The Venture Codex Logo

The Venture Codex

Character

2140 N Prospect Ave, Milwaukee, WI, 53202, United States

Overview

Character is a new VC firm founded by John Zeratsky, Jake Knapp, and Eli Blee-Goldman. Character builds on Zeratsky's and Knapp's work at Google Ventures (GV), where they developed the Design Sprint, worked with 150+ startups including Flatiron Health, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Slack, and wrote the bestselling Sprint book. Blee-Goldman brings a strong track record in software investing and broad experience in fund management after 10 years as a VC at Capital Midwest. Character invests up to $1M at seed stage into startups betting on big shifts in customer behavior. They are a remote-native firm investing in companies located anywhere in the USA. After investing, they work hand-in-hand with founders, using the sprint method they created at GV, to help startups find and expand product-market fit.

Total investments
16
Lead investments
0
Investments · 12mo
1
Active investors
0

Sector focus

  • Venture Capital
Visit website

Investment portfolio

  • Weave

    Participated · Series A · Oct 2025

    Founded in 2022, San Francisco-based Weave Bio offers an end-to-end, AI-driven regulatory platform that helps pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, CROs, and consultants create, manage, and submit complex regulatory dossiers. The software integrates AI across data extraction, authoring, review, publishing, and health-authority response workflows, cutting regulatory timelines by more than 50% while improving consistency and compliance. Initially adopted for pre-clinical IND filings, the platform now supports clinical, approval-stage, and post-market submissions and complies with FDA, EMA, and other global standards. Recent recognition includes winning the "Biotech AI Innovation of the Year" award. Future product plans include full coverage of NDA/BLA filings, deeper AI analytics for portfolio insights, and geographic expansion into Europe, Japan, and Latin America. The company will also grow its commercial team to reinforce market leadership. With the new Series A financing, Weave Bio’s total funding reaches $36 million, providing resources for accelerated product development and global scale-up.

  • Hypernatural

    Participated · Seed · Jul 2025

    Hypernatural is an AI-powered video creation platform that generates high-quality, bespoke videos in minutes. Its core product offers text-to-finished-video, extensive editing with style updates and regeneration, persistent custom characters, thousands of templates or custom styles, a nearly 2 million-video AI-generated content library, and AI narration and captions. The company serves over a million users and operates a credits-based subscription starting at $12 per month, with higher-tier plans unlocking advanced features. Hypernatural positions itself as a bridge between slow, resource-intensive traditional video production and fragmented AI video models, emphasizing speed, affordability, and consistency. Leadership aims to build a Canva-for-video, with a five-year ambition for AI to be the default way people craft visual narratives. Investors and partners have praised the team’s rapid product development, user growth, and market understanding.

  • Extend

    Participated · Seed · Jun 2025

    Extend offers a full-stack document processing cloud that combines large language models with its own parsing engine, evaluation tools, and orchestration layer to achieve 95%+ extraction accuracy on everything from clean PDFs to degraded scans and handwriting. Developers can access the product via modern APIs while operators use no-code tools, allowing teams to move from prototype to production in days rather than months. The company reports reaching multi-millions in annual recurring revenue and becoming cash-flow positive within a year of launch, already outpacing the capital raised in its seed round. Customers such as Brex, Square, Checkr, Flatiron Health, and several Fortune 500 firms collectively process millions of documents through the platform. Brex alone now runs key workflows for its 30,000 customers on Extend. With the new capital, Extend plans to scale engineering and go-to-market teams, invest further in R&D, and roll out a self-serve version of its platform. The technology targets high-precision industries including healthcare, finance, and logistics where data reliability is critical.

  • Inductive Bio

    Participated · Series A · May 2025

    Inductive Bio develops an AI-driven platform (Compass) that predicts ADMET properties before molecules are synthesized, guiding chemists toward higher-probability candidates. Its approach centers on a pre-competitive data consortium where contributors share anonymized data in an IP‑protected environment to train foundational models. Since launching a year ago, Compass supports dozens of active small‑molecule programs and has enabled medicinal chemists to explore over 1 million molecule designs. The company’s Beacon-1 model won first place in the Polaris ADMET competition, outperforming 38 competitors. Inductive has published collaborative results (with Nested Therapeutics) showing improved permeability and metabolic stability leading to a nominated development candidate. The company says it will use new funding to expand AI model R&D, grow the data consortium, deploy the technology industry‑wide and ultimately launch an AI-native CRO. Inductive Bio builds a machine learning platform designed to speed the compound optimization step in drug discovery by mapping drivers of small-molecule ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, toxicity). The company constructs datasets and ML models to enable predictions of ADME properties and to guide optimization from initial compounds to leads and development candidates. Its platform is intended to help scientists find candidates with a better balance of ADMET properties more quickly. One early partner, Denali Therapeutics, has integrated custom ADME models from Inductive into its small-molecule design platform. The company was co-founded by Josh Haimson and Ben Birnbaum, and recently added Ankit Mahadevia, M.D., to its advisory board. Inductive plans to use new funding to expand operations and further its development efforts.

  • 1Fort

    Participated · Equity · Apr 2025

    1Fort builds an AI platform that automates broker workflows for business insurance, including autofilling applications, retrieving carrier quotes, comparing coverages, and integrating payment and financing options. Brokers using 1Fort reportedly save up to two hours per submission and increase bind rates by up to 20 percent. The company also offers complementary risk-management software to help businesses manage policies and proactively prevent claims. 1Fort has partnered with over a dozen leading brokerages and A‑rated carriers, including Arch, Tokio Marine HCC and Markel, and is licensed in all 50 states. Revenue grew nearly 200% month-over-month in 2024 and hundreds of independent brokers use the platform. The company plans to use the new funding to double down on AI features, hire talent, and expand broker and carrier partnerships. 1Fort provides a cyber insurance automation platform that integrates via API with businesses' existing tools to detect and remediate security issues and deliver real-time visibility into inside-out security posture. The platform helps teams close security gaps so customers become insurable and can secure favorable coverage terms and pricing. 1Fort distributes its service through partnerships with retail brokers, enabling brokers to support clients through security-control requirements and place cyber deals more efficiently. The company closed a $2M pre-seed financing and intends to use the funds to accelerate product development, make key hires, and strengthen broker relationships. 1Fort is led by co-founder and CEO Anthony Marshi and is based in New York City.

Team

No current team members are available.