Cowboy Ventures
525 Lytton Ave, Palo Alto, CA, 94301, US
Overview
Cowboy Ventures is a venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage investments in technology startups, primarily at the pre-seed and seed stages. The firm provides support through connections, expertise, and a community of founders to help build successful companies.
- Total investments
- 109
- Lead investments
- 18
- Investments · 12mo
- 5
- Active investors
- 8
Sector focus
- Finance
- Financial Services
- Venture Capital
Investment portfolio
- Eisen
Participated · Series A · May 2026
Eisen provides an AI-enabled compliance operations platform that continuously applies state-by-state regulatory requirements across all 50 states to support escheatment, disbursement, and 1099 reporting. The platform is used by fintechs, financial institutions, and digital asset companies and replaces manual spreadsheets and disconnected vendors with a software system of record. Eisen currently monitors nearly $16 billion in balances across tens of millions of accounts at nearly 50 companies, including Adyen, Binance.US, BitGo, OKX, and PeoplesBank. In 2025 the company said it prevented more than 31% of at-risk assets from being lost to state custody. Eisen plans to use its latest funding to expand compliance coverage and grow its team serving its customer base. The company is based in New York.
- Basata
Participated · Series A · May 2026
Basata builds an end-to-end workflow that ingests specialty referrals (often arriving by fax), extracts clinical information, and uses AI voice agents to call patients to schedule appointments or handle common administrative tasks. The company integrates with the electronic medical record systems used by targeted specialties and has prioritized a focused rollout—starting with cardiology and then urology—rather than a broad, generalized approach. Basata sells to specialty practices on a usage-based pricing model, charging per document processed and per call handled. It reports processing roughly 500,000 patient referrals to date, with about 100,000 processed in the last month, and says 70% of new deals now come via word of mouth. Basata was founded two years ago in Phoenix and was cofounded by CEO Kaled Alhanafi, president Chetan Patel, and CTO Vivin Paliath.
- Petual
Participated · Equity · Apr 2026
Petual provides an AI platform that ingests structured and unstructured evidence (screenshots, PDFs, Excel) to autonomously generate auditor-ready work papers and execute control tests. Its agentic AI outputs are formatted to meet external auditor expectations and include traceable reasoning to source documents, with a built-in review workflow to preserve human oversight. Early customers include S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 companies across industries such as energy, software, infrastructure, manufacturing, and financial services. Petual reports customers can achieve efficiency gains of 68–80% on SOX workflows compared with manual processes. The team includes founders and leaders with experience at Retool, Lyft, Stripe, and the Big Four, and the company announced plans to use new capital to accelerate product development and go-to-market.
- Standard Kernel
Participated · Seed · Mar 2026
Standard Kernel builds an AI-driven platform that automatically produces instruction-level, hardware-specialized GPU kernels, replacing static libraries with code precisely tuned to each workload and accelerator. In partner tests on NVIDIA H100 GPUs, the software has delivered 80 % to 4× end-to-end performance gains, occasionally surpassing NVIDIA’s own cuDNN. By operating deep in the systems stack, the company aims to provide day-one peak efficiency for every new chip without months of manual tuning. The Palo Alto–based team includes alumni from MIT, Stanford, UIUC, and SJTU, and has created open-source projects such as KernelBench and Kernel Tree Search. Newly raised capital will fund continued R&D, expansion of deployments with AI-native and enterprise customers, and progress toward adaptive systems software that evolves alongside emerging models and hardware. The company is actively hiring engineers and researchers to advance its kernel generation technology.
- Palla
Participated · Series A · May 2025
Palla operates a platform that enables partners to embed real-time international payments into existing digital channels via APIs, white-label apps, and embeddable components. The product allows financial institutions to offer international payments directly within their native applications or via Palla’s hosted infrastructure. Palla has established partnerships with more than 30 financial institutions and distribution partners, and expects additional partners to launch before year-end representing a combined end-customer base of over 150 million individuals across LATAM and the Caribbean. The company announced a $14.5 million Series A and will use the funding to broaden existing payment corridors, expand into new sending and receiving corridors, and introduce additional product lines and money-movement mechanisms. Leadership changes tied to the round include the addition of David Golden and Heidi Miller to Palla’s board, supporting planned growth and global expansion.