John Melas-Kyriazi

🌟 Calling all emerging GPs! Walking Ventures is seeking new venture funds to invest in as LPs. With 50+ successful investments and an IRR exceeding 30%, Walking Ventures isn’t just a VC, they’re also LPs in five standout funds that excel in areas outside their own focus. Now, they’re looking to add more LP positions, particularly in first or second funds led by smaller, ambitious firms. Here’s what they’re looking for: 1️⃣ Strong deal flow 2️⃣ Solid internal processes 3️⃣ Operating experience 4️⃣ Relevant network 5️⃣ Sector or geographic expertise Walking Ventures is agnostic on geography, sector, and focused on identifying top-tier emerging funds that deliver exceptional returns. If your fund fits the bill, check out Tim Jackson post for more details on how to connect.

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Insightful look into bioplatform strategy, and what it takes to raise a Series A from my partner, Omri Amirav-Drory: https://lnkd.in/dFv7GbF6

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And my second investment at defy is in 🐶 zeroETL puppies 🐶... I mean PuppyGraph, which is all the beauty of a graph database, none of the data migration or continuous upkeep of a graph database. Sounds like magic? So are puppies 🐶 . Puppygraph is NOT a graph or a database. It is graph analytics engine that answers graph questions on your existing data warehouses, whether that is a Databricks datalake, Google BigQuery or postgres. Compared to SQL, it's faster, handles way more complexity, scales and has almost no upkeep. How did I get to conviction? 1. Tailwinds - 🌊 Lakehouses 🌊 have helped enterprises put all their data in one place, enabling Puppygraph to unlock insights previously unavailable. - 📚 LLMs! 📚AI and RAG cannot easily traverse fragmented data. Puppygraph's Graph RAG unlocks insights with their Knowledge Graph and spoonfeeds to the LLMs. 2. 👯 Team 👯 We have graph experts from Google, LinkedIn, Databricks, Tigergraph, and Instacart who are uniquely able to build this solution. 3. 💸 Customers 💸 . My alma mater Coinbase is a proud user. The feedback from my former colleagues was off the charts! A blockchain is very much a graph database and Puppygraph tracks down fraudulent transactions that go through mixers and helps identify patterns. Huge congrats to Weimo Liu Danfeng Xu Lei Huang Zhenni Wu Gary Hagmueller, defy.vc is proud to be an investor!!

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👀 Looking at our recent investments at Draper Associates, here’s what standout founders nailed, making our decision to invest much easier (and faster): 💥 Visionary Tech with a Bold Vision – These founders are not here for incremental wins; they’re reimagining what’s possible in across tech - biotech, robotics, aerospace, and beyond. Their vision is big and audacious, tackling complex problems that demand breakthrough solutions, others have not been willing to try. 👊 Clear Passion & Purpose – The drive in these founders is undeniable. They’re committed to their mission with a depth of purpose that shapes every choice. One founder, for example, took two years completely off to learn and meet everyone in longevity biotech. This level of grit and dedication is rare but essential for the most impactful founders. 🌟 Assembling All-Star Teams – They bring together top-tier talent from diverse disciplines: experienced business leaders with successful exits or industry experience at top companies, technical co-founders with deep expertise, often PhDs or industry pioneers, and even published authors. It’s a complementary team, unified by a shared vision. They make the: "Why this team?" obvious - at a glance. 💻 Data-Driven to the Core – These founders present data insights that show why their approach is unique, especially against a competitive field of companies. This data is delivered with clarity and they make the complex simple. Many are published in top journals, adding depth and credibility to their approach, and reinforcing that they know their tech inside out. ⚡️ Memorable, Clear Vision – They don’t just pitch; they make the future feel tangible, with a vision that’s both compelling and concise. If I can relay their pitch in under 30 seconds to my team, they’ve killed it. 📣 Transparent & Proactive Communication – The best founders don’t wait for questions. They come prepared, often with a comprehensive FAQ doc, give timely updates to our questions, and are candid about challenges. This level of openness builds trust and strengthens our partnership. 💸 Milestone-Driven Funding Strategy – Each funding stage aligns clearly with already achieved or upcoming achievable milestones. They’ve mapped out a roadmap that minimizes risk at every step, giving us confidence in their journey. 💰 Revenue Milestones Along the Way – Even if it'll take a decade to hit revenue on their big vision, these founders find revenue generation stops along the way to profitability. They share a trajectory that connects early wins to revenue, showing how every step is a building block toward their bigger vision. Overall, the best founders are incredibly thoughtful, prepared, and fantastic verbal / written communicators. #founders #startups #fundraising #VC

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California's Carbon Champions in this week's Climate Tech Roundup number 21 #climatetechquartet. Cool stuff happening in our state to fight #CO2. Here are 4 #California early-stage companies working on clever ways to capture or utilize carbon. Check them out: Ebb Carbon HQ: California Founders: Ben Tarbell, Matthew Eisaman, Todd Pelman Ebb Carbon uses #electrochemistry to remove carbon dioxide from the ocean while also reducing ocean acidity. Their innovative approach not only helps combat climate change but also addresses the growing problem of #oceanacidification, benefiting marine ecosystems. Blue Planet Environmental Systems Inc. HQ: California Founder: Brent Constantz Blue Planet Systems is creating carbon-negative #concrete by mineralizing CO2 in building materials. Their process captures CO2 from industrial sources and permanently stores it in synthetic #limestone aggregate, which can then be used in concrete production, effectively turning a carbon problem into a valuable #construction material. Curious about more climate tech startup updates? Stay in the loop, I publish a new episode of my #climatetechquartet every week. Twelve HQ: California Founders: Kendra Kuhl, Etosha (Eee-tah-sha) Cave, and Nicholas Flanders Twelve is transforming CO2 into valuable products and materials. Using their carbon transformation technology, they're able to convert captured carbon dioxide into chemicals, materials, and fuels that are typically made from #petroleum. Heirloom HQ: California Founders: Shashank Samala, Noah McQueen Heirloom Carbon is accelerating the natural process of #carbonmineralization. By enhancing the ability of minerals to absorb CO2 from the air, they're developing a scalable, permanent carbon removal solution. #carboncapture #climatetech #CO2 #carbon #carbonoffset #greenstartups #cleantech #california #Innovation #carbonremoval #netzero #sustainability

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chpter. , founded by Tesh Mbaabu and his friends, raised $1.2 million pre-seed last week in a round that was led by former investors in their previous startup, MarketForce. I saw a comment from X, saying that the product that chpter. has out there so far, has so many problems, that it is basically a waiting list with a poorly-designed landing page. Which is true. I went to see the live site myself and the observation was not far off. HOWEVER. I think a lot of people who have never built startups don't really know how startups work. I lead a team of talented individuals building Mentorlst and I have picked up a few lessons. First, chpter. raised pre-seed funding, which means at this point, investors were looking at four things: the team, the idea, the total addressable market (TAM) and the go-to-market strategy. And looking at chpter. , it nails down these four perfectly, except one, which I will explain. The team, led by Tesh Mbaabu has experience running a busy startup operating in many markets, and this experience cannot be substituted for anything else. It is also the reason why even after WeWork failed after allegations of financial misappropriation, Adam Neumann, the CEO and founder, still managed to raise money from investors for his subsequent ideas. It doesn't matter whether a founder fails in his first or nth startup, as long as he has the experience of building products, managing teams and raising funds. Investors value the experience and network above everything else. Second, the TAM. chpter. is building a product to enable e-commerce businesses to automate customer relationship management at its basic. Social/e-commerce is the new zone of commerce and the African market is untapped. I don't know whether customers really need a chpter. like product vs what they are already using such as WhatsApp Business, but it remains to be seen. This is why I have doubts with the product, but products can always grow and even pivot. The market they are after is there, the only challenge is to grab a share of that market from social media giants and existing players. Third is GTM. I won't comment much on this but this is what a lot of founders struggle with, given that many founders confuse GTM strategy with marketing. GTM is the whole strategy of taking a new product to market and driving demand for it, and marketing is just part of it. I haven't seen much activity from chpter. in the socials, and I am hoping that the funding they have acquired will boost their GTM efforts in the coming months. One last thing: When investors give you money, they don't deposit that money in your account and give you a debit card to spend it. Such funding always come with conditions that must be met, which includes figures and milestones you have to hit before you unlock more levels of that funding. It is the same way the IMF works. This is why startups sometimes die shortly after raising funding, because they failed to meet these conditions. #mentorlst

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WE DID IT! After 2 years of pushing through the biggest downturn in VC in decades, Matthew Stotts 🌐 and I made it to the finish line with Fund I! We couldn't have done this without One Small Planet (Will Peterffy and Jack Wielebinski 🙏), Regen Network and Regen Foundation (Austin Wade Smith Gregory Landua and Will Szal), and a dozen other family offices and angels who believed that we can build a nature-positive economy utilizing our eye for software and our history as founders from day 1 A shout out goes to all of our founders (only four announced today, but watch this space - there are multitudes!) who trusted us enough to give us a spot on their cap table for this 10-15 year journey. This is the best job in the world, and it's because we get to work with people like you who have weird ideas in the best possible way. Using Bitcoin as anchor base load to decarbonize residential housing in America's most expensive energy market? Make every complex supply chain legible to machines so we can find and eliminate deforestation in commodity supply chains? Build deeply liquid environmental asset markets to price ecosystem services, on a blockchain, that no one needs to know is a blockchain? I'm so excited to get to work on this stuff for the next 10-15 years minimum, and to see what we can accelerate with our tiny fund in the next 5-6 years as we approach 2030 Onward! https://lnkd.in/gy3B-DFe

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DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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Congrats to Christopher Robson, Kurtis Broda and Kristen Cote at Wyvern on bringing on fantastic new investors Guy Filippelli, Dan Madden and Isaac Carp, CFA at Squadra Ventures. I'm a broken record at this point, but we're in the early innings of the Earth Observation market, and as we're seeing with Wyvern there is more demand for hyperspectral data than supply. As we will see in the coming years, there will be all kinds of problems that can be addressed by understanding our world beyond what our eyes can see. https://lnkd.in/gEzTjYks

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💥 We are thrilled to unveil today our new visual identity and website 💥 tl;dr Same love for Product. More love for Product Founders. We’re doubling down on our brand essence: Connect is where product founders fit. A venture firm designed to work for exceptional founders scaling outlier product companies. The” toggle” in our new logo captures this fitting element and our role as a catalyst for product founders in the software realm. It reflects why we exist: to stay actively and enduringly connected with our founders. This is our ultimate "brand" promise: to help them realise theirs, by ensuring they have the velocity, perspectives and support to create product companies that are loved by many. There we go 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻 www.connectventures.co

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🚀Super excited to announce Day Zero Ventures Investment in Zeno🚀 We're thrilled to back Zeno, a company set to revolutionize two-wheel transportation in emerging markets with their innovative electric motorcycle ecosystem. Why we're excited: Massive Untapped Market: • 600M petrol motorcycles globally, growing to 2B by 2040 • 60-80% are 100-200cc commuter motorcycles • No good electric options exist for this segment yet Perfect Product-Market Fit: • African bike taxi (boda boda) drivers cover enough miles annually to circle the globe • Switching to electric can reduce fuel costs by 50-75% Comprehensive Ecosystem Approach: • 100-200cc equivalent electric motorbike • Flexible multimodal charging: swapping, fast charging, home charging • Innovative battery-as-a-service subscription model Exceptional Team: • Michael Spencer (CEO): Ex-Tesla leadership, 15 years in East Africa • Rob Newberry (VP Software): Former Apple & Nest senior engineer • Swaroop Bhushan (VP Engineering): Powertrain expert from Lucid and Harley's LiveWire • Plus ex-engineers from Gogoro, Ola Electric, and Ather Zeno's vision goes beyond transportation. They aim to transform customers' relationship with energy, potentially powering homes, businesses, and supporting the grid in emerging markets. We're excited to partner with Zeno on this journey to electrify the world's fastest-growing vehicle segment. As emerging markets continue to develop and urbanize, Zeno is well-positioned to become a cornerstone of sustainable transportation infrastructure. Read why we invested in Zeno in the 1st comment! Alok Bishoyi Rahul Rajvanshi #CleanTech #ImpactInvesting #ElectricVehicles #EmergingMarkets

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Are electric vehicles as green as we think? I recently joined the 'ESG Detectives' podcast to discuss the true environmental impact of EVs, from manufacturing to energy consumption. We also explored the vital role of AI and semiconductors in shaping the future of sustainable transportation. Tune in to discover the surprising realities behind this rapidly evolving industry. What are your thoughts on the environmental impact of EVs? Share in the comments below! #EV #AI #Sustainability #GreenTech #Podcast #Discussion

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Can poop save the planet? 🤔 Well, in Silicon Valley, it's not just a punchline—it's a multimillion-dollar climate solution. Big players are teaming up with startup Vaulted Deep, paying $58.3 million, to pump organic waste underground. The deal was brokered by Frontier Climate, a coalition launched in 2022 by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability. But why are tech giants getting their hands dirty with sewage and manure? Vaulted Deep's technology, rooted in decades-old methods used for oil and gas fracking cleanup, gives them an edge. But instead of sludge, they're tackling carbon-rich waste, aiming to sequester CO2 underground. They plan to sequester 152,480 tons of carbon dioxide by 2027 as part of the deal (That equates to 36,000 gas cars off the road for a year). Is this greenwashing, or a silver bullet? Critics warn of cost, the need for rigorous carbon accounting, and potential environmental trade-offs - i.e. emission prevention versus carbon removal. #decarbonization

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Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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Check out my recent post on why President Trump is the forcing function for us to solve the “Missing Middle” and catch the industrial Tsunami of onshoring coming to the US!

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It was an honour to unveil Molten Ventures’ short film, 2054, at the London Stock Exchange this morning as Molten Ventures’ new CEO.   This film, created using 14 separate generative AI applications, formed the core of the theme for this year’s CEO summit: “what if you succeed?”. A question which we should ask ourselves every day – and urge every entrepreneur and investor to do the same.   By diving thirty years ahead into a fictional future, we can get a glimpse of what may be possible if the capital, support, expertise and energy is injected into businesses and ideas at the right time. Something that we’ve been doing at Molten Ventures for many years.   We have already built a portfolio of Europe’s most forward-thinking companies who have developed technology that changes lives, now.   You can find out more about the story behind the film, including films made by our portfolio companies here: https://lnkd.in/ezNbeEPu

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Interesting concept to rename rounds by milestones. But "Series Client Expansion Extension" just doesn't have the same ring to it 😋 . Maybe we can start incorporating it into a descriptor to add context, "Series Seed Extension: client expansion." #startups #venturecapital

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This is the beginning of big corporates in industrial and foundational industries solving the data availability problem to leverage the power of generative AI

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