first-round-capital
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Thena Wants to Kill the Support Ticket, Starting Inside Slack
A four-founder startup out of Branch is betting that B2B support belongs where customers already talk - Slack, Teams, email - and that AI agents, not queues, should do the routing. The incumbents it is chasing are Microsoft, Atlassian, Oracle, EasyVista, and Text.
Blaxel
Blaxel is a San Francisco cloud infrastructure startup building what its founders call the 'AWS for AI agents.' Its platform runs autonomous agents on isolated microVMs that resume in roughly 25 milliseconds, alongside a distributed agent filesystem, programmable networking, and an AI gateway for model routing and failover. Founded in 2024 by a six-person team of repeat cloud builders who previously sold a data platform to OVHcloud, Blaxel went through Y Combinator's Spring 2025 (X25) batch and raised a $7.3M seed round led by First Round Capital. It already processes millions of agent requests daily across 16 regions.
Thenuka Karunaratne
Thenuka Karunaratne is the CEO and co-founder of daydream, a San Francisco startup building an AI-native agency for organic search that pairs SEO agents with human growth experts. He started making money from affiliate websites in high school, bootstrapped a streaming-search business called Flixed through college using programmatic SEO, and in September 2023 launched daydream with co-founder Shravan Rajinikanth. The company raised a $15M Series A in April 2026 led by WndrCo, bringing total funding to roughly $21M.
Grant Miller
Grant Miller is the co-founder and CEO of Replicated, a platform that helps software companies ship their applications so enterprise customers can run them inside their own secure, self-managed environments. A self-taught programmer who started his career in technology M&A at Goldman Sachs, Grant first built and sold the mobile live-chat startup Look.io to LivePerson in just nine months, then set out to build a company he never wants to sell. Since founding Replicated in 2015 he has raised more than $80 million, made 'modern on-prem' a category worth taking seriously, and become a recognizable voice in enterprise software as host of the EnterpriseReady podcast.
Jacob Braunstein
Jacob Braunstein is the co-founder and CEO of LiveControl, a Santa Monica company that turns any venue into a professional live-video studio using PTZ robotic cameras run by a remote team of producers. He invented the remote-camera system at the core of the platform, which now produces thousands of streamed events each month for churches, schools, theaters, government bodies and memorial services. Braunstein was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and has raised roughly $33 million, including a $30 million Series A led by Coatue Management in 2021.
Rachel Lea Fishman
Rachel Lea Fishman is co-founder and CEO of Arketa, a New York-based operating system for boutique fitness and wellness studios. A certified yoga instructor turned software CEO, she started the company in 2020 with UCLA classmate Josh Archer to give small studios the tools she wished she had when she was working the check-in desk. In June 2025 Arketa raised a $15 million Series A led by Inspired Capital, bringing total funding to roughly $23 million and its customer base to more than 3,000 studios and gyms.
Jay Li
Jay Li is the founder and CEO of Proception, a Palo Alto robotics startup building high-dexterity robotic hands for humanoid robots. A former electronics lead on Tesla's Optimus program, he left to bet that the fastest path to capable robots runs through hardware close enough to the human hand that machines can learn directly from people. His ProHand packs 22 degrees of freedom and skin-like tactile sensors; its companion ProGlove captures human manipulation data with no robot in the loop. In June 2026 Proception shipped its first hands, settled a Tesla trade-secret lawsuit, and closed an $11M seed round led by First Round Capital on the same day.
Town
Town is a San Francisco AI startup building a personal AI assistant - your 'Townie' - that plugs into the tools you already use (email, calendar, Slack, docs, WhatsApp, desktop and web), learns how you work, and proactively does the work for you. Founded in late 2024 by former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze and ex-Google applied-AI director Tony Vincent, Town launched in 2025 as an AI-driven tax-and-compliance service for small businesses, then widened into a general-purpose assistant. It exited beta in June 2026 alongside a $55M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Jacob Cole
Jacob Cole is the CEO and cofounder of Ideaflow, a Palo Alto company building intelligence-amplifying software - a notebook and team knowledge platform designed to fuse human thinking with AI. A former MIT Media Lab collective-intelligence researcher who also studied at Oxford, Cole frames Ideaflow as a life mission: a future where 'nobody feels alone with their ideas.' The company has raised more than $10M from First Round Capital, 8VC, StartX, Tim Draper, and Naval, building a human-AI hybrid 'shared brain' for organizations.
Ilana Borkenstein
Ilana Borkenstein is the co-founder and CEO of M7 Health, a New York healthtech company building nurse staffing and scheduling software designed by the people who live the night shift. A registered nurse who worked a bone marrow transplant unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering - the literal M7 floor the company is named for - she turned a Harvard Business School class project into a platform now used daily by tens of thousands of clinicians across more than 60 hospitals. M7 has raised about $17 million, including a $10 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures, on a single idea: fix nurse scheduling not as a math problem but as a human one.
Jon Wang
Jon Wang is the co-founder and co-CEO of Assort Health, a San Francisco company building voice AI agents that answer the phone for doctors' offices. A Stanford bioinformatics graduate and Gates-Cambridge Scholar who walked away from UCSF medical school, Wang spent two years studying why patients wait on hold before launching Assort with Jeff Liu in 2023. The company has since handled more than 42 million patient interactions and raised $102 million, including a $76 million Series B led by Lightspeed in 2025.
Neil Sobin
Neil Sobin is the founder and CEO of Quartermaster, an Arlington, Virginia company turning working ships into sensing nodes for a global maritime intelligence network. Its SmartMast hardware bolts weather-hardened cameras and radios onto vessel masts, runs AI at the edge, and stitches the feeds into a live picture of the open ocean. After building distributed networks at Hivemapper and AI infrastructure at Scale AI, Sobin raised a $43M Series A in May 2026 co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, with more than 600 vessels already covering 10 million square miles and assisting 20-plus rescues.
Zach Rosen
Zach Rosen is the co-founder and CEO of Brellium, a New York healthcare startup whose AI reads every patient chart a provider group produces, checking it against more than a thousand clinical and payor standards before a claim ever goes out. He started the company after a personal misdiagnosis cost him two years that, he learned, a few unchecked boxes in a chart could have prevented. A Berkeley Haas grad who passed through Paycom engineering, Moelis investment banking, and a first healthcare venture called Sapien, Rosen raised a $16.7M Series A in April 2025 from First Round Capital and Left Lane Capital and counts Grow Therapy, Talkiatry, Headspace, and Rula among Brellium's customers.
Mihir Garimella
Mihir Garimella is co-founder and CEO of Actively AI, a New York company building what he calls GTM superintelligence: persistent AI agents that work individual sales accounts around the clock for enterprises like Ramp, Ironclad, Attentive and Samsara. In April 2026 the company raised a $45M Series B co-led by TCV and First Harmonic, pushing total funding past $68M. Long before the cap tables, Garimella was the teenager who built a $250 fruit-fly-inspired rescue drone called Firefly, won his category at the 2015 Google Science Fair, spoke at TEDxTeen, and was profiled by CNN before he could legally drive.
Jean-Denis Greze
Jean-Denis Greze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, an AI-powered tax platform for small businesses that raised an $18M seed round led by First Round Capital in March 2025. Previously, he served as CTO of Plaid, where he scaled the engineering team from 20 to 350 people, and before that as Director of Engineering at Dropbox. A Columbia CS grad and Harvard Law JD, he brings an unusually cross-disciplinary approach to building technology companies at the intersection of finance, law, and software.
Brett Berson
Brett Berson is a Partner at First Round Capital, the early-stage venture firm behind Uber, Square, and Notion. Starting as a college intern in 2008, he spent over 15 years rising through the ranks to co-lead the firm. He is the architect behind the First Round Review (the firm's widely-read editorial publication), the In Depth podcast, and Angel Track — a program that trains operators to become better angel investors. Named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital in 2015, Berson holds NYU degrees in economics and film, and credits studying filmmaking with teaching him to notice the thousands of micro-decisions that compound into company-defining outcomes. His key portfolio bets include Clay, Persona, and Stedi.
Hayley Barna
Hayley Barna is a General Partner at First Round Capital and co-founder of Birchbox, the subscription beauty pioneer that invented an entirely new retail category. After growing Birchbox from a Harvard Business School idea to a 200-person company with over a million monthly subscribers, she joined First Round Capital in 2016 as its first female partner and was promoted to General Partner in 2017. She brings a rare founder-operator lens to early-stage investing, with a portfolio spanning healthcare, consumer, and commerce companies including Alma, Thirty Madison, Studs, Mirror, and Clare. A finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search who once worked at IBM's research lab at age 16, Barna is equal parts scientist, builder, and storyteller - one of the most distinctive investor voices in New York's startup ecosystem.
Liz Wessel
Liz Wessel is a Partner at First Round Capital and former co-founder/CEO of WayUp, the early-career recruitment platform she built from a dorm-room idea to a 7-million-user marketplace over seven years. After navigating WayUp's acquisition by Yello in 2021, she spent time as a Visiting Group Partner at Y Combinator advising 110+ startups, and since 2016 has backed 40+ companies as an angel — including Ramp, ScaleAI, and Ro. She joined First Round in September 2023, bringing a rare combination of founder empathy, GTM rigor, and a reputation as the person early-stage founders call when they need to actually close their first enterprise deal.
Rob Hayes
Rob Hayes is a Board Partner at First Round Capital, the seed-stage venture firm famous for backing companies before anyone else dares. Over 12 years as a full partner beginning in 2006, Hayes made some of the most consequential bets in tech history - writing the first institutional check into Uber when it was worth $4 million, backing Square before payments were cool, and leading investments in Mint.com, eero, Planet Labs, and Gnip. A former Palm product manager turned Omidyar Network pioneer turned VC legend, Hayes built First Round's San Francisco office from scratch and helped define what 'founder support' actually means in venture capital.
Josh Kopelman
Josh Kopelman is the co-founder and managing partner of First Round Capital, one of the world's most influential seed-stage venture firms, and a serial entrepreneur who sold Half.com to eBay for $300 million in 2000. A Wharton grad who started his first company as a sophomore in 1992, Kopelman has backed over 500 startups including Uber, Square, Warby Parker, and Notion. Known for the legendary Half.com/Halfway-Oregon PR stunt and the 'Penny Gap' essay, he is a consistent Forbes Midas List honoree who describes his career as a deliberate effort to stay permanently in the first 18-24 months of company-building - the phase he loves most.
Bill Trenchard
Bill Trenchard is a Partner at First Round Capital, a top-tier seed-stage venture capital firm. A serial entrepreneur turned VC, he sold his first company (Jump Networks) to Microsoft at 23, scaled LiveOps to $100M in sales, and made early-stage bets on category-defining companies including Uber, Looker (acquired by Google for $2.6B), Flexport, Notion, Verkada, and Superhuman. Known for creating First Round's Pitch Assist program, he's a fundraising savant who teaches founders his process-driven approach to raising capital. He was named to Forbes Midas List in 2017 (#41) and 2020 (#17), and BusinessWeek's Best Young Technology Entrepreneurs in 2006.
Phin Barnes
Phin Barnes is a co-founder and Managing Partner of The General Partnership (TheGP), a $300M seed-stage VC firm built on a 'sweat equity' model that pairs capital with embedded operational talent. Before TheGP, he spent 13 years at First Round Capital rising from unpaid intern to General Partner, co-created the Dorm Room Fund, and backed companies like Notion. His pre-VC career included scaling AND1 sneakers from $15M to $225M and founding one of the first fitness video games for Xbox and PlayStation 2 - making him one of the few investors who can say they've run a shoe brand, shipped a console game, and written the check.
Todd Jackson
Todd Jackson is a Partner at First Round Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied seed-stage venture funds, where he backs pre-seed and seed-stage founders building B2B SaaS, AI, and enterprise products. His path to the table was anything but conventional: he helped build Gmail from beta to 200M users at Google, rewired Facebook's News Feed under Zuckerberg, built and sold a 2M-user Android app (Cover) to Twitter, and led Dropbox through its 2018 IPO as its first VP of Product and Design. He created First Round's widely cited Product-Market Fit Method, a rigorous four-level framework that has guided 75+ early-stage founders. Rare among VCs, Jackson holds all three operator lenses - big-tech product leader, startup founder, and public-company exec - and deploys them in service of the founders he backs.