Darkmode Ventures

Darkmode Ventures

Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals

Founders supporting founders

About us

Darkmode Ventures is an early-stage fund managed by 3 startup founders: Amir Shevat, Kat Orekhova, and Raphael Danilo. We have a “by builders for builders” ethos and invest in the next generation of enterprise software companies with a focus on developer platforms, AI/ML, and the modern data stack. We invest $100K-$200K checks at the early stage (Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A.) Select portfolio companies include: Drata, Merge, Bluesky, Tabnine and Puzzle.

Website
https://www.darkmode.vc
Industry
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
Company size
2-10 employees
Headquarters
Remote
Type
Partnership
Founded
2021

Locations

Employees at Darkmode Ventures

Updates

  • At Darkmode, one of our ongoing theses is that, as AI copilots for developers become pervasive, the entire stack that supports the software development lifecycle will be forced to evolve. Today, Heal.dev (a Darkmode portfolio company) is announcing the launch of their private Beta. They are tackling one of the hairiest problems in software development today: automating end-to-end test coverage to keep up with the much faster pace of code generation that AI co-pilots have enabled. Congrats to 📍Vladimir de Turckheim and the Heal team! Big things ahead.

    View organization page for Heal.dev, graphic

    253 followers

    Today we’re happy to announce that heal.dev is moving to private Beta. At heal, we’re building an AI-powered software testing tool that lets you automate end-to-end tests from natural language prompts. Existing tools are hard to use, and rely on brittle locators to execute tests. This means flaky tests that create noise and require a lot of maintenance.  And sure you can invest a lot of time building and maintaining your playwright test suite, but that’s not the best use of engineering time. Our design partners tell us they spend up to 20% on testing, and most of that time is spent on test maintenance. With heal they’ve been able to save hundreds of hours of engineering time fixing flaky tests, and increase their trust level in their testing. Heal is designed so that devs, PMs and testers alike can use it to define tests, breaking some of the quality silos we see in software teams. We hope that you join us in our journey to take humans out of the repetitive work of fixing test automation (or worse, running manual tests). If you’d like to try heal out, sign up or DM us! Signup here: https://www.heal.dev/

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  • Big congratulations to Connectly.ai on your Series B round! Excited to see you continue to reshape the conversational commerce category.

    View organization page for Connectly.ai, graphic

    6,556 followers

    🚀 We're thrilled to announce that Connectly has raised $20 million dollars in our Series B funding! 💰💰 This round, led by Alibaba Group and supported by Unusual Ventures, Volpe Capital, RX Ventures by Lojas Renner S.A., Falabella Ventures, enables us to enhance and expand our AI-driven conversational commerce solutions, propelling our customers' growth and revolutionizing their digital engagement strategies. 🤝🤖 🗨 “At Alibaba, we look to partner with innovative companies that are paving the way in their industry”. 📢 📗 Check out the TechCrunch news: https://lnkd.in/gpiWynCq This investment will elevate our capabilities, helping us to transform how brands interact with customers worldwide. A big thank you to our partners for their trust and support. Together, we're on track to make online experiences more interactive and personalized than ever. 💬 🛍 🗣 Stefanos Loukakos and Yandong Liu, Connectly's founders. #SeriesB #AI #ConversationalCommerce #Alibaba #UnusualVentures #VolpeCapital #RXVentures #FalabellaVentures

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  • Darkmode Ventures reposted this

    Driver-based investing. This is a big component of our investment philosophy at Darkmode Ventures, and it's inspired by CFOs. 🎉 Just like top finance leaders know that past performance isn't indicative of the future, we know that early startup traction is not always indicative of unicorns. Sometimes there's not enough traction ("too early"), sometimes it's misleading ("lots of growth, but will it scale?"). In either case, to forecast the future, we need to understand what the drivers of success are, and to forecast these drivers forward as accurately as possible. We see 2 large advantages to driver-based investing: 1. You will have conviction to invest in companies earlier while taking on only marginally more risk. This is because you can invest as soon as you've got conviction in the "inputs" as opposed to waiting to see the "outputs." For example, rather than waiting for a founding team to clearly show a revenue hockeystick, you can try to predict the drivers that will lead to this and invest right before this critical inflection point. 2. By understanding drivers, you can avoid investing in companies that have an incredible early track record, only to flame out in their later years because of an unsustainable business model. If the "driver" of early revenue traction is low pricing, highly custom software, or something else that won't work in the long-term, it's time to dig in with the founder. Investors - if you're thinking about this, we'd love to compare frameworks and learn from each other!

  • Huge congrats to Mountaintop Studios for building an incredible game and raising another $30M. Sign up for their next playtest here: https://lnkd.in/gGtvPT2X

    View organization page for Mountaintop Studios, graphic

    15,698 followers

    We started Mountaintop with one goal: bring players together through unforgettable new challenges. Today, we're thrilled to share that we've raised $30M in additional funding from some of the best investors in the industry, including Anthos Capital, RX3 Growth Partners, and a16z Games. We’re also honored to welcome some incredible new angel investors, including shroud, tarik, iiTzTimmy, Zedd, CohhCarnage, Sacriel, and Paul George. Thanks for joining us on this journey. Building a timeless game is all about understanding why we play and what we want/need from the genre. We're always listening to player feedback to help guide us. Over the last few years, we've been playtesting regularly with an insanely talented group of tactical shooter fans. Want to get involved? Sign-up for the next upcoming playtest - https://lnkd.in/gGtvPT2X. Or, if you’re interested in potentially joining the team at Mountaintop, we’d love to hear from you! https://lnkd.in/g_RKDV2

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