Connect Ventures

Two product founders obsessed with user-centricity. A giant market category dominated by unloved legacy products. A core technology shift in the data infrastructure. BI is the only layer in the new modern stack without a new multi-billion leader and Steep is building the product to win it. We're thrilled to partner with Johan Baltzar and Nino Höglund, leading a $4m seed round, with existing investor Rebecka Löthman Rydå at Inventure and participation from Alliance VC, Antler and Greens. Read Pietro's post on how Steep are building the future of business intelligence here - https://lnkd.in/e_5V5iKE

We recently travelled to the heel of Italy’s boot - the beautiful Salento coastline - to host our fifth founder retreat, disConnect 2024. Getting the chance to spend quality time with founders and connecting them to each other makes this our favourite event of the year. And for this edition, we focused on a much-discussed but often misunderstood topic - resilience. That’s why we partnered with Jenny Campbell, author, founder and lead researcher from The Resilience Dynamic, on the retreat. Resilience is actually about our ability to deal with change, and to maintain our resilience reserves so we can cope with what life - and business - throws at us, which is pretty valuable for those building in the context of high uncertainty and low information, aka all founders. More importantly, the retreat is an excellent opportunity for founders across the portfolio to connect with each other and over the course of a few days new relationships, both personal and customer 😉 were formed. Simon Rohrbach, founder and CEO at Plain, said “disConnect was one of the best things I’ve done for myself lately. I came back having made new friends, and full of energy and excitement about the journey ahead.” disConnect ‘24 is a wrap - but we can’t wait til next year for the chance to reflect, connect, check in with ourselves and check out of the day to day. https://lnkd.in/eCKUdxap Alec Mocatta Amos Wittenberg Ben Holdham Corvin Jaedicke Ed Hardy Fabian Seipel Hans Kristian Furuseth Jeylani Jeylani Jonathan Tiret Louis Lecat Madeline Parra Matias Szarfer Barenblit Matt Vagni Max Hardy-Werbin Michael Lazarenko Nino Höglund Paul Anthony Ravinder Bhadhal Rita Kerbaj Sam Shannon Sean Conley Simon Rohrbach Simon Wolff Jenny Campbell Pietro Bezza Rory Stirling Katy Turner Mark Pettit Sammy Daniels

Some founders are cut from a different cloth — those you know you want to back within the first thirty minutes and with whom you aspire to partner over the next decade. They're deeply opinionated about the problem. For us, Madeline Parra and John Talbott are two of those founders - on a mission to solve the problem of unsold inventory by re-inventing e-commerce. Congratulations to you and Purple Dot - The Pre-Commerce Company for raising your Series A and welcome to the journey OpenOcean. Read about Pietro's experience of working with two product founders in Madeline and John who think at venture velocity. https://lnkd.in/er-evNnS

Aikido Security announces their $17M Series A to give every developer access to all-in-one affordable, flexible and open source security. Pietro Bezza shares his thought's on Aikido's secret sauce - thinking and executing with venture velocity. Congrats to Willem Delbare, Felix Garriau and Roeland Delrue, and welcoming Singular and Henri Tilloy - we're delighted to be on the journey with you all! cc Notion Capital https://lnkd.in/gHtC4fhv

"B2B marketplaces are notoriously difficult to scale, but generation 2.0 is using AI and product to generate liquidity at an accelerated pace and Torg is a great example of this"... Excited to announce our latest investment in Torg. Read more about our partnership with Hans Kristian Furuseth, Rita Kerbaj and Ben Holdham from Sitar Teli (link in the comments).

Forget unicorns, play bigger and become a Category King. 👑 It's been four years since Pietro created the Minimum Viable Category Design framework (an agile version of the 'Play Bigger' book) with the goal of providing a practical tool to help early-stage founders design their categories when building products. In this new episode of the Category Thinkers podcast, Pietro is interviewed by the category masters John Rougeux and Mike Damphousse. Pietro shares why category design is key for early-stage founders and what we look for when partnering with them. Shortcuts to the key takeaways: 🧀 Pietro’s journey from soft cheese to soft…ware. And why Philadelphia is the perfect example of category domination (2:00) 🚀 Zero to One. Don’t just create a better version of what already exists. Strive to invent a new market. (2:00) 💭 Why Pietro created the Minimum Viable Category Design workshop (5:00) 🤝 Who we back: product-obsessed founders with a strong thesis about a problem and a vision for how to solve it which is great for both the customers and the company (12:20)  🤔 The difference between category design and PMF (13:40)  🔎 How to use the category lens to quantify the potential opportunity and define your product and problem at the early stage (19:30) Listen: https://lnkd.in/eVvKWvRt The MVCD Framework: https://lnkd.in/eUN37y3x Pietro’s MVCD workshops: https://lnkd.in/ewn4bKWq Tune in below. #categorydesign #seed #vc

Today, we wish the Zash team the best of luck in their next chapter following their acquisition by CoinGecko. 🦎 When we first met Parit Patel and Efe Surekli they pitched us their vision to help devs launch trusted NFT products by streamlining blockchain data into one API and improving NFT data infrastructure. They had an ambitious goal: to become the market leader in providing the most accurate NFT data. Fast forward to 2024, and CoinGecko's users will be able to access token data seamlessly after Zash's NFT data has been integrated with its API. An exciting next step for Zash and great news for all Web3 citizens. #web3 #web3community #startup

I am very proud to announce one of the biggest achievements in the Kheiron journey so far; we have conclusive scientific evidence that we are helping save lives by detecting breast cancer earlier, as just published in Nature Medicine. After years of intensive effort to develop AI tools that give women a better chance against breast cancer, we now have prospective evidence that our AI solution called Mia® can increase breast cancer detection by up to 13%.  Extrapolating the results published in Nature, Mia could halve the rate of missed cancers and help save 2,000 lives in the UK, 40,000 in the US every year. And this is just the beginning. Just this week we spoke to a woman whose early stage cancer was picked up by Mia but missed by radiologists. It was very moving to hear her speak about how lucky she feels to have had her cancer picked up at an earlier stage when her prognosis is so much better and her treatment is so less severe. Our Nature Medicine paper marks an important advance in the promise of AI to detect cancer earlier. Prospective evidence of the safe implementation of AI into real clinical practice has been very limited so far; this is the first evaluation of its kind. Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make this groundbreaking paper possible, Annie Ng, Cary Oberije, Ambrózay Éva, Endre Szabo, Orsolya Serfőző, Edith Karpati, Georgia Fox, Ben Glocker, Elizabeth Morris, Prof. Gabor Forrai MD PhD, Robert Kovacs, András Vadászy, Dezso Visi, Tobias Rijken and the entire Kheiron Team. #ai #cancer #cancerresearch #breastcancer #breastcancerscreening #patientsafety https://lnkd.in/gh_B-Y_t

Gen AI – everything, everywhere, all at once? This year, it seems like every product launched a Gen AI feature. If you're a founder, it can be easy to feel in a rush to jump on the AI train. 🚂 So, we've created a 101 guide for pre-PMF non-AI native founders explaining how and when you could think about embedding AI into your product. Check it out and let us know what you think. cc. Graham Paterson #genai #generativeAI #pmf

Aikido Security 🥋 One cybersecurity platform to rule them all? The code and cloud cybersecurity stack for SMEs is broken. ⚒️ For companies that can’t afford an in-house security team, many are left with an array of costly tools, most of which generate a lot of noise and false positives. Aikido aims to solve this by simplifying SaaS security for busy developers with one unified platform. In Pietro's words: “We are in the era of the Great Bundle. In this new b2b software world, businesses seek SaaS products that combine efficacy with efficiency, value for money, simplicity and focus. Driven by these needs, customers are looking to consolidate point solution software into full-stack software suites. Aikido’s all-in-one platform for software security fits extremely well with this new framework.” Read about why we co-led their €5M seed round with Notion Capital in this blog post. cc: Willem Delbare, Felix Garriau, Roeland Delrue #vc #cybersecurity #startups