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GTM Acceleration (Step 6 of 12):  Equipping Your Sales Team with Clear Account Assignments 
Nishkam Prabodh and The Venture Guides Team Nishkam Prabodh and The Venture Guides Team

GTM Acceleration (Step 6 of 12):  Equipping Your Sales Team with Clear Account Assignments 

A well-crafted Account List is critical to any high-performing enterprise sales motion. It aligns your go-to-market strategy with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), guides prioritization, and rep-by-rep drives meaningful pipeline coverage and opportunity generation. At its core, a clearly defined Account List is a prioritized set of companies to engage with based on strategic fit. It’s the tactical foundation for everything from messaging to resource allocation. 

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GTM Acceleration (Step 5 of 12): Turning Customer Learning into Messaging That Moves Your ICP 
Brian Bakstran and the Venture Guides Team Brian Bakstran and the Venture Guides Team

GTM Acceleration (Step 5 of 12): Turning Customer Learning into Messaging That Moves Your ICP 

Learning the value-driven messaging that resonates most with your ICP is a critical piece of the ACCELERATION process. The most effective messaging uses ICP-centric discovery to surface and quantify business pain, leads with what the customer actually cares about, and anchors differentiation in customer proof points.

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Backing the Future of GRC: Venture Guides Leads Compyl’s $12M Series A
Nishkam Prabodh and Anton Simunovic Nishkam Prabodh and Anton Simunovic

Backing the Future of GRC: Venture Guides Leads Compyl’s $12M Series A

At Venture Guides, we are always on the lookout for companies that are redefining industries through innovation and strategic execution. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce our lead investment in Compyl’s $12 million Series A funding round, fueling Compyl’s next phase of growth as it transforms Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) for mid-market enterprises.

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GTM Acceleration (Step 4 of 12): Engineering Your Pricing to Reflect Customer Value 
Will Schnoor & the Venture Guides Team Will Schnoor & the Venture Guides Team

GTM Acceleration (Step 4 of 12): Engineering Your Pricing to Reflect Customer Value 

This post is about how early-stage teams can approach pricing and packaging with the same rigor they bring to product, reflecting customer value clearly, supporting growth, and earning buyer confidence from day one. 

Founders often treat pricing and packaging as a spreadsheet exercise. In reality, it’s a storytelling exercise. Your pricing tells the customer what your product is, how it fits into their workflow, and how they should think about its value.  

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Clarity Security Raises Series A: The Future of Identity Starts Here  
Ben Holzman and Nishkam Prabodh Ben Holzman and Nishkam Prabodh

Clarity Security Raises Series A: The Future of Identity Starts Here  

Clarity isn’t tweaking around the edges of identity governance—they’re reinventing it. In a space long dominated by slow-moving incumbents, Clarity is delivering what enterprise teams have needed for years: a fast, intuitive, and scalable way to manage identity across hybrid IT environments. And they’re doing it with uncommon speed and precision.  

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GTM Acceleration (Step 3 of 12) ACCELERATING Your Deal by Identifying and Engaging Your Champions 
Murph Vandervelde and the Venture Guides Team Murph Vandervelde and the Venture Guides Team

GTM Acceleration (Step 3 of 12) ACCELERATING Your Deal by Identifying and Engaging Your Champions 

In this post, we will talk about how identifying your Champion can ACCELERATE opportunity creation and sales cycle. Determining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) can boil down to one simple truth: if you are not speaking to a specific someone, you are saying nothing to everyone. One of the biggest levers for revenue acceleration in early-stage startups is clearly identifying, defining, and targeting a single ICP.

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Built Not Born Podcast                   Beyond Capital: How Venture Guides is Redefining the Venture Playbook
The Venture Guides Team The Venture Guides Team

Built Not Born Podcast Beyond Capital: How Venture Guides is Redefining the Venture Playbook

In today’s episode of Built Not Born, host Sage Nye sits down with Ben Nye, Managing Partner at Venture Guides, to explore how a hands-on, team-based venture model is helping early-stage startups scale smarter, even in today’s uncertain market. From embedding go-to-market support at every level to co-locating portfolio teams, Ben breaks down what it takes to build enduring companies in 2025. 

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The Next Chapter of Building: Venture Guides Raises Fund II  
The Venture Guides Team The Venture Guides Team

The Next Chapter of Building: Venture Guides Raises Fund II  

We are proud to announce Venture Guides Fund II at $262.5 million.  This milestone helps validate both our strategy and differentiated approach to venture investing and guiding. It also serves as a testament to the strength of partnership and alignment with both our LPs and portfolio companies.  We are especially pleased that 100% of our Fund I family office investors rejoined and are thrilled to welcome a new cohort of institutional and family office backers to the Venture Guides community.

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Venture Guides’ New Podcast  with Guest  Paul Cormier, Chairman and former CEO of Red Hat
The Venture Guides Team The Venture Guides Team

Venture Guides’ New Podcast with Guest Paul Cormier, Chairman and former CEO of Red Hat

To kick off this new series, host Sage Nye sits down with Paul Cormier, Chairman and former CEO of Red Hat, to discuss the strategic leadership frameworks that helped scale Red Hat from a $50 million Linux distributor to a $4 billion enterprise software giant. Through years of leadership, Paul honed a set of principles that allowed Red Hat to evolve, make bold strategic decisions, and maintain a high-performing culture amid hypergrowth.

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GTM Acceleration (Step 2 of 12): ACCELERATING Your Start-up with Customer Segmentation
Ben Nye and the Venture Guides Team Ben Nye and the Venture Guides Team

GTM Acceleration (Step 2 of 12): ACCELERATING Your Start-up with Customer Segmentation

Your first customers provide critical insights that shape not only what you build (product focus), but also how you market and sell it (go-to-market focus), and how your team organizes to solve a specific customer problem. By identifying and engaging the right early adopters by sector and size, you develop feedback loops that sharpen your value proposition, improve messaging, and ensure that every function—product, sales, marketing, and customer success—is working toward the same goal: serving the customers who will drive your long-term growth.

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The AI Navigator: The Ecstasy and the Agony of Enterprise AI’s Semantic Layer – Part 1  
Will Schnoor and Nico Herden Will Schnoor and Nico Herden

The AI Navigator: The Ecstasy and the Agony of Enterprise AI’s Semantic Layer – Part 1  

Today, enterprise AI is a contradiction. It can write code but doesn’t understand how software systems fit together. It can summarize documents but struggles with facts. It can generate endless responses yet lacks a fundamental grasp of truth. LLMs have pushed automation forward, but remain unreliable without context. The missing link is the semantic layer: ontologies, knowledge graphs, and structured data that encode meaning and logic into AI systems. 

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The AI Navigator: The Value and Complexity of AI Inferencing
Will Schnoor and Nico Herden Will Schnoor and Nico Herden

The AI Navigator: The Value and Complexity of AI Inferencing

Every AI-powered interaction requires inference, and as usage grows, these workloads will massively outscale training. While a few tech giants have spent billions training models, enterprises deploying them for GenAI will face inference costs orders of magnitude higher. If AI is going to be embedded everywhere, then inferencing infrastructure has to be built for that reality.

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GTM ACCELERATION: A 12-step Guide for Startup Founders in 2025
The Venture Guides Team The Venture Guides Team

GTM ACCELERATION: A 12-step Guide for Startup Founders in 2025

Welcome to January, 2025. Your startup is advancing nicely from early design customer wins to now building its first go-to-market (GTM) engine – a major milestone in scaling your business. With this phase comes the new challenges of hiring teams and allocating resources to grow your customer base; increase market share; and efficiently build recurring revenue streams…

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Precog and Venture Guides: Pioneering AI-driven ELT Solutions
Ben Holzman and Sage Nye Ben Holzman and Sage Nye

Precog and Venture Guides: Pioneering AI-driven ELT Solutions

Decision-making, AI, business operations - they all run on data. But, we have heard from countless enterprise customers how hard it is to get data from 72,000 SaaS apps into warehouses where they can access and analyze this information. 

Today, Precog is the only solution providing customers with data for an AI-driven world, seamlessly transforming siloed SaaS data into fully normalized, business-ready insights with remarkable speed and elegance. We have the great privilege of joining them in their journey.  

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Selling into the Enterprise: Practical Advice for Early Stage Teams
The Venture Guides Team The Venture Guides Team

Selling into the Enterprise: Practical Advice for Early Stage Teams

Last week, Venture Guides hosted Alla Piltser, an infrastructure technology leader with three decades of experience selecting and managing enterprise tools and vendors. This fireside chat, hosted by Leigh Moore from Venture Guides, focused on key strategies for early-stage founders looking to break into enterprise markets. Alla shared guidance and first-hand experience about the purchasing process with local Boston founders and sales leaders, along with a virtual audience, sharing what works, and what to avoid, in the enterprise selling process. 

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Venture Guides 2024 Leadership in Technology Award
The Venture Guides Team The Venture Guides Team

Venture Guides 2024 Leadership in Technology Award

We recently hosted our 2nd Annual Investor Meeting at our Boston office, and we extend our heartfelt thanks to our Limited Partners, portfolio leaders, and friends of the firm for joining us. The last few days have been full of engaging discussions regarding the growing value and awareness of infrastructure software (IS), the present and future of AI in IS, and the progress we have made in guiding some of the most disruptive companies in the domain.

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Why We Invested in Odigos:               The Future of Application Tracing and Observability  
The Venture Guides Team The Venture Guides Team

Why We Invested in Odigos: The Future of Application Tracing and Observability  

Venture Guides is excited to announce we have led Odigos' $13 million Series A round. The Odigos technology provides customers with the next generation of application tracing and application performance monitoring (APM). Odigos’ unique usage of eBPF to automatically produce context-propagated traces, positions the company as the only solution to unlock distributed tracing for all customers. For the first time ever, customers can observe their entire environment end-to-end without manual instrumentation. 

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Venture Guides Welcomes VibeIQ to Its Portfolio: Announcing $6.3 Million Investment and New CEO
The Venture Guides Team The Venture Guides Team

Venture Guides Welcomes VibeIQ to Its Portfolio: Announcing $6.3 Million Investment and New CEO

The Venture Guides team is thrilled to announce our newest portfolio investment in VibeIQ, the first digital workspace purpose-built for product collaboration. With a $6.3 million funding boost, VibeIQ is redefining the landscape of consumer product development, facilitating a seamless, data-driven, and real-time collaborative environment.

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Venture Guides Dinner Series:  Modern AppSec in Hybrid Cloud Environments
The Venture Guides Team The Venture Guides Team

Venture Guides Dinner Series:  Modern AppSec in Hybrid Cloud Environments

The Venture Guides team recently hosted a panel of security leaders along with a roomful of members from the Venture Guides Technology Advisor Network, CISOs and AppSec leaders from Bank of America, NS1, Pega Systems, Rapid7, Salesforce, Santander, State Street and many others to discuss the evolving challenges of managing application security in ever-changing hybrid cloud environments.

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