As the year comes to a close, we bring you our final newsletter of 2024. What a year it has been! The macro environment is looking bright for software in 2025 as AI ushers in a new era experimentation and exploration across every category of software. As exploration shifts to deployment, AI startups are seeing record growth rates. We are optimistic as we head into 2025 that next year will see continued AI-driven innovation and adoption across the software stack from applications and developer tools, to systems software and cyber security.
In this edition, we recap our 2024 investments, revisit the key content we shared throughout the year, and highlight fresh insights from our recent roundtable on scaling engineering teams, featuring John Thiemsen, former CTO of Qualtrics.
Content from the Crew Collective
Portfolio Roundtable: Few engineering leaders have shaped globally transformative tech products quite like John Thimsen. At Qualtrics, he scaled the engineering organization from 50 people to over 1,500, playing a pivotal role in the company’s growth leading to its successful IPO. At Amazon, he contributed to shaping what would later become Alexa. At Microsoft, he worked on Internet Explorer.
Crew Capital recently hosted a roundtable with founders and engineering leaders from our portfolio companies, where John shared insights on building engineering culture, managing team transitions, and evolving as a technical leader.
Through years of scaling engineering organizations, John has identified five distinct transition phases in the journey of team growth. The first phase occurs with teams of fewer than 20 engineers, where project-based execution is the norm. “You’ve got a capable co-founder and maybe one other trusted tech leader and manager. You’ve got a strong project focus,” John said. “It’s perfect, It’s what you want. You’re on that project, get it done by next month, and you sort of rinse and repeat to achieve these milestones that are critical when you’re still young.”
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2025 Recap
Our Investments: This year, we publicly announced 3 new additions to our portfolio and added another 3 unannounced investments, while also providing follow-on funding to 4 existing companies. These investments span AI-powered business applications, security software, and database software.
Seal Security - We invested in the $7.4M seed round alongside our friends at Vertex Ventures in the company, led by co-founders Itamar Sher (CEO), Lev Pachmanov (CTO), and Alon Navon (CPO). Seal Security is redefining open-source vulnerability and patch management with its AI-driven solution, empowering enterprises to automatically remediate critical vulnerabilities and maintain robust security across their software supply chains. Read more here.
SurrealDB - Earlier this year, we announced our investment in SurrealDB’s $20M Series A , alongside our friends at FirstMark, led by brothers Tobie Morgan Hitchcock (CEO) & Jaime Morgan Hitchcock (COO). SurrealDB is building the first database platform to combine relational, graph, and document database capabilities in one medium. Read more here.
Updates on Existing Investments: Amidst this year’s evolving fundraising landscape, 6 of our existing portfolio companies have successfully announced new follow-on funding rounds.
Melio, co-founded byMatan Bar (CEO), Ilan Atias (CTO) & Ziv Paz, secured $150 million in a strategic Series E funding round led by Fiserv, Inc. This investment will accelerate Melio’s mission to empower small and medium businesses with its industry-leading accounts payable and receivable platform.
Robco, led by Roman Hölzl (CEO), Paul Maroldt (Head of Robot Engineering), Constantin Dresel (Chief Solution Engineer), secured a $42.5M Series B financing round led by Lightspeed. We are thrilled to be supporting RobCo's mission to revolutionize robot automation for SMEs across Europe.
Spring Health raised a $100 million Series E funding round led by Generation Investment Management. We couldn’t be more excited for Spring Health's incredible team led by co-founders April Koh (CEO), Abhishek Chandra.
Content from the Crew Collective: This year, we've added new articles to our blog, a collection of insightful conversations we've had with the exceptional founders and operators in our community, focused on the intricacies of startup creation. Check out this year’s highlights below and thank you to everyone in the Crew family for your continued support!
