True Ventures

True Ventures's Michael Montano has managed everything from a six-person team to a 3,000-person engineering org at Twitter. Now, he invests at inception, where getting as close as possible to the work matters. For him, that means building alongside founders we back. What surprised him is how much of what actually makes him fast right now is taste and fundamentals. His advice to founders: look at managers, directors and VPs as IC hires. Some of the best builders out there may be sitting in management roles - some maybe on your team already. And to the folks managing teams today: your experience doesn’t disappear when you go back to doing IC work. It becomes your edge. Mike’s full argument: https://lnkd.in/gJd8UBis

A lot of enterprise AI is still framed as a technology problem. Increasingly, it is an operating model problem. That was one of the clearest themes from Connected Stack 2026. At the event, Anthropic’s Kate Jensen and True Ventures’s Michael Montano talked about what enterprise adoption actually takes: a committed business owner, a clear outcome, and the willingness to change a process. That last part is easy to underestimate. Access to powerful technology is only one part of the investment. Companies also have to change how they work: how decisions get made, where context lives, how permissions are handled, and which workflows need to be redesigned rather than simply automated. That has implications for what gets built next. The opportunity is not just to make AI more capable. It is to make organizations capable of using it. A look back at the day:

The simple cycle of our founders introducing us to founders they respect is a key element of our work as early stage investors. Before technology matures, before there is a product, there must be trust and alignment between the founders and investors. And there is no better test of that trust than the introductions they make to their trusted networks. In the summer of 2020, as we learned to live and work with COVID, we were introduced to Viswa Colluru, PhD and Enveda by an existing True Ventures portfolio founder Ashley Zehnder, cofounder and CEO of Fauna Bio. Viswa founded Enveda to discover better medicines by learning from nature's chemistry. The idea was simple to describe and hard to execute. Nature’s chemistry at work with plants and microbes has spent millions of years encoding information into molecules, and most of them have never been characterized. Enveda built an AI platform that reads that chemistry, understands that chemistry, and translates that chemistry at scale with speed into a drug discovery platform. There was power in that idea of learning from life itself. And though the hard work still lay ahead, the promise was clear and so was the path Viswa described. True Ventures is designed to back founders at that very moment, when uncertainty is greatest and the difference they hope to make may still be an idea. Our responsibility is to help them take those first steps and partner with capital and care through the years of hard work that follow. Now, a mere six years later, Enveda has three oral drug candidates in human trials, with encouraging early clinical readouts already and many more in the pipeline. The team's new funding round will help advance those candidates and develop many more potential treatments for inflammatory and metabolic disease. The purpose behind their work has always been deeply human: Viswa has lived the saying that science and research is service to humanity. We are thrilled to have played a small part in it by leading that seed round and investing in multiple rounds since including this financing. Here’s to Viswa Colluru, PhD and the Enveda team, to their commitment to innovation powered by life on earth, for life on earth. https://lnkd.in/gY4WNjPp

Today, Basecamp Research announced their$140M Series C. Their data now spans partnerships in more than 30 countries and powers EDEN, the largest biological model ever trained with 9.7 trillion nucleotides that translates evolutionary data into therapeutics. Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince's idea for Basecamp Research took shape in a tent on an Icelandic icecap. They sought to collect and sequence life in the field, and kept finding how much was missing from existing databases both in depth and scale. That gap looked like an opportunity to build a deeper understanding of nature, and use it to expand what scientists can design as well as the certainty with which they can tackle the complexities of biology. Their aim from the beginning was to design the models as well as medicines. Enveda Founder Viswa Colluru, PhD introduced us to Glen and Oliver in 2021. When a founder we've backed points us to another founder, we’re honored, and we pay attention. That for us is the greatest signal we’re doing something right to earn true trust.  Funding a hypothesis asks three things of us: conviction before all the answers are clear, curiosity as the science develops, and a commitment to the people doing the work. We're thrilled to continue that commitment to Glen Gowers, Oliver Vince, Phil Lorenz, and the entire Basecamp Research team. More here on their recent announcement: https://lnkd.in/p/gMFCXsDE And a brief story from Rohit Sharma on how it all began: https://lnkd.in/p/gcJBDyiM

Co-founders Mike Greene, Mitesh Suchak, and John Miller had already built one company together in insurance before starting Hi Marley—15+ years each of hard-won industry expertise. It's the kind of foundation that makes for a great founding team tackling problems only those with lived experience know best. Since that first pilot in December 2017, Hi Marley has grown into a trusted partner for carriers like American Family and Plymouth Rock, bringing a simpler, more human way to communicate to an industry that had been waiting for it. We were proud to be first to believe in this team back in 2019, and we're even prouder of what they've built since.

More content is not a customer relationship. As AI slop makes it easier to fill feeds, the actual important work is building your customer relationship authentically: understanding what your customers need, who they trust, and what makes them choose a product. Misbah Uraizee and Farah U. shared on Bloomberg how they're building Nectar around how people actually buy, drawing on 20M+ conversations between brands, consumers, and creators every week.

Every year, Team True heads to Stinson Beach to ask hard questions about our work: where we have conviction, what we’re missing, and how we can be more useful to founders. Our focus is clear: find founders who see something others don’t yet see, fund the hypothesis, and help them build a company around it. Twenty years of relationships make that work possible. Sixty-five founders have chosen to build with True again. Founders introduce us to the next generation and trust us with ideas still taking shape. We have to keep earning that trust: by staying close, asking thoughtful questions, making useful introductions, and being someone a founder can call before they know what to do next. That takes a team willing to question its own assumptions. We value people who engage, disagree thoughtfully, admit mistakes, and change their minds. Experience should give us better questions—not less room to challenge the answers. We leave Stinson with a responsibility to put that experience to work: stay curious, go early, and help courageous founders build what comes next.