Latest news with #AydinSenkut
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
After a string of successes, early-stage fund Felicis raises fresh $900M
Felicis founder Aydin Senkut is celebrating his 20th year as an institutional early-stage investor by announcing the firm's biggest fund yet: a $900 million Fund X. This follows the $825 million Fund IX raised in 2023 and the $600 million Fund XIII raised in 2021. Felicis, a seed and Series A firm, is known for backing a long string of successes, including Ayden, Bonobos, Ring, Shopify, and Twitch, among others. Since being founded in 2006, Felicis has backed over 50 unicorns and had over 125 exits, it says. Lately, Felicis, like most VCs, has been all over AI. Its portfolio now includes, for example, Browser Use, Poolside, Runway, and Supabase. 'We believe dozens of $100B+ AI companies will emerge this decade (not merely $1B or $10B),' Felicis wrote in its blog post, adding that 70% of its active portfolio are what it considers AI-native startups. Senkut did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
TechCrunch
12-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
After a string of successes, early-stage fund Felicis raises fresh $900M
In Brief Felicis founder Aydin Senkut is celebrating his 20th year as an institutional early-stage investor by announcing the firm's biggest fund yet: a $900 million Fund X. This follows the $825 million Fund IX raised in 2023 and the $600 million Fund XIII raised in 2021. Felicis, a seed and Series A firm, is known for backing a long string of successes, including Ayden, Bonobos, Ring, Shopify, and Twitch, among others. Since being founded in 2006, Felicis has backed over 50 unicorns and had over 125 exits, it says. Lately, Felicis, like most VCs, has been all over AI. Its portfolio now includes, for example, Browser Use, Poolside, Runway, and Supabase. 'We believe dozens of $100B+ AI companies will emerge this decade (not merely $1B or $10B),' Felicis wrote in its blog post, adding that 70% of its active portfolio are what it considers AI native startups. Senkut did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Exclusive: Felicis has raised $900 million tenth fund
Aydin Senkut got 50 nos before he heard one yes. 'I thought I was never going to raise that fund,' said Senkut. 'I had my first son coming, and it was a really tough time…So, when I heard that first 'yes,' I thought it was a miracle.' The year was 2009, and Aydin Senkut—a Turkish immigrant who'd first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1995—had been investing since he left Google in 2005, where he'd been the company's first product manager and was official employee number 63. He wanted to prove he wasn't just lucky, but that he could engineer luck, both for himself and for others. Determined to build something from scratch like his entrepreneurial parents, Senkut in 2006 launched Felicis Ventures, a firm named after the Latin word for 'good fortune.' His fortune wasn't very good at first, as he tells it—rejected by former Google colleagues almost unanimously, he forged ahead fundraising, drowning in nos. That first institutional fundraise, finally, pulled together $41 million, with early backers like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. At a moment when little else was in his control, Senkut focused on what he could: his business card. 'I was so into details, like Steve Jobs,' laughed Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis. 'I literally found this specific printing shop in South San Francisco. They were the only ones that took heavy card stock and embossed business cards.' He still keeps that card—it's even got a QR code that to this day, links back to his contact information. Now, three logos, nearly 20 years, and nine funds later: Felicis has raised its tenth fund at $900 million, the firm's largest to date, Fortune can exclusively report. It comes two years after the firm announced its ninth fund of $825 million in 2023, and the size of the 35-person team has remained consistent since. The firm's current portfolio includes Notion, Plaid, and Canva, along with AI startups like Supabase, Mercor, Runway, Poolside, Revel, and Skild AI. Credit Karma, Adyen, Shopify, and Weights & Biases are some of Felicis's key exits over the years. But Senkut remains acutely attuned to the version of himself that was rejected by dozens of other VCs and LPs at the very beginning. 'You can do one of two things,' he said. 'You can either admit defeat, let people put you in a box, like you're a loser. Or you can take that and say 'No, I'm not a loser.' And the way to show them they're wrong is that you have to pull magic tricks out of nowhere…That's why there will never be a victory lap.' Senkut is often described as being in 'founder mode'—a term originated via Brian Chesky and Paul Graham to describe a relentless, hands-on leadership style. That ethos carries through in how Felicis engages with startups: The firm includes a unique clause in its term sheets promising never to vote against a founder, contractually aligning itself with the entrepreneur. 'We kept saying we were founder-friendly,' said Senkut. 'One of our founders was like: What the hell does that even mean? Just commit. So, it's now in our term sheet.' I tell Senkut that I could easily see that going wrong, and he doesn't flinch. 'It could go really wrong,' he said. 'We've made hundreds of investments and there were only two in the history of Felicis where things have gone drastically wrong. But you can't be successful on fear. You'll only be successful on the companies that work out…That's the most misunderstood aspect of venture. People think we sit at a table, eliminating risk. And no, actually—you're taking it on. You're running into the risk. It's like F1. One driver says, 'I can crash, but that's what it's gonna take to cut another 0.01 second and get over the finish line first.' That's the mindset.' Felicis was notably active during the ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) era, when markets were frothy and valuations were especially high. According to prior TechCrunch reporting, Felicis funded 50% more deals in 2022 than in 2021. Senkut isn't worried how that might shake out—that's part of the race, too. 'If you're not active, you're actually going backwards,' he told Fortune. 'We can't say that we'll just sit it out for a while: Nobody's going to care about you in nine months. So we never stop investing…The big fabric that people are missing is this: The only thing that matters in this business is not the stages, ownership, whatever. It's all about how you look after you invest. Is there a hockey stick growth?' One of the most dramatic growth stories in AI right now is recruiting startup Mercor, which raised a $100 million Series B led by Felicis in February. Mercor CEO and cofounder Brendan Foody wasn't planning to raise at the time—but when Felicis invited him and his cofounders to race Ferraris in Las Vegas, he figured, 'why not?' 'They've got incredible hustle—like very few other firms,' Foody told Fortune. 'They asked what valuation we thought made sense, we gave them a range of $1 billion to $2 billion, and they went straight to the top. We closed the deal.' Foody sees Felicis as uniquely poised to help Mercor—whose revenue surpassed $75 million over about two years—in its next phase of growth, citing the firm's deep understanding of frontier AI research and hiring help. Felicis managing partner Sundeep Peechu and partner James Detweiler have been taking calls with 'almost every candidate' as Mercor has been hiring, Foody said. The firm doesn't disclose ownership, but told Fortune it varies—Mercor was the largest check of Felicis's last fund at $50 million, while the smallest was $100,000. Supporting these types of AI companies is key to Felicis's future and, to this end, the firm this year hired OpenAI's Peter Deng as a general partner. (Deng was a consumer VP leading the team working on ChatGPT.) Katie Riester, Felicis managing director and GP of fund of funds investing, said that Felicis is actively making choices to stay competitive in a venture space that, over the last two decades, has become more ferociously competitive. 'We're constantly evolving what our platform looks like, and does it match the game that's being played today,' said Riester, who was a Felicis LP herself for seven years while an SVB director. 'I actually don't like to think of venture as gambling, so that's not the association I'm making. I think of it as getting to play a game over and over, but the game changes every time. How do you keep winning? You have to constantly change. You have to be aware of that, recognize that ego doesn't matter. The fact you've won before doesn't matter.' To win, Felicis is ultimately looking to underwrite without reservation, going all-in, come what may. Data bears this out: In fund nine, 94% of Felicis's investments were at the seed or Series A stage, and 87% of the capital deployed went into rounds where the firm led or co-led. They expect a similar breakdown for fund ten. When Senkut was raising the first institutional Felicis fund, he heard 50 nos before landing his first yes—from Judith Elsea, managing director at Weathergage Capital. 'Felicis has reinvented itself from a small, scrappy seed stage investor to a large, scrappy multi-stage investor who regularly leads deals,' says Elsea. While startup investors often catch an 'innovation wave' and reap big profits, Elsea wrote Fortune in an email, the VCs who stay relevant are the ones who are already paddling out for the next wave as the first one reaches the beach: 'Being a VC investor is hard to do well and particularly hard to do well over long periods of time. Felicis is showing that kind of stamina.' Senkut goes to waves too, and we talk about the HBO series, The 100 Foot Wave. You have to be ready to wipe out seriously in order to succeed spectacularly. 'If you ask me, like, our biggest fail mode is we need to take more smart risks,' said Senkut. 'So, you have to really unwind your brain, like that surfer in Portugal. I used to say we're wave surfers. But I realized there are too many good surfers, and too many waves. So, now I'm saying we're tsunami surfers.' See you tomorrow, Allie GarfinkleX: @agarfinksEmail: a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here. Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today's newsletter. Subscribe here. Correction, June 12, 2025: We misspelled Katie Riester's name in the email version of this story. This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
Globe and Mail
28-05-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Chalk Raises $50M Series A to Power AI Inference
Chalk, the data platform for AI inference, announced today that it has raised a $50 million Series A at a $500 million valuation. The round was led by Felicis with participation from Triatomic Capital and existing investors General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund. Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis, will join Chalk's board. The capital will be used to accelerate development of Chalk's platform, onboard new customers, and grow its engineering and go-to-market hubs in San Francisco and New York. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: As AI adoption accelerates, compute is shifting from training to inference to improve predictions, transform customer experiences, and reduce costs. Existing solutions like Databricks and Snowflake solve training data pipelines, and feature stores provide low-latency access to pre-computed data. But these incumbents don't provide a solution for applications that require fresh data, with complex computation, at inference time. Chalk fills a critical gap in the market – inference data pipelines. Chalk's real-time data platform enables customers to make predictions with fresh data at inference time to prevent identity theft, issue instant loans, increase clean energy efficiency, and moderate harmful content. Senkut shared, 'Chalk is poised to become the Databricks of the AI era. It's one of the fastest-growing data companies we've ever seen. The team has fundamentally redefined how data moves through the AI stack, a crucial advancement for chain-of-reasoning models. What's even more remarkable is Chalk's ability to deliver 5-millisecond data pipelines at massive scale - something that, until now, was considered out of reach. We couldn't be more excited to partner with Marc, Elliot, and Andy, who are all repeat technical founders passionate about building infrastructure that delivers an incredible developer experience.' Marc Freed-Finnegan, Chalk Co-Founder and CEO, added, 'We feel incredibly fortunate to have Aydin and Felicis as our partners for the next phase of our growth. We have a shared vision of the future, and we're honored to be part of the cohort of companies they have invested in.' Chalk powers real-time ML across industries including fintech, identity, healthcare, and e-commerce. Companies like Whatnot, Found, Medely, and Iwoca use Chalk as a core infrastructure layer across their business. 'Chalk helps us deliver financial products that are more responsive, more personalized, and more secure for millions of users. It's a direct line from infrastructure to impact,' said Meng Xin Loh, Senior Technical Product Manager, MoneyLion. Chalk has become critical infrastructure for its customers by enabling teams to rapidly operationalize machine learning and AI. At its core, Chalk's Compute Engine empowers teams to write features in pure Python, automatically translating them into high-performance C++ and Rust pipelines to deliver real-time data without complex ETL. Additionally, Chalk's LLM Toolchain unifies structured and unstructured data, offering native vector storage, automated evaluations, and seamless integrations with major LLM providers. Rahul Madduluri, CTO at Doppel, said, "Chalk powers our LLM pipeline, turning complex inputs — HTML, URLs, screenshots — into structured, auditable features. It lets us serve lightweight heuristics up front and rich LLM reasoning deeper in the stack, so we detect threats others miss without compromising speed or precision.' Chalk was co-founded by Freed-Finnegan, Elliot Marx, and Andrew Moreland — veterans of fintech and data infrastructure. After meeting at Stanford, Marx and Moreland solved large-scale data problems at Affirm and Palantir before co-founding Haven Money, acquired by Credit Karma. Before Chalk, Freed-Finnegan helped launch Google Wallet and started Index, acquired by Stripe (it's now called Stripe Terminal). Across these ventures, the team saw how real-time data pipelines enabled entirely new product categories and business models. Fast forward to today — real-time decisions at inference are essential for all modern applications, and Chalk makes that possible. About Chalk Chalk is the data platform for inference, providing critical infrastructure that empowers teams to rapidly operationalize machine learning and AI. The developer-friendly platform consists of a Compute Engine that automatically compiles features into high-performance Rust pipelines without complex ETL, and an LLM Toolchain that seamlessly unifies structured and unstructured data. Chalk powers real-time, low-latency machine learning for the world's leading companies, enabling instant loans, fraud prevention, personalized recommendations, and even clean energy optimization. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, Chalk has raised over $60M from Felicis, General Catalyst, Triatomic Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Chalk Raises $50M Series A to Power AI Inference
Chalk powers real-time decisions for industry leaders Socure, Doppel, and Sunrun SAN FRANCISCO, May 28, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chalk, the data platform for AI inference, announced today that it has raised a $50 million Series A at a $500 million valuation. The round was led by Felicis with participation from Triatomic Capital and existing investors General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund. Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis, will join Chalk's board. The capital will be used to accelerate development of Chalk's platform, onboard new customers, and grow its engineering and go-to-market hubs in San Francisco and New York. As AI adoption accelerates, compute is shifting from training to inference to improve predictions, transform customer experiences, and reduce costs. Existing solutions like Databricks and Snowflake solve training data pipelines, and feature stores provide low-latency access to pre-computed data. But these incumbents don't provide a solution for applications that require fresh data, with complex computation, at inference time. Chalk fills a critical gap in the market – inference data pipelines. Chalk's real-time data platform enables customers to make predictions with fresh data at inference time to prevent identity theft, issue instant loans, increase clean energy efficiency, and moderate harmful content. Senkut shared, "Chalk is poised to become the Databricks of the AI era. It's one of the fastest-growing data companies we've ever seen. The team has fundamentally redefined how data moves through the AI stack, a crucial advancement for chain-of-reasoning models. What's even more remarkable is Chalk's ability to deliver 5-millisecond data pipelines at massive scale - something that, until now, was considered out of reach. We couldn't be more excited to partner with Marc, Elliot, and Andy, who are all repeat technical founders passionate about building infrastructure that delivers an incredible developer experience." Marc Freed-Finnegan, Chalk Co-Founder and CEO, added, "We feel incredibly fortunate to have Aydin and Felicis as our partners for the next phase of our growth. We have a shared vision of the future, and we're honored to be part of the cohort of companies they have invested in." Chalk powers real-time ML across industries including fintech, identity, healthcare, and e-commerce. Companies like Whatnot, Found, Medely, and Iwoca use Chalk as a core infrastructure layer across their business. "Chalk helps us deliver financial products that are more responsive, more personalized, and more secure for millions of users. It's a direct line from infrastructure to impact," said Meng Xin Loh, Senior Technical Product Manager, MoneyLion. Chalk has become critical infrastructure for its customers by enabling teams to rapidly operationalize machine learning and AI. At its core, Chalk's Compute Engine empowers teams to write features in pure Python, automatically translating them into high-performance C++ and Rust pipelines to deliver real-time data without complex ETL. Additionally, Chalk's LLM Toolchain unifies structured and unstructured data, offering native vector storage, automated evaluations, and seamless integrations with major LLM providers. Rahul Madduluri, CTO at Doppel, said, "Chalk powers our LLM pipeline, turning complex inputs — HTML, URLs, screenshots — into structured, auditable features. It lets us serve lightweight heuristics up front and rich LLM reasoning deeper in the stack, so we detect threats others miss without compromising speed or precision." Chalk was co-founded by Freed-Finnegan, Elliot Marx, and Andrew Moreland — veterans of fintech and data infrastructure. After meeting at Stanford, Marx and Moreland solved large-scale data problems at Affirm and Palantir before co-founding Haven Money, acquired by Credit Karma. Before Chalk, Freed-Finnegan helped launch Google Wallet and started Index, acquired by Stripe (it's now called Stripe Terminal). Across these ventures, the team saw how real-time data pipelines enabled entirely new product categories and business models. Fast forward to today — real-time decisions at inference are essential for all modern applications, and Chalk makes that possible. About Chalk Chalk is the data platform for inference, providing critical infrastructure that empowers teams to rapidly operationalize machine learning and AI. The developer-friendly platform consists of a Compute Engine that automatically compiles features into high-performance Rust pipelines without complex ETL, and an LLM Toolchain that seamlessly unifies structured and unstructured data. Chalk powers real-time, low-latency machine learning for the world's leading companies, enabling instant loans, fraud prevention, personalized recommendations, and even clean energy optimization. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, Chalk has raised over $60M from Felicis, General Catalyst, Triatomic Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund. To learn more about Chalk, visit View source version on Contacts Media Contacts ChalkKyla Keefekyla@ Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
