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The Venture Codex

Surface Ventures

104 Fifth Avenue, 17th Floor, New York, NY, 10011, United States

Overview

Surface Ventures is a seed and pre-seed venture capital firm focused on partnering with B2B software companies.

Total investments
13
Lead investments
5
Investments · 12mo
3
Active investors
3
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Investment portfolio

  • Octozi

    Led · Seed · Jul 2026

    Octozi offers a human-in-the-loop AI platform that integrates with existing clinical systems to automate data cleaning, reconciliation, review, and reporting for clinical trials. The platform combines large language models, deterministic clinical algorithms, and external medical knowledge to produce context-aware outputs and keeps clinical teams in oversight. Octozi already supports Phase III trials and, in a controlled study, its AI assistance increased data-cleaning throughput roughly six-fold while cutting reviewer error rates from 54.7% to 8.5% and reducing false positive queries about fifteen-fold. An economic analysis cited in the announcement estimated more than $5 million in savings for a representative Phase III oncology trial. The company is headquartered in New York City and recently raised a $3 million seed round to support its growth.

  • BotGauge AI

    Led · Equity · Feb 2026

    BotGauge AI is a US-headquartered startup that provides Autonomous Quality-Assurance-as-a-Solution, taking full responsibility for customers’ software quality outcomes rather than simply supplying testing tools. Its platform deploys AI-driven QA agents that autonomously identify testing needs, generate and maintain comprehensive test suites, and execute tests at scale across the development lifecycle, with human QA specialists validating results. Early deployments with clients such as Sully.AI, OroLabs, Kitsa, and Ripple have produced 80% faster testing coverage, roughly 75% fewer production bugs, and release cycles shortened by up to 50% without adding QA headcount. The company intends to channel new capital into R&D, enhance its agentic testing capabilities, and hire across engineering, product, and AI functions. Over the next 12–24 months it plans to broaden adoption among mid-market and high-growth software firms in the United States and internationally. Longer-term, BotGauge AI aims to make autonomous QA a foundational layer of modern software development, enabling faster and more reliable releases at scale. Its latest $2 million raise provides the financial runway to advance these goals.

  • Poetiq

    Led · Seed · Jan 2026

    Founded in June 2025 by former Google DeepMind researchers Shumeet Baluja and Ian Fischer, Poetiq builds a meta-system that pairs with any frontier LLM—such as GPT-5.2, Gemini, Claude, or Llama—to make the underlying model learn faster, reason more deeply, and operate at lower cost. Instead of requiring thousands of fine-tuning examples, customers supply only a few hundred samples, after which Poetiq’s system spins up an agent that recursively refines itself for the target problem. The technology recently set a new state-of-the-art on the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, achieving 75% accuracy on the public evaluation set using GPT-5.2 and eclipsing prior leaders at roughly half the cost per task. An August 2025 MIT study highlighting that 95% of enterprises see no ROI on GenAI underscores the commercial need Poetiq addresses. The company positions itself as model-agnostic, augmenting rather than competing with frontier providers, which broadens its potential customer base across diverse AI platforms and use cases. Poetiq currently employs six people and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. To date, it has secured $45.8 million in seed financing to fuel product development and commercialization.

  • DocJuris

    Participated · Series A · Oct 2024

    DocJuris offers an AI-powered contract negotiation platform that automates review, redlining, and negotiation workflows. Its software screens third-party contracts in seconds, applies playbook-compliant redlines in one click, and generates formatted track changes, exception tables, and amendments from a cloud-based application. Several Fortune 500 companies — including Siemens, Dell, FedEx, Toyota, and Duke Energy — use DocJuris for contract management tasks. A company survey of 700+ in-house attorneys and contract administrators found 74% of companies manually review and draft contracts, underscoring demand for automation. DocJuris announced an $8 million Series A that brings total capital raised to $11.2 million and said it will focus on scaffolding its platform around generative AI, expanding customer success, and growing its user base. Headquartered in Houston, the company positions its platform to reduce contract cycle times and legal risk for enterprise teams. DocJuris is a software-as-a-service company that helps legal, sales, and procurement teams negotiate and close contracts with greater speed and precision. The platform emphasizes contract collaboration and aims to 'revisualize' the way people read contracts to improve the user experience for lawyers and business users. Founded in 2018 and based in Houston, the company says pandemic-driven remote work increased demand for tools that replace sending Word documents over email. DocJuris has been remote since before the pandemic, with all but one employee based in Houston, and is hiring across sales, customer service, and marketing. Management plans to grow its locally concentrated remote team while further developing the product to address contract optimization needs.

  • Nirvana Health

    Participated · Series A · Sep 2024

    Nirvana provides an AI-powered platform that delivers instant insurance verification and highly accurate cost estimates to providers and patients. Its Discover technology can retrieve complete eligibility using only name, date of birth, and ZIP code, and handles data-entry errors. The product is available via direct API, EHR/EMR integrations, and a web/mobile OneVerify application. Nirvana was built for behavioral health and has expanded into sectors including physical therapy, intensive outpatient, and primary care. The company adapts its models using patterns from its millions of monthly eligibility checks to handle specialty-specific insurance nuances. Nirvana recently raised a $24.2M Series A to support expansion into additional specialties and scale its eligibility management platform. Nirvana offers a practice management platform for mental health professionals that centralizes back-office workflows. The platform streamlines insurance workflows for enterprise and solo practices through integrations with top mental-healthcare insurers. It also unifies financial management for practices and enables building patient-facing experiences. Launched in 2020 by CEO Akshay Venkitasubramanian, the company targets therapists and enterprise customers across the U.S. Nirvana plans to use new capital to expand its engineering, customer success, and sales teams and to bring its technology to more therapists and enterprises. To date the company has raised nearly $12M. Nirvana Health provides a practice-management platform that automates insurance authorizations, claims filing (in- and out-of-network), payment processing, and appointment management tailored to mental-health therapists. The company uses AI and machine learning to reduce manual back-office work and add transparency to patient benefits and session costs. It serves several hundred therapists today and has recovered more than $1 million in therapy-session reimbursements for consumers through its paperwork automation. Nirvana is working to scale into a self-serve platform, deepen payment-chain integrations, and enable large enterprises, teletherapy marketplaces, and EAPs to onboard therapists. The product aims to increase therapist capacity by removing administrative friction so clinicians can see more clients and accept a wider range of patients.

Team