Fall Happenings with Adverb Ventures
Get to know the Adverb team, sound off in the first Adverb Founder Survey, and join our events this month!
Welcome to Adverb Ventures’ October Newsletter! As a reminder, Adverb invests $500K - $5M in early-stage companies from pre-seed to Series A.
Adverb Team News
The Adverb investing team has grown! Please join us in congratulating Liza Gurtin on her transition to a full time investing role and welcoming Gary Pesola to the team.
Liza Gurtin has transitioned into an investing role!
Liza Gurtin has been a key part of the Adverb team since before we even closed Fund 1, and joined us last summer as our first full-time hire as Director of Products, Programs, and Community. Liza has worn many hats – from helping us build out our toolset for managing our investing pipeline to organizing more than 30 community events with founders and builders to build awareness of Adverb and attract deal flow. Even better, Liza has herself attracted exceptional founders to the Adverb portfolio, including an investment we co-led in Q2 yet to be announced.
Liza’s not a first-time investor: she was on the investing team at Matrix for a year prior to joining us and has angel invested in over 20 companies. But her depth of experience on the building side really stands out - she was employee #18 at Robinhood, and early on the Product team at Slack, where she tackled a number of the product and scaling challenges our portfolio companies will face in the years to come.
We are delighted to have Liza transition into investing full-time, and hugely grateful for the many contributions she’s made to date. Liza is based in NYC, and holds a degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford.
You can reach Liza at liza@adverb.vc.
Welcome Gary Pesola to Adverb!
Gary Pesola joined us in September as a full-time investor and has hit the ground running (he literally did a half ironman the weekend before his first day with us). Gary was most recently on the investing team at Conviction looking at all things AI, and was previously at General Atlantic where he studied and covered more mature companies.
In every one of our conversations and references Gary’s insatiable curiosity, infectious enthusiasm, and ability to build rapport with founders stood out. He also brings an AI-native network and perspective to our team, from everything to products, how we work, and who we know. We’re delighted to have him on our team!
Gary is based in SF and you can reach him at gary@adverb.vc.
New Digs
In addition - we’ve moved to a new location in the Presidio, where we are subletting space. We’ll be hosting events here later in the fall so we hope to see you here soon!
Connect with the Adverb Community this Fall!
🏕️ Special opportunity: Adverb’s Inaugural Founder Retreat
We are excited to offer 2 spots to founders recommended by you, our community. If you have a founder of a pre-seed to Series B company who you think would be a great addition to our first-ever founder retreat, please email April by Tuesday, October 8.
Who: Adverb Portfolio Founders and a few select Friends of Adverb
When: Wednesday, October 16 - October 18, 2024
Where: Sonoma County, California
Invitation Only: email nominations to april@adverb.vc
🫡 Chief of Staff Dinner
Who: Chiefs of Staff or Operations Leaders at Seed to Series B companies
When: 10/10
Where: NYC
Email liza@adverb.vc to sign up
🍸AI Happy Hour
Who: AI Founders, Builders, and Investors
When: 10/22
Where: Adverb’s office in The Presidio, San Francisco
Sign Up Here
📣 April speaking on “Product-Market Fit: how to find, and keep it” at Techcrunch Disrupt
Who: Founders, Builders & Investors
When: Monday, October 28, 2024
Where: San Francisco
Sign Up Here ($ registration fee for conference)
Founders – we want a vibe check!
Founders! We are seeking study participants for Adverb’s Inaugural Founder Study, conducted in partnership with Behzod Sirjani of Yet Another Studio and powered by Outset (an Adverb portfolio company). We like to flex some of those old muscles used while building companies like Slack and Twitter in our work as investors, so we are kicking off this qualitative research study to better understand our customers - founders like you! We’d love to hear your perspective as a venture-backed founder in 2024 - in your own words.
If you’re a founder between inception stage and Series C, we want to hear from you. Click here to complete the study.
Portfolio Spotlights
Particle is standing out as the best new source for news. The team at Particle set out in the early days of the Gen AI wave to see how it could be applied to news. Could AI help consumers get beyond bias and go deeper on the news stories they care about most? We’re particularly excited about the audio experience that generates an audio version of your personalized feed of breaking news. Particle announced an $10.9M Series A, led by Mike Mignano (founder of Anchor) at Lightspeed in June (Axios, Techcrunch) .
You can get on the waitlist for access here.
Piramidal announced their seed round (VentureBeat, Techcrunch). Piramidal is leveraging AI to build a foundational model for the brain to modernize diagnosis of neurological conditions with EEG data. They are partnering with hospitals and research institutions who have an interest in being at the forefront in this area. If you’re connected to neurologists or institutions who may want to learn more, please let us know.
Outset.ai launched Outset Interactive. Outset.ai uses generative AI to give their customers the depth of qualitative research with the speed of a survey. AI asks the questions to unearth insights from study participants, and now with the launch of Outset Interactive, it can be married with real-time product usage data to replicate usability studies critical to software development teams’ understanding of their customers.
GrantScout is now Arwin! Despite being on track to $500K this year, the GrantScout team took stock of what they’d learned from their first year in-market leveraging AI to author government grant applications and were decisive that the opportunity wasn’t big enough to match their ambitions. In just 2 months, they pivoted to an adjacent space - leveraging AI in the taxing RFP process for software vendors which slows down sales cycles and stands in the way of revenue. They’re working with their first design partner already and relaunched as getarwin.com. Founder and CTO Jennifer Jang wrote a great post about the pivot here.
Adverb Community and Programs: Summer 2024
Thanks to friends in our network, we were able to offer portfolio founders support in mission-critical areas through our programming this summer: founder-led sales, and working with the fast-evolving foundational models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Adverb partnered with Anthropic to host a virtual brown bag session for founders building on top of Claude to hear more about their roadmap and get real-time guidance on how to get the most out of their platform. Several of our founders have been able to access higher-touch support from the Anthropic team after the session.
Adverb hosted a fireside chat on Founder-driven Sales with Saji Wickramakasara, CEO of Benchling. Founders learned from one of the best about how to close early deals and get early market feedback.
Adverb attended a closed-door session for the VC community with OpenAI. We got insight into their roadmap, an open Q&A with Sam Altman, and got to extend early access to their Real-time API (highly performant 2-way audio) to a couple of teams in the Adverb portfolio.
Opportunities to Work for Adverb Portfolio Companies:
Full Stack Engineer at Accend (AI-powered Compliance for Fintech)
Full Stack Developer at Arwin (AI for RFPs, formerly known as GrantScout)
Software Engineer, Backend at Particle (AI-powered news app)