Pear VC

Huge thanks to Mar Hershenson, Managing Partner at Pear VC, for a great insightful session with the DelightX program! 🙏 Her breakdown of the Pre-Seed and Seed stages was pure gold for any founder. Here are my key takeaways for Pre-Seed and Seed stage: 1️⃣ Pre-Seed: From Zero to "Customer Love" ❤️ The goal is to go from "nothing exists" to "at least one customer truly loves your product." Founder Focus: VCs evaluate you on three core axes: 1. Market & Customer Knowledge: Do you understand the space better than anyone? 2. Execution: Can you hire, build, and sell effectively? 3. Character: Are you a leader people will follow? The Story is Everything: Especially for non-native English speakers, crafting a compelling "Hero's Journey" narrative is crucial. Create FOMO by showing investors that your success is inevitable, and you're the hero to make it happen. 2️⃣ Seed: Proving it's a "Must-Have" ✅ The mission shifts from "a few happy customers" to "a clear, repeatable path to the next customers." The PMF Test: The ultimate goal is Product-Market Fit. You've hit it when customers "can't live without" your product, not just "like" it. The key metric? Aim for >40% of users who would be "very disappointed" if they could no longer use your product. Speed Over Polish: Your MVP doesn't need to be perfect. Getting to market quickly and iterating based on real customer feedback is far more valuable than building a polished product in isolation. My biggest "Aha!" moments from the talk💡 📈 Metrics & The "Why": In Japan, I know the startup growth playbook (e.g., LTV/CAC > 3x), but Mar emphasized the why. A 3x ratio isn't arbitrary; it's the minimum needed to cover all your other costs (R&D, G&A) and generate actual profit. 😂 TAM/SAM/SOM Reality: A surprising number of VCs (~80%, especially at the growth stage) aren't focused on the textbook definitions. They care more about the vision and the size of the opportunity. 🚀 Slope > Snapshot: In the early stages, VCs aren't looking at your absolute revenue number. They're analyzing the slope of your growth. Every dollar of revenue must tell a meaningful story about your future potential. An amazing learning experience! Thank you again, Mar Hershenson and Pear VC! #Startups #VentureCapital #Founder #SeedFunding #PreSeed #Entrepreneurship #ProductMarketFit #PearVC #DelightX

We are extremely excited to announce the launch of August, the configurable legal AI platform built for midsized law firms. We’ve raised $7M led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Pear VC, leading law schools, Afore Capital, and incredible angels such as Gokul Rajaram, Geoff Charles (Ramp), David A. (OpenAI), Kevin Zhang (BCV), and others. Midsized law firms are constantly looking for ways to deliver exceptional client experiences and remain cost-competitive. These firms are excited about AI’s potential to grow their business and to work with more clients, but are overwhelmed with how to get started. Having worked at mid-sized law firms, large financial organizations, and world-class tech companies, we founded August to enable mid-sized law firms to leverage the best legal AI. August’s workflows are uniquely tailored to each firm, aligning precisely with their specific formats, guidelines, and precedents. Firms using August have been able to review over 5,000 documents over 90% faster, cut diligence time by over 60% and generate deposition questions from over 200,000 files. August’s mission is to partner with firms to implement best-in-class legal AI, providing personalized onboarding led by attorneys and engineers, demonstrating real ROI. We’re expanding our team extremely rapidly across engineering, legal, product, and sales, already serving clients across multiple geographies, including North America, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Patient access shouldn’t be a gamble. It should be a system. A fair system. Excited to share Paxos Health's product launch video! 🚀 Today, patient access teams at medtech, diagnostics, and other healthcare organizations spend hours navigating opaque health insurance rules, only to face delays, denials, and lost revenue. Despite evidence-backed therapies, manual processes and red tape still block reimbursement and slow adoption. And don’t even get me started on how this hurts patients. After seven years at Medtronic, and two at Stanford working directly with patients to appeal health insurance denials, I saw these challenges first-hand. My co-founders, Alex Lacey and Malcolm Asher, directly experienced this problem, each getting denied for $40k+ treatments. They had to resort to Reddit (where they originally met each other 🤯) to figure out how to fight back. Patient stories like these are why we built Paxos: to help more patients access care. After a number of successful partnerships helping patient access teams secure case-by-case approvals, we’re now launching the platform publicly. With Paxos, patient access teams, along with providers and even patients themselves, can now: 📂 Upload clinical records and have the platform extract key details 🏢 Access the correct payer policy for a patient’s specific plan and requested treatment 🔍 Identify missing information needed for coverage by cross-referencing policy criteria 🧾 Review AI-generated outputs with confidence: every data point is cited and linked to source documentation ✅ Auto-generate prior authorizations, appeals, and other insurance justification documents All of the above in minutes, not hours. 👉 Interested in learning more? Link to grab time with me in the comments 👇 #HealthTech #MedTech #AI #PatientAccess #MarketAccess #Reimbursement

Founders, if you’re worshipping your first six-figure customer, they might be the anchor that sinks you. ⚓ That was one of Adam Evans’ (EVP & GM of @Agentforce) mic-drop moments during our Pear VC PearX S25 Speaker Series event last week. When Adam was running Airkit, a $150,000 enterprise pilot validated the product but also trapped their product roadmap. You end up building something custom for that one customer. 😬 It’s the classic “hero customer” trap, and Adam warns founders to be careful. “They’re a great logo, but they’re going to control everything about your roadmap.” 🫠 Adam has built not 1 but 2 startups that were successfully acquired by Salesforce. I've known Adam for many years; we met back when he cofounded RelateIQ. His entire talk was a string of counter-intuitive truths (hard-earned from being in the trenches), like: ⭐ Capital > scrappiness ⭐ Culture can’t be efficient ⭐ Hiring is a veto game more than a numbers game ⭐ In M&A, emotions matter as much as spreadsheets I’ll include the link to the full recap in the comments, and we’ll be sharing more PearX S25 Speaker Series learnings for founders over the next few weeks.   What’s a counter-intuitive decision that’s paid off for you?

LinkedIn, it’s been a minute. Here goes: I’ve joined Pear VC as a Partner. You could say it’s been an unconventional path to venture. In 2016, after eight years at JPMorgan, I left NYC for SF. Over the next decade, I somehow convinced three seed-stage startups – Second Measure (Bloomberg Second Measure), Pipe, and Turnstile – to let me be their first GTM hire. I can only assume it was my last name that won them over… In 2020, I co-founded Dash Fund, raising and deploying two funds (~$25M) into 57 incredible companies. We won’t raise a third. To the founders who bet on an unproven fund with zero brand – thank you. You still have me in your corner. And to our LPs: there’s no greater vote of confidence than backing someone with your capital – I’ve never taken that lightly. So, yes – I’ve spent the last decade operating and investing at Day 0. It’s become more than a passion – a borderline obsession. I was gearing up to raise my next fund… and then Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson called. Unplanned, unexpected – and they quickly won me over. Few firms do Day 0 better than Pear. Their first-check track record is remarkable (DoorDash, Dropbox, Guardant, Gusto, Vanta, etc.), but what really hooked me is their relentless founder-first focus and their discipline to resist the urge to asset-gather and double down on what they do best: being the best pre-seed and seed investors in the world. This opportunity doesn’t exist without the founders, colleagues, and friends who trusted me along the way. I’ll drop a longer thank-you in the comments (it’s important to me). If you’re building (or noodling), DMs open. Or email me: ryan@pear.vc Onward.

✨Vanta has raised $150M in Series D funding and is now valued at $4.15B!✨ Our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. In 2018, that meant helping startups automate SOC 2, giving them a faster path to market and revenue. Today, it means using AI to help 12,000 customers of all sizes automate compliance, reduce risk, and prove trust in real time. In the past year alone, we've: 🚀 Shipped 350+ new features, including Vanta AI Agent & AI Assessments 🔐 Acquired Riskey to deliver continuous, AI-driven vendor monitoring 🤝 Launched Vanta for Marketplaces with Atlassian & Snowflake 📃 Rolled out Policy Builder to streamline audit readiness for startups 🏛️ Expanded into govt. frameworks like FedRAMP, CMMC, & NIST 800-53 💜 Grown to 1,000 Vanta’ns strong And we’re just getting started. With this new funding, we’ll double down on our investments in AI and expand into new areas like third-party risk management, privacy, and US Government, ultimately building more for our customers. That means making zero-touch security reviews a reality, enabling AI agents that can rewrite policies, assign owners, and collect evidence, and mapping contract commitments to live controls so customer promises are continuously verified. Thank you to Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, JPMorganChase, Craft Ventures, Y Combinator, Atlassian Ventures, and CrowdStrike Ventures for your support and continued investment in Vanta’s vision and mission. To our customers, partners and super fans: thank you for helping us reimagine trust and GRC in the age of AI. We can’t wait to share all that’s to come. For a behind the scenes look at Vanta’s journey and where we’re headed, read more from our CEO Christina Cacioppo at the link in the comments.