Upfront Ventures

Congrats to portfolio company Writer on their newest $200 million Series C funding! Truly an exciting milestone for May Habib and the entire team - looking forward to seeing what you accomplish next 👏 👏

Excited for the next chapter of Endgame! In a world where AI often times can lead to humans spending less time thinking and allowing the machines to do everything for them, Endgame 2.0 aims to give the sales rep superpowers by being the most informed about the buyer and their needs. The result is every sales rep can feel like a true trusted advisor where its clear they are really listening and building a relationship that has the chance of ultimately resulting in a sale. This is accomplished through next level account research and AI powered selling assistance leveraging sales methodology you already know and love - with the rep (not AI) always in the drivers seat. For anyone that has been sold an enterprise product, you know that experience where it feels like you are just an opportunity in a CRM that an organization is mindlessly trying to convert. It sucks. However, those rare moments where you speak with a rep who feels like they are truly listening to you and working to genuinely solve your problems it feels refreshing. This is what Endgame looks to achieve for every sales interaction! Excited to see Endgame truly bring selling back. Check it out! https://lnkd.in/gYut6nur Alex Bilmes Aditya Khargonekar Endgame Upfront Ventures

Will you be at All Raise #VCSummit24 this year? I’ll be there leading a breakout session with two of the best Laura Chau & Frederique Dame! We’ll be talking and sharing playbooks around the topic, “How to Win in Competitive Situations” - it should be a fun one. Hope to see you there!

🚀 We’re Hiring for our Investment Team at Upfront Ventures! If you're a technical operator (data, eng, product) at a noteworthy or high-growth startup with some investing experience (maybe you angel invest on the side or started a fund with friends), we'd love to hear from you! What's In It For You: 🌎 Hands-on exposure across VC - think meeting founders, sourcing deals, supporting portfolio companies 🤝 Partner closely with Kevin Zhang & our Investment Partners [the best part, but I may be biased :)] 📈 Our alumni have moved on to join top tech startups in leadership positions, continued in VC, or even launched their own companies Apply ⤵ or tag someone who'd be a great fit! 💫 https://lnkd.in/gAyr-meM #Hiring #VentureCapital #DataScience #MachineLearning #TechJobs #UpfrontVentures

Conversations at tech conferences aren’t always memorable. But this one definitely was. 👇👇 By day three at TechCrunch Disrupt, Alexandre Massonneau and I had pitched Remento's "life story books that write themselves" hundreds of times. Spirits were high. But man were we exhausted. And then Ben walked over and reminded me exactly why I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have this job. Big thanks to Ben for his willingness to share why he bought his mom Remento last Christmas, and how using our product has brought them closer together. Definitely a familiar story.

Thank you, Aditi Maliwal, for bringing us together for an incredible panel at Money20/20, "It Starts with B2B: Building the Right Long-term Relationships". We chatted about identifying the ideal customer profile and building strong relationships. Some key takeaways: - Finding your ideal first customer. - How to avoid the perception of being a service provider. - Building genuine and empathetic connections with you customers. I also spoke about building strong relationships within the #creditunion industry, the importance of collaborating with #regulators to establish yourself as a trusted source, and how that enhances your credibility. Another reason to celebrate this panel, and what many of you don't know, is that it was Aditi's birthday on Monday. She spent it with us in Las Vegas moderating this insightful discussion. Thank you, Aditi, for your dedication and for making it a day to remember. Happy belated birthday! #B2B, #customerrelationships, #buildingtrust, #fintech

Always fun to get to hang out with friends like Mike de Vere from Zest AI, Sophia Goldberg from Ansa and Alex Kostecki from Clair, at #money2020 talking about all things B2B! Some highlights ➡️ finding the right first customer ➡️ the give and take relationship with design partners ➡️ how not to end up being a service provider to customers ➡️ having deep customer empathy ➡️ knowing when to fire your first customer Really great discussion and nuggets of knowledge!

🥁...WE HAVE CLOSED OUR SEED ROUND 🚀 Today is a big day for Ashish Bagri and me. We're over the moon to share some big news. GlassFlow has officially raised its seed round, led by the brilliant minds at Upfront Ventures. Kevin Zhang and Peter Zakin have been incredible to work with from day one. 🎉 In the last 12 months, we have shipped a super smooth user experience that lets you create pipelines through our visual editor or using Jupyter Notebook. With GlassFlow, you get highly scalable pipelines with the option to use all your favorite Python libraries, transformation templates, in-built connectors to SQS, Clickhouse, Pub/Sub, etc., and serverless execution of your py functions. That's just the beginning. With the new funding, we will add more transformation capabilities, the ability to run in your cloud, additional connectors and more. Stay tuned. ❤️ Behind all our achievements is a team that works hard, smart and tirelessly. Thank you, Dmitry Kutakov, Meryem Cebeci, Muhammet Ramoğlu, Pablo Pardo Garcia, Bobur U., Benjamin Gorski, Mohammed Ayaan Islam, and Alexander Trefz. 🤝 The next chapter begins, and it means a lot to us to welcome a group of exciting new investors on board who have experience working at Weaviate, Redis, Fivetran,Sentry, dbt labs and scouts from world-class VC firms. Thank you, Bob van Luijt, Jernej Strasner, Taimur Rashid, Eva Spannagl, Enrique Sarap, Kamil Mieczakowski, Navid Meyer, Keith Grose and Mark Maxwell. 👏 I would also like to thank our existing investors for their continued support: Robin Haak, Martin Möllmann, Philipp Moehring, Thomas Dohmke, Heikki Nousiainen, Serhii Sokolenko, Andrew Tymovskyi, Andrei David, Prof. Dr. Roland Fassauer, Andrés Tapia and Philippe Brulé. Onwards and upwards!

Thrilled to lead $4.8M Seed round in GlassFlow, a radically simple approach to streaming data infra. Check out our blog post to learn more: https://lnkd.in/gg9CzXfd Streaming infra has become an essential piece of infrastructure for the largest companies in the world (Kafka alone is in use at over 80% of the Fortune 100) but still carries substantial ops burden and a high learning curve. One engineer we spoke to recently remarked that whenever they think about “using something like Kafka”, they get scared. Suffice to say, the last generation of big data infra warrants a rethink for teams that don’t have extremely high volumes of data. The Glassflow approach is radically simple: serverless infra + python API for publishing, subscribing and reacting to real time events. It’s simple yet robust for the needs of most companies doing real-time stream processing. Armend and Ashish have lived this problem first-hand and have made it their life’s work to bring simplicity to the world of streaming infra. Peter and I are thrilled to partner with them and add to the growing Upfront Ventures portfolio of European dev tools / infra founders!

New portfolio alert! Meet GlassFlow: specifically designed for Python developers, GlassFlow enables data teams to build event-driven data pipelines easily, helping organizations save both time and costs. So long, infrastructure complexities! And today they just announced their $4.8M seed round 🎉 We're excited to have led this round and look forward to helping co-founders Armend Avdijaj, Ashish Bagri, and the entire team on their mission to bring the simplest, most powerful platform for Python devs to build data streaming pipelines. Learn more about the news from our team Kevin Zhang and Peter Zakin in the comments: