Hunter Walk

Seed-stage fundraising requires differentiation. Grind Ventures found it at the intersection of three underserved markets Technology transfer from universities creates early-stage opportunities that most VCs miss. Defense and federal marketplace applications provide revenue visibility. Critical infrastructure sectors offer commercial scale. Focused Thesis - Dual-use technologies serving defense and 16 critical infrastructure sectors Technology Transfer - University research teams1-5 years old at $1-3M valuations Revenue Clarity - Federal marketplace provides structured procurement pathways Commercial Scale - Critical infrastructure sectors offer massive addressable markets   Geographic Focus - US-based companies with clear domestic advantages Stage Discipline - Seed investments with defined entry points and milestones The market rewards problem-obsessed founders with healthy margins and cash flow visibility. Dual-use technology delivers both. Which of these thesis elements resonates most with your investment approach? #VC #GrindVentures #ThoughtLeadership

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Ali Asaria and Tony Salomone built what they needed to build an AI research lab + ended up realizing the tools themselves were the company. Ripple Ventures is excited to back Transformer Lab in their pre-seed round alongside Hawktail and Garage Capital. Ali and Tony started tinkering on this about a year ago, wanted to go head-to-head with OpenAI on transformer architecture, and kept hitting walls with the tooling so they built their own. The insight is pretty simple. Research labs at OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla all built proprietary internal tools to do their work. Transformer Lab is opening that up. They are building the Modern OS for AI research instead of dealing with decades-old systems that don't talk to each other. Transformer Lab is already being used by research institutes across North America and launched globally today! They are not just building for the biggest players. They are building so anyone can build like the biggest players. cc: Matt Cohen Katie Ko Jay L. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gs_h37rY

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**Exit Alert** I cannot confirm any of the details mentioned in the WSJ article, but I can confirm that Ground Up was the first investor in Glass Imaging. The journey with Glass reconfirms the only hard and fast rule in venture: if you have the opportunity to back a repeat founder assembling a world-class tech team to tackle a big challenge then commit on the spot. In our case that meant committing before the company had even been incorporated and leading their pre-seed. All the way back in 2019 we believed that the next leap in photography would not come from adding more glass, more bulk or another camera bump. It would come from treating optics and software as one system and using artificial intelligence to rethink the camera from first principles. Few founders are better suited to rebuild the camera than Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop who possess a deep understanding of both sides of the problem: the physical constraints of camera hardware and the rapidly expanding ability of neural networks to recover real image detail. Just as importantly, they had the patience to tackle a technically difficult problem that required years of research, testing and work with some of the world's largest device makers. We are proud to have backed them from the beginning and excited to see how much more they will accomplish inside of OpenAI.

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New founder Q&A on our site! Love what Ralph Betesh is building at Coverdash! Anyone who has insured a small business knows the drill: a phone call, a PDF, and a week of waiting. Coverdash turned that into a few clicks — and then put it inside the platforms small businesses already use, so coverage gets offered at the moment of need instead of chased down later. That last part is what got our attention. Insurance is a distribution business more than a product business, and owning the point of sale is a durable advantage in a market this fragmented. Link below — worth a few minutes.

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Two articles I've been thinking about together this week: Amir Kabir at Overlook VC on "the defining tension of 2026: extraordinary concentration at the infrastructure layer, extraordinary democratization at the application layer" Take a read: https://lnkd.in/gyaFg-nB And Isaac Arnold's framework for what actually makes an application layer company durable: workflow entanglement, domain specific knowledge, and data that compounds from usage rather than just intelligence. Take a read for yourself: https://lnkd.in/gSDXA-vH Amir identifies where the opportunity is, Isaac identifies why most companies building there won't capture it durably and what separates the ones that will.

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