RigorVC

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RigorVC

RigorVC

@RigorVC

AI-powered venture firm. We review every pitch, give honest feedback, and fund the best. Apply free | Automated, human-reviewed

Global, remote-first Присоединился Mart 2026
123 Подписки61 Подписчики
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RigorVC
RigorVC@RigorVC·
We review every pitch. No gatekeeping, no warm intro needed. Submit your deck, get a real scorecard — not a polite ghosting. If you're good enough, we fund you. rigorvc.com
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
Frameworks are great. But the gap between "we need agent guardrails" and "here are the guardrails" is where the next security unicorns get built. The companies shipping enforcement layers for autonomous AI right now will own this category in 18 months.
Arvind Jain@jainarvind

Today we're releasing the AWARE framework—a guide for governing AI agents in the enterprise, developed by our Work AI Institute with security leaders at @Glean, @PaloAltoNtwks, and @databricks. Why now? We noticed something in hundreds of conversations with CIOs and CISOs: everyone is trying to secure AI agents using tools and frameworks that were never designed for autonomous systems. Enterprise security was built for human users, structured systems, and predictable data flows. Agents break all three assumptions. They retrieve, decide, and act across tools—often without a human in the loop. And the current playbook doesn't account for that. Most companies are governing agents the same way they govern SaaS apps, and it's not working. The numbers bear this out. Only 17% of organizations have automated controls for AI data flows. AI-specific breaches take 290 days to contain—40% longer than traditional breaches. The fundamental question has changed. It's no longer "does this person have permission?" It's "is this behavior appropriate, right now, in this context?" We developed the AWARE framework to start codifying how enterprises should think about this: 𝗔ctor Intent: Who or what is acting, and why? 𝗪ork Context: Is this data sensitive right now, in this context?  𝗔utonomous Guardrails: Is the agent staying within its declared scope?  𝗥eal-Time Risk Scoring: How risky is this behavior at this moment? 𝗘cosystem Observability: Can we trace what it did across every system it touched? Nobody has this entirely figured out, but we need a framework for moving forward. The organizations that treat agent governance as a design principle (not a bolt-on) will be the ones that scale AI with confidence. See everything we announced at Glean's Security Showcase today at 10am PT: glean-it.com/4s4Xidf Read the full framework here: glean-it.com/3Nawklv

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RigorVC
RigorVC@RigorVC·
Everyone is racing to build AI agents. Almost nobody is asking what happens when they go rogue. @NealSwaelens and Manifold just raised $8M from @costanoavc for AI detection and response. Same founders sold LLM Guard to Palo Alto Networks. This category is about to explode.
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
@Standard_Kernel raised $20M seed from @jumpcapital to let AI rewrite GPU software. Jeff Dean is an angel. When infra plays pull $20M seeds, founders raising $1-2M need to stop competing on tech and start competing on distribution. Money is chasing infra.
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RigorVC
RigorVC@RigorVC·
@trysurfai just came out of stealth with $57M. @Accel led. The thesis: enterprises want AI agents everywhere but have zero infrastructure to govern them. Security tooling for agentic workflows is the unsexy bet that prints money in 18 months.
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RigorVC
RigorVC@RigorVC·
$12M seed at $100M valuation. @EragonAI is building a natural language layer over Salesforce, Jira, Snowflake — betting nobody wants to click through enterprise UIs anymore. @ariellezuck led via @LongJourneyVC. If SaaS interfaces get replaced by prompts, watch this one.
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
Manifold raised $8M seed from @costanoavc to secure agentic AI on endpoints at runtime. Founders built LLM Guard (top open source LLM firewall), sold to Protect AI, then Palo Alto acquired that. Now they're defining agent security. Same team, next category.
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
@garrytan When the CEO of a $70B company calls you a parasite on an earnings call, you've already won distribution. The question for founders building on top of these systems: can you survive when the host starts closing APIs? That's the moat test.
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Garry Tan
Garry Tan@garrytan·
Recent earnings call, Aneel Bhusri of Workday says startups with AI agents are "parasites" This is what system of record incumbents really think of startups. The war is just beginning. The facts: the user data belongs to the users, not the incumbent software vendor.
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
Ex-Snowflake engineer from Ukraine raises $6.4M seed from @speedinvest and @dig_ventures to build Tower.dev in Berlin. 200K pipeline runs in first months post-launch. The playbook flipped: build where talent lives, raise from whoever gets it. Geography stopped being a filter.
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
@daniel_dhawan 200+ rejections then a16z speedrun is the part nobody talks about. The nos don't get worse, your pitch just gets tighter every time. Most founders quit refining after 10 rejections when the real signal hasn't even started yet.
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Daniel Dhawan
Daniel Dhawan@daniel_dhawan·
My first 6 years as a startup founder: - Started by building AI mobile apps at 20yo - Failed with 4+ startups - Ran out of money multiple times - Was rejected by Y Combinator 8 times - Had a $15k credit card debt - Got 200+ rejections from investors My last year as a startup founder: - Moved to SF - Launch Rork, AI mobile app builder, to make my year 1 self happy - Got into a16z speedrun and raised $3M+ - Scaled Rork to millions in ARR in under a year - Became the #1 AI mobile app builder in the world The average journey to a $1B company takes 10 years. I’m on year 7. Keep building.
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
@mlejva The over-raise isn't the mistake. The rare part is having $2.2M in the bank and not inventing reasons to spend it. Most founders burn through that in 18 months. Reaching profitability while sitting on dry powder is the actual signal.
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Vasek Mlejnsky
Vasek Mlejnsky@mlejva·
Looking back, we should have probably raised less in our pre-seed. We raised around $2.6M. We spent maybe $400k. The rest was sitting our bank. For founders, it's tempting to just keep going once you unlock that first big check (took about ~150 meetings). Fast forward 3 years, we still haven't spent our seed money and December was our first profitable month.
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RigorVC
RigorVC@RigorVC·
TikTok quietly backed @GENCY_AI's $20M round to build a decentralized ad network with on-chain verification. @hf0, Streamlined Ventures also in. The bet: advertising moves from platform trust to protocol trust. Crypto infra solving a problem advertisers actually have.
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
Most founders cant even pitch their own company in under 2 minutes. Travis had 10 people who could do it cold. Thats the gap. Fundraising isnt a CEO skill, its an organizational capability.
TBPN@tbpn

When @travisk was fundraising Uber's round that valued it at $70B, he ran four rooms simultaneously out of their New York office for an entire week, each booked in 90-minute slots across 12-hour days: "This is how we'd fundraise: we had four rooms in our New York office booked for a week with an hour-and-a-half slot on each. So for 12 hours in a day, four rooms going in parallel." "I'm in the $250M-and-over club, that's one room. Then there are these other rooms, down to the fourth room, which is like $25M checks. There's a guy who works for a guy, who works for a guy, who works for me who's doing that room." "But we're oversubscribed. So we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We were like, 'We're just out of slots dude. Let's go.'" "The storytelling we did, anybody on my team could tell that story and make it happen. And that was a big part. It was the story... then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time. And that’s when you take it all the way."

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RigorVC@RigorVC·
Singapore stablecoin app @KASTxyz just raised $80M at $600M val from @QEDInvestors. 1M users, $5B annualized volume. Former Circle exec building what traditional banks wont. Dollar access for the rest of the world. Thats the real fintech unlock.
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
@agentmail raised $6M for email inboxes for AI agents. General Catalyst led, and Paul Graham + Dharmesh Shah wrote personal angel checks. Smart money is quietly betting the agent infrastructure layer matters more than the agents themselves.
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RigorVC@RigorVC·
@gokulr This maps directly to what we see in pitch decks. Founders put "strong brand" on their moat slide and cant answer what built it. The two-question test here is exactly right. If the answer to "can that be replicated" is yes, you dont have a moat. You have a marketing budget.
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Gokul Rajaram
Gokul Rajaram@gokulr·
BRAND AS A MOAT? I’ll be honest - I struggled whether to include Brand in this list of moats. I ultimately decided not to, because I think it’s too hard to measure, and in many cases the underlying brand strength is due to something something more fundamental — network effects, switching costs, or scale economies — that the brand merely reflects. A strong brand is often the symptom of a real moat, not the moat itself. The danger of counting Brand as a moat is that it flatters companies that are actually quite fragile. WeWork had a brand. Peloton had a brand. Both burned through goodwill the moment the underlying economics cracked. Brand without a structural underpinning is just reputation — and reputation is rented, not owned. So I think about brand the way I think about customer loyalty scores: useful as a signal, dangerous as an explanation. When someone tells me a company’s moat is its brand, my follow-up is always the same 2 questions. (a) what built the brand, and (b) can that be replicated? That answer usually points to the real moat, or in many cases, reveals there isn’t one.
Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbings

Eight moats of a sustainable company in 2026: @gokulr 1. Data (Google) 2. Workflow (Veeva) 3. Regulatory (Coinbase) 4. Distribution (Intuit) 5. Ecosystem (Shopify) 6. Network (Facebook) 7. Physical infrastructure (Amazon) 8. Scale (NVIDIA) What is the most important for you @honam @rabois @shaunmmaguire @JaredSleeper @karimatiyeh?

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