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Backing the Future of GRC: Venture Guides Leads Compyl’s $12M Series A
At Venture Guides, we are always on the lookout for companies that are redefining industries through innovation and strategic execution. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce our lead investment in Compyl’s $12 million Series A funding round, fueling Compyl’s next phase of growth as it transforms Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) for mid-market enterprises.
GTM Acceleration (Step 4 of 12): Engineering Your Pricing to Reflect Customer Value
This post is about how early-stage teams can approach pricing and packaging with the same rigor they bring to product, reflecting customer value clearly, supporting growth, and earning buyer confidence from day one.
Founders often treat pricing and packaging as a spreadsheet exercise. In reality, it’s a storytelling exercise. Your pricing tells the customer what your product is, how it fits into their workflow, and how they should think about its value.
Clarity Security Raises Series A: The Future of Identity Starts Here
Clarity isn’t tweaking around the edges of identity governance—they’re reinventing it. In a space long dominated by slow-moving incumbents, Clarity is delivering what enterprise teams have needed for years: a fast, intuitive, and scalable way to manage identity across hybrid IT environments. And they’re doing it with uncommon speed and precision.
GTM Acceleration (Step 3 of 12) ACCELERATING Your Deal by Identifying and Engaging Your Champion
In this post, we will talk about how identifying your Champion can ACCELERATE opportunity creation and sales cycle. Determining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) can boil down to one simple truth: if you are not speaking to a specific someone, you are saying nothing to everyone. One of the biggest levers for revenue acceleration in early-stage startups is clearly identifying, defining, and targeting a single ICP.
Built Not Born Podcast Beyond Capital: How Venture Guides is Redefining the Venture Playbook
In today’s episode of Built Not Born, host Sage Nye sits down with Ben Nye, Managing Partner at Venture Guides, to explore how a hands-on, team-based venture model is helping early-stage startups scale smarter, even in today’s uncertain market. From embedding go-to-market support at every level to co-locating portfolio teams, Ben breaks down what it takes to build enduring companies in 2025.
The Next Chapter of Building: Venture Guides Raises Fund II
We are proud to announce Venture Guides Fund II at $262.5 million. This milestone helps validate both our strategy and differentiated approach to venture investing and guiding. It also serves as a testament to the strength of partnership and alignment with both our LPs and portfolio companies. We are especially pleased that 100% of our Fund I family office investors rejoined and are thrilled to welcome a new cohort of institutional and family office backers to the Venture Guides community.
Venture Guides’ New Podcast with Guest Paul Cormier, Chairman and former CEO of Red Hat
To kick off this new series, host Sage Nye sits down with Paul Cormier, Chairman and former CEO of Red Hat, to discuss the strategic leadership frameworks that helped scale Red Hat from a $50 million Linux distributor to a $4 billion enterprise software giant. Through years of leadership, Paul honed a set of principles that allowed Red Hat to evolve, make bold strategic decisions, and maintain a high-performing culture amid hypergrowth.
GTM Acceleration (Step 2 of 12): ACCELERATING Your Start-up with Customer Segmentation
Your first customers provide critical insights that shape not only what you build (product focus), but also how you market and sell it (go-to-market focus), and how your team organizes to solve a specific customer problem. By identifying and engaging the right early adopters by sector and size, you develop feedback loops that sharpen your value proposition, improve messaging, and ensure that every function—product, sales, marketing, and customer success—is working toward the same goal: serving the customers who will drive your long-term growth.
The AI Navigator: The Ecstasy and the Agony of Enterprise AI’s Semantic Layer – Part 1
Today, enterprise AI is a contradiction. It can write code but doesn’t understand how software systems fit together. It can summarize documents but struggles with facts. It can generate endless responses yet lacks a fundamental grasp of truth. LLMs have pushed automation forward, but remain unreliable without context. The missing link is the semantic layer: ontologies, knowledge graphs, and structured data that encode meaning and logic into AI systems.
GTM Acceleration (Step 1 of 12): ACCELERATING Your Start-up with World Class Hiring
Hiring well is a skill. Over decades of hiring and managing people, the Venture Guides team understands what to look for and knows common mistakes that can be made, especially in fast-moving, early-stage start-ups.
The AI Navigator: The Value and Complexity of AI Inferencing
Every AI-powered interaction requires inference, and as usage grows, these workloads will massively outscale training. While a few tech giants have spent billions training models, enterprises deploying them for GenAI will face inference costs orders of magnitude higher. If AI is going to be embedded everywhere, then inferencing infrastructure has to be built for that reality.
GTM ACCELERATION: A 12-step Guide for Startup Founders in 2025
Welcome to January, 2025. Your startup is advancing nicely from early design customer wins to now building its first go-to-market (GTM) engine – a major milestone in scaling your business. With this phase comes the new challenges of hiring teams and allocating resources to grow your customer base; increase market share; and efficiently build recurring revenue streams…
Precog and Venture Guides: Pioneering AI-driven ELT Solutions
Decision-making, AI, business operations - they all run on data. But, we have heard from countless enterprise customers how hard it is to get data from 72,000 SaaS apps into warehouses where they can access and analyze this information.
Today, Precog is the only solution providing customers with data for an AI-driven world, seamlessly transforming siloed SaaS data into fully normalized, business-ready insights with remarkable speed and elegance. We have the great privilege of joining them in their journey.
Selling into the Enterprise: Practical Advice for Early Stage Teams
Last week, Venture Guides hosted Alla Piltser, an infrastructure technology leader with three decades of experience selecting and managing enterprise tools and vendors. This fireside chat, hosted by Leigh Moore from Venture Guides, focused on key strategies for early-stage founders looking to break into enterprise markets. Alla shared guidance and first-hand experience about the purchasing process with local Boston founders and sales leaders, along with a virtual audience, sharing what works, and what to avoid, in the enterprise selling process.
Venture Guides 2024 Leadership in Technology Award
We recently hosted our 2nd Annual Investor Meeting at our Boston office, and we extend our heartfelt thanks to our Limited Partners, portfolio leaders, and friends of the firm for joining us. The last few days have been full of engaging discussions regarding the growing value and awareness of infrastructure software (IS), the present and future of AI in IS, and the progress we have made in guiding some of the most disruptive companies in the domain.
Why We Invested in Odigos: The Future of Application Tracing and Observability
Venture Guides is excited to announce we have led Odigos' $13 million Series A round. The Odigos technology provides customers with the next generation of application tracing and application performance monitoring (APM). Odigos’ unique usage of eBPF to automatically produce context-propagated traces, positions the company as the only solution to unlock distributed tracing for all customers. For the first time ever, customers can observe their entire environment end-to-end without manual instrumentation.
Venture Guides Welcomes VibeIQ to Its Portfolio: Announcing $6.3 Million Investment and New CEO
The Venture Guides team is thrilled to announce our newest portfolio investment in VibeIQ, the first digital workspace purpose-built for product collaboration. With a $6.3 million funding boost, VibeIQ is redefining the landscape of consumer product development, facilitating a seamless, data-driven, and real-time collaborative environment.
Venture Guides Dinner Series: Modern AppSec in Hybrid Cloud Environments
The Venture Guides team recently hosted a panel of security leaders along with a roomful of members from the Venture Guides Technology Advisor Network, CISOs and AppSec leaders from Bank of America, NS1, Pega Systems, Rapid7, Salesforce, Santander, State Street and many others to discuss the evolving challenges of managing application security in ever-changing hybrid cloud environments.
Press Release: Venture Guides Launches Sales Academy to Accelerate Portfolio Company Growth
Venture Guides, an early stage venture capital firm focused on team-based investing and guiding, today announced the launch of Venture Guides’ Sales Academy for Leadership, Excellence, and Success (VG SALES) designed to accelerate sales for its portfolio companies with trained and motivated sales professionals, ready to join fast-growing tech startups.
What I Wish I Knew Series: Hire Sales Early
As I look back on the many lessons I’ve learned as a founder, one in particular stands out to me: it’s crucial to invest in sales from the get-go. There is so much value in having real-time feedback streaming into your product cycle—insights into use cases, deployment issues, and customer pain points upfront. This early interaction with customers not only accelerates product iteration but also fosters a deeper understanding of their needs, enabling companies to tailor our offerings more effectively.
