There is a version of this story where Nina Achadjian gets a Harvard degree in Government,
becomes a policy wonk, and disappears into the machinery of Washington.
That didn't happen. Instead, she went to New York and traded bonds.
Then she went to Google, ran FP&A and AdSense sales, learned how software at scale actually touches
industries, and noticed something: the software world was obsessed with serving other software companies.
The plumbers, the HVAC technicians, the fleet operators, the people who kept physical civilization running -
they were getting by with clipboards.
That gap became her investment thesis.
At Index Ventures, one of the handful of firms that can credibly claim to have shaped modern tech -
Dropbox, Robinhood, Slack, Etsy - Nina carves out territory in the unglamorous corners of software
adoption. Vertical SaaS for the trades. AI-powered documentation for clinicians.
Software that governs how rockets and robots are tested before they fly.
Great hardware, whether it's a rocket or a robot, depends on software to safely test, control, and operate it in the real world.
- Nina Achadjian, on investing in Revel
ServiceTitan is the case study that proves the thesis. In the early days, the company was
building software for HVAC installers and electricians - a market that most VCs didn't even
know how to spell. Nina saw a category-defining business. When ServiceTitan IPO'd in
December 2024 at a multi-billion dollar valuation, it wasn't a surprise to anyone
who had been paying attention to her portfolio.
What makes Nina Achadjian unusual isn't the list of companies - it's the pattern that explains the list.
She invests in replacement cycles, not new categories. The software isn't building
something nobody knew they wanted. It's replacing the pen-and-paper, the spreadsheet,
the five different siloed tools that a business uses because nobody ever got around
to consolidating them.
The Anthropic investment pulls that same thread, just at a different layer.
Anthropic isn't trying to replace a clipboardit's rebuilding the foundation
of what software can do. But the underlying logic holds: back the companies
that are building infrastructure before the infrastructure becomes obvious.
Gong did it for revenue teams. Physical Intelligence is doing it for robotics.
DeepScribe did it for medical documentation. The industries vary. The signal is the same.
