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The Venture Codex

Zeno Ventures

580 California St, San Francisco, CA, 94104, United States

Overview

Zeno Ventures invests in early stage technology enabled companies addressing consumer and enterprise markets. Zeno Ventures likes to back exceptional entrepreneurs before their businesses have scaled and often even before their business models are formed. Zeno Ventures seeks to partner with talented and passionate founders solving difficult problems that were illuminated by their personal experience.

Total investments
16
Lead investments
1
Investments · 12mo
6
Active investors
2

Sector focus

  • Consumer
  • Enterprise
  • Finance
  • Financial Services
  • Venture Capital
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Investment portfolio

  • Andromeda Surgical

    Participated · Series A · Aug 2026

    Andromeda Surgical is developing an autonomous surgery platform and is beginning clinical and commercial activity in endourology. The company is initially focusing on procedures that treat BPH, prostate cancer, bladder cancer, and kidney stones, and reports that urologists in three countries have used its platform to perform holmium laser enucleation of the prostate (HoLEP) in more than 40 patients. It has observed enucleation times as fast as 30 minutes versus a published average of about 90 minutes. The team combines surgical deeptech and healthcare expertise from organizations including Neuralink, Science Corp, Avail, and the group that launched the first autonomous truck at Starsky Robotics. Andromeda has raised $30 million to date, including a $15 million Series A, and has been cleared to launch commercially in Canada and New Zealand. The company plans to deploy its first commercial systems into hospitals in the coming months and to scale utilization while expanding into additional procedures and autonomous capabilities.

  • Openlaw

    Participated · Seed · Apr 2026

    Openlaw operates beglaubigt.de, a platform that digitises the end-to-end company formation process in Germany, handling document preparation, notary appointments and register filings while working with around 300 notary offices. The platform claims to reduce typical German GmbH formation timelines from six to eight weeks down to as little as three days and has served over 25,000 customers since launch. Beglaubigt.de is integrated with partners such as Qonto and counts customers or partners including Qonto, Holvi and Sevdesk. The company was accepted into Y Combinator's F24 batch and was founded by executives with prior exits and experience scaling startups. Openlaw's near-term plans include expanding the range of formation types and register processes, adding ongoing bookkeeping services, and scaling the product beyond Germany into other European markets. The fresh $3.3M seed financing is intended to accelerate those product and market expansion plans.

  • Minimal AI

    Participated · Seed · Mar 2026

    Minimal AI develops an "AI Manager" that lets customers describe needs while the system writes integration code from API docs and builds new tools for support agents on the fly, aiming to avoid heavy engineering work. The product targets e-commerce brands that run different systems, processes, and business rules that change frequently. In eight months the company crossed seven-figures in ARR with a team of three and reports customers achieving 90%+ ticket resolution rates. The startup is part of Y Combinator’s S25 batch. Fifteen of its customers invested as angel backers in the seed round, indicating early customer commitment. The team announced the seed close occurred in the week before Demo Day, signaling rapid investor interest.

  • Trace

    Participated · Seed · Feb 2026

    Trace is a London-based startup that maps an enterprise’s tools and processes—such as email, Slack, and Airtable—into a centralized knowledge graph. This graph supplies rich contextual data so that when a user gives a high-level prompt like designing a microsite, Trace automatically generates a detailed, step-by-step workflow. The platform delegates specific sub-tasks to AI agents while assigning others to human employees, effectively acting as a ‘manager’ for both digital and human workers. By automating the historically cumbersome onboarding of AI agents, Trace aims to accelerate real-world enterprise adoption of agentic AI. The company’s leadership positions its approach as “context engineering,” viewing it as the next evolution after prompt engineering. Competition includes in-house agent features from productivity suites and offerings from major AI labs such as Anthropic, but Trace’s founders believe their knowledge-graph architecture differentiates them. Financially, the company has secured $3 million in seed funding to further develop its infrastructure platform.

  • Saturn

    Participated · Series A · Oct 2025

    Founded in 2023 by Amal Jolly, Michael Ettlinger, and Rohit Vaish, Saturn builds compliance-focused AI that slashes the time advisers and paraplanners spend on documentation, onboarding, and regulatory tasks. The platform can reduce processes that once took four hours to about 20 minutes, freeing advisers to focus on client interaction. Purpose-built for UK regulations such as FCA standards and Consumer Duty, Saturn embeds each firm’s internal policies into every workflow. Its technology is already trusted by more than 600 advisory firms, consolidators, and advice networks including Progeny and Hoxton Wealth. By tackling the £2,000 per-client annual cost that prices most consumers out of advice, Saturn aims to make professional guidance accessible to one billion people. The company’s recent funding strengthens its balance sheet with $15 million to accelerate next-generation AI development and expand its engineering, research, and customer delivery teams.

Team

  • Duarte Moreira

    Co-Founder and CEO

    LinkedIn
  • Christopher Kile

    Co-Founder and Managing Partner

    LinkedIn