Mohib Jafri
they want to be us so bad (PSA: someone is impersonating @SeedLabsHQ . we won't ever DM you asking for your $, user credentials, etc. Support team at X has been notified.)
Updates
Aug 27, 2024
Product
Aug 27, 2024
Introducing Oracle
Today, we're excited to open early access to Oracle: an AI powered investor search engine to help founders find the right investors. Oracle learns more about your startup— reading your deck, docs, landing pages, and memos— and gives you high-signal angels/VCs that would most likely want to invest in you.
Why we built this
In the last few months, my cofounder Shriank and I have been helping many YC and A16Z-backed founders save hundreds of thousands of dollars in compliance cost by optimizing their fundraising legal structure using Founder-Led Vehicles. A cherry-on-top feature for these founders was access to the Private Capital Network (PCN): a group of angels, VCs, syndicates, and family offices looking to invest $100M+ into startups this year.
Shriank and I would spend hours with each founder, learning as much as we can about what they're building. Once we felt we had a good feel for the startup, we'd go to our PCN directory and start some intense legwork: What blog posts did XYZ Firm release recently that align with the founder's vision? This angel tweeted out their interest in the personalized healthcare space two weeks ago. Maybe they would be interested in talking to a healthcare founder?
The connections we made helped many founders fill up their fundraise. We thought the Private Capital Network was a nice-to-have extra that would help some founders, but we were surprised to see how grateful founders were to have PCN behind them.
But there was a big problem: we couldn't scale it. Because of how labor intensive it was for our team to make these matches, we had to “pick winners” that we felt most “deserved” our help and access to the Private Capital Network.
This didn't feel right. Founding is hard enough as it is. We've seen too many of our fellow founders suffer to attract venture dollars not because their idea wasn't venture-scalable, or they didn't have a product. They're just not “insiders.”
Oracle is our latest attempt at increasing the number of successful startups in the world. Oracle is scaling what we did with our Private Capital Network… to everyone.
How it works
Oracle is an AI powered investor search engine to help founders find the right investors. Oracle learns more about your startup— reading your deck, docs, landing pages, and memos— and gives you high-signal angels/VCs that would most likely want to invest in you.
If you're a healthcare AI startup, you've probably reached a dead end doing one of the following:
- Googled into the void: “investors in healthcare AI”, “angels healthcare startups”, or “Venture firm healthcare”
- Relied on recall: “I watched a podcast where Chamath Palihapatya said he thinks AI will help improve patient outcomes. But how do I get to him?”
- Found ten “angel/VC aggregator lists”: most are massively incomplete, many have high paywalls, and none of them know a thing about what you're building
We trained Oracle to synthesize two things:
- Investor data: FF reads more venture firm blog posts, investment portfolio data, and investor background data than any superconnector can achieve
- Your startup's context: talk to Oracle in natural language, drop in your decks, docs, landing pages, memos, founder backgrounds, etc.
What used to take us hours to do for one select founder now takes Oracle seconds to do for every founder.
Beyond search
You've built a great product. You've proven people want it. You've used Oracle to find the best investors to reach out to. But how do you cross the chasm and actually get the check in?
Oracle sits atop a suite of new venture products that the Seed Labs team is building.
To help you go from a shortlist of investors on Oracle to committed funds, we've launched Founder-Led Vehicles to streamline the fundraising process and save you thousands in legal fees. With Founder-Led-Vehicles, investors you request to invite can commit and send funds in one simple link.
Oracle was built by founders, for founders. Build on. 🕊️
Aug 1, 2024
Improvement
Aug 1, 2024
Improved security verification for VentureOS
Yesterday, someone tried to impersonate us on Twitter/X by cloning our account with a handle that closely resembles ours.
They bought 50k followers and started off their attack following some of ours followers.
Unlucky for them, they followed the Seed Labs founders (us)...
The report to X was swift and the account was taken down within a few hours. But this got us thinking: it is far too easy for people to impersonate us!
Especially given that our entire core product can be whitelabeled and served on a customer's domain, how do you know you're using the real VentureOS and being phished?
Introducing the Security Home
Today, we're launching a security page that will be the home for all security-related feature. Two features are live today:
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Domain verification. Enter any website domain and we'll confirm if it's a valid VentureOS customer or not. We've also added a convenient security badge on the login page of all whitelabeled customer sites that takes you to this feature.
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External account verification. Account verification: confirm that the Twitter account you might be interacting with is the real deal.
A culture of speed and security
Security is not a one-time thing. As new threats come up, you'll see our security page evolve. And within less than 24 hours of the impersonation incident, you'll know that we do do it fast.
Jul 24, 2024
Update
Jul 24, 2024
Hello, Updates
Before today, we've been sending each of our customers personal updates through Slack, email, and text. Our team moves fast and we're pushing out new updates constantly, and we want to make sure our growing customer base is always kept in the loop.
We're excited to announce Updates— an easier way for our team to share the latest about Seed Labs and our offerings.
A look under the hood
We're particularly excited about this rollout because of how deeply tied into our product workflow this is. All of our external facing material (like landing pages, Library), core software product, APIs, and SDKs sit in one codebase— a monorepo powered by NextJS. It's how we're able to ship quality products fast as a small team. This Updates page allows us to document and share milestones as soon as we put them out, which helps us get feedback and iterate faster.
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© 2024