We invest in fractional founders*

Congratulations to Angela Ferrante and the Laudable team for the acquisition! In this age of AI, genuine customer testimonials will be what ultimately helps companies stand out, and Angela has been helping her customers do just that.

Angela, along with Ryan Quindlen and Nate Wildermuth, have built the first AI-powered customer voice, sentiment, and advocacy startup, all in one. Laudable auto generates UGC and customer insights directly from customer call recordings, such as Gong and Chorus by ZoomInfo, and they offer a Slackbot for customer reference and UGC searchability.

IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Laudable continue to grow as a part of Zapier.

Building a venture-backed SaaS startup today requires more than just a great product. With global SaaS revenue projected to reach $900 billion by 2030, competition is fierce. This course is designed for both full-time and fractional founders who want to create profitable SaaS products that succeed in today’s landscape. You’ll learn how to validate your market through customer insights, craft compelling investor pitches, and implement early traction strategies to acquire your first paying customers.

We’ll explore key SaaS growth metrics, and cover revenue growth strategies. Whether you are preparing for fundraising or focusing on customer acquisition, you will leave this course with a clear, actionable plan to drive your SaaS company forward.

In Good Companies Podcast speaks with a leading voice in the field of technology and entrepreneurship: Shuo Chen, Silicon Valley connoisseur, faculty professor at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, and partner at IOVC, an investment firm focused on early-stage startups that drive the future of work.

Shuo shows us how tools like AI and Blockchain can revolutionize business. She demonstrates how technology will eliminate repetitive tasks, streamline our processes, redirect our attention to cultural human questions, and afford us more time to hone our leadership skills. Shuo shines a light on a new, diverse generation of self-starters who are taking their seat at the business table. And she breaks down how technology is changing the nature of entrepreneurship; opening up new career paths going forward.

This is an exclusive virtual event featuring Sophia Velastegui, former Chief AI Officer in Business Applications Group at Microsoft, as she delves into the future of AI in business. ​This session is moderated by Shuo Chen, General Partner at IOVC.

With AI rapidly becoming a critical component of modern business strategies, Sophia will share her expertise on how to successfully integrate AI into your business model to drive innovation, efficiency, and growth. 

Seattle-based proptech company Flyhomes announced Tuesday that it has acquired ZeroDown and is launching an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered home search portal to bring "conversational real estate search and research to the market."

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see ZeroDown continue to grow as a part of Flyhomes.

Boom Supersonic is building The Supersonic Future—the end-to-end value chain to bring commercial supersonic travel to the world. The Washington Post covers the story.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Boom continue to grow.

IOVC hosts conversation with Jonathan McKay, OpenAI's Head of Product, for founders and aspiring founders to learn about the future of AI.

Instacart is the first notable venture-backed tech company to hit the U.S. public market since December 2021. The grocery delivery company has a fully diluted valuation of just over $11 billion at the close of its opening day after its IPO.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see Instacart continue to grow.

In June 2023, the world’s leading entrepreneurs gathered in Monaco for EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year™, the ultimate global competition for entrepreneurs. Thought leaders from EY Tech University and the EY Luminary Network led interactive “Future of” sessions to discuss critical business challenges and today’s hot-button issues that will greatly impact our collective future. 

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Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, spoke on the Future of Money, how we can leverage technology to make smarter transactions, and why the most successful entrepreneurs are fractional.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, is featured in the New York Times for her personal story.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, is featured by The Economist's Innovation@Work Conference to speak about top trends driving the future of work.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, is featured by the 51st St Gallen Symposium in Switzerland to speak about the future of entrepreneurship.

Pulse Q&A, the largest community of CIOs, was acquired by Gartner. Pulse is a tech-enabled platform and community that facilitates ongoing and meaningful connections between CIOs, senior IT leaders and their peers via peer-driven insights, advice and guidance that drive technology and business decisions.

IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Pulse Q&A continue to grow as a part of Gartner.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, is featured by TEDxWoodside to speak about the future of education with an entrepreneurship lens. This session is focused on how to emerge stronger from the pandemic.

Commercial-services software company Convex has raised $39 million to expand on its digital bet for a sector that touches on everyday life, from elevators and escalators to air systems and lighting. This round is backed by investors including Emergence Capital and GGV Capital.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to Convex continue to grow.

Boom Supersonic lands United Airlines as the first major U.S. airline for a landmark commercial agreement. New aircrafts will cut travel times in half and operate on up to 100% sustainable aviation fuel.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see Boom continue to grow.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, has been been appointed to the California Mental Health Commission by Governor Gavin Newsom. Shuo is an advocate for supporting employee mental well-being, particularly those at small businesses and startups.

MioTech, the AI-based sustainability data and technology provider, announced today that HSBC has invested in the company in an additional financing round to its Series B, further expanding the company's stellar investor base which already includes Horizons Ventures, and Moody's.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see MioTech continue to grow.

Dialpad, the business-centric voice, video and contact-center service, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E funding round led by OMERS Growth Equity. Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, ICONIQ Capital and Work-Bench also participated. The company says its valuation is over $1.2 billion after it has now raised a total of $245 million.

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IOVC is one of the earliest investors, and we are excited to see Dialpad continue to grow.

Samsung showcases the first cloud-based chip design platform in partnership with Rescale
Fabless customers can use diverse EDA tools with flexible computing power.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Rescale continue to grow.

Today it announces the launch of an $800 million fund to back promising new AI companies and academic research. It will consequently be opening a London office as an extension to its original Hong Kong base.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Skymind continue to grow.

Dialpad, the pure-cloud business communications provider, has acquired TalkIQ, a leader in real-time speech recognition and artificial intelligence. By combining TalkIQ’s real-time speech recognition and natural language processing technologies with Dialpad’s leading communications solutions, Dialpad will deliver Voice Intelligence to help business teams capture and learn from conversations as they happen.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see TalkIQ continue to grow as a part of Dialpad.

Ford Smart Mobility, the company founded by Ford Motor Company to help provide alternate means of transportation, just made its first acquisition: Chariot, the San Francisco-based commuter ride-sharing startup.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited see to Chariot continue to grow as a part of Ford.

Congratulations to Blake Scholl and the Boom team for Boomless Cruise—supersonic flights up to 50% faster with no audible sonic boom. We are proud to have been among the earliest investors, and are looking forward to more to come!

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Boom continue to grow.

Checkr boosts revenue as back-ground-check firm courts large enterprise clients. The company topped $700M in revenue in 2023, and enterprise clients now include OpenAI, Birkenstock and Kia.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Checkr continue to grow.

TeachShare creates lesson plans adapted for each teacher’s needs. It stood out to the TechCrunch team because it offers software that adjusts difficulty based on individual student knowledge. TeachShare aims to assist teachers in tailoring daily content, ensuring alignment with educational standards.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see TeachShare continue to grow.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, shares her perspective on the latest technologies, startups, and trends driving the future of finance. She see financial services going through cycles of --

1. Bundling (consolidation into major banks)

2. Unbundling (spinouts of fintech startups), and now,

3. Rebundling (embedding of fintech into existing businesses)

The result? More startups are embedding financial services into their existing products and offerings.

ServiceTitan, a leading software platform built to power the trades, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Convex, a leading sales and marketing platform purpose-built for the commercial services industry.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Convex continue to grow as a part of ServiceTitan.

AnswersAI is personalizing education for students worldwide, and is recognized by a16z in the future of education map. The team has reached 100M views, 1M questions asked, and 120k users across mobile and desktop. 

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Answer continue to grow.

IOVC hosts annual gathering to provide intimate access to and learning opportunities from unicorn founders, as well as leaders from Google, TikTok, Snap, GitLab, ServiceNow and EY among others – all in the intimate setting of 10-person roundtables

FlowGPT offers an example in which business leaders can refine their prompts.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see FlowGPT continue to grow.

Woolf inaugurates Academic Advisory Council of top leaders in higher education to guide strategy. Specifically, Woolf identified distinguished leaders at the forefront of innovation in higher education will join Woolf to provide academic, regulatory, and technology guidance to the global collegiate university as it expands. Shuo, GP at IOVC, is honored to serve on Woolf's inaugural Academic Advisory Council.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see Woolf continue to grow.

Matternet, a drone startup, reaches a major milestone in partnering with UPS to deliver packages.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see Matternet continue to grow.

First, they found a “main hustle,” whether as an attorney (Obama), management consultant (Legend), or marketer (Burch). Second, they pursued a “side hustle” on nights and weekends, whether as a community organizer (Obama), backup singer (Legend), or fashion designer (Burch). Third, they converted their side hustle into their main hustle, effectively catapulting themselves to fulfilling careers. In doing so, they also did what few dare to do: (re)define what it means to be successful.

In this course, award-winning Silicon Valley venture investor Shuo Chen will show you how to build your own side hustle, step by step. And through this side hustle, you will learn about the latest labor market and technology trends, identify your unique assets and strengths, build your network, and, in the end, come to greater clarity around what “success” means to you.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, teaches entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley College of Engineering. This course is called "How to Think Like an Entrepreneur" and helps founders and aspiring founders launch their startups.

Rescale is the leader in intelligent computing for digital R&D with high performance Computing built for the cloud. It powers science and engineering breakthroughs with intelligent full-stack automation powered by the near-infinite computing capabilities of hybrid cloud.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to Rescale continue to grow.

Joshua Broggi believes that three new colleges need to be created every single day, for the next decade, in order to adequately meet demand from students. So, he is building Woolf, what he claims is the first software platform that can launch and manage an accredited digital college.

IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see FlowGPT continue to grow.

Checkr, a leading HR technology company powering the future of work, announced today it has raised $250 million, in a Series E round valuing the company at $4.6 billion. The round was led by Durable Capital, alongside new investors Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton with participation from all major current investors including BOND Capital, Khosla Ventures, IVP, T. Rowe Price, Coatue, Accel, and Y Combinator.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Checkr continue to grow.

ZX Ventures – the global investment and innovation group of AB InBev – has announced a new partnership with Clara Foods, which will focus on unlocking the potential of precision fermentation at a large scale. Clara Foods specialises in engineering, manufacturing and formulating animal-free proteins using precision fermentation. In 2019, the company secured funding in a Series B round led by Ingredion.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Clara Foods continue to grow.

Now, in 2021, we’re thrilled to share that we’re continuing to take steps in the right direction with our $25 million in Series B financing, led by Obvious Ventures. This latest round brings Torch’s total financing to nearly $40 million and puts our company in the same portfolio as other category-defining brands like Beyond Meat, Diamond Foundry, Gusto, and Virta Health.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Torch continue to grow.

The investment, led by WRVI Capital’s Michael Marks, brings Boom’s total funding to $210 million, and takes the company one step closer to its objective of broadly accessible high-speed flight.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Boom Supersonic continue to grow.

While Sugar gains a ton of AI expertise, it also adds a customer prediction element to the platform, such as figuring out the customers most likely to convert or most likely to leave. This puts it in more direct competition with Adobe and Salesforce, which for some time have had intelligence layers that provide that kind of predictability. CEO Craig Charlton says his company’s solution puts that kind of capability in reach of more companies.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Node continue to grow as a part of SugarCRM.

Ryan Chan, Founder and CEO of UpKeep, said that around 80 percent of the company’s 400,000 users are on the free version of the app. Some brands on the app include Unilever, Siemens, DHL, McDonald’s, and Jet.com. Chan said UpKeep saw a 206 percent increase in revenue in 2019.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see UpKeep continue to grow.

ZeroDown, a startup that helps customers own a home without making a down payment, announces the closing of more than $100M of debt capital from Credit Suisse to fuel the next stage of the company’s growth. ZeroDown gives future homebuyers an unmatched level of ease and flexibility in pursuing their homeownership goals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see ZeroDown continue to grow.

Goldman Sachs has agreed acquire Final, an Oakland-based credit card startup, the bank confirmed to Fast Company on Monday. The new talent will help fuel the big bank’s expanding consumer efforts.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see Final continue to grow as a part of Goldman Sachs.

GrubMarket, the AI-powered technology enabler and digital transformer of the American food supply chain industry, as well as one of the largest private food eCommerce companies globally, announced the new release for WholesaleWare, its AI-powered ERP platform. This latest update introduces powerful new features designed to help food wholesalers and distributors streamline operations, save time, and get deeper business insights.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see GrubMarket continue to grow.

Unlike any other event, this conference features invite-only opportunities to join private roundtable discussions and dinners with distinguished founders and operators including the Head of Growth at Scale AI, as well as the Heads of Product Management at LinkedIn, Netflix and Warner Bros etc.

This is an exclusive session with Teresa Briggs, a distinguished member of the Board of Directors at leading companies such as ServiceNow, Snowflake, DocuSign, and Warby Parker. ​This session is moderated by Shuo Chen, General Partner at IOVC.

Key topics covered include understanding the strategic value of board members in modern organizations, best practices for fostering collaboration between the board and executive teams, how to align board members' expertise with your company’s strategic goals, as well as case studies from Teresa’s experience at ServiceNow, Snowflake, DocuSign, and Warby Parker.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, shares her perspective on boards and the future: going plural, encouraging innovation, adding value to entrepreneurs, and preparing for the future of work.

Tune in to hear her thoughts on: How have you built your plural career? (2:36) How should board members be thinking about the future of work? (7:34) What are the practical implications of fractional work for board members? (10:13) How can boards tread the line between diversification and di-worsification? (13:02) How should boards be thinking about AI? (16:57) How should boards think about innovation/value capture versus focus? (28:20) What’s your experience of boards as an entrepreneur? (34:28)  Where have you seen start-up boards add and destroy most value? (37:03) ⚡ The Lightning Round ⚡(40:43)

This Growth Marketing Masterclass help founders master data-driven and AI-powered strategies to grow users and revenue for your business. This covers foundational frameworks that span user acquisition to lifecycle marketing. You will learn how to use some of the most important marketing channels today, as well as how to use data-driven insights to come up with growth hypotheses and test them through experimentation.

You'll also get exposed to the latest AI-powered growth marketing strategies so that you have a lens into how generative AI content, automation, and workflow tools can help you accelerate revenue. Whether you're looking to grow new users or maximize revenue, this course will equip you with the frameworks and executional skills to lead and grow your business.

FlowGPT, aims to be a sort of “app store” for generative AI models like Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama 2 and OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, as well as front-end experiences for those models (think text fields and prompt suggestions). Through FlowGPT, users can build their own GenAI-powered apps and make them publicly available, earning tips for their contributions.

IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see FlowGPT continue to grow.

The Fractional Founders’ 2-step method to company building:

1. DERISK: Test your idea as a part-time project

2. DEPLOY: Convert your part-time project into a full-time startup

Congratulations to Jay Dang and Lifan Wang, co-founders of FlowGPT, for sharing their journey from UC Berkeley to full-time company building in the The Wall Street Journal. We are excited to continue to support you as you take your vision from day dream to day job.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see FlowGPT continue to grow.

Imbue is focused on building custom AI agents capable of reasoning, with the goal of making users more productive, and will continue to grow in partnership with Nvidia.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see Imbue continue to grow.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, judges for the final of the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition. This is the largest entrepreneurship competition in the Greater Boston area, founded in 1989, and its past winners include public companies such as Akamai and HubSpot.

IOVC hosts annual gathering to provide intimate access to and learning opportunities featuring Google's Chief Privacy Officer, Eventbrite's Chief Product Officer, and Oculus' Founder & Chief Engineer among others.

Leading people development platform sees tremendous customer growth as the Great Resignation continues. Torch, a leading people development platform that harnesses the power of trusted relationships to fuel employee growth and success, today announced a $40 million Series C financing round.

IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Torch continue to grow.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, is featured by Venture Capital Journal, as a 40 Rising Star award recipient.

Shuo Chen, GP at IOVC, is featured by Forbes, as a Forbes 30 Under 30 award recipient in the venture capital category.

IOVC hosts annual gathering to provide intimate access to and learning opportunities featuring the founders of Coursera, Databricks, Gradescope and You.com among others.

IOVC hosts conversation for founders with Adam Cheyer, the founder of Siri. Adam joins to share personal stories of selling Siri to and working with Steve Jobs.

IOVC hosts conversation for founders with Dan'l Lewin, the CEO at Computer History Museum and former Corporate VP at Microsoft. Dan'l is one of the few people who have personally worked with both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and he joins to share learnings with founders.

Rescale, a leading hybrid HPC cloud platform enabling intelligent computing for digital R&D, today announced it has closed $50 million in Series C funding from Hitachi Ventures, Microsoft’s M12, NVIDIA, and Samsung Catalyst Fund among others, bringing the company’s total funding to over $100 million.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Rescale continue to grow.

B Capital led the round, with help from new investors such as Marc Benioff along with previous investors Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Y Combinator and Javelin Venture Partners. This investment brings the total raised to more than $82 million.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Armory continue to grow.

Caterpillar (CAT) recently acquired the San Francisco, CA-based robot and autonomy technology solutions company — Marble Robot. The buyout is in sync with Caterpillar’s automation and autonomy strategy.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Marble continue to grow as a part of Caterpillar.

Dray Alliance, a digital drayage marketplace that connects shippers and truckers for short-range delivery of shipping containers between ports and logistics centers, announced today that it has closed a $10.2 million Series A led by Matrix Partners. Ex-Uber syndicate Moving Capital also participated in the Series A along with previous investors Craft Ventures among others.

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IOVC is one of the earliest seed investors, and we are excited to see Dray Alliance continue to grow.

IOVC hosts for founders an intimate conversation with Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom, to learn from his experiences and insights.

Game Golf has been acquired by Inpixon (Nasdaq: INPX), a world leader in indoor intelligence.

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IOVC is one of the earliest pre-seed investors, and we are excited to see Game Golf continue to grow as a part of I.