• Tavus

  Participated · Seed · Mar 2023

  Tavus is a San Francisco–based AI research lab developing Personal Affective Links (PALs), lifelike digital humans that understand context, emotion, and social cues across text, voice, and video. Powered by proprietary foundational models—Phoenix-4 for visual rendering, Sparrow-1 for conversational audio intelligence, and Raven-1 for contextual perception—PALs can read expressions, remember past interactions, and autonomously manage tasks such as scheduling and emails. The company positions PALs as the next interface paradigm after chatbots, aiming to make computer interaction feel as natural as talking to a friend. Tavus’s technology is already used by more than 100,000 developers and enterprises in recruiting, sales, education, and customer service. Future plans include expanding PALs’ agentic capabilities and continuing to push the boundaries of “human computing.” The firm is backed by top-tier investors and is scaling its research team with specialists in rendering, perception, and affective computing.

• Copilot

  Led · Series A · Jan 2023

  Copilot provides client portals that let clients send messages, make payments, sign contracts and access custom apps, aimed at marketing agencies, accounting firms, law firms and other service businesses. Businesses can use Copilot’s in-house apps or integrate the SaaS products they already pay for to consolidate fragmented tool stacks and improve the client experience. Co-founders Marlon Misra and Neil Raina launched the company in early 2020 after going through Y Combinator, and the company says thousands of tech-enabled services businesses run on its platform. Copilot has about 15 employees and reports more than four years of runway. The company has raised $13 million in capital to date and declined to disclose revenue. Future plans focus on expanding the engineering and product teams to build a "Shopify-like" app store specifically for services businesses.

• Magna

  Participated · Seed · Sep 2022

  Magna provides a token management platform that lets crypto organizations automate distributions to teams, stakeholders, community members and other recipients on Solana, Ethereum and other blockchains. The product includes token planning features that help founders plan future distributions and educate token holders on future ownership. The company supports distributions on Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche and others, and has been managing over $30M of distributions for select customers. Magna went live in July and has distributed to thousands of recipients since launch. The company plans to use the new funding to launch additional token management offerings and expand its team. Magna was founded in early 2022 by CEO Bruno Faviero and CTO Arun Kirubarajan and has a presence in New York, Miami, and Toronto.

• Whatnot

  Participated · Series D · Jul 2022

  Whatnot is a live commerce marketplace launched in 2019 that connects buyers and sellers through live-streamed auctions and sales. The platform has expanded from a collectibles focus into hundreds of categories, including trading cards, designer goods and fresh food. Whatnot has crossed one billion orders on its platform and has grown significantly since its Series C in 2021. The company has raised about $1.5 billion in total funding to date, culminating in the $545 million Series G that values it at $20 billion. Whatnot has faced scrutiny over gambling-like spending on the platform and says it bans raffles and lotteries and enforces seller controls. Company leadership has discussed careful management of valuation and signaled a preference to remain private as long as practical while preparing for the possibility of an eventual IPO.

• Pave

  Participated · Series C · Jun 2022

  Pave is a real-time compensation platform that helps companies effectively plan, communicate, and benchmark compensation. The company's suite integrates with dozens of ATS, HRIS, and equity management tools, including Greenhouse, TriNet, BambooHR, Namely, Lever, ADP, Workday, Jobvite, Shareworks, Equity Edge Online, Carta, Rippling, Justworks, Paylocity, Sapling, Personio, Capdesk, Ledgy, and UltiPro. In June 2022 Pave raised $100 million in a Series C at a $1.6 billion valuation. The company acquired Advanced-HR from Morgan Stanley, which provides compensation data via products OptionDriver and OptionImpact and serves over 3,900 companies and 290 venture capital firms. Pave said it will leverage the capital infusion and the acquisition to accelerate its global expansion. The company is led by founder and CEO Matt Schulman and is based in San Francisco. Pave helps companies benchmark, plan and communicate employee compensation through a suite of products that includes free benchmarking and paid HR integrations and offer-generation tools. It integrates with HR systems such as Workday, Carta and Greenhouse and consolidates market and partner data to benchmark salaries and support promotion and salary decisions. Pave’s platform covers data on over 65,000 employee records and it serves roughly 900 customers, about one-third of which come from Y Combinator. The company offers free benchmarking as a top-of-funnel product while charging enterprise contracts for its integration and offer-generation services. Pave has launched the Pave Data Lab and plans diversity-and-inclusion dashboards to surface pay inequities and provide suggestions to improve breakdowns. CEO Matthew Schulman said the company aims to move customers from annual to continuous D&I analysis and has disclosed internal diversity metrics (33% of employees identify as women; half of executives and board members identify as women). Pave was incubated by Y Combinator and is based in San Francisco. Pave (formerly Trove) builds a compensation platform called Total Rewards that integrates HR tools such as Workday, Carta, and Greenhouse to let companies track, measure, and communicate pay and equity. The product lets employees view their full compensation package and uses predictive analytics to show how they can grow their stake, while employers can manage promotions, adjustments, bonuses, and equity grants. The company says setup takes about five minutes for customers and emphasizes anonymized data to protect individual salaries. Pave has launched an industry-wide benchmark project, gathering opt-in compensation data from portfolio companies of a16z, Bessemer, NEA, Redpoint, and YC, and plans to expand to other geographies and types of businesses. Early customers and interested companies include Allbirds, Checkr, Tide, and Instabase, and the founder says early adopters have been bullish about transparency. The company graduated from Y Combinator, recently grew its team from five to 13 with a 30-person target by year-end, and faces the challenge of convincing some startups to share compensation data despite anonymization.

No current team members are available.