Boldstart Ventures, the inception fund for technical founders building the autonomous enterprise, announced the close of Fund VII, a $250 million vehicle dedicated to backing bold technical teams from the very first commit.
Fund VII was significantly oversubscribed, but Boldstart chose to hold firm at $250 million to stay true to its model: high-conviction, hands-on investing at inception and nothing else. And Fund VII will write initial checks from $500K to $15M, with the ability to support breakout growth through Boldstart’s existing $175M Opportunities III fund.
Standout inception-stage investments from first commit to category leader include:
1.) Snyk – creators of developer-first security, now AI security leader, last valued at $7.4 billion
2.) Protect AI – AI security leader acquired by Palo Alto Networks for over $700 million
3.) Clay – creators of GTM engineering valued at $3.1 billion
4.) Kustomer – reimagining customer support, sold to Meta for a reported $1 billion
5.) CrewAI – Multi-agent platform powering 60M+ agent runs/month
6.) Spectro Cloud – leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, valued at $750 million
7.) Hypernative – Real-time risk intelligence for crypto and traditional finance
The autonomous enterprise will require entirely new business models, robotic execution layers, and AI-native workflows built without a traditional back office. Crypto and smart contracts will unlock programmable money and permissionless automation, enabling trustless coordination across systems at scale. Systems will run at machine scale, continuously learning, reasoning, and operating in real time.
KEY QUOTES:
“When others wait for signals, we bet on conviction. Fund VII is our biggest commitment yet to the builders reimagining the operating system of the enterprise, where software, agents, and machines plan and act on our behalf. Staying at $250 million lets us stay focused, stay early, and keep showing up for founders before the rest of the world believes.”
“This isn’t about optimizing yesterday’s stack. It’s about building the operating system for the intelligent enterprise; from scratch, wired for autonomy, and secured from day one.”
Ed Sim, Founder and General Partner
“Inception is about far more than capital, it’s about compound leverage. For 15 years, we’ve worked side by side with technical founders to help shape the earliest story, unlock first customers, and architect the conditions for breakout. That’s where Boldstart operates best, before the noise, before the signal.”
Eliot Durbin, General Partner
