Ben Rattray

A new fund focused on preventing extinction? Music to my ears. 🇺🇸 Superorganism closes $25.9M Fund I for biodiversity startups This San Francisco VC closed its first fund from Cisco Foundation, AMB Holdings, Builders Vision, a16z partner Jeff Jordan, and others. Managing Directors Tom Quigley & Kevin Webb are backing startups working on extinction prevention and conservation technology —a thesis that's been underinvested despite the urgency. The firm writes checks of $250k - $500k for pre-seed and seed companies and donate, with portfolio including Spoor (computer vision for bird tracking around wind farms) + They commit 10% of profits to future conservationist efforts. Biodiversity isn't just environmental—it's infrastructure for planetary resilience. Learn about the moves shaping deep tech in this week's Conscious Tech intel linked below. Congrats to the team! 👏 _____ Hi, I'm Sera Tajima, angel investing alongside EQT Foundation & Hoxton Ventures. 🤙

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I’m thrilled to share Earthshot Ventures most recent investment, Unlimited Industries! Unlimited is an AI-native construction company that both designs and builds. Its platform can generate and evaluate hundreds of thousands of design configurations in parallel, automatically identifying optimal layouts for cost, safety, and performance before construction begins. Why did we invest? Solving a real need we know well: Over the last decade, we have worked with hundreds of companies that are ready to deploy their technology, but struggle with slow construction timelines and cost overruns. Unlimited makes it feasible for emerging infrastructure companies to bring projects to life reliably and efficiently. Massive market potential: The EPC market is ~$800B. While this entire market is not addressable from day one, early adopters will pave the way for the mass market, enabling massive possible scale over time. Exceptional team: The company is led by Alex Modon, a repeat founder and multidisciplinary engineer. To accelerate the company, Alex teamed up with Tara Viswanathan and Jordan Stern, who previously built and scaled Rupa Health as the founder/CEO and first teammate respectively, from zero to millions in revenue before its successful nine figure acquisition in 2024. Software is eating the world, and AI will eat engineering: Software engineering is increasingly being augmented and automated by AI, aided by large repositories of coding data like Github. Other engineering disciplines will be transformed over time as analogous data sets are compiled and software encodes the operating principles of the real world. Companies that can create proprietary datasets, like Unlimited’s burgeoning catalogue of projects, will gain defensibility through data moats. Lastly, since a good portion of my network here consists of founders who could be customers of Unlimited and their investors, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say - hit me up if you’d like to connect with Unlimited to deliver your next project on time, on budget! Welcome to the Earthshot portfolio, Unlimited!

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Most organizations fundraise for programs. I built a funding architecture. The difference is not semantic. It is structural. A program needs a funder. An architecture attracts investors. It was assembled one layer at a time, each aligned to a different player's genuine interest in the outcome. Layer 1 — The CBO's existing foundation. Our partners already had base funding covering their infrastructure and relationships. That was not Nomi's money to provide. Their existing funding held the ground. Our partnership extended what they could do with it. Layer 2 — Nomi's program funding. This came after four years of direct work — training the first 20 women myself, watching the impact compound. Six of those 20 became trainers. The proof existed. Only then did we replicate — supporting CBOs to implement a framework already validated in the field, still used by our team 10 years later. The funding followed the evidence. Not the other way around. Layer 3 — Employer CSR funding. The layer most organizations never reach. The employer cared about worker wellbeing — but the business problem was retention. Workers leaving within six months. Compounding recruitment costs. We designed a solution for both. Our graduates stayed significantly longer. And then something unexpected happened — the employer began funding the program for participants who would never migrate to their factory. Not their workers. Community members who stayed home. Why? Because supporting the community built their brand as a genuinely committed employer. The ROI was not in headcount. It was in trust. And trust, in a last mile community, is a business asset with long-term returns. Layer 4 — Innovation and gap funding. Nomi's other funders covered field-level innovation, validation of new ideas, improvement of outcomes. The R&D layer that traditional MEL never had a budget for. Most practitioners try to produce numbers without system change. The number playbook says: hit targets, report, write next year's proposal. The system playbook says: build something so real that funders stop buying outputs and start investing in the system that produces them. Funders invested in the system don't leave when a grant cycle ends. They look for ways to stay. Are your funders buying outputs — or investing in a system that produces them year after year? Because if they are buying outputs, you will spend every year writing the same proposal. And if they are investing in a system, the conversation changes entirely.

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Francisco Partners is paying $650 million for Weave Communications — a 34% premium — with a stated plan to expand the company's AI capabilities across more than 40,000 healthcare practices once the deal closes. I ran that plan against our PE diligence framework below, because "invest in AI" is a line item until someone defines what it means. Weave runs patient communication, scheduling, and payments for dental, optometry, veterinary, and medical practices. The premium says Francisco Partners believes AI can widen that footprint or lift revenue per practice. Neither outcome shows up in a signed term sheet. Ask three questions before close. Was the AI stack built for scale or for demos? How much of the platform's value depends on data Weave doesn't fully control? What keeps a PE-backed roadmap from outrunning a startup's compliance function once the deal is signed? We built a four-part framework for exactly this kind of post-close AI plan: technical credibility, data dependencies, governance posture, and commercial execution. More on how we structure that below. https://lnkd.in/gaznUzCx If your firm is underwriting an "invest in AI" plan the way Francisco Partners just did, which of those four gets tested first?

If you’re still obsessing over features, you’re already behind. For years we told founders that excellence in product would naturally translate into traction. I believed it too. When I started investing in pre-seed ClimateTech, most pitch decks were obsessed with technology depth, patents, engineering brilliance. Distribution was usually the last slide, almost an afterthought. Recently I met two founders operating in the same space, both sharp and technically credible. One focused almost entirely on refining the product. The other spent just as much time building relationships, testing channels and creating early momentum with a defined group of users. We chose to back the second because the route to traction was clearer. Building has never been easier. AI, no-code tools and global talent pools have compressed the time between idea and launch. What used to require a full engineering department can now be prototyped by a tiny team. When everyone can build, product stops being the differentiator. Reach becomes the constraint. Quality alone doesn’t guarantee visibility. Algorithms filter attention. Markets are crowded. Switching costs are low. If you are not intentional about how your solution travels through networks, communities and channels, it simply doesn’t travel. The companies breaking out right now treat distribution as infrastructure. They embed themselves in niche communities before going broad. They combine product-led adoption with intentional sales motion. They test manually before automating. They design growth loops as carefully as they design features. At pre-seed, I now ask founders this question: "How will this technology spread?" If you cannot map how your first 100 customers find you, trust you and talk about you, you are not ready to scale. Innovation still matters, especially in ClimateTech where the problems are complex and urgent. But innovation without distribution is just potential energy. To build companies that move markets, we need to engineer both. 💬 If you are building at pre-seed and feel the product is strong but traction is slow, let’s talk about your distribution architecture. Sometimes the breakthrough is not in the code, but in the channel. ---------------------------- Follow @Claudio Colombo for insights on Venture Capital & ClimateTech. Links in the first comment for: • Venture Capital Unlocked (VC Course) • Venture Scout Unlocked (Real VC Experience)

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There are about 4,000 publicly traded companies in the U.S. But when it comes to giving, there are over 1.8 million nonprofits. That’s about 450x as many choices with far less data, analysts, and almost no shared diligence. In public markets, investors benefit from an entire ecosystem: Research reports, analysts, financial media, transparency, and good old fashioned debate with and CNBC or FoxBusiness In philanthropy? Most donors are navigating a landscape that’s vast, fragmented, and largely opaque. It’s no wonder giving can feel overwhelming. And it raises an important question: What would it look like if generosity had better infrastructure? If the people who care deeply about solving big problems could more easily find the best strategies, the strongest leaders, and the opportunities where capital could make the greatest difference? That's one of the problems Henry Kaestner and I are passionate about solving with a bunch of friends who have been thinking deeply about this space. That's the heart behind Solving the World's Greatest Problems Giving Funds. Making it accessible for Faith Driven Entrepreneurs and Faith Driven Investors to find the best ways to effectively give amidst a busy schedule. Thrilled to have launched the conversation this past week in Austin at SXSW and excited to see what is to come!

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