Thanks to everyone who came to our Founders-In-Residence Cohort 4 Showcase event on Monday! We had a packed house of ~150 top founders, operators, and Seed / Series A investors attending. We're looking for exceptional candidates for Cohort 5! If you know anyone that might be a fit (who is the most interesting person you've met recently?) - please email jack mcclelland at [email protected] / have them apply at afore.vc/residence and mark your name as a referral. Our FIR teams are very early but wanted to showcase where they're headed. Sneak peek into half of them below: 1️⃣ Wayside is an AI assistant for people teams 🤝 Ish Baid is a 3x founder (YC S20, Forbes 30 Under 30), prev SWE at Meta (helped build their in-house HRIS). Phil Dakin previously led a tech team at Citadel Securities ⭐️ Wayside's AI Agent automates core HR workflows such as inquiry handling and people analytics, reducing necessary headcount 2️⃣ Podqi provides intellectual property protection for the biggest names in entertainment 🤝 Ivan Esmeral and Jesse Xu lived together at UPenn (CS). Ivan built large-scale data pipelines at Microsoft, Jesse worked on GEN AI for Google Docs. Trevor West grew up with Ivan, went to USC, and sold data science software to the gov ⭐️ Podqi automates detection, takedown, and retroactive compensation for infringement on entertainment intellectual property 3️⃣ Echo (askecho.ai) protects your focus by eliminating busywork 🤝 Manu Ebert is a 4x founder with 2 exits (one to Airbnb) and has 12 YOE building in ML. Conor Brennan-Burke is a repeat AI founder and seasoned PM (Checkr, Pave), prev BCG ⭐️ Office workers spend over half of their time coordinating their work over email, chat, and meetings. Echo AI protects your focus by automating the flow of information in your organization to enable deep work 4️⃣ MineMe is building a data marketplace where users reclaim control and compensation for their info, while enterprises get access to the best consumer data. 🤝 Archana Somasegar (Harvard BA, Wharton MBA) worked in consumer tech innovation at McKinsey and led New Customer Growth at Deliverr ⭐️ MineMe builds robust, ethically-sourced consumer data feeds & generates AI driven insights to help marketers better connect with their customers 5️⃣ AgentKali (agentkali.ai) transforms offshore SDRs' voices to sound American during live sales call using deep learning and AI 🤝 Shikhar Sakhuja was previously a SWE at Discord and Motive, did CS at Waterloo and NYU, and is a 3x published ML author. Charles Javelona was the ex-COO of Tiny Mile, a 3x founder, and ex-Scotiabank (innovation team) ⭐️ AgentKali is augmenting offshore SDRs workflow such as outbound and inbound to book more calls using deep-learning and ML techniques 6️⃣ 7️⃣ 8️⃣ 9️⃣ And we have four more in stealth! For any questions / referrals for our Founders-In-Residence program, please contact jack mcclelland at [email protected] or find out more and apply at https://afore.vc/residence
Afore Capital
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
San Francisco, California 7,827 followers
Afore Capital is a $300M venture fund that focuses on Pre-Seed stage exclusively and is based in San Francisco.
About us
Afore Capital is a Pre-Seed VC with $300 million in AUM co-founded by Anamitra Banerji & Gaurav Jain. We support product-oriented founders building software companies at the very earliest stages. Our sweet spot is investing $1-2m into founders' first institutional round. We can lead this round alongside high value angels. At Afore, we believe that before there's a company, before there's a business, there's a product-oriented founder leading by product. The products are often raw, sometimes just rough concepts requiring a lot of imagination. They are pre-traction and pre-obvious. But they come from founders with non-obvious insights and infectious ambitions. We started Afore to back these founders at the pre-seed stage exclusively, on day zero of their journey. We bring with us 16 years of product experience and 7 years of institutional investing experience.
- Website
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http://afore.vc
External link for Afore Capital
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 2-10 employees
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2016
- Specialties
- Venture Capital, Seed Stage Venture Capital, Pre Seed Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship , and Founders
Locations
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Primary
San Francisco, California , US
Employees at Afore Capital
Updates
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Congrats to Jimmy McDermott at Rubie on the $3.2m raise announcement! Setting up ERP's, CRM's, or other complex software involves tedious configuration and long implementation times. Rubie utilizes AI to automate manual configurations tasks. Excited to have led the round! 🎉
Excited to share that I’ve raised $3.2m from Afore Capital and Crossbeam Venture Partners for my new company, Rubie! I feel very lucky to have some amazing funds and angels supporting the round: Earl Grey Capital, Comma Capital, SSC Venture Partners, Will M., Charlie Stigler, Nishant Neel, Greg Arrese, and many more. More to share soon on our big vision product, but here’s the headline: we help post-sale teams provision and configure software for their customers faster. And not just a little faster - in the case of one of our partners, 70% faster! I can’t wait to show off the product - using it feels like magic. We're hiring founding engineers in person in New York who want to work on agents and AI to solve some super thorny automation problems in a new way. The role has a competitive salary and very meaningful equity, and you’ll get to nerd out with us on weird website architectures, tricky edge cases, and reverse engineering. If that excites you, we built a fun challenge for you to try. Head to https://lnkd.in/gFJMhB_J to get started 🙂 A few special shoutouts: - David and Adarsh from Comma Capital were the first investors to believe in me before I even had an idea and provided very real, tangible support - I’m so grateful. - Anamitra and Gaurav from Afore mean it when they say they’re early, high-conviction investors. Pumped to be on the same team for this journey. - The team at South Park Commons has created a very special place for founders to take time and reset explore. I’m proud to have spent time with them. It’s clearer to me than ever that this is just the starting line. We have **so much work** to do, and I hope that you or someone you know will consider joining us on the journey. Here we go!
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Afore Capital reposted this
at Afore Capital, we’re hosting a showcase for our founders-in-residence (and happy hour afterwards) at our sf office in two weeks! for the past two months, nine founder-in-residence teams have been working from our office ideating and working to get to conviction on problems and products. on july 15, we’ve invited friends of afore (a small group of investors, angels, operators, and future fir’s) to get a first look at what these teams are building and mingle with the other sharp minds in the room. teams will share their raw updates - many of them are still very early on their journeys and won’t raise for another few months. during this showcase, our fir’s will share what they’ve learned / built so far and where they’re headed. we’re now opening up a handful of seats for others to attend this summer! learn more here: https://lnkd.in/efY9hjqZ
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Afore Capital reposted this
at Afore Capital, we’re hosting a showcase for our founders-in-residence (and happy hour afterwards) at our sf office in two weeks! for the past two months, nine founder-in-residence teams have been working from our office ideating and working to get to conviction on problems and products. on july 15, we’ve invited friends of afore (a small group of investors, angels, operators, and future fir’s) to get a first look at what these teams are building and mingle with the other sharp minds in the room. teams will share their raw updates - many of them are still very early on their journeys and won’t raise for another few months. during this showcase, our fir’s will share what they’ve learned / built so far and where they’re headed. we’re now opening up a handful of seats for others to attend this summer! learn more here: https://lnkd.in/efY9hjqZ
Afore Founders-in-Residence Cohort 4: Showcase & Happy Hour · Luma
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Excited about Keragon's launch out of stealth today! Congrats to Conno Christou and team 🚀 Keragon lets healthcare providers build HIPAA-compliant automations, helping eliminate the repetitive and manual processes they struggle with. Thrilled to have co-led the first round 🎉 #startups #venturecapital #healthcare
Co-founder @ Keragon - Building the future of healthcare. Former Co-founder @ Avocarrot (acquired by Glispa / Market Group in 2016).
👶 Company reveal 👶 ⬇ Keragon - here's how it all started (Spoiler: This is not your typical Silicon Valley story) I met my cofounders 18 years ago during our military service and then studied together at Imperial College London. After uni, we started a company in the mobile adtech space and 3.5years later it was acquired by Glispa and then Market Group. After the vesting period ended, my cofounders and I decided to take some time off to focus on things we haven't had the chance to do over the 7 year grind. Even though there was a big overlap with Covid and restricted traveling, we managed to reflect, heal (yep, post-exit trauma is real) and eventually regrouped after 12 months. For the first time in a while, we held long sessions again - this time about career and life goals, and whether even considering working together on another play. Surprise surprise - our masochist part prevailed and we decided to jump again into the battlefield. However, unlike our first company, we weren't driven by a specific problem nor were passionate about a unique insight. This time, we decided to explore, agreeing on 3 core principles for our new venture: 1. pick any industry, but adtech 2. pick a broken space we could build a sector-defining company 3. life's too short to work with a-holes Healthcare quickly became the winner - as newcomers we dedicated half a year to researching how our skillset could give the most value in this space. And that's how we found ourselves hustling again: we reached out to 100s of healthcare professionals over 6 months, out of which 338 agreed to jump on a call to help us map the problems of the industry through their eyes - most of you are now LinkedIn friends, thanks for being part of the journey 🙏 We compiled and ranked a long list of problems - even though infrastructure is never the most glamorous play, we ended up picking this critical problem that was coming again and again and was right in our wheelhouse - healthcare providers are struggling with manual, repetitive, processes, and spend their limited time saving files instead of saving lives. And that's how Keragon was born. Incredibly grateful for focal (Daniel Darling), who were the first to believe in Avocarrot back in 2014 and are now co-leading the round of Keragon along with the amazing people at Afore Capital (Gaurav Jain), and also very lucky to have the backing and deep healthcare expertise from 25m Health - Lifepoint Health® (Thank you Ryan Macy and Merrill Anovick). Also big thanks to all our 👼 (Elliot Cohen, Giorgos Zacharia, Marina Hatsopoulos, Alexis Pantazis, Emilios Markou, Andreas Stavropoulos) Keragon is a first of its kind. And we're excited for what's coming! ▶ If you're a healthcare professional, looking to automate your day-to-day work - reach out, we can help. ▶ If you're a rockstar software engineer or growth hacker who wants to make a difference in healthcare - come and join us. cc George Eracleous George Makkoulis Panos Papageorgiou
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Congrats to Thoughtly on the $3m raise announcement! The product feels truly magical, allowing you to build and deploy human-like AI phone agents for your business in minutes. Excited to have led the pre-seed 🎉 #startups #venturecapital #ai
After almost a year of building, I’m beyond excited to announce what we’ve been working on over at Thoughtly– the first-ever CCaaS platform built from the ground up for the era of generative AI. By leveraging LLMs, Thoughtly creates human-like AI agents capable of handling every inbound and outbound phone call for high-volume contact centers. Everything you can train a human agent to say and do, you can train your Thoughtly to do the same. We’re building a world where human voice and artificial intelligence coalesce to create the ultimate user experience for business interactions. Just as companies like Apple enhance consumer devices with voice AI experiences like Siri, we believe businesses should leverage the same technology. At Thoughtly, our innovations ensure zero hold time, 24/7 service, full scalability, deep integration, and perfect, personalized customer service every single time. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮’𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐝, 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫. When I first reached out to Casey Mackrell back in July, I couldn’t have imagined the incredible (and difficult!) journey we’ve been on ever since. From meeting our killer sales lead David Khaydatov, pitching Will Zell and the Ohio Angel Collective, being invited to work in San Francisco with awesome founders during Pioneer's summit, meeting Gaurav Jain at his offices in South Park, setting up our tiny office in New York, hanging out with Jen Hilibrand from Greycroft, to building an epic team– the journey so far has been nothing short of life-changing. I cannot emphasize enough how grateful I am for everyone who has joined me on this journey so far. And we’re only just getting started! We’ve raised our $3M seed round with participation from Afore Capital, Greycroft, Expansion Venture Capital, Shift Left Ventures, Pioneer, the Ohio Angel Collective, Andrew Ofstad from Airtable, and Rico Mallozzi from Sapphire Ventures. Thank you so much to our investors, team, and everyone who has played a role in bringing us to where we are today. Together, let's usher in a new era of communication where every voice is empowered, every connection is personalized, and best of all– no more hold times. #ThoughtlyLaunch #AI #VentureCapital
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Afore Capital reposted this
We have been working for a while to bring together different stakeholders in the government, healthcare and social care space together for the inaugural Blooming Day event. Our goal? Powering communities for better social health. Thank you Chelsea Clinton, Claire Casey, Bob Blancato, Greg Olsen, Amanda Parsons MD, MBA, Erin Westphal, Archelle Georgiou, MD, Ronald Taylor, Dorella W., Nikki Kmicinski, and other esteemed speakers/contributors for joining this dialogue. Join us to make social health more accessible and equitable. Register below.
🌟 Join us as we embark on a transformative journey at the inaugural Blooming Day event, either in the heart of New York City or virtually! 🌍 Blooming Day is featuring a stellar lineup of visionaries such as Chelsea Clinton, AARP Foundation, United Health Group, Healthfirst, Detroit Area Agency on Aging, The SCAN Foundation and more. Dive into dynamic discussions and help shape a future where equitable access to social health is a reality for all. Secure your spot now and be part of the change: https://hubs.la/Q02wC0d90 #Bloomingday2024 #PoweringCommunities #SocialHealth #aging #agetech #aginginplace #agingservices #healthtech #healthequity #medicare #healthcareinnovation
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Congratulations to Gaurav Jain, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Afore Capital, for being featured as #7 in the Business Insider Seed 100 list for 3 years in a row! Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gcCnTM5P
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Congrats to Baselayer on the $6.5m seed raise announcement! We're excited about the opportunity to build better tooling in fraud, risk, and identity. Happy to have backed the team in their first round 🎉 Incomplete business records, missing fraud signals, and extensive manual review processes have been a burden for risk teams to handle, until now. Additionally, it has become easier than ever to incorporate and open new business entities, which has massively increased the surface area for fraud attacks. Baselayer helps address these problems with best-in-class business verification, extensive risk indicators, tools for manual review, portfolio monitoring, and more. Lucky to have the opportunity to work alongside Jonathan Awad, Timothy Hyde, and the rest of the Baselayer team - looking forward for what's to come in next-gen KYB and business verification! #startups #venturecapital #fintech
My whole life has come to this point - today (!) Thank you to Axios and Lucinda Shen for covering Baselayer's story Teamed up with Timothy Hyde & raised $6.5M in seed funding from top VCs and banking experts to start Baselayer - the first AI-Native business identity, fraud and risk platform verifying 100% of good businesses. The journey was long, but fulfilling: Innovative Partners - Beyond grateful for the almost 30 financial services companies (that touch millions of businesses) that we’ve helped verify over 100k businesses and structurally prevent millions of dollars in repeat B2B fraud Intentional Vision - When Tim and I first met three years ago, we knew with his expertise in Machine Learning (and one ML co’ exit under his belt to a Fortune 500) - we had the tools in hand to make a massive impact in financial services. After 100s of interviews with Banking and Lending execs, the problem became clear: credit scores for small businesses are broken and we could solve that. Immense Gratitude: To Tim - for there would be no Baselayer without his effortless brilliance. To our incredible employees who took an early risk on us. To our forward thinking customers who gave us the opportunity to help them. To our unbelievable investors, who have believed in us from day 0. & of course to my parents. They’re Egyptian immigrants and humble me every day (my mom has asked 3 times if we have a 401k yet). My dad offered to sponsor 10 people’s Axios subscriptions who comment below so they can read our press release - so please let him know in the comments if you’d like that (!!) Investors: Torch Capital, Afore Capital, Picus Capital, Founder Collective, Gilgamesh Ventures, Four Acres Capital, Comma Capital, Picks and Shovels Experts: Eric Woodward, Jonathan Weiner, Jason Mikula, Stuart Cook, Rory O'Reilly, Kieran O'Reilly, Miguel Armaza, Maia Bittner, Jack Arenas, Thejo Kote, Alek Koenig, Daniel M., Eric Rosenthal, Alain C. Glanzman, & so many more Looking forward to accelerating the US economy - one good small business at a time. https://lnkd.in/edAi9jvv #fintech #ai #tech #lending #smallbusiness #genai #innovation
Baselayer raises $6.2M to be FICO score for businesses
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Want to attend Afore’s Founder-in-Residence Showcase on April 2nd in San Francisco? Next Tuesday, a limited group of investors, angels, operators and future FIRs will get a first look at the companies coming out of Afore Capital’s Founder-in-Residence program (afore.vc/residence). Come see companies across: ⚡️ Consumer tech across commerce & mac experience ⚡️ AI-based replacements for ZoomInfo ⚡️ Developer tools focused on making PLG onboarding much faster ⚡️ Healthcare applications streamlining care using the latest in AI ⚡️ Radiology software being adopted by some of the largest clinics in America ⚡️ Construction tooling making analytics and projects more efficient ⚡️ and many others We’re opening up a handful of seats for others to attend this year (space limited). Please sign up here: https://lu.ma/1wnibmhp
Afore's Founders-in-Residence Showcase (Spring 2024) · Luma
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