The intelligence layer for private capital
The AI chief of staff for every investor
Pre-seed round | San Francisco | July 2026
Charlotte Ketelaar, CEO & Co-founder / Reid Williams, CTO & Co-founder
A VC fund runs on 2–20 people’s memory. And nothing else.
89% of VC firms are emerging managers. This is what their day looks like.
More startups. Fewer funded.
The agentic era will widen the gap further.
Two tailwinds are converging. The firms with the best context layer will win the next decade.
Startups created are up 60% since 2019; funded deals are down 48% from the 2021 peak. Every check now comes from a much bigger pile, and in 2025 the top 1% of startups captured a third of all VC dollars. Picking right has never mattered more, and 89% of the firms doing the picking are emerging managers.
Source: SVB State of the Markets 2026
In 18 months, agents will draft memos, screen inbound, and prep meetings. Agents are only as smart as the context they reason over. Most firms have none. Context is siloed across 2–20 people's heads, stitched together with Notion, Airtable, and Affinity. No agent can reason across that.
a16z: System of Intelligence is the new System of Record (2026)
Capwave is the AI chief of staff for VCs.
Every person on the firm gets one. It holds the full context of your portfolio, network, and pipeline . It tells you what to do next.
The constraint on every fund is human attention. Even great firms miss obvious things, because the context lives in 2–20 people’s heads and nowhere else. Who the GP met three years ago. Which portco mentioned this founder. Which LP referred a similar company.
We call the category IRM, intelligent relationship management: the system after CRM. A CRM stores your network. Capwave works it.
Partners pick better. Associates operate at firm-level leverage. Nothing the firm has ever known goes missing.
Connect your tools once. Everyone gets an AI chief of staff with the firm's full memory.
Email, calendar, drive, and transcripts in. Scored deals, meeting briefs, and IC drafts out. Every agent reasons over the same firm-wide context.
One context layer, both sides of the table. Founders first, investors next.
We built the founder side first. The investor side is now in beta, and stands on its own.
Roadmap: thesis-matched first looks routed from the founder side to VCs, end of 2026.
VC is going agentic.
Generic tools can’t hold the context.
An agent on top of this stack can retrieve. It can’t reason.
An agent on top of Capwave can decide. On your strategy, in your voice.
The context layer compounds. Every month it’s harder to replace.
The moat is three things at once: proprietary founder-side data, a venture-native schema, and the firm's own accumulated memory. No competitor has all three. Affinity, PitchBook, and Harmonic track public signal anyone can buy. Capwave holds the private layer too.
System of record was Salesforce. System of intelligence is the firm's context. Capwave is built to be where it lives.
We’ve raised it. Built it. Sold it.
Sat on both sides of the term sheet.
One raised and exited an investment bank. One built and sold a startup to a US bank. We’re not learning on your dime.
- Started in NYC as an investment banker at ING Capital
- Founded, ran, and exited a boutique investment bank; raised $500M+ for founders
- Put $500K of her own capital into Capwave
- Sat on investment committees; saw the spreadsheet stack from inside
- Co-founder & CTO of TravelBank; acquired by US Bank (9-figure exit, 2021)
- The acquisition is a Harvard Business School case study
- Invested $100K alongside; US Marine veteran
2 founders. 5 builders. $600K of our own capital in. 4 live agents in 10 months.
Every dollar of $25 trillion passes through a human decision.
200,000 private capital professionals allocate $25T in AUM and close $2.3T of deals a year. Each makes dozens of decisions a day, every working day, for a 30-40 year career. We sit inside the decision.
Land one seat at $200. Expand to the firm.
Bottoms-up, because that is how emerging VCs buy: no procurement, no six-month pilot, one partner trying it on their own inbox.
Every $1 of burn buys $2.20 of new ARR.
$1.13M ARR twelve months after launch, on a plan built as a floor: zero founder monetization assumed.
ARR mix Oct 2027: Pro $768K, Team $216K, accelerators and other $132K, founder side flat at $9.6K. Even 50% behind on every driver: $500K+ ARR.