VC Deal Flow Signal (GitDealFlow), curated entity corpus revision 17718fa233309443, as of 2026-06-17. https://signals.gitdealflow.com/api/corpus.json. CC BY 4.0.

Each subsequent line is one entity record with a stable recordHash. Diff two pulls line-by-line to localize changes; compare the _meta revision to detect any change at all.


Adyen

Adyen (fintech, public) — GitHub org github.com/Adyen. European-anchored payments platform. Public org hosts API libraries plus the iDEAL, Klarna, and POS integration tooling.


AI21 Labs

AI21 Labs (ai-ml, series c) — GitHub org github.com/AI21Labs. Israeli frontier-AI lab. Builds the Jamba and Jurassic model families with strong reasoning and long-context focus. SDK + API tooling public.


Airbyte

Airbyte (analytics, series b) — GitHub org github.com/airbytehq. Open-source data integration platform with 350+ connectors. The OSS challenger to Fivetran with strong community-built connector momentum.


Alchemy

Alchemy (fintech, later) — GitHub org github.com/alchemyplatform. Web3 development platform with node infrastructure, Account Abstraction stack, and developer tooling across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Base, and Optimism.


Amplitude

Amplitude (analytics, public) — GitHub org github.com/amplitude. Product analytics platform. Public org hosts analytics SDKs across web, iOS, Android, plus the Experiment feature-flag tooling.


Anthropic

Anthropic (ai-ml, later) — GitHub org github.com/anthropics. Frontier AI lab — Claude model family, MCP protocol, Claude Code CLI, Claude Agent SDK. Their MCP standardization is reshaping the entire agentic ecosystem.


Anyscale

Anyscale (ai-infra, later) — GitHub org github.com/anyscale. Commercial vendor for Ray, the distributed compute framework. Founded by Ray creators at UC Berkeley RISELab. Cloud platform for distributed ML training and serving.


Arize AI

Arize AI (observability, series b) — GitHub org github.com/Arize-ai. ML observability platform with strong LLM evaluation focus. Phoenix is their open-source LLM tracing tool; commercial cloud handles enterprise-scale eval workflows.


Asana

Asana (productivity, public) — GitHub org github.com/Asana. Work management platform with strong API ecosystem. Public org hosts SDK clients across major languages plus the Luna React framework that powers their web app.


Astro

Astro (developer-tools, series a) — GitHub org github.com/withastro. Multi-framework static site generator with islands architecture. Strong content-site focus competing with Next.js for content-heavy use cases.


Axiom

Axiom (observability, series a) — GitHub org github.com/axiomhq. Modern observability platform with strong logs and event-data focus. Distinctive economics on high-volume data with serverless storage backend.


Backstage (Spotify)

Backstage (Spotify) (developer-tools, later) — GitHub org github.com/backstage. Developer portal platform for managing services, docs, and tooling. Open-sourced by Spotify in 2020; now a CNCF incubating project with broad enterprise adoption.


Beamable

Beamable (gaming, series a) — GitHub org github.com/beamable. Unity-native live-game backend for identity, economy, social, and live-ops, now building open decentralized (DePIN) backend infrastructure for games. Raised a $13.5M Series A led by BITKRAFT in 2025.


BentoML

BentoML (ai-infra, series a) — GitHub org github.com/bentoml. Open-source platform for packaging and deploying ML models as production-grade services. Strong adoption for serving custom and fine-tuned models in regulated environments.


Better Stack

Better Stack (observability, series a) — GitHub org github.com/BetterStackHQ. Modern monitoring and incident management platform combining uptime monitoring, logs, and on-call paging. Strong product-led growth across SMB developer teams.


Braintrust

Braintrust (observability, series a) — GitHub org github.com/braintrustdata. LLM eval and observability platform with 'evals as code' philosophy. Competes with Helicone, Langfuse, and Arize on the LLM-app observability frontier.


Browserbase

Browserbase (ai-infra, series a) — GitHub org github.com/browserbase. Headless browser infrastructure for AI agents. One of the canonical picks for agent runtimes needing browser execution.


Buildkite

Buildkite (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/buildkite. CI/CD platform optimized for hybrid cloud — control plane in Buildkite, agents on customer infrastructure. Strong adoption with engineering orgs running large-scale build farms.


Bun

Bun (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/oven-sh. All-in-one JavaScript runtime, package manager, bundler, and test runner. Written in Zig with custom JSC integration; one of the most active OSS JS projects.


Buoyant (Linkerd)

Buoyant (Linkerd) (infrastructure, series a) — GitHub org github.com/linkerd. Commercial vendor for Linkerd, the original CNCF service mesh. Smaller and simpler than Istio with strong Rust-based data plane; Buoyant Enterprise handles production support.


Canva

Canva (productivity, later) — GitHub org github.com/canvanauts. Visual content creation platform with strong template ecosystem. Public org hosts Canva Apps SDK, Connect API integrations, and partner extension tooling.


Circle (USDC)

Circle (USDC) (fintech, public) — GitHub org github.com/circlefin. Issuer of USDC stablecoin and broader Web3 financial infrastructure. Public org hosts smart contract verifiers, wallet SDKs, and the Circle Web3 Services tooling.


CircleCI

CircleCI (developer-tools, later) — GitHub org github.com/CircleCI-Public. CI/CD platform with strong cloud-native deployment story. Public org hosts orbs (reusable config packages), runner installers, and CLI tooling.


Clerk

Clerk (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/clerk. User management for modern apps — auth, organizations, billing. Strong React/Next.js integration and growing multi-framework SDKs.


ClickHouse

ClickHouse (database, series c) — GitHub org github.com/ClickHouse. Real-time analytics database. The core engine is fully open-source with active enterprise development on cloud, replication, and the SQL layer.


ClickUp

ClickUp (productivity, series c) — GitHub org github.com/clickup. All-in-one productivity platform combining tasks, docs, goals, and chat. Aggressive feature breadth competing with Notion, Asana, and Monday.com.


Cloudflare

Cloudflare (infrastructure, public) — GitHub org github.com/cloudflare. Edge platform — Workers, R2, D1, Hyperdrive, Durable Objects, AI Gateway. Their public org ships dozens of active repos across runtimes.


CockroachDB

CockroachDB (database, later) — GitHub org github.com/cockroachdb. Distributed SQL database from Cockroach Labs. Strong PostgreSQL compatibility, global low-latency replication, serverless tier. Founded by ex-Google Spanner engineers.


Coda

Coda (productivity, later) — GitHub org github.com/coda-io. Document-and-database hybrid productivity platform competing with Notion. Public org hosts the Coda Packs SDK for third-party integrations.


Codeium / Windsurf

Codeium / Windsurf (developer-tools, series c) — GitHub org github.com/Exafunction. AI coding assistant + Windsurf IDE. Closed-source extension with broad IDE coverage; competes directly with Cursor and Claude Code on the AI-coding frontier.


Cohere

Cohere (ai-ml, series c) — GitHub org github.com/cohere-ai. Enterprise-focused LLM provider — strong retrieval and embeddings stack, growing agent and tool-use layer.


Coinbase

Coinbase (fintech, public) — GitHub org github.com/coinbase. Largest US crypto exchange. Public engineering org hosts the Base L2 chain, Coinbase Cloud node infrastructure, and broad blockchain developer tooling.


Comet

Comet (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/comet-ml. ML experiment tracking, model registry, and observability platform. Competes with Weights & Biases on ML-experiment infrastructure with strong enterprise traction.


Continue

Continue (developer-tools, seed) — GitHub org github.com/continuedev. Open-source AI coding assistant with native VS Code and JetBrains integration. Customizable model and provider selection; competitor to Cursor with stronger OSS positioning.


Convex

Convex (database, series b) — GitHub org github.com/get-convex. Reactive backend platform — database, queries, mutations, file storage, scheduling, all in one TypeScript-native runtime.


CoreWeave

CoreWeave (ai-infra, public) — GitHub org github.com/coreweave-org. Specialized GPU cloud platform that IPO'd in 2025 as one of the largest AI-infra public-market debuts. Major OpenAI and Mistral capacity supplier.


Couchbase

Couchbase (database, public) — GitHub org github.com/couchbase. JSON document database with SQL++. Public org hosts the core server, mobile sync, and 10+ SDK languages.


CrewAI

CrewAI (ai-ml, seed) — GitHub org github.com/crewAIInc. Multi-agent orchestration framework with strong public mindshare in role-based agent design.


Cube

Cube (analytics, series b) — GitHub org github.com/cube-js. Semantic layer and headless BI platform. Open-source core (Cube.js) plus Cube Cloud. Strong adoption for embedded analytics and AI-grounded BI use cases in 2025-2026.


Cursor

Cursor (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/getcursor. AI-first code editor that became the default IDE for AI-era engineers. Limited public surface but tracked closely by the sector.


Datadog

Datadog (observability, public) — GitHub org github.com/DataDog. Cloud observability platform. Public org ships the Agent, integrations, and lambda layers across every major runtime. Consistent multi-language SDK release cadence.


dbt Labs

dbt Labs (analytics, later) — GitHub org github.com/dbt-labs. Analytics engineering tooling. dbt is the de-facto SQL transformation layer for Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, and modern Postgres warehouses.

100+ public repos across adapters and packages


Deno

Deno (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/denoland. Secure JavaScript and TypeScript runtime by Ryan Dahl, plus Deno Deploy edge runtime and Deno KV. Rust-based engine with V8.


DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean (infrastructure, public) — GitHub org github.com/digitalocean. Developer-focused cloud platform with predictable pricing. Public org hosts the doctl CLI, Kubernetes tooling, App Platform integrations, and Marketplace 1-click images.


Dremio

Dremio (database, later) — GitHub org github.com/dremio. Open lakehouse platform built on Apache Iceberg and Apache Arrow. Query engine on top of cloud data lakes with strong SQL semantics.


Drizzle

Drizzle (developer-tools, seed) — GitHub org github.com/drizzle-team. TypeScript-first ORM that became the default Drizzle replacement choice in the AI-era stack. Fast-compounding GitHub presence.


DuckDB

DuckDB (database, seed) — GitHub org github.com/duckdb. In-process analytical database engine. The DuckDB core ships under MIT license with bindings in 10+ languages — the SQLite of analytics.


Dust

Dust (ai-ml, series a) — GitHub org github.com/dust-tt. AI-native workspace assistant for teams. Open-core platform with growing public agent surface area.


Dynatrace

Dynatrace (observability, public) — GitHub org github.com/Dynatrace. Enterprise observability and AIOps platform with strong APM, infrastructure, and security monitoring. Public org hosts OneAgent integrations and OpenTelemetry tooling.


E2B (ai-infra, seed) — GitHub org github.com/e2b-dev. Sandboxed code execution for AI agents. Strong developer mindshare in the agent-runtime category.


Edgegap

Edgegap (gaming, series a) — GitHub org github.com/edgegap. Edge game-server orchestration that auto-deploys multiplayer servers close to players to cut latency, no ops required. Raised a $7M Series A led by Konvoy Ventures.


Elastic

Elastic (observability, public) — GitHub org github.com/elastic. Elasticsearch creators — search, observability, and security stack. Massive public OSS surface across Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, and the Elastic Common Schema.

300+ public repos across the entire stack


ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs (ai-ml, series c) — GitHub org github.com/elevenlabs. Voice synthesis and audio AI. Public SDKs across runtimes with steady release cadence.


Fermyon

Fermyon (infrastructure, series a) — GitHub org github.com/fermyon. Wasm-native serverless platform — the canonical bet on WebAssembly as the next compute runtime.


Figma

Figma (productivity, later) — GitHub org github.com/figma. Collaborative design platform. Public org hosts design-system tooling, the Plugin API, and devtools. Core product is closed but the developer surface is meaningful.


Fireworks AI

Fireworks AI (ai-infra, series b) — GitHub org github.com/fw-ai. Fast inference for open-weight LLMs and image models. One of the rotating top picks for cost-per-token-served.


Fivetran

Fivetran (analytics, later) — GitHub org github.com/fivetran. Automated ELT data pipeline platform connecting hundreds of SaaS sources to data warehouses. Public org hosts connector SDKs, dbt integration, and customer-extension tooling.


Fly.io

Fly.io (infrastructure, series b) — GitHub org github.com/superfly. Global app platform — micro-VMs near users, with a strong Postgres and durable-objects layer.


GitLab

GitLab (developer-tools, public) — GitHub org github.com/gitlabhq. End-to-end DevOps platform spanning Git hosting, CI/CD, container registry, and security scanning. Public engineering mirrors on GitHub with the canonical repo on gitlab.com.

20+ public repos (mirror); 100+ on gitlab.com


Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs (observability, later) — GitHub org github.com/grafana. Open-source observability — Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Pyroscope. Their public org is one of the most active in monitoring tooling.


Groq

Groq (ai-infra, series c) — GitHub org github.com/groq. LPU-based fast inference. Strong developer mindshare for sub-100ms LLM responses.


Gusto

Gusto (fintech, later) — GitHub org github.com/gusto. SMB payroll, benefits, and HR platform. Public org hosts the Gusto Embedded SDK, partner-integration tooling, and OAuth provider tooling.


HashiCorp

HashiCorp (infrastructure, public) — GitHub org github.com/hashicorp. Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad — the canonical infrastructure-as-code stack. Their public org is a long-running benchmark for OSS infra companies.


Hathora

Hathora (gaming, seed) — GitHub org github.com/hathora. Serverless hosting and orchestration for multiplayer game servers — deploy and scale game servers worldwide with no ops. Raised a $7.6M seed (Upfront Ventures, Founders Fund) in 2023.


Haystack (deepset)

Haystack (deepset) (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/deepset-ai. Open-source LLM application framework focused on production-grade RAG, semantic search, and agentic workflows. Commercial vendor deepset offers managed deployment and enterprise features.


Heap (Contentsquare)

Heap (Contentsquare) (analytics, later) — GitHub org github.com/heap. Autocapture product analytics platform. Acquired by Contentsquare in 2024; serves product teams who want event tracking without manual instrumentation.


Helicone

Helicone (observability, seed) — GitHub org github.com/Helicone. LLM observability proxy plus dashboard. Drop-in OpenAI-API-compatible proxy that logs every request; YC-backed with strong indie-developer adoption.


Heroic Labs

Heroic Labs (gaming, seed) — GitHub org github.com/heroiclabs. Maker of Nakama, the leading open-source game backend — multiplayer, matchmaking, leaderboards, chat, and social services used by studios and publishers. A textbook game-infrastructure shape where the product is the public GitHub org.


Hex

Hex (analytics, series c) — GitHub org github.com/hex-inc. Collaborative data workspace combining notebooks, SQL, and BI dashboards. Strong adoption with modern data teams; AI-grounded analytics is a 2025-2026 product focus.


Honeycomb

Honeycomb (observability, later) — GitHub org github.com/honeycombio. Observability platform optimized for high-cardinality traces. Public org hosts agents, integrations, OpenTelemetry collectors, and Honeycomb-Lambda layers.


Hugging Face

Hugging Face (ai-ml, later) — GitHub org github.com/huggingface. The default model hub for open-weight AI. Transformers, datasets, diffusers, accelerate — the entire OSS ML stack ships through this org.


InfluxData

InfluxData (database, later) — GitHub org github.com/influxdata. Time-series database platform with InfluxDB OSS, Cloud, and Enterprise tiers. Major IoT and observability data layer; recently shifted core engine to Rust.


Inngest

Inngest (developer-tools, series a) — GitHub org github.com/inngest. Event-driven workflow engine with strong AI-agent orchestration support. Open-source SDKs across runtimes.


Jina AI

Jina AI (ai-ml, series a) — GitHub org github.com/jina-ai. Open-source neural search and embedding infrastructure. Builds Jina (multi-modal AI framework), CLIP embeddings, and reranker models for the search stack.


Kong

Kong (infrastructure, later) — GitHub org github.com/Kong. API gateway and microservices management platform. Kong Gateway is OSS (Lua + nginx); Kong Konnect is the commercial cloud. Strong AI Gateway momentum in 2025-2026.


Koyeb

Koyeb (infrastructure, series a) — GitHub org github.com/koyeb. Serverless deployment platform with native GPU support for AI workloads. Strong European developer-experience focus competing with Render and Fly.io.


Lambda Labs

Lambda Labs (ai-infra, later) — GitHub org github.com/lambdalabs. GPU cloud platform for AI training and inference. Public org hosts the Lambda Stack (Linux ML environment) and managed GPU workstation tooling.


LangChain

LangChain (ai-ml, series b) — GitHub org github.com/langchain-ai. Most-forked AI-framework org — LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith. Defines a large slice of the public agent-tooling surface.


Langfuse

Langfuse (observability, seed) — GitHub org github.com/langfuse. LLM observability and evaluation platform. Open-source core plus cloud. Strong RAG and agent-trace use cases; rapid adoption in 2025-2026 agent-infra stacks.


Letta

Letta (ai-ml, seed) — GitHub org github.com/letta-ai. Stateful agent framework (formerly MemGPT). The reference implementation for agent memory architectures.


Linear

Linear (productivity, series c) — GitHub org github.com/linear. Issue tracking and product management for software teams. Their public SDK and API ecosystem ship steady weekly updates.


LlamaIndex

LlamaIndex (developer-tools, series a) — GitHub org github.com/run-llama. RAG and LLM application framework with strong focus on data ingestion, indexing, and retrieval. The Python ecosystem's leading RAG framework alongside LangChain.


Lovable

Lovable (ai-ml, series a) — GitHub org github.com/lovable-dev. Vibe-coding platform — natural-language to full-stack web app. One of the most-discussed AI builder platforms of 2025-2026.


MariaDB

MariaDB (database, public) — GitHub org github.com/MariaDB. MySQL fork run by the original MySQL team. Open-source relational database with enterprise replication, ColumnStore, and SkySQL cloud tooling.


Mastra

Mastra (ai-ml, seed) — GitHub org github.com/mastra-ai. TypeScript-first agent framework with strong workflow primitives. One of the fastest-rising agent libraries in late 2025.


Meilisearch

Meilisearch (database, series b) — GitHub org github.com/meilisearch. Lightweight Rust-native search engine. Open-source core with a hosted cloud — the developer-experience-first alternative to Elasticsearch for app search.


Metabase

Metabase (analytics, series c) — GitHub org github.com/metabase. Open-source BI tool. Clojure backend with React frontend; widely adopted at SMB and mid-market for self-serve analytics.


Milvus

Milvus (database, series b) — GitHub org github.com/milvus-io. Open-source distributed vector database from Zilliz. The most-starred open-source vector DB; multi-language SDKs across Python, Go, Java, Node.


Miro

Miro (productivity, later) — GitHub org github.com/miroapp. Collaborative whiteboard platform widely adopted for design workshops, sprint planning, and remote-team workflows. Public org hosts Web SDK and app marketplace tooling.


Mistral AI

Mistral AI (ai-ml, series b) — GitHub org github.com/mistralai. Open-weight European frontier lab. Their public Mistral and Mixtral checkpoints are a benchmark for permissive-license LLM releases.


Mixpanel

Mixpanel (analytics, later) — GitHub org github.com/mixpanel. Product analytics platform. Public org hosts SDKs across 12+ platforms plus the JQL exploratory query tooling.


Modal

Modal (ai-infra, series b) — GitHub org github.com/modal-labs. Serverless compute for AI — train, fine-tune, serve, and orchestrate Python workloads with sub-second cold starts on GPUs.


Mode (ThoughtSpot)

Mode (ThoughtSpot) (analytics, later) — GitHub org github.com/mode. Collaborative analytics platform combining SQL, Python, R, and BI dashboards. Acquired by ThoughtSpot in 2023; serves analytical teams at mid-market and enterprise companies.


Modular

Modular (developer-tools, series c) — GitHub org github.com/modularml. Builds Mojo programming language (Python superset with C++-level performance) and MAX, an AI deployment platform. Founded by Chris Lattner (LLVM, Swift, TPU creator).


Monday.com

Monday.com (productivity, public) — GitHub org github.com/monday-com. Work management platform with strong customization and integration depth. Public org hosts apps SDK, GraphQL tooling, and integration primitives for the Monday Apps Marketplace.


MongoDB

MongoDB (database, public) — GitHub org github.com/mongodb. Document-oriented database with a multi-cloud Atlas service. Public org ships drivers across 12+ languages plus Compass, Realm, and the Mongoose ecosystem.

200+ public repos across drivers, tooling, and infra


Monzo

Monzo (fintech, later) — GitHub org github.com/monzo. UK neobank known for engineering blog culture and microservices-heavy architecture. Public org hosts open-source tooling around Cassandra, gRPC, and Kubernetes operations.


N26 (fintech, later) — GitHub org github.com/n26. German digital bank serving multiple European markets. Public org hosts SDK tooling and architectural primitives around their pan-European banking infrastructure.


Neon

Neon (database, series c) — GitHub org github.com/neondatabase. Serverless Postgres with branching. The standard managed Postgres choice for AI-era developer-tools companies.


Netlify

Netlify (infrastructure, later) — GitHub org github.com/netlify. Jamstack hosting and edge platform. Public org hosts CLI, build plugins, edge-functions tooling, and the Netlify Identity service.


New Relic

New Relic (observability, public) — GitHub org github.com/newrelic. Application performance monitoring and observability platform. Public org hosts agents across major languages, OpenTelemetry distributions, and the Pixie eBPF-based observability layer.


Nubank

Nubank (fintech, public) — GitHub org github.com/nubank. Brazilian neobank and the largest digital bank in Latin America. Public engineering presence anchored around Clojure tooling and microservices infrastructure.


Nuxt (NuxtLabs)

Nuxt (NuxtLabs) (developer-tools, seed) — GitHub org github.com/nuxt. Vue.js meta-framework plus commercial team (NuxtLabs). Stripe-style developer surface for the Vue ecosystem with strong SSR and edge-runtime story.


Ollama

Ollama (developer-tools, seed) — GitHub org github.com/ollama. Easy local LLM runtime for running open-weight models on consumer hardware. The de-facto path for indie-developer and prosumer local-inference workflows.


OpenAI

OpenAI (ai-ml, later) — GitHub org github.com/openai. Closed-weight frontier lab whose open-source presence (SDKs, gym, whisper, evals) defines the public surface area for AI infrastructure.


Ory

Ory (developer-tools, series a) — GitHub org github.com/ory. Open-source identity infrastructure — Kratos (identity), Hydra (OAuth2), Keto (authorization), Oathkeeper (zero trust). Self-hostable Auth0 alternative.


Outerbounds

Outerbounds (developer-tools, series a) — GitHub org github.com/outerbounds. Commercial vendor for Metaflow, Netflix's open-source ML workflow framework. Cloud platform for ML and AI infrastructure spanning experimentation to production.


PagerDuty

PagerDuty (observability, public) — GitHub org github.com/PagerDuty. Incident response and digital operations management platform. Public org hosts SDKs across major languages plus integration tooling for the PagerDuty Marketplace.


Perplexity

Perplexity (ai-ml, series c) — GitHub org github.com/perplexity-ai. Answer engine with proprietary retrieval and ranking. Limited but precise public surface.


Pinecone

Pinecone (database, series b) — GitHub org github.com/pinecone-io. Managed vector database optimized for retrieval-augmented generation. Proprietary engine with public SDKs and integration tooling.


Plaid

Plaid (fintech, later) — GitHub org github.com/plaid. Banking API platform. Public org hosts SDKs across 10+ languages plus the Link integration kits — the developer surface of US fintech.

50+ public repos across SDKs and templates


PlanetScale

PlanetScale (database, series c) — GitHub org github.com/planetscale. Serverless MySQL on Vitess. Public SDK and CLI shipped from a steady, multi-language org.


Portainer

Portainer (infrastructure, series a) — GitHub org github.com/portainer. Container management platform with strong UI focus across Docker, Kubernetes, and Nomad. Popular for self-hosted homelab and SMB Kubernetes deployments.


PostHog

PostHog (analytics, series c) — GitHub org github.com/PostHog. Open-source product analytics — events, session replay, feature flags, A/B tests, LLM observability, all in one self-hostable platform.


Pragma

Pragma (gaming, series b) — GitHub org github.com/pragmaplatform. Backend platform for live-service games — accounts, social, store, matchmaking, and game data as one integrated system, trusted by studios including Bungie and Remedy. Raised a $22M Series B led by Insight Partners.


Predibase

Predibase (ai-ml, series b) — GitHub org github.com/predibase. Commercial vendor for Ludwig, an open-source low-code ML framework. Platform for fine-tuning and serving open-weight LLMs with strong enterprise adoption.


Preset

Preset (analytics, series b) — GitHub org github.com/preset-io. Managed Apache Superset platform. Commercial vendor for the open-source Superset BI tool, founded by the original Superset creator (Maxime Beauchemin).


Prisma

Prisma (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/prisma. TypeScript ORM and database tooling. Strong public SDK presence and steady release cadence over multiple years.


Privy

Privy (fintech, series b) — GitHub org github.com/privy-io. Embedded wallet and authentication platform for Web3 apps. Strong adoption with consumer crypto apps; SDK-first integration model.


Pulumi

Pulumi (developer-tools, series c) — GitHub org github.com/pulumi. Infrastructure-as-code as actual code — TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET, Java IaC. The cloud-native challenger to Terraform; growing post-HashiCorp acquisition.

200+ public repos across providers and SDKs


Qdrant

Qdrant (database, series a) — GitHub org github.com/qdrant. Rust-native vector database with HNSW indexing. Open-source core plus Qdrant Cloud; widely used in RAG production stacks.


Railway

Railway (infrastructure, series a) — GitHub org github.com/railwayapp. Heroku-style deploy platform with a sharp UI and a growing public SDK presence.


Rancher (SUSE)

Rancher (SUSE) (infrastructure, public) — GitHub org github.com/rancher. Kubernetes management platform now under SUSE. Public org hosts Rancher core, K3s (lightweight Kubernetes), Longhorn (cloud-native storage), and Fleet (GitOps).


Ready Player Me

Ready Player Me (gaming, series b) — GitHub org github.com/readyplayerme. Cross-game avatar platform — one 3D avatar players carry across thousands of games and apps. Raised a $56M Series B led by a16z in 2022.


Redis

Redis (database, later) — GitHub org github.com/redis. In-memory data store and broker. Redis is the de-facto cache layer of modern apps; the public org hosts the core engine plus 12+ client libraries.


Remotion

Remotion (developer-tools, series a) — GitHub org github.com/remotion-dev. Programmatic video creation in React. The canonical pick for AI video pipelines and developer-built creative tools.


Render

Render (infrastructure, series b) — GitHub org github.com/renderinc. Unified cloud platform competing with Heroku and Vercel for full-stack app deployment. Strong developer-experience focus with native git-driven deploys, managed Postgres, and Redis.


Replicate

Replicate (ai-infra, series b) — GitHub org github.com/replicate. Run open-source ML models with an API. Their Cog runtime is one of the most-forked packaging standards in OSS ML.


Resend

Resend (developer-tools, series a) — GitHub org github.com/resend. Email API for developers. SDKs across every major runtime; React Email is the de facto template library. A textbook case of API-first developer-tools growth.


Retool

Retool (productivity, series c) — GitHub org github.com/tryretool. Internal tools platform — drag-and-drop interface builder backed by SQL, REST, and GraphQL. Strong adoption with engineering and ops teams for replacing custom internal dashboards.


RunPod

RunPod (ai-infra, series a) — GitHub org github.com/runpod. GPU cloud platform with serverless and dedicated GPU options. Strong indie-developer adoption for fine-tuning, training, and inference workloads.


Runway ML

Runway ML (ai-ml, later) — GitHub org github.com/runwayml. Generative video and image platform. The category-defining AI video tool with proprietary Gen-* model family; limited public ML surface but active SDK presence.


Scaleway

Scaleway (infrastructure, later) — GitHub org github.com/scaleway. European cloud provider (Iliad Group subsidiary) with strong sovereign-cloud positioning. Public org hosts CLIs, Terraform providers, and Kubernetes operators.


Sentry

Sentry (observability, later) — GitHub org github.com/getsentry. Open-source error monitoring and performance. Multi-language SDKs and the OSS Sentry server make this one of the most fork-able observability orgs.


shadcn

shadcn (developer-tools, seed) — GitHub org github.com/shadcn-ui. Component library by reference — copy-paste primitives that became the default React UI stack in 2024-2026.


Sigma Computing

Sigma Computing (analytics, later) — GitHub org github.com/sigmacomputing. Spreadsheet-style BI tool for cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks). Strong adoption with operations teams comfortable with spreadsheet semantics.


SigNoz

SigNoz (observability, series a) — GitHub org github.com/SigNoz. Open-source observability platform built on OpenTelemetry. Strong adoption as the OSS challenger to Datadog and New Relic; ClickHouse-backed for high-cardinality data.


Sourcegraph

Sourcegraph (developer-tools, later) — GitHub org github.com/sourcegraph. Code intelligence platform with the Cody AI coding assistant. Public org hosts the indexer, language servers, and Cody extensions across major IDEs.


Splunk

Splunk (observability, public) — GitHub org github.com/splunk. SIEM and log management platform now under Cisco (2024 $28B acquisition). Public org hosts the Splunk Connect tooling, observability cloud agents, and Splunk Cloud integrations.


Stability AI

Stability AI (ai-ml, series c) — GitHub org github.com/Stability-AI. Open-weight model lab known for Stable Diffusion. Public org hosts model code, training recipes, and the StableLM language-model family.


Stripe

Stripe (fintech, later) — GitHub org github.com/stripe. Payments infrastructure. Their public SDK org is a long-running baseline of what a mature, multi-language, API-first engineering organization looks like.


Stytch

Stytch (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/stytchauth. Auth API for B2B and consumer apps. Multi-runtime SDKs with steady release cadence.


Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic (observability, later) — GitHub org github.com/SumoLogic. Cloud-native log management and SIEM platform. Public org hosts SDK clients and collector tooling for hybrid-cloud log aggregation.


Supabase

Supabase (developer-tools, series c) — GitHub org github.com/supabase. Open-source Firebase alternative — Postgres-native backend, auth, storage, edge functions. Their commit velocity has compounded steadily since the 2020 launch.


Tailwind Labs

Tailwind Labs (developer-tools, later) — GitHub org github.com/tailwindlabs. Tailwind CSS, Headless UI, Heroicons. One of the longest-running and most influential public design-system orgs.


Tauri (CrabNebula)

Tauri (CrabNebula) (developer-tools, seed) — GitHub org github.com/tauri-apps. Rust-based desktop app framework competing with Electron. Smaller binary, better performance, native OS bindings. CrabNebula is the commercial team.


Temporal

Temporal (developer-tools, series c) — GitHub org github.com/temporalio. Durable workflow orchestration platform. Core Go server, multi-language SDKs (TS/Py/Java/Go/.NET/Ruby/PHP), and visibility primitives all public.

100+ public repos across server, SDKs, and tooling


ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot (analytics, later) — GitHub org github.com/thoughtspot. AI-native search-based analytics platform. Strong embedded analytics story; Sage AI engine adds natural-language data exploration on top of the SpotIQ engine.


Timescale

Timescale (database, series c) — GitHub org github.com/timescale. Postgres extension for time-series data plus a hosted cloud. The TimescaleDB engine ships under Timescale License; SDKs and tooling are MIT.


Together AI

Together AI (ai-infra, series b) — GitHub org github.com/togethercomputer. Open-weight LLM training and inference. Heavy public OSS presence — RedPajama, Mamba, OpenChatKit.


Traefik Labs

Traefik Labs (infrastructure, series b) — GitHub org github.com/traefik. Commercial vendor for Traefik, the cloud-native edge router and load balancer. Strong adoption in Kubernetes environments; Traefik Hub adds API management on top of the open-source core.


Trigger.dev

Trigger.dev (developer-tools, series a) — GitHub org github.com/triggerdotdev. Background jobs and durable workflows for developers. Open-core with a self-hostable runtime.


Turso

Turso (database, series a) — GitHub org github.com/tursodatabase. Edge SQLite (libSQL fork) for global low-latency reads. Heavy OSS contributions to libSQL.


Twilio

Twilio (developer-tools, public) — GitHub org github.com/twilio. Communications API platform. Public org with SDKs across 8+ languages plus Functions, Studio tooling, and the SendGrid+Segment integration surface.


Typesense

Typesense (database, seed) — GitHub org github.com/typesense. C++ open-source search engine designed as a Meilisearch / Elasticsearch alternative. Hosted Typesense Cloud is the commercial path.


Upstash

Upstash (infrastructure, series a) — GitHub org github.com/upstash. Serverless Redis and Kafka. A frequent default storage choice in the Vercel marketplace + AI-era stack.


Vercel

Vercel (developer-tools, later) — GitHub org github.com/vercel. Vercel ships the frontend cloud (Next.js, hosting, AI SDK, AI Gateway, Workflow, Sandbox). Their public org is one of the most active in the developer-tools sector.


vLLM

vLLM (ai-infra, seed) — GitHub org github.com/vllm-project. High-throughput LLM serving engine originated at UC Berkeley Sky Computing Lab. The de-facto open-source LLM inference engine in 2025-2026; commercial backing via Neural Magic (acquired by Red Hat/IBM).


Voyage AI

Voyage AI (ai-ml, seed) — GitHub org github.com/voyage-ai. Embedding-model specialist focused on retrieval-augmented generation accuracy. Acquired by MongoDB in early 2025 as their RAG/embedding stack.


Weaviate

Weaviate (database, series b) — GitHub org github.com/weaviate. Open-source vector database with hybrid search. One of the headline players in the AI-native data layer.


Weights & Biases

Weights & Biases (developer-tools, series c) — GitHub org github.com/wandb. ML experiment tracking, model registry, and evaluation platform. Public org hosts the wandb SDK, Weave LLM observability layer, and Launch.


Wise

Wise (fintech, public) — GitHub org github.com/transferwise. Cross-border payments platform (formerly TransferWise). Strong public engineering footprint with comprehensive SDK and integration tooling across multiple languages.


WorkOS

WorkOS (developer-tools, series b) — GitHub org github.com/workos. Enterprise SSO, directory sync, audit logs — the SOC2-ready APIs that B2B SaaS bolts on for compliance.


Writer

Writer (ai-ml, series c) — GitHub org github.com/writer. Enterprise generative AI platform with the Palmyra model family. Focus on regulated industries with on-prem deployment options.


Zapier

Zapier (productivity, later) — GitHub org github.com/zapier. No-code automation platform connecting 7,000+ apps. Public org hosts the Zapier Platform CLI, app templates, and connector developer tooling.


500 Global

500 Global is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on pre-seed and seed globally. 500 is one of the highest-volume globally distributed early-stage funds; their geographic concentration is distinct from peer Silicon-Valley funds.

500 runs a globally distributed pre-seed and seed thesis with strong emerging-markets sourcing. Per-geography programs publish localized investment criteria.


Accel

Accel is a Palo Alto-based venture fund focused on seed through Series B across multiple geographies. Accel is one of the longest-running early-stage funds; their European and Indian sourcing footprints are particularly active.

Accel publishes a 'prepared mind' sourcing thesis — partners specialize ahead of market shifts. Recent public writing centers on AI infrastructure, vertical software, and European founder strength.

ai-ml enterprise-saas developer-tools infrastructure


Altimeter Capital

Altimeter Capital is a Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on growth through pre-IPO. Altimeter is one of the most visible crossover funds, with strong partner-publishing cadence and visible public-equity positions on top of venture-stage bets.

Altimeter (Brad Gerstner) publishes a thesis on category-defining technology compounders. Distinctive crossover model with public-equity and venture-stage participation. Notable for Snowflake, MongoDB, Crowdstrike positions.


Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz is a Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on seed through growth across multiple verticals. a16z combines breadth of vertical funds with a high-volume operator-content strategy — their blog and podcast network is itself a deal-flow surface.

a16z publishes vertical-specific theses — American Dynamism, AI, Crypto, Bio + Health, Consumer, Games, Enterprise, Fintech. The general partner pool is sector-specialized; each vertical has its own publishing cadence and sourcing surface.

ai-ml developer-tools infrastructure fintech consumer gaming


Battery Ventures

Battery Ventures is a Boston-based venture fund focused on seed through growth. Battery is one of the longest-running multi-stage venture firms, with broad sector coverage and a strong partner-published thesis surface.

Battery publishes a multi-vertical thesis with strong B2B software, infrastructure, industrial tech, and consumer angles. Distinct for partner-publishing cadence and operator-style portfolio support.

enterprise-saas developer-tools infrastructure ai-ml


Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on early-stage (Series A primarily). Benchmark is one of the most concentrated and operationally hands-on Series-A funds; partner-written content is sparse but consistent.

Benchmark runs a flat-partnership structure with concentrated portfolios — fewer, larger early-stage bets where every partner is on the cap table of every deal. Public posture skews toward category-defining founders in B2B and consumer.


Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer Venture Partners is a Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on seed through growth, vertical-software-heavy. Bessemer publishes more durable thesis content per partner than almost any other firm; this is a sourcing surface in itself.

Bessemer's State of the Cloud annual report and Roadmap essays publicly define their thesis. Strong sourcing in cloud-native B2B, developer tools, and healthcare software.

enterprise-saas developer-tools infrastructure healthcare


BITKRAFT Ventures

BITKRAFT Ventures is a Denver-based venture fund focused on seed through Series B, gaming and synthetic reality. BITKRAFT is one of the largest gaming-native investment platforms, leading rounds in game-infrastructure companies (Beamable among them) with 130+ portfolio companies globally.

BITKRAFT invests across gaming, interactive media, and immersive technology under a "Synthetic Reality" thesis — the convergence of physical and digital worlds. Founded by ESL co-founder Jens Hilgers, the firm spans game infrastructure, content, and platform layers.


Boost VC

Boost VC is a San Mateo-based venture fund focused on pre-seed accelerator with frontier-tech focus. Boost is one of the most distinctive frontier-tech pre-seed programs; the founder Adam Draper anchors the public thesis.

Boost publishes a frontier-tech thesis — VR/AR, biotech, space, crypto, AI. Their accelerator program runs in cohorts with a strong sci-fi sourcing posture.


Coatue

Coatue is a New York-based venture fund focused on growth through public. Coatue is one of the most-cited crossover funds; their public-equity research surface informs their private sourcing in TMT.

Coatue runs a crossover thesis — late-stage private plus public. Their TMT focus centers on AI, semiconductors, and software platforms.

ai-ml enterprise-saas infrastructure semiconductors


DST Global

DST Global is a Hong Kong / London-based venture fund focused on growth through pre-IPO. DST Global is the most internationally-distributed growth investor in technology venture, with positions in Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Stripe, and frontier AI labs.

DST Global (Yuri Milner) publishes a global thesis on consumer internet platforms, social networks, fintech, and AI. Distinctive for international growth-round leadership across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.


Emergence Capital

Emergence Capital is a San Mateo-based venture fund focused on series A through growth. Emergence is the dominant SaaS-pure-play venture firm; their portfolio anchors the modern B2B SaaS category.

Emergence publishes a B2B-SaaS-exclusive thesis. The most concentrated SaaS-only fund of meaningful size; notable Salesforce, Veeva, Zoom, Box, ServiceTitan investor.


First Round Capital

First Round Capital is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on seed and pre-seed. First Round Review predates most modern venture-content surfaces; the publication itself is part of their sourcing strategy.

First Round publishes the First Round Review — one of the longest-running operator-content surfaces in venture. Sourcing skews B2B SaaS, developer tools, and consumer.


Founders Fund

Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on seed through growth, contrarian-thesis. Founders Fund is one of the most thesis-heavy public funds in venture; their partners' essays explicitly anchor sourcing decisions.

Founders Fund publishes a contrarian-thesis posture — frontier technology bets, public-sector tech, defense, biotech, space. Manifesto-style essays from the partnership define the brand more than blog content does.

ai-ml frontier-tech infrastructure defense biotech


Founders Inc

Founders Inc is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on pre-seed and seed. Founders Inc combines fund and studio operations with one of the most visible operator-content surfaces in pre-seed venture.

Founders Inc publishes an operator-content-heavy thesis with sourcing across consumer, AI, and developer tools. Strong studio/incubator overlay on top of fund operations.


General Catalyst

General Catalyst is a Cambridge / San Francisco-based venture fund focused on seed through growth across multiple verticals. GC has one of the most distinctive published category-design postures; their thesis essays explicitly anchor multi-fund sourcing.

GC publishes an 'Applied AI' thesis with strong sourcing in defense, healthcare, fintech, and enterprise software. Their Health Assurance and Global Resilience theses are explicit categories.

ai-ml healthcare fintech defense enterprise-saas


GV (Google Ventures)

GV (Google Ventures) is a Mountain View-based venture fund focused on seed through Series C across life sciences and tech. GV is one of the most active corporate-strategic funds with a particularly strong life-sciences sourcing footprint.

GV publishes parallel life-sciences and tech theses. Their tech focus has strengthened in AI infrastructure and developer tools through the 2024-2026 fund cycles.

ai-ml developer-tools infrastructure life-sciences


Greylock Partners

Greylock Partners is a Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on seed through Series B in enterprise and AI. Greylock combines a strong EIR program with a high-quality partner-content surface; sourcing concentration is heavy in AI and enterprise.

Greylock's published thesis emphasizes AI-native applications, infrastructure, and enterprise productivity. Partner-led essays cover go-to-market patterns for technical founders and category-design playbooks.

ai-ml enterprise-saas infrastructure developer-tools


Haystack

Haystack is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on seed primarily. Haystack is one of the most distinctive solo-GP-style funds; their public-content surface anchors a high-volume sourcing model.

Haystack publishes a founder-content-heavy seed thesis run by Semil Shah. Sourcing concentrates on early-stage founders before broader market awareness.


Hustle Fund

Hustle Fund is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on pre-seed. Hustle Fund's high-volume pre-seed model and operator-content presence make it one of the more distinct emerging-manager funds.

Hustle Fund publishes a 'hustle' thesis — high-volume pre-seed bets on go-to-market-first founders. Strong operator-content presence through partner publishing.


ICONIQ Capital

ICONIQ Capital is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on growth-stage enterprise software primarily. ICONIQ Growth is one of the most concentrated late-stage enterprise-software funds; their portfolio appears as a stage benchmark in many emerging-manager LP decks.

ICONIQ Growth invests in late-stage B2B software with a heavy focus on infrastructure, vertical SaaS, and AI-native applications.


Index Ventures

Index Ventures is a London / San Francisco-based venture fund focused on seed through Series B across enterprise and consumer. Index is one of the most active US/Europe-bridge funds; their multi-office structure shapes a distinct sourcing pattern.

Index publishes a transatlantic thesis with strong European-founder sourcing. Recent partner essays emphasize AI-native enterprise software, fintech infrastructure, and developer tools.

ai-ml enterprise-saas fintech developer-tools


Initialized Capital

Initialized Capital is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on seed (rare Series A). Initialized is one of the most concentrated seed-only funds with sourcing roots in the YC network.

Initialized publishes a seed-only concentration thesis with strong technical-founder bias. Heavy sourcing in AI infrastructure, developer tools, and consumer-tech.


Insight Partners

Insight Partners is a New York-based venture fund focused on growth-stage software (Series B through public). Insight is one of the largest growth-stage software funds; their published Onsite content is a significant operator-content surface.

Insight publishes a 'ScaleUp' thesis — high-conviction growth-stage software, with a substantial Onsite operating team that supports portfolio companies post-investment.

enterprise-saas developer-tools fintech ai-ml


Intel Capital

Intel Capital is a Santa Clara-based venture fund focused on seed through growth. Intel Capital has invested in over 2,000 companies; the deep-tech thesis especially relevant to silicon-adjacent and AI-infra categories.

Intel Capital publishes a deep-tech thesis spanning silicon, AI hardware, networking, edge compute, and infrastructure software. One of the longest-running corporate venture programs.

ai-infra ai-ml infrastructure developer-tools


Khosla Ventures

Khosla Ventures is a Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on seed through growth, deep-tech and frontier. Khosla is one of the most distinctive frontier-tech funds; sourcing skews toward technical founders with deep domain expertise.

Khosla publishes a frontier-tech-heavy thesis — AI, climate, biotech, fusion, agriculture. Partner-written essays emphasize 'unreasonable' technical bets on category-defining technology shifts.


Konvoy Ventures

Konvoy Ventures is a Denver-based venture fund focused on pre-seed through Series A, gaming and interactive entertainment. Konvoy is one of the most prolific dedicated gaming VCs, leading early rounds in game-infrastructure companies (Edgegap among them) and writing detailed public thesis material on the category.

Konvoy is a thesis-driven firm investing in the platforms and technologies of interactive entertainment — game infrastructure, tooling, and the engine/runtime layer beneath studios. The team publishes a weekly gaming-industry newsletter that doubles as a public sourcing surface.


Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on seed through growth across multiple geographies. Lightspeed is one of the most globally distributed early-stage funds — their per-geography partner pages explicitly publish thesis statements.

Lightspeed publishes a multi-vertical thesis across enterprise, consumer, fintech, healthcare, and a strong India and Israel sourcing footprint. AI-infrastructure and developer-tools sourcing has compounded in their recent fund cycles.

ai-ml enterprise-saas fintech developer-tools consumer


Lux Capital

Lux Capital is a New York / Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on seed through growth. Lux Capital is the dominant deep-tech VC; their portfolio anchors much of the frontier-science and defense-tech venture landscape.

Lux Capital (Josh Wolfe) publishes a deep-tech, frontier-science thesis — quantum, robotics, defense tech, healthcare AI, frontier ML. The most concentrated deep-tech fund of meaningful size.

ai-ml ai-infra frontier-tech defense biotech


M12 (Microsoft Ventures)

M12 (Microsoft Ventures) is a Seattle-based venture fund focused on series A through growth. M12 is Microsoft's strategic venture arm; their public investments often signal Microsoft's strategic interest in adjacent categories.

M12 publishes a corporate-venture thesis aligned with Microsoft's strategic priorities — AI, enterprise infrastructure, security, and developer tools. Distinct from arms-length VC for its M&A optionality.

ai-ml developer-tools infrastructure enterprise-saas


Makers Fund

Makers Fund is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on pre-seed through Series A, interactive entertainment. Makers Fund is a dedicated interactive-entertainment VC with over $1B AUM, investing from product inception through global scaling across the games stack.

Makers Fund backs builders of the future of interactive entertainment — games, content, platforms, and ecosystem technologies — with a thesis centered on the intersection of creativity, technology, and community. Global presence across San Francisco, London, Tokyo, and Singapore.


Menlo Ventures

Menlo Ventures is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on series A through growth. Menlo is one of the longest-running venture firms with broad multi-stage coverage and a strong AI-thesis publishing footprint.

Menlo publishes a multi-vertical thesis with AI, B2B SaaS, fintech, and consumer angles. Notable for early Anthropic position and partner-published AI thesis cadence.


New Enterprise Associates

New Enterprise Associates is a Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on seed through growth across tech and healthcare. NEA is one of the largest multi-stage funds; their healthcare and tech arms operate as parallel sourcing organizations.

NEA publishes parallel tech and healthcare theses. Their tech focus centers on enterprise software, AI infrastructure, and developer tools.

enterprise-saas ai-ml developer-tools healthcare


NFX

NFX is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on seed and pre-seed across multiple verticals. NFX has one of the most distinct published thesis surfaces in seed venture — the Network Effects Manual is a permanent reference for the category.

NFX publishes the canonical 'network effects' thesis. Their essay surface (Brief, Manual) anchors a heavy operator-content sourcing strategy.


Pear VC

Pear VC is a Palo Alto-based venture fund focused on pre-seed and seed. Pear's founder-fellowship and Stanford ties make it one of the most concentrated technical-founder pre-seed sources.

Pear publishes a deep-tech and Stanford-network thesis with strong founder-fellowship programs. Sourcing concentrates around technical founders with strong domain backgrounds.

ai-ml biotech developer-tools infrastructure


Pioneer Fund

Pioneer Fund is a Distributed-based venture fund focused on pre-seed (tournament-based sourcing). Pioneer is one of the most-distinct pre-seed sourcing surfaces — the public tournament itself is the funnel.

Pioneer runs a public tournament that sources pre-seed companies globally. The thesis is platform-agnostic — strong founder signal + early-product traction.


Redpoint Ventures

Redpoint Ventures is a Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on seed through growth. Redpoint is one of the longer-running multi-stage venture firms with broad sector coverage.

Redpoint publishes a thesis covering enterprise software, infrastructure, consumer internet, and crypto. Long-running multi-stage model with strong operator-content surface through partner blogs.


Ribbit Capital

Ribbit Capital is a Palo Alto-based venture fund focused on seed through pre-IPO. Ribbit is the most globally-distributed fintech-focused fund, with public positions across major fintech category leaders.

Ribbit publishes a global-fintech-first thesis spanning payments, banking infrastructure, lending, and crypto. Strong international footprint with positions across LATAM, SEA, and EU fintech.


Salesforce Ventures

Salesforce Ventures is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on series A through growth. Salesforce Ventures is one of the largest enterprise-software CVCs, with explicit AppExchange-distribution leverage for portfolio companies.

Salesforce Ventures publishes a strategic-venture thesis aligned with Salesforce's Customer 360 platform — AI, enterprise SaaS, developer tools, vertical SaaS. Strong AppExchange integration angle for portfolio companies.


Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital is a Menlo Park-based venture fund focused on seed through growth, AI and enterprise software-heavy. Sequoia is one of the most prolific check-writers across stages and one of the most visible thesis publishers in tech venture.

Sequoia publishes a multi-decade thesis on outlier founders building enduring, often category-defining companies. Recent partner writing emphasizes AI-native infrastructure, vertical AI, and platform shifts in enterprise software. Their Arc and Scout programs widen sourcing into pre-seed.

ai-ml enterprise-saas developer-tools infrastructure


Spark Capital

Spark Capital is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on seed through growth. Spark Capital has one of the most distinctive concentrated-conviction sourcing motions in venture.

Spark publishes a thesis on category-defining consumer and B2B software. Notable for early Twitter, Slack, Discord, and frontier AI positions; distinctive for concentrated partner-led conviction model.

ai-ml consumer enterprise-saas developer-tools


Susa Ventures

Susa Ventures is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on seed primarily. Susa is one of the more distinctive sustainable-growth seed funds with a strong B2B sourcing footprint.

Susa publishes a 'real businesses' seed thesis — capital-efficient, sustainable revenue models, often B2B and developer tools.


Techstars

Techstars is a Distributed (city programs)-based venture fund focused on pre-seed accelerator. Techstars is one of the most geographically distributed accelerator networks; per-city programs operate as semi-independent sourcing units.

Techstars runs city- and vertical-specific accelerator programs with partner-authored thesis surfaces per program.

enterprise-saas developer-tools consumer ai-ml


Thrive Capital

Thrive Capital is a New York-based venture fund focused on series A through growth. Thrive has one of the most concentrated growth portfolios in tech venture, with publicly known positions across the frontier AI and category-defining consumer waves.

Thrive Capital (Joshua Kushner) publishes a concentrated thesis on category-defining founders across consumer internet, fintech, and AI. Recent emphasis on frontier AI and developer infrastructure.

ai-ml enterprise-saas consumer fintech infrastructure


Tiger Global

Tiger Global is a New York-based venture fund focused on growth through pre-IPO. Tiger Global is one of the most prolific crossover investors, with public participation in dozens of category-defining venture rounds.

Tiger Global publishes a thesis of high-velocity, multi-stage capital deployment across software, internet, and consumer. Distinctive for fast-decision growth-round leadership during 2020-2021; pulled back significantly in 2023-2024.

ai-ml enterprise-saas developer-tools fintech consumer infrastructure


Union Square Ventures

Union Square Ventures is a New York-based venture fund focused on seed through series A. USV anchors much of the modern thesis-driven venture-publishing tradition; their early Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Cloudflare positions defined a generation of network-effects investing.

USV publishes a thesis on network effects, marketplaces, decentralized protocols, and learning systems. One of the most published thesis-driven venture firms; partners write extensively on their blog.

consumer fintech developer-tools enterprise-saas


Village Global

Village Global is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on pre-seed and seed across verticals. Village's Venture Partner Network is one of the more distinctive sourcing models in seed venture.

Village Global runs a Venture Partner Network model — operators and founders source on behalf of the fund. Thesis surface skews toward AI applications and developer tools.

ai-ml developer-tools consumer enterprise-saas


Y Combinator

Y Combinator is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused on pre-seed accelerator (batches). YC is the longest-running and most-cited accelerator; its batch demo days are themselves a category-defining sourcing surface.

YC publishes a permanent open thesis through Requests for Startups and partner-authored essays. The accelerator itself is the sourcing engine.

ai-ml developer-tools enterprise-saas consumer fintech


Adam Wathan

Adam created Tailwind CSS and co-founded Tailwind Labs. Author of Refactoring UI.


Addy Osmani

Addy leads aspects of the Chrome web platform team and is one of the most-cited web-performance authors. Long-running public OSS and book-publishing presence.


Caleb Porzio

Caleb created Livewire (Laravel) and Alpine.js. Bootstrapped a sustainable independent OSS business around these projects.


Chris McCord

Chris created the Phoenix web framework for Elixir and leads its development through Dockyard.


Daniel Gross

Daniel co-runs NFDG and AI Grant with Nat Friedman, focused on AI-native technical founders.


David Heinemeier Hansson

DHH created Ruby on Rails and is a co-founder of 37signals. Long-running public-figure status with deep OSS and public-writing footprint.


Edward Z. Yang

Edward is a long-running PyTorch core engineer. Public blog and conference talks anchor his public identity.


Dan Abramov

Independent (former React core team at Meta)

Dan co-authored Redux, Create React App, and was on the React core team. Long-running public-writing presence via overreacted.io.


José Valim

José created the Elixir programming language and co-founded Dashbit. Former Rails core team.


Kelsey Hightower

Independent (former Distinguished Engineer at Google Cloud)

Kelsey was a Distinguished Engineer at Google Cloud and is one of the most-cited public voices on Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.


Kent C. Dodds

Epic Web, EpicAI (independent education business)

Kent runs Epic Web and EpicAI, two large independent education platforms for software engineers. Long-running public OSS and teaching presence.


Lee Robinson

Lee leads product at Vercel and is one of the most active public devrel voices for Next.js. Personal site and GitHub host his canonical OSS, courses, and writing.


Pieter Levels

Nomad List, RemoteOK, and a portfolio of indie SaaS products

Pieter publicly runs multiple bootstrapped products and publishes his revenue, GitHub activity, and tech stack openly. One of the most-cited indie hacker public figures.


Mitchell Hashimoto

Founder & CEO of Ghostty Inc., co-founder of HashiCorp

Mitchell co-founded HashiCorp (Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, Vagrant) and currently leads Ghostty, a high-performance terminal emulator.


Mo Firouz

Heroic Labs (Nakama open-source game server)

Mo co-founded Heroic Labs and contributes to Nakama, focusing on scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems. Self-published GitHub identity (@mofirouz) and personal site.


Tom Preston-Werner

RedwoodJS, Chatterbug (current), GitHub (former)

Tom co-founded GitHub and currently leads RedwoodJS. Created Jekyll, semantic versioning, and TOML.


Nat Friedman

AI Grant, NFDG (current), GitHub (former CEO)

Nat was CEO of GitHub during the Microsoft acquisition. Now runs AI Grant (research-grant program) and NFDG (investment fund with Daniel Gross).


Chris Molozian

Chris is a co-author of Nakama, the open-source game backend, and writes on distributed systems. Self-published GitHub identity (@novabyte) and personal site.


Patrick McKenzie

Independent (former Stripe Atlas, Bingo Card Creator)

Patrick writes on software business operations at kalzumeus.com and Bits about Money. Former Stripe employee and one of the most-cited indie-software-business public-writing voices.


Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo founded Vercel (formerly Zeit), which builds Next.js and the Vercel deployment platform. Long-running OSS history across socket.io, mongoose, slackin, and Next.js itself.


Sahil Lavingia

Sahil founded Gumroad. He has published the company's books in public OSS form and runs one of the more transparent public-narrative founder operations.


shadcn

shadcn created the shadcn/ui component library, which became the default React UI primitive set in 2024-2026. Currently at Vercel.


Solomon Hykes

Solomon founded Docker and now leads Dagger, a code-first CI/CD engine. Long-running public-figure status in DevOps.


Sindre Sorhus

Independent (maintainer of 1000+ npm packages)

Sindre is one of the most prolific open-source maintainers in JavaScript, maintaining a vast catalog of npm packages used across the ecosystem.


Steve Schoger

Steve co-founded Tailwind Labs with Adam Wathan and co-authored Refactoring UI. Heroicons project lead.


TJ Holowaychuk

Apex (and prior Express.js, koa, mocha, jade, stylus)

TJ authored Express.js, Koa, Mocha, Jade, and many other foundational Node.js libraries. Currently runs Apex.


TJ Holowaychuk (tj-actions org)

Public maintainer organization for a collection of widely-used GitHub Actions. Listed here as the maintainer-org identity, not a personal profile.


Tobias Lütke

Tobi founded Shopify and remains its CEO. His GitHub presence is sparse but publicly anchored to Shopify Engineering and his personal site.


Linus Torvalds

Linus created the Linux kernel and Git. His GitHub profile is read-only (kernel work happens via mailing list), but the handle is a canonical public identity.


Travis Fischer

Agentic, prior projects in OSS AI tooling

Travis built several widely-used OSS AI projects and runs Agentic. Self-published GitHub identity and personal site.


Yathin Sethu

Yathin's public projects (see public source)

Public engineering profile maintained as a self-published GitHub presence with multiple open-source projects.


Evan You

Evan created Vue.js and Vite. Both projects are among the most-installed JavaScript packages globally.


Andrei Mihu

Andrei is the most active contributor to Nakama, the open-source game backend (github.com/heroiclabs/nakama). Self-published GitHub identity (@zyro) and personal site.


A2A AgentCard

Google's Agent-to-Agent protocol — a JSON-RPC envelope plus an /.well-known/agent-card.json descriptor that lets autonomous agents discover and call each other's capabilities. VC Deal Flow Signal publishes an AgentCard at /.well-known/agent-card.json and a JSON-RPC stub at /api/a2a so any A2A-compatible orchestrator can route deal-flow queries to the panel without bespoke integration.


Acquihire

An acquisition primarily motivated by acquiring the team rather than the company's products or revenue. Common in AI — Adept (Amazon), Character AI (Google), and Inflection (Microsoft) followed this template in 2024. The product is often wound down post-acquisition; the engineering team joins the acquirer. Acquihire valuations are often non-disclosed and structured as a mix of cash and retention compensation packages.


AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Structuring content so that answer engines — Google's People-Also-Ask, Reddit pull-quotes, Quora top answers, ChatGPT search results, Perplexity citations — can extract a complete, self-contained answer in 40–80 words. AEO emphasises FAQPage and QAPage schema, atomic question-answer blocks, and explicit source attribution. VC Deal Flow Signal publishes a 200+ Q&A dataset at /qa.jsonl as an AEO surface for both human readers and retrieval pipelines.


Agent Evaluation

The discipline of measuring LLM agent capability, reliability, and safety across well-defined benchmarks. Distinct from LLM evals (which measure single-call performance) because agent evals require multi-step trajectory measurement. Common benchmarks: SWE-bench (software engineering), τ-bench (tool use), WebArena (browser navigation), AgentBench (general capability). Vendors: Braintrust, Galileo, Inspect AI, LangSmith.


Agent Guardrails

Runtime constraints that limit agent behavior — output filtering, tool-call validation, spend limits, time budgets, and harmful-action detection. Implementations include NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails, Guardrails AI, and platform-specific safety APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI). Distinct from training-time alignment (RLHF, Constitutional AI) — guardrails operate at inference time and can be customized per deployment.


Agent Memory

Persistent state an LLM agent maintains across turns, sessions, or interactions. Three common memory types: (1) short-term — the current context window; (2) episodic — recent conversation history retrieved via RAG; (3) long-term — facts and preferences stored in a separate database. Letta (formerly MemGPT) is the canonical reference implementation for persistent agent memory; modern frameworks (Mastra, CrewAI) ship memory primitives as a first-class concept.


ai.txt and ai-policy.json

Emerging conventions for advertising a site's policy toward AI training and retrieval. ai.txt is the human-readable analog to robots.txt; ai-policy.json is the machine-readable counterpart with per-agent allow/deny rules. VC Deal Flow Signal publishes both at the root and at /.well-known/ along with /openai-search.json and /.well-known/ai.json — explicitly allowing crawl, training, and retrieval under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.


AIO (AI Overview Optimization)

The subset of GEO/AEO targeted specifically at Google's AI Overviews (formerly SGE). AIO combines clear topic sentences, FAQPage schema, Speakable selectors, HowTo structure, DefinedTerm sets, and quotable single-sentence facts. Google's AI Overview model preferentially extracts text wrapped in Speakable selectors and content surrounded by topical entity schema. VC Deal Flow Signal exposes /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt, /qa.jsonl, /md/* and a Speakable selector across pillar pages for this purpose.


Anti-dilution Provision

Investor protection against down rounds — adjusts the conversion price of preferred shares so existing investors aren't diluted as much when new shares are issued at a lower price. 'Weighted average' (broad-based) anti-dilution is standard and most founder-friendly. 'Full ratchet' anti-dilution is investor-friendly but punitive in a down round and is uncommon outside distressed deals.


ARR

Annual Recurring Revenue — the annualized run rate of all active recurring contracts, excluding one-time fees, services, and usage spikes. ARR is the headline SaaS revenue metric venture rounds are priced against; multiples like 10× ARR or 30× ARR set the framing for valuation conversations. ARR is forward-looking by construction (it annualizes the current monthly book) and differs from booked revenue, GAAP recognized revenue, and cash collected — investors will ask for all four.


Bot Filter

The deterministic exclusion rule that removes commits authored by automated accounts (Dependabot, Renovate, GitHub Actions, and any account name matching the substring 'bot') before any aggregation runs. Bot filtering is applied at the commit level, not the repository level, so a human-authored commit in a repo that also receives bot traffic is still counted. Without this filter the framework-migration signal type would be inflated by lockfile churn and the resulting ranking would be noise.


BreadcrumbList Schema

A Schema.org type that describes the hierarchical position of a page within a site, expressed as an ordered list of ListItem entries. BreadcrumbList markup gives search engines and LLMs a deterministic crawl-depth signal and is rendered as a hierarchical breadcrumb in Google search results. VC Deal Flow Signal emits BreadcrumbList on every leaf page and faceted hub.


Bridge Round

An interim financing round between two priced rounds, typically structured as convertible notes or SAFEs that convert at the next priced round's terms (often with a discount or valuation cap). Bridges extend runway when a company needs more time to hit milestones before pricing a Series A/B/C. Common during downturns; sometimes signals difficulty raising; sometimes just gives time to execute.


Burn Multiple

Net burn divided by net new ARR in the same period. Coined by David Sacks as a single-number SaaS efficiency metric: under 1 is elite, 1–1.5 is great, 1.5–2 is OK, 2–3 is suspect, and over 3 means the business is buying revenue at unsustainable cost. Burn multiple normalizes across stage and gross-margin profiles where standalone burn rate or growth rate would mislead. It is the SaaS analog to LTV:CAC for the venture-rounds market.


Burn Rate

The net rate at which a startup spends cash, expressed in dollars per month. Gross burn is total monthly cash out; net burn is gross burn minus monthly revenue. Burn rate is the denominator of runway. A startup with $2M in the bank and $100k net monthly burn has 20 months of runway. Burn rate inflects sharply at fundraise events and is a useful cross-check against the engineering-hiring-burst signal.


CAC

Customer Acquisition Cost — fully loaded sales and marketing spend in a period divided by new customers acquired in that period. CAC includes people, tools, ad spend, and overhead allocated to acquisition; back-of-envelope CAC that excludes salaries is the most common reason investor diligence finds the real number 2–4× higher than founders report. CAC feeds the LTV:CAC ratio (3:1+ healthy) and CAC payback metric.


CAC Payback

The number of months it takes for the gross profit from a new customer to repay the fully-loaded cost of acquiring them. CAC payback = CAC / (ARPA × gross margin), measured in months. Healthy SaaS sits under 12 months; over 24 months is a warning sign that the business needs cheaper acquisition channels or higher-margin contracts. CAC payback is cash-flow-oriented where LTV:CAC is unit-economics-oriented — both are needed.


Canonical URL

A link-element annotation (rel=canonical) that designates one URL as the authoritative version of a page when multiple URLs serve the same content. Canonical tags collapse duplicate-content signals into a single ranked URL. VC Deal Flow Signal sets canonical URLs through Next.js metadata.alternates.canonical on every route, with bidirectional hreflang reciprocation across the 12 supported locales.


Cap Table

The capitalization table — a record of every share, option, warrant, and convertible instrument in a startup, broken down by holder. Cap tables track ownership percentages, dilution effects of new rounds, vesting schedules, and option-pool refresh decisions. Investors review the cap table before committing capital because past structuring decisions (heavy preferences, founder control issues, dead equity) can make a clean term sheet impossible.


Capital Call

A formal request from a venture fund's General Partner to its Limited Partners to wire committed but not-yet-funded capital to the fund. LPs typically receive capital calls 10-15 days before the deadline with the dollar amount, allocation purpose, and wiring instructions. Capital call defaults are extremely rare (default would forfeit the LP's stake) but do happen during economic distress.


Carried Interest (Carry)

The General Partner's share of fund profits above the LPs' return of capital (and typically a preferred return hurdle of 6-8%). Industry standard is 20% carry on the upside, though high-performing funds can negotiate 25-30%. Carry is the primary economic incentive aligning GPs with LPs and is taxed favorably as long-term capital gains in most jurisdictions.


CC BY 4.0 License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International — the most permissive of the standard CC licenses, requiring only attribution. CC BY 4.0 permits commercial use, modification, and redistribution. VC Deal Flow Signal licenses every public surface (the dataset, the SSRN paper, the methodology, the answers corpus, the OpenAPI spec) under CC BY 4.0, with the citation string requested in /citation-guide.


Chain of Thought (CoT)

Prompting technique where a model is instructed (or trained) to articulate intermediate reasoning steps before producing a final answer. Empirically improves accuracy on math, logic, and multi-step problem solving — sometimes dramatically. 'Reasoning models' like OpenAI's o1/o3 family and Anthropic's Claude with extended thinking train chain-of-thought into the model rather than relying on prompting alone.


Change Failure Rate (DORA)

One of the four DORA metrics — the percentage of changes to production that result in degraded service, requiring hotfix, rollback, or remediation. Elite and high-performing teams: 0-15%. Medium and low performers: 16-30%. Despite intuition that high deployment frequency causes more failures, DORA research shows the opposite — high performers have BOTH high deployment frequency AND low change failure rate, because small batches reduce per-change risk.


Churn

Customers or revenue lost in a period, divided by the count or revenue at the start of the period. Logo churn measures customer counts; revenue churn measures ARR or MRR; net revenue churn includes expansion. Churn compounds non-linearly: 5% monthly churn is roughly 46% annual churn, not 60%. SaaS investors look at churn cohort-by-cohort because aggregate churn averages early-cohort survivors with recent-cohort decay and masks problems.


ClaimReview

A Schema.org type that marks a structured fact-check or claim assessment, with a claimReviewed text and a numeric reviewRating. ClaimReview is the schema Google uses to surface fact-check labels in search results. VC Deal Flow Signal emits ClaimReview on /predicted, marking the weekly Acceleration Watch prediction as a falsifiable claim with an as-of date — the same reproducibility commitment that anchors the Pricing Hold pillar of the manifesto.


Code-Side Sourcing

The category VC Deal Flow Signal defines: the practice of using public repository-velocity data as a leading indicator of venture-stage outcomes, surfacing fundraises 21 to 47 days before pitch decks circulate. Three properties make a sourcing channel Code-Side: (1) the input data is public and reproducible from primary sources, (2) the signal arrives before the company actively markets the round, (3) the methodology is published and falsifiable, not opaque. Code-Side Sourcing is a sub-category of alternative data — narrowed to engineering-side public repository activity — and runs alongside warm intros, decks, and databases rather than replacing them. The full canonical definition, what it replaces, the five first principles, and the practitioner list live at /code-side-sourcing.


Commit Velocity

The total number of commits to a startup's most active public GitHub repository over a rolling 14-day window. Commit velocity measures the raw volume of engineering output, not the quality or significance of individual commits. At VC Deal Flow Signal, we track commit velocity as a baseline metric — what matters most for investors is the rate of change (see: Commit Velocity Change).


Commit-Velocity Acceleration Engine

The named mechanism behind VC Deal Flow Signal. Five deterministic steps: (1) pull 14-day commit volume per organization from the public GitHub REST API with the bot filter applied, (2) compute the percentage delta against the prior 14-day window, (3) require two-period confirmation before a breakout becomes actionable, (4) score contributor concentration with the Gini coefficient, (5) classify the breakout into one of four signal types (Hiring Burst, Infrastructure Buildout, Deploy Spike, Framework Migration). The engine is published, sourced, and reproducible — see /mechanism for the full formula and the SSRN proof panel. The engine is the formal implementation of the broader category: Code-Side Sourcing.


Commit Velocity Change

The percentage change in commit velocity compared to the preceding 14-day window. This is the primary ranking signal at VC Deal Flow Signal. A startup with 40 commits this period and 20 commits last period shows +100% velocity change. Commit velocity change measures engineering acceleration — whether a team is speeding up, maintaining pace, or slowing down. Sustained acceleration has historically preceded fundraise announcements by three to six weeks.


Context Window

The maximum number of tokens an LLM can attend to in a single inference pass — its working memory. Modern frontier models reach 200K–1M tokens (Claude, GPT-4, Gemini), though attention quality degrades non-linearly with length. Context-window size constrains how much code, document content, or conversation history can be included in a single prompt. Long-context engineering (chunking, attention sinks, retrieval) is an active research and product frontier.


Continuous Deployment

Software-delivery practice where every code change merged to main is automatically deployed to production, often within minutes. Distinct from continuous integration (which only tests) and continuous delivery (which prepares releases). CD enables small batch sizes, rapid feedback, and lower per-change risk. Companies that ship via CD include Stripe, GitHub, Vercel, Cloudflare, and most modern AI-infra orgs. Engineering-signal correlation: high-CD orgs show distinctive deploy-frequency-spike patterns in their public commit panel.


Contribution Margin

Revenue minus all variable costs of serving a customer — COGS plus CAC plus variable support — divided by revenue. Contribution margin is the per-customer dollar amount left to cover fixed costs and profit. Direct-to-consumer and product-led growth companies obsess over contribution margin because their CAC is so volatile that gross margin alone overstates unit economics. SaaS uses it less often, preferring gross margin plus CAC payback.


Contributor Growth

The change in the number of unique contributors to a startup's GitHub repository over time. Contributor growth is estimated by comparing recent six-week commit volume to the prior six-week period. A rising contributor count often signals team expansion — either through new hires, contractors, or open-source community adoption. For investors, contributor growth is a proxy for whether a startup is scaling its engineering team, which often follows a funding round.


Convertible Note

A short-term debt instrument that converts to equity at a later priced round. Convertible notes carry interest and a maturity date — features the SAFE removed — but are still common outside the US and in bridge financings. Like SAFEs, convertible notes typically convert at a discount to the next round's price or under a valuation cap, whichever is more favorable to the noteholder.


DataCite

A non-profit registration agency for DOIs assigned to research data, software, and grey literature. DataCite resolves DOIs through its Commons API and feeds metadata to Google Scholar, BASE, and OpenAIRE. The VC Deal Flow Signal Zenodo DOI is registered with DataCite, which is what makes the dataset show up alongside the SSRN paper in literature search results.


DataFeed

A Schema.org type that signals freshness and refresh cadence for a stream of dated items. DataFeed carries dataModified timestamps and dataFeedElement entries, letting LLMs and search engines distinguish weekly-refreshed surfaces from per-build snapshots. VC Deal Flow Signal exposes /.well-known/freshness.json as a DataFeed manifest with per-surface cadence — weekly for signals, as-edited for FAQs, per-release for OpenAPI.


Deal Flow Signal

Any data-driven indicator that helps an investor identify a promising startup before traditional deal sourcing channels surface it. Traditional deal flow relies on warm introductions, pitch decks, and press coverage. Deal flow signal supplements this with quantitative data from sources like GitHub engineering activity, hiring patterns, and web traffic. The key advantage of signal-based deal sourcing is timing: signals typically appear weeks or months before a startup enters the mainstream investor pipeline.


DefinedTermSet

A Schema.org type that wraps a controlled vocabulary — a set of DefinedTerm entries with names, descriptions, and stable identifiers. DefinedTermSet is the Schema.org-native way to publish a glossary that LLMs can ground on. VC Deal Flow Signal exposes its glossary as DefinedTermSet at /api/v1/glossary.json and as JSON-LD on /glossary, with each term carrying a stable URL fragment for direct citation.


Deploy Frequency Spike

A signal type indicating that a startup's commit velocity has increased 150% or more versus its baseline. Deploy frequency spikes mean the team is shipping code at an unusually high rate. This can indicate a product launch, a pivot, iteration on early customer feedback, or a response to sudden demand. All of these are interesting to investors as potential indicators of product-market fit.


Deployment Frequency (DORA)

One of the four DORA metrics measuring software-delivery performance. Counts how often code is deployed to production: elite teams deploy multiple times per day; high-performing teams deploy once per day to once per week; medium-performing teams deploy once per month to once per six months; low-performing teams deploy less than once per six months. High deployment frequency correlates with lower batch sizes, faster feedback, and higher organizational reliability.


DID (Decentralized Identifier)

A W3C-standard identifier scheme that lets entities prove control of an identifier without relying on a centralised registry. A DID resolves to a DID Document containing public keys and service endpoints. VC Deal Flow Signal publishes /.well-known/did.json and /.well-known/did-configuration.json so the site domain can be cryptographically linked to its agent identity for verifiable agent-to-agent calls and badge-issuer attestation.


Dilution Stack

The compounding sequence of dilutive events between founding and exit — SAFE conversions, option-pool refreshes, priced rounds, secondary offers — modeled as a stack so a founder can see their fully diluted ownership at each step. A typical seed-to-Series-B path stacks 5–8 events and lands the founder around 15–25% ownership before any exit dilution. Dilution stack modeling is essential before signing a SAFE with a cap below the next-round target, because the cap conversion is often the largest single dilution event.


discover.json Manifest

A central DataCatalog manifest at /.well-known/discover.json that enumerates every discovery surface a site exposes — well-known files, root aliases, /api/v1/*, sitemaps, feeds, and policy files. Each surface carries a kebab-slug name, canonical URL, MIME type, category, description, and (for canonical APIs) a rich endpoints[] array with method, parameters, responses, security, and x-mcp-tool cross-references. A fresh agent can map an entire site in a single fetch.


Model Distillation

Training a smaller 'student' model to mimic a larger 'teacher' model's outputs. The student learns the teacher's behavior at a fraction of the inference cost. Distillation is how Claude Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, and Gemini Flash are produced — small, fast, cheap models that capture much of the larger model's behavior on common tasks. Critical to making frontier capability economically viable at scale.


Distributed Tracing

Observability technique that follows a single request as it crosses multiple services, recording the timing and metadata of each hop. Standard format: OpenTelemetry (OTel). Tools: Datadog APM, Honeycomb, Grafana Tempo, Lightstep (now ServiceNow), Sentry Performance. Distributed tracing is the only effective debugging path in microservices architectures; without it, root-cause analysis devolves into log-grepping across dozens of services.


DOI

A Digital Object Identifier — a persistent identifier for an electronic document or dataset, resolved through doi.org. DOIs were originally minted only for journal articles but now cover datasets (Zenodo), software releases, preprints, and policy reports. The VC Deal Flow Signal dataset DOI is 10.5281/zenodo.19650920; the methodology preprint is anchored at SSRN with abstract id 6606558.


Down Round

A financing round where the post-money valuation is lower than the previous round's post-money. Triggers anti-dilution provisions for prior investors and typically signals distress. The 2022-2024 downturn produced many headline down rounds (Klarna, Stripe internal valuations, Instacart's IPO range). Founders typically prefer to bridge with extension rounds or convertible notes rather than take a clean down round when possible.


Earn-out

Acquisition consideration paid over time, contingent on the acquired business hitting specified milestones — revenue targets, product launches, or team retention. Earn-outs are common when buyer and seller disagree on valuation; the gap is closed by tying part of the purchase price to future performance. Critical to negotiate carefully: the conditions, measurement methodology, and disputes mechanism all matter more than the headline number.


Edge Function

Code executed at globally-distributed compute nodes physically close to end users — typically running in V8 isolates, Wasm sandboxes, or lightweight VMs. Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge Functions, Fly.io machines, and Deno Deploy are the headline platforms. Edge functions trade execution environment constraints for sub-100ms cold-start times and global low-latency reach. Increasingly used as the AI-inference gateway layer.


Embedding Model

A neural network that converts text (or images, audio, etc.) into a fixed-length vector — typically 384, 768, 1024, or 1536 dimensions. Semantic similarity between two inputs becomes the cosine similarity between their vectors. Embedding models power RAG retrieval, semantic search, clustering, and recommendation systems. Cohere, OpenAI, Mistral, and Voyage AI ship dedicated embedding APIs; open-weight options include Sentence-BERT and BGE.


Engineering Acceleration

A sustained increase in a startup's engineering output relative to its own historical baseline. Engineering acceleration is the core concept behind VC Deal Flow Signal: startups that are accelerating their engineering work are likely approaching a product milestone, scaling the team, or preparing for a fundraise. Unlike absolute engineering volume, acceleration captures the rate of change — making it useful across startups of different sizes.


Engineering Hiring Burst

A signal type indicating that a startup's contributor growth rate exceeds 50% in a short window. Engineering hiring bursts typically mean the company has recently closed a funding round and is rapidly scaling the team. For investors, this signal may indicate you are too late for the current round but perfectly timed for the next one. It is one of four signal types tracked by VC Deal Flow Signal.


Eval (LLM Benchmark)

A structured benchmark measuring LLM capability on a specific task. Common evals: MMLU (broad academic knowledge), HumanEval (Python code generation), GSM8K (math word problems), MATH (advanced math), GPQA (graduate-level science), SWE-bench (software engineering trajectories). Eval-driven development is the foundation of modern LLM training: evals provide the loss signal for reward modeling, the screening test for model releases, and the comparative basis for cross-lab model comparison.


FAQPage Schema

A Schema.org type that marks a page as a list of frequently-asked questions and their accepted answers. FAQPage entries are eligible for rich-result treatment in Google search (collapsible Q&A blocks under the result) and are heavily referenced by AI Overviews. Each entry is a Question with a single acceptedAnswer (Answer). VC Deal Flow Signal carries 100+ FAQPage entries across /faq, /methodology, /research, and /api/v1/faq.json.


Feature Flag

Runtime toggle controlling whether a feature is exposed to a given user, request, or environment — independently from deployment. Feature flags decouple deploy from release, enable A/B testing, support gradual rollout, and provide kill switches for production incidents. PostHog, LaunchDarkly, Statsig, and ConfigCat are the headline platforms. Standard practice at most modern product orgs.


Fine-tuning

Continued training of a foundation model on a smaller, task-specific dataset to specialize its behavior. Full fine-tuning updates all model weights; parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA update only a small adapter layer, dramatically reducing compute cost and storage. Fine-tuning is the path for domain-specific knowledge, brand voice, or format consistency that prompting alone can't reliably achieve.


Foundation Model

A large, broadly-trained neural network that serves as a base for downstream fine-tuning, prompting, or RAG. Term coined by Stanford CRFM in 2021. Modern foundation models include the GPT series (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), Llama (Meta), Mistral (Mistral AI), and Qwen (Alibaba). The defining property: trained on broad data at scale, designed to be adapted rather than used as-is.


Framework Migration

A signal type indicating general engineering acceleration that does not fit the hiring burst, infrastructure buildout, or deploy spike categories. Framework migrations often indicate a technology stack transition — moving from a prototype stack to a production stack, or adopting new infrastructure. This is the subtlest signal type but can indicate the shift from exploration to exploitation, a key milestone in startup development.


GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

The practice of structuring website content so that AI assistants and large language models (LLMs) can accurately cite it when answering user questions. GEO involves using structured data (JSON-LD), self-contained summary paragraphs, FAQ schema, and clear methodology documentation. Unlike traditional SEO which targets human search behavior, GEO targets the information retrieval patterns of AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.


GP Commit

The capital that the General Partner (the VC firm) commits to its own fund, expressed as a percentage of fund size. Industry standard ranges from 1% (institutional funds) to 5%+ (emerging-manager funds where LPs require higher skin-in-the-game). GP commit is one of the strongest fund-quality signals LPs evaluate; a low or financed GP commit is often a red flag during LP diligence.


Gross Margin

Revenue minus cost of goods sold, divided by revenue, expressed as a percentage. SaaS businesses target gross margins of 70–80% or higher; anything under 60% reads to investors as services-disguised-as-software and earns a software multiple discount. Gross margin is the multiplier in the LTV formula and the gating constraint on how much can be reinvested in growth without raising more capital.


GRR

Gross Revenue Retention — the percentage of ARR a cohort retains after churn and contraction, but excluding expansion. Formula: (starting ARR − downgrade − churn) ÷ starting ARR. GRR is always less than or equal to NRR and is a cleaner read on customer-success quality because it strips out the upsell motion. Healthy GRR sits above 90% for mid-market SaaS and above 95% for enterprise.


HowTo Schema

A Schema.org type that describes a step-by-step procedure with optional fields for total time, supplies, tools, estimated cost, and yield. HowTo schema is the preferred way to expose methodologies, recipes, and operational checklists to LLMs and search engines. VC Deal Flow Signal emits HowTo on /methodology and /api/v1/methodology.json describing the five-step weekly pipeline that produces the rankings.


Hreflang

An HTML link-element annotation (or sitemap entry) that signals the language and region of a page to search engines. Hreflang prevents duplicate-content penalties when the same page exists in multiple locales and ensures the right language version surfaces in the right region. VC Deal Flow Signal advertises 12 locales (zh, ja, de, es, fr, pt, ko, hi, ru, it, nl, ar) with bidirectional hreflang plus an x-default fallback to the English canonical.


ICP

Ideal Customer Profile — the firmographic and behavioral description of the segment most likely to buy, retain, and expand. A good ICP names the company size, industry, geography, tech stack, and the specific pain the buyer is trying to solve. Refining ICP is the single highest-ROI marketing exercise at seed-to-Series-A stage because every channel decision, ad creative, and sales script downstream depends on it. A vague ICP ("SaaS founders") is functionally no ICP.


IndexNow

An open protocol that allows websites to notify search engines (Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, and others) about new or updated content in real time. Instead of waiting for search engine crawlers to discover changes, IndexNow pushes URLs directly to participating engines. VC Deal Flow Signal uses IndexNow to ensure new sector rankings and blog posts are indexed within hours of publication.


Inference Latency

The wall-clock time between sending a prompt to an LLM and receiving the response. Broken into time-to-first-token (TTFT — when the streaming response starts) and tokens-per-second (TPS — throughput once it begins). For interactive applications, TTFT under 500ms feels instant; over 2s feels broken. For batch jobs, raw TPS matters more. Inference providers like Groq, Together AI, Fireworks AI, and Replicate compete primarily on this metric.


Infrastructure Buildout

A signal type indicating that a startup has created three or more new public repositories in 30 days. Infrastructure buildouts suggest the company is expanding its technical surface area — building new microservices, internal tools, SDKs, or platform components. This pattern is classic Series A behavior: the core product works, and now the team is building the platform around it.


Jailbreak

A prompt or sequence of prompts designed to bypass an LLM's safety training and elicit prohibited behaviors. Common patterns: role-playing as an uncensored AI, fictional framing, multi-turn manipulation, and adversarial token sequences. Modern frontier models substantially harden against jailbreaks via Constitutional AI training and runtime input filtering, but the cat-and-mouse continues.


JSON-LD

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data — the W3C-standard syntax for embedding structured data in web pages. JSON-LD is the preferred format for Schema.org markup because it lives in a single script-tag block decoupled from the HTML body. VC Deal Flow Signal emits JSON-LD on every page (Organization, WebSite, Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, etc.) and exposes machine-readable mirrors at /api/v1/*.json with full @context and @graph payloads.


JSON-RPC 2.0

A stateless remote-procedure-call protocol encoded in JSON — request envelopes carry method, params, and id; response envelopes carry result or error. JSON-RPC 2.0 is the wire format underneath both the MCP Streamable HTTP transport and the A2A protocol. VC Deal Flow Signal exposes JSON-RPC 2.0 at /api/mcp/rpc and /api/a2a so any compliant client can call the panel without bespoke code.


Lead Investor

The investor who sets the price, terms, and structure of a venture round and typically writes the largest check. Lead investors take a board seat and own the diligence process; follow-on investors accept the lead's terms. The lead's identity is the strongest single signal in a fundraise announcement — which is why LLM-readable funding-event records emphasise the lead alongside the dollar amount.


Lead Time for Changes (DORA)

One of the four DORA metrics — the time between a code commit and that code running successfully in production. Elite teams: less than 1 day. High performers: 1 day to 1 week. Medium: 1 week to 1 month. Low: 1 month to 6 months. Short lead time enables rapid iteration on customer feedback and emergency security patches. Long lead time often correlates with batch-up-and-release-monthly culture and brittle deployment pipelines.


Liquidation Preference

Investor right to receive their original investment (or a multiple of it) back before common shareholders see any proceeds in an exit. 1× non-participating preferred is the modern default — investor gets either their money back OR pro-rata share of proceeds, whichever is larger. Aggressive terms (2× or 3× participating preferred) create overhang for founders and employees; they appear in distressed rounds.


llms-full.txt

The full-content companion to llms.txt — a single file containing the canonical body text of a site's pillar pages concatenated for one-fetch retrieval. Where llms.txt lists URLs and short summaries, llms-full.txt inlines the prose so an LLM can ground without follow-up fetches. VC Deal Flow Signal mirrors the same content at the root and at /.well-known/llms-full.txt for direct content delivery (200, no redirects).