Boardy AI: From pre-seed to seed in < 3 months
Necessary Nuggets
Happy Wednesday! If you’re new here, welcome to Necessary Nuggets, your one-stop pre-seed shop. We deliver updates from Necessary Ventures and helpful tidbits on our little corner of the world. Every edition is also on our blog.
Jobortunities 🚨
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Market Stirrings 🚩
Here's what the week looked like in pre-seed:
$14.4M
Total Amount Raised
9
Total Funding Rounds
$1.6M
Average Dollars per Round
$8M-$16M
Estimated Valuation Range
Data aggregated from proprietary research and Crunchbase; valuation estimate based on 10-20% ownership stake.
THE ACADEMY AWARD GOES TO ...
Curious about how pre-seed deals shaped up across all sectors in 2024? Check out the graph below. Not surprisingly, AI & data startups took home the “Most Pre-Seed Deals in 2024” trophy with 759 deals, followed by SaaS in second place. In contrast, despite recent buzz and backing from the Inflation Reduction Act, climatetech lagged behind, closing just 10% of the deals AI & data did.
Good Reads 📖
For the rushed reader …
Just months after raising a $3M pre-seed, Boardy AI, the AI-powered networking startup, is back with an $8M seed round led by Creandum.
AI is proving to be more than just a buzzword, and it’s now the go-to tool for "cost avoidance," or in simpler terms, fewer hires.
According to Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures, the biggest players—Microsoft, Google, Meta—are too busy building AI empires to spend cash on acquisitions.
For the less rushed reader …
Investors on Boardy: Getting ghosted on LinkedIn might soon be a thing of the past. Just months after raising a $3M pre-seed, Boardy AI, the AI-powered networking startup, is back with an $8M seed round led by Creandum. So, what’s their secret? Boardy’s AI agent handles the matchmaking, connecting users with people they should know—because, apparently, networking is now a job for robots. Since launching in October, they've made over 10,000 calls, helped startups secure partnerships, and might just be giving LinkedIn a run for its money. And here’s the best part: investors reached out to them after trying the product. So, if you’re wondering what happens when VCs actually want to talk to your AI instead of you—well, this is it.
AI held in hire esteem: AI is quickly becoming the new “employee of the month,” minus the desk, health benefits, and PTO. AI is proving to be more than just a buzzword, and it’s now the go-to tool for “cost avoidance," or in simpler terms, fewer hires. Companies like TS Imagine are using AI to save 4,000 hours of manual work, cutting the equivalent of 2.5 full-time employees. Palantir’s taking it further, slashing headcount by 10-15% to fund more AI experiments. While some see this as a strategic way to optimize resources, worries are growing about the impact on white-collar jobs. Will AI replace coveted jobs or just the boring ones? Only time will tell.
Billions of bills: $370B is locked up in a 500-foot tower. You climbing it? According to Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures, the biggest players—Microsoft, Google, Meta—are too busy building AI empires to spend cash on acquisitions. Microsoft hasn’t bought a company since January 2023, and Google’s attempts to acquire Wiz and HubSpot fizzled. These giants are sitting on nearly $370B in cash, a near-historic high, but instead of shopping for new toys, they’re focused on infrastructure like GPUs and power plants to fuel their hyperscaler ambitions. With these giants distracted, mid-market players have an opportunity to lead the M&A charge in 2025. There’s still $182B in purchasing power on the table, and smaller companies are primed to drive the next wave of software acquisitions. The mid-market crowd doesn’t need to climb the tower if they own it.
Fire Up the Pre-Seeds🔥
Highlighting a few companies with pre-seed raises this past week:
healthtech
RyboDyn - Better discoveries than the Discovery Channel.
RyboDyn raised $4 million led by Genedant and SeaX Ventures. RyboDyn is paving the way for novel immunotherapies to overcome cancer with the discovery of a new proteome.
artificial intelligence
Cuckoo - It’s up to AI interpretation. Cuckoo raised $500k from Y Combinator. Cuckoo is building an AI interpreter designed specifically for global teams, where technical details don’t get lost in translation.
MilkStraw AI - More transparent than even a cloud. MilkStraw AI raised $600k led by Flat6Labs at a $3 million pre-money valuation. MilkStraw AI is creating an AI platform that tackles real time compute optimization, providing full visibility on cloud spend and claiming to cut AWS costs by 50%.
OpenFunnel - AI agents not calling about your car’s extended warranty. OpenFunnel raised $1.3 million from Y Combinator, Transpose Capital, NYX Ventures, and Decacorn Capital. Targeting B2B SaaS companies, OpenFunnel is developing personalized AI agents that help reach the right prospects more efficiently.
Kamiwaza AI - It’s the generative AI generation. Kamiwaza AI raised $2.5 million from several investors, including Pioneer Square Labs, Ascend, and Community Access Fund. Kamiwaza is building a software platform that enables generative AI within companies’ already established workflows, providing rapid data analysis and coding automation among other capabilities.
Outro🚪
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