Participated · Seed · Feb 2024

Armilla AI benchmarks and assesses third‑party AI models and then underwrites warranties that reimburse customers for model fees if the model fails to meet agreed standards. The company tests models for hallucinations, racial and gender bias, robustness, security and compliance with emerging regulations such as the EU AI Act and NYC Local Law 144. Armilla launched warranty coverage in late 2023 backed by insurance carriers and serves enterprises and third‑party AI vendors seeking a trust signal to shorten sales cycles. The firm reports roughly 10 customers (including a healthcare client using GenAI on medical records) and says customer traction has been growing ~2x month‑over‑month since Q4 2023. Armilla is based in Toronto and has 13 employees. Proceeds from its recent fundraise will be used to expand its warranty offering and introduce new products. Armilla AI is an all-in-one AI governance platform that automates model testing, validation, and monitoring across the model development lifecycle. The platform continuously runs more than 50 tests to assess robustness, accuracy, fairness, data drift, bias and other faults, and includes Armilla FingerPrint™, a validation framework that learns system sensitivities and riskiest components. Armilla centralizes transparency, auditability, and traceability, enabling executives, managers, risk and compliance teams, and data scientists to collaborate on test results in real time. Customers cited range from financial services to other businesses leveraging machine learning, using the platform to catch issues such as discriminatory credit decisions or faulty insurance pricing. The company announced its launch and $1.5M in funding to support its go-to-market and product activities. Armilla positions itself to help organizations responsibly deploy robust, trustworthy AI models and meet growing regulatory machine-learning compliance requirements through continuous stress-testing and auditable logs.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2023

Barnyard Games develops social games and original maps using Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), publishing titles directly into Fortnite’s Creative ecosystem. The team—made up of veterans from AAA game development—has launched multiple UEFN games including Gun Game Party, StormChasers, and Mega Golf Fun Zone, and produced nine new maps from an internal Game Jam. The company is leveraging Fortnite’s Creative 2.0 and its reported 70M+ active player base to rapidly iterate and reach large audiences. Barnyard aims to create next‑generation social games that can scale within the Fortnite ecosystem and benefit from Epic’s creator payouts and engine roadmap toward AAA quality. Financially, Barnyard completed a $3.4M seed raise to support development and growth.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2023

Nomic AI builds tools to make AI systems more explainable and accessible. Its Atlas product lets users interact with multi‑million point unstructured datasets of text and embeddings, and GPT4All enables running large language models on resource‑constrained devices. The company is committed to open‑source and plans to use new funding to expand operations and accelerate development. Nomic AI is also working with industry partners like MongoDB and Hugging Face to create and distribute rich, interactive data visualizations that clarify the data feeding AI systems. The company is led by founder and CEO Brandon Duderstadt. Financially, Nomic AI recently closed a Series A funding round to support these efforts.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2023

Nomic, founded last year and based in New York, develops open-source large language models and tooling. It has released GPT4ALL, a free open-source LLM that can be downloaded and run on small devices such as a laptop, and Atlas, a tool for visualizing unstructured datasets used to build other LLMs. The company emphasizes transparency and auditability, arguing that freely accessible code, datasets, documentation and model weights are essential and that current LLM technology is concentrated among a few firms. More than 50,000 developers are using Nomic's open-source models, and the company has partnerships with MongoDB, Replit and a new collaboration with Hugging Face to create interactive data visualizations. With new funding, Nomic is hiring for several roles and plans to improve its existing product suite. Co-founder Andriy Mulyar said users need to understand what data goes into these systems.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2022

Tea is a unified package manager, universal interpreter and virtual environment manager built to simplify how developers install and manage software packages. The company launched a CLI last month to challenge incumbents such as NPM and Homebrew and has attracted roughly 16,000 developers who have authenticated their packages with Tea. Tea was formally founded last November in Puerto Rico by Max Howell and Timothy Lewis and emerged from stealth in March backed by $8 million in funding, including participation from the venture capital arm of Binance. The team plans to build a web3 protocol that uses digital contracts and issues NFTs to package maintainers to evidence work and direct rewards, with the protocol’s core components remaining optional. Management says the protocol is expected to be available sometime in 2023 and that Tea will offer revenue-generating services on top of the protocol, including enterprise security and license-management tools. Tea builds an open-source web3 platform to automate sponsorship and compensation for open source developers. Its product issues utility tokens tied to projects and uses digital contracts so sponsors can receive perks like special access or license agreements guaranteeing developer support. Tea maintains a decentralized, immutable graph that registers projects and their dependencies; the company will bootstrap that graph from Homebrew. The platform adds a security layer to notify users and owners when parts of a stack break and includes a slashing mechanism to transfer project control if maintainers are unavailable. Tea describes its model as a "loyalty scheme" and uses an inflationary mechanism to allocate rewards proportionally across the ecosystem. The company is Puerto Rico–based and was co-founded by Max Howell and three fellow engineers; it announced an $8 million seed financing led by Binance Labs.