capital-efficiency
(5)
The Houston fund betting your best round is the one you never raise
Golden Section has built a $110 million platform around a contrarian SaaS idea: founders can grow, professionalize and sell well without surrendering the company one priced round at a time.
Retell AI Turned $5M Into $50M and a Voice on Every Phone Line
A five-person startup out of San Carlos hit $50 million in annual revenue on $5.1 million raised, powering more than 50 million voice calls a month while the giants it competes with spend hundreds of millions buying their way in.
Sequence Markets
Sequence Markets is a New York and Toronto based trading-infrastructure startup (Y Combinator W26) that lets traders execute a single view across fragmented crypto venues - centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, perps, prediction markets, and tokenized assets - from one system. Its venue-neutral smart order router sits on proprietary low-latency infrastructure (roughly 2 microseconds internal latency, network paths up to 2.5x faster than the public internet) to find better prices and cut slippage, with access via terminal, API, SDK, and MCP for human traders, algorithmic systems, and AI agents.
Candice Xie
Candice Xie is the co-founder and CEO of Veo, the micromobility company she started in 2017 from West Lafayette, Indiana, while still in her twenties. A finance analyst by training rather than a Silicon Valley engineer, she built Veo into the first North American shared-micromobility operator to reach unadjusted EBIT profitability - reaching roughly $52 million in revenue on about $16 million of total funding, while competitors raised billions and flamed out. Calling herself an 'anti-tech bro' CEO and the 'tortoise' of the scooter race, she designs vehicles in-house, expands one city at a time, and won the largest exclusive micromobility contract in the United States with Denver.
Eric Paley
Eric Paley is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist who co-founded Founder Collective in 2008, building it into one of the world's highest-performing seed funds with investments in Uber, The Trade Desk, Airtable, and 20+ unicorns. Before VC, he co-founded Brontes Technologies — a 3D dental imaging startup spun out of MIT — and sold it to 3M for $95 million in 2006. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked as high as #9 globally and the world's top-ranked seed investor), he became known for his unusually candid critiques of venture capital excess. In June 2025, he left Founder Collective to serve as Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development under Governor Maura Healey, overseeing a 700-person agency focused on housing affordability, business competitiveness, and the AI innovation economy.