget that conversation with @jimpayne a few years ago. He knew he had to get back in the arena to seize the largest computing shift in history and build the AI-native platform to monetize it. After building MoPub and MAX, he wasn’t chasing another company, he was chasing a legacy. That conviction is why we backed him. And today, we’re proud to announce the general availability of @cloudx. LFG! 🚀

I think most people, including some really smart ones, are misunderstanding what's going on with Clawdbot/Moltbot. From what I can tell there is no new intelligence in any of these tools. They're using the same models we had a month ago. It's just a very well thought out system for those models to make tool calls - lane-based queues for reliability, semantic browser snapshots instead of screenshots, sandboxed shell execution, and clean abstractions over different model providers. The innovation is infrastructure and UX, not AI. It's given an easy way for most people to give models computer access, so the volume of tool calls has gone up dramatically. The models could always do this - someone just made it frictionless. This isn't some sort of takeoff. It's just very good software engineering.

We’re in the early days of transitioning to an intelligent agentic web. Eventually I believe you’ll have a single multimodal interface for everything you do (potentially two: one for work, one for personal). That primary interface will be a knife fight between Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft with a potential carve out for vertical specific solutions. The rest of the value will be made up of tool/service/subagent providers. If you provide the best service, the assistant should send traffic your way. In some cases the assistants will try to subsume that second layer, so building lasting moats will be key. Companies that figure out how to be indispensable to the assistant layer will capture enormous value.