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The Venture Codex

First Rays Venture Partners

3031 Plaza West, San Jose, CA, US

Overview

First Rays Venture Partners supports visionary early-stage founders. The firm invests in future-forward ideas that will disrupt the enterprise stack and makes initial investment in Seed, Pre-Series A, and Series A stage startups focusing on B2B enterprise software. It specializes in helping startups to find early customers in AI, enterprises, or developer communities and focuses on B2B themes of AI, Cloud-Edge-Data orchestration, and automation in the enterprise stack.

Total investments
18
Lead investments
6
Investments · 12mo
3
Active investors
3

Sector focus

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • B2B
  • Cloud Data Services
  • Financial Services
  • Software
  • Venture Capital
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Investment portfolio

  • Discern Security

    Participated · Series A · Jul 2026

    Discern Security provides an AI-native security workspace, the Discern Security Loop, that unifies data across an organization's environment and combines reusable AI Skills, intelligent agents, and human-approved workflows to identify, prioritize and remediate control gaps. The platform connects findings to underlying controls, assets and compliance requirements and produces executive-ready reporting aligned with frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK. Discern says customers typically use less than 25% of features in purchased security products and that its agentic loops can at least double tool utilization. The company plans to expand its library of AI Skills and autonomous capabilities and grow engineering and product teams following its Series A. Discern is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and raised $13 million in the Series A announced July 30, 2026.

  • ChatSee.ai

    Participated · Seed · Jun 2026

    ChatSee.ai offers a failure intelligence layer for enterprise autonomous AI systems that captures context around behavioral failures, preserves remediation knowledge, and tracks recurrence to create a shared failure memory. The platform continuously monitors, detects, and structures recurring failure patterns across agents and produces failure analysis reports that quantify impact and recommend corrective actions. ChatSee positions its product as complementary to observability tools by focusing on whether agent behavior is correct and enabling continuous improvement of AI behavior and operational outcomes. The company was co-founded by Sekhar Sarukkai and Sanjay Agrawal and is based in San Francisco. ChatSee was recently included in the Gartner Market Guide for Guardian Agents, and it plans to use its new funding to expand engineering and accelerate enterprise deployments.

  • Backslash Security

    Participated · Series A · Feb 2026

    Backslash Security is a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company focused on protecting AI-driven software development environments. Its platform plugs into modern IDEs and coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini Code Assist, and GitHub Copilot, giving security teams visibility, governance, and real-time protection over AI-assisted coding activities. The product also vets and monitors Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to ensure AI-generated code complies with organizational security and regulatory requirements. By embedding security controls directly in the developer workflow, Backslash aims to let enterprises adopt AI coding tools without increasing risk exposure. The company plans to deepen the platform’s capabilities and expand its go-to-market reach in the United States and Europe. Funds are earmarked for hiring additional R&D talent and scaling sales operations to meet rising demand from large enterprise customers. The company is led by CEO Shahar Man, and former CyberArk CRO Ron Zoran has joined the board as an independent director.

  • unSkript, Inc

    Participated · Seed · Jan 2024

    unSkript provides an Infrastructure Health Intelligence platform that leverages Generative AI and an LLM agent to learn from existing knowledge bases and user activity to triage incidents and suggest next steps. The product ships hundreds of pre-built failure signatures (health checks) covering Kubernetes, databases, messaging, and IaaS cloud, and makes all health-check scans available as open source on GitHub. unSkript claims its LLM agent and signatures can reduce troubleshooting time by up to 12x and detection/resolution time by up to 25x. The platform positions AI as a co-pilot for on-call teams to reduce human error and developer burnout as deployments scale. The company markets to software and cloud operations teams facing complex distributed systems and undocumented runbooks. Financially, unSkript has raised external capital (see deal details) and highlights customer use in scaling and monitoring production deployments.

  • WireMock

    Participated · Seed · May 2023

    WireMock began as an open-source API mocking project created by Tom Akehurst in 2011 and the founders launched a company based on that project last year, offering a managed cloud product called WireMock Cloud. The platform lets developers create dynamic mock APIs manually, by importing API specifications, via an SDK, or by recording live API traffic to automatically generate mocks. Its mocks enable testing of different scenarios in a sandbox without calling third-party APIs, and the company provides a free-forever tier alongside paid plans. The open-source project reports about 4 million downloads per month, and the company has around 100 customers on the paid product, including IBM, NIH, and Intuit. WireMock currently has about 10 employees and plans to double headcount over the next year, with diversity cited as a hiring priority. The founders say the dual open-source and free-forever managed cloud strategy is intended to let developers try the product without paying.

Team

  • Amit Sridharan

    Co-Founder & Managing Partner

    LinkedIn
  • Alok Nandan

    Co-Founder & Managing Partner

    LinkedIn
  • Jenny Sohn

    Chief Financial Officer

    LinkedIn