First Round is a venture capital firm that works with founders exclusively at the earliest stages of company building, often when all they have is an “imagine if.” We fill in where we can until the team is filled out, tackling crucial early hiring and equipping those who are great at building product with the skills to sell it, too. By getting the foundational firsts right, we increase the odds of finding extreme product-market fit. Our founders’ “imagine ifs” have turned into companies like Notion, Roblox, Uber, and Square.
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Sarah Scharf is one of those rare folks who has managed to keep her personal growth curve apace with the company’s, even through Vanta's meteoric rise. She's also an incredible marketer and human to boot! Great article this morning for anyone in startup marketing, or simply curious about how "you don't have to leave to reinvent yourself."
The story behind Vanta’s viral billboard, the brainchild of CMO Sarah Scharf: https://lnkd.in/eiwi8FcJ
Vanta’s new CMO is the creative mind behind their viral “Compliance that doesn’t SOC 2 much” billboard. Sarah Scharf joined as the first product marketer back in 2020. In six years, she’s held many roles at the company, moving up, down and sideways across the marketing org. Today, she becomes CMO. For the latest essay in our “Firsthand” series, she writes about the culture at Vanta that’s made her many reinventions possible: https://lnkd.in/eiwi8FcJ
First Round Capital reposted this
Nearly six years ago, I joined Vanta as its first Product Marketer. Today, I’m stepping into the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Back then, Vanta was still a seed-stage startup and I knew nothing about compliance. I would have pronounced SOC 2 “S-O-C-2” in my interview were it not for Anthony Maggio who corrected me before my first call with Christina (and shout out to Dasha Maggio who connected me to Vanta in the first place!) In the six years since, I’ve moved up, down, and sideways. I always tried to choose the move that afforded the steepest learning curve, and that move always seemed to present itself at Vanta. As the company grew from a charmingly-nerdy, llama-obsessed startup into a $4.15B company with $300M in ARR (thank goodness for Stevie Case!!), my role shape shifted from PMM, to leading marketing, then Head of Product Marketing, then adding in Comms and Brand, then VP Revenue Marketing, leading company-wide AI transformation, and now CMO. I’m of course proud of the work I’ve done over the years: we’ve repositioned Vanta 3 times, launched viral billboards, built out the largest conference for GRC professionals, and pioneered new forms of “debrandgen” aka brand performance advertising, to name a few accomplishments. Mostly, though, I’m proud of the team I got to do it alongside - insanely smart, humble, funny as hell marketers who take the craft more seriously than they take themselves. Thank you to Christina Cacioppo who took a chance on me six years ago and has supported every reinvention since, and to our kind and killer leadership team: John McCauley Jeremy Epling and Stevie Case. And thanks to my mentor, friend, and now Vanta Advisor Scott Holden without whom I would feel far less confident in taking on this next challenge. For the First Round Capital Review, I shared the story of how I got here, which is really the story of how Vanta has built a culture of trust and learning that makes constant reinvention possible: https://lnkd.in/gmX_wXRq
First Round Capital reposted this
There’s a generational land grab playing out in enterprise software right now, and deployments are the frontier. But right now nobody can hire enough FDEs. It’s a brutal talent war. And even if you can hire them, your best people can only take on so many customers, so you’re forced to ration the high-touch deployment work for your most strategic accounts. Enter Genera: founded by Will Patterson and James Honsa. Genera helps AI application companies scale white-glove deployments – using a combo of agents, humans, and pricing based on outcomes (not hours). They act as an extension of your in-house team so you can run every deployment like it’s your most critical customer. Fin and Ironclad are great examples. They’ve been using Genera and seen massive impact in scaling high-touch customer deployments (more in the video below on the impact at Fin). Proud to have led their $10M seed round and worked with this team from the very beginning of their story. They’re launching today and hiring across the board. More below:
First Round Capital reposted this
To bring millions more Townies to life, we need more humans. So we’re hiring for 13 (!) roles across engineering, design, sales, enablement, marketing, and recruiting. We think it’s a pretty great time to join Town. Why? 1️⃣ You’d be one of the first 25 employees working on a product that Inc. Magazine calls “Silicon Valley's New Favorite AI Tool,” fresh off a $55M Series A from a16z. 2️⃣ You get to work with incredible people like Jean-Denis Greze, Tony Vincent, and Lisa Campbell. 3️⃣ You’d be joining post-product market fit (based on hundreds of enthusiastic customer endorsements), pre-mainstream adoption. Sound like a company you’d be excited to join? Head over to town.com/careers. We can’t wait to meet you, and your Townie!
First Round Capital reposted this
Almost two years ago Ryan Williams joined us for First Round Capital's PMF Method. He'd just left his first company (Cadre, the real estate investment platform he scaled to $6.5B+ in AUM before selling to YieldStreet) and was pressure testing ideas for his next one. He kept coming back to a problem he'd run into head-first as a fund manager: basic portfolio questions were strangely hard to answer. “What’s our net IRR to our top 10 LPs?” took weeks of hunting across spreadsheets and disconnected systems instead of just a couple of clicks. He wasn't alone in making hundred million-dollar+ investment decisions based on stale data in Excel. Today he and his team are launching Ellis, the AI-native operations platform that solves this problem for private credit. They’ve built a unified data layer that connects every system firms run on, along with AI agents that take the first pass on all the workflows teams have had to run manually, from reconciliation to waterfalls. It was a privilege to lead Ellis’ $10M seed round and get to work with Ryan from the very beginning as everything was still taking shape. More on what they’re up to in Forbes today: https://lnkd.in/eXkRKnhd
K2 Space Corporation doesn’t make small bets. In March, the company launched Gravitas, one of the highest-power spacecraft ever built. And today, they’re announcing a $500M Series D. Congrats to Karan Kunjur, Neel Kunjur and the whole team. This ten-minute documentary tells the story of the company: https://lnkd.in/gdNbnjCC
Our biggest round yet: K2 Space Corporation has raised a $500M Series D at a $6.8B post-money valuation. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ, with participation from CapitalG, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, ARK Investment Management LLC, T. Rowe Price, and other existing investors. "Scaling” is probably the word I’ve used most often the past few months in conversations with our investors, customers, and employees when talking about what’s next for K2 Space in 2027 and beyond: --We’re going to continue to scale up mass production, to deliver against the $1B+ in contracts we’ve won to-date. --We’re going to scale up the satellite itself, from the 20kW Mega to the 100kW class Giga. Its no longer just 100kW, but we’ll save that update for another day. The capital from the Series D will turbocharge this scaling. Thanks to everyone who has been on this journey with us for the last four years – let's keep building bigger.
First Round Capital reposted this
Artemis Security 🤝 Cursor AI-powered attacks now happen at machine speed. Cursor’s defense matches and exceeds it. Every signal in their environment, across 10 billion events a day and 20+ log sources, gets automated correlation and investigation. 96% of cases resolve autonomously. The few that need a human decision arrive with the evidence and reasoning already assembled. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to partner with Tom Daniels Zehuan Li and the world class team at Cursor over the past few months. Together, we push the boundaries of agentic security and shape the future of autonomous cyber defense. As Tom Daniels, Cursor's CISO, put it: "We are an AI company end to end. It did not make sense for security to still operate at human speed." Want to learn what AI-native security operations look like? The full case study on how Cursor runs their SOC with Artemis is in the comments.
First Round Capital reposted this
Our healthcare system was designed with only one type of household in mind: one breadwinner, one employer, one plan. Now there are 30 million dual-income families, many of which have access to multiple employer plans. Our healthcare system treats those working spouses like they're strangers. When you buy a house, the bank looks at both incomes together. When you insure a car, you combine coverage as a household. In health insurance, employees make decisions in isolation. Families are left navigating one of their biggest financial decisions alone. No one looks at the whole picture. We're fixing that. We built a health insurance plan that's designed for dual-income families from the ground up, something they've never had before. I'm building this in Columbus, the third company I've helped scale here after Root Insurance and Olive AI. I'm long on this city. It won't be an underdog much longer. Today, we're announcing $18M in funding: a $14M Series A led by 111° West Capital, and participation from Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Pioneer Fund, GoAhead Ventures, and North Coast Ventures. Since 2021, employers using Healia have provided $33M in additional coverage to their employees. Read more about what we're building. Links in the comments below.