.Eddy Widerker

The pitch deck FLORA AI used to raise a massive $42M Series A from Redpoint Ventures and attract founders of Vercel, Frame io, and fal 🔥 FLORA just closed a $42M Series A (bringing total funding to $52M) led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Emery Wells (Frame io), and the founders of fal. But here’s the real reason this deck stands out: It doesn’t sell AI tools. It sells a new creative default. The deck is a masterclass in how to pitch an AI platform without competing on models. Here’s what founders will learn from reading it: - How to frame AI as a workflow shift, not a feature upgrade - How to position yourself above models instead of being replaced by them - How to use interface and product screenshots to communicate strategy - How to pitch enterprise credibility without overexplaining - How to make your product feel inevitable in a world where models commoditize If you’re building in AI, creative tools, or infrastructure, this is one of the cleanest Series A decks you’ll see this year. Comment “FLORA” and I’ll send you the link 🌱

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There’s a lot of conversation about how AI is concentrating capital. That’s real. But I’m also seeing how it’s expanding what small teams can build. At ThriveLink, AI has allowed us to move faster, reach more patients, and build technology that helps families navigate systems that were never designed to be easy. We’ve been able to do with a small amount of capital what used to require entire teams and millions in funding. The tools are changing. The mission isn’t. Thankful to the Los Angeles Business Journal and Plug In Ventures for highlighting the changing venture landscape and what founders like myself are navigating right now.

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I’m calling it now. ACO is the new SEO for ecommerce. Agentic Commerce Optimization. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol went live. Wayfair and Etsy are already closing transactions inside AI Mode. No website visit. No “add to cart” on your domain. This isn’t the future. This is February 2026. Here’s what most people are missing. UCP introduces six core capabilities: • Product discovery • Cart management • Identity linking • Checkout inside the AI interface • Order management • Vertical extensions That’s not a feature update. That’s infrastructure. For 25+ years, we optimized for the click. Now we’re optimizing for selection and transaction. Your schema markup is no longer about rich snippets. It’s the protocol agents use to decide: Who to show. Who to trust. Who to buy from. Product schema. Offer data. Shipping details. Return policies. This is no longer “SEO hygiene.” It’s your checkout flow. Here’s the shift. Search engine optimization was about ranking pages. Agentic Commerce Optimization is about being executable by machines. If an AI agent cannot: • Parse your inventory • Understand your pricing logic • Validate your fulfillment terms • Authenticate identity via OAuth You are not in the game. The SEOs who treat structured data as commerce infrastructure will dominate the next five years. Everyone else will keep optimizing title tags for a click that never happens. Three moves to make now: 1. Audit your Merchant Center feed like it’s your homepage. 2. Populate every relevant schema.org commerce property. Not the basics. All of it. 3. Start thinking in capabilities, not keywords. We are moving from search optimization to selection optimization. Agents are choosing who gets the order. Be choosable. Execution still beats hype. Every. Single. Time.

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The Headline family is experiencing incredible momentum, and today our portfolio company DeepIP is announcing a $25M Series B, bringing total funding to $40M.  This is the kind of company that doesn’t just add AI to a workflow, but it sets the standard for an entire category. The momentum speaks for itself: 1️⃣ 10x ARR growth in < 18 months 2️⃣ Trusted by 400+ law firms and leading corporate IP teams globally 3️⃣ 2M+ chats on the DeepIP platform We’ve had the chance to back FX (Francois-Xavier) L. and Edouard D., leading their Seed round with Headline. Watching them take on a problem as complex and high-stakes as patent work has been genuinely impressive. And working with them has been an absolute pleasure: these 2 are coupling very high ambition and humility. Tech built in Europe, but opening the US office very early and FX starting a life in NYC with his family with 0 hesitation in order to build a global category leader in the IP industry. What convinced me early is still what stands out today: patent teams don’t need another standalone AI tool. They need something that fits the way the work actually happens: documents, long-running matters, multiple stakeholders, and zero room for sloppy context handoffs. Big congrats to the whole DeepIP team + Korelya Capital, Balderton & Serena Proud that we’re doubling down at Headline and continuing the support for what’s next!

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We've designed, launched, or operated within 15+ venture studios and codified 40+ operational frameworks from that work.                                   The same structural questions come up in every engagement. Entity design, governance, sequencing, capital strategy — the patterns are remarkably consistent regardless of sector or operating model. So much so that more often than not, we do our best work by slowing down and working through fundamentals before getting into complexities. So we made the pattern recognition available. Studio GPT is trained on what we've learned across our collective experience. The Readiness Assessment tells you where you actually are in the studio lifecycle — not where you think you are. Both are free. No account needed.  

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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Founders often scramble to prep materials *after* a VC shows interest. That’s backward. You should be ready for diligence before your first meeting with a VC. Smart founders: 🗂 Have their data room ready 📊 Can share a clear KPI dashboard if asked 💸 Keep clean, up-to-date financials 📣 Track and communicate metrics Flailing around getting your files in order can erode investor trust. Put in the work ahead of time and it will build confidence in you and your company. #FundraisingAdvice #StartupTips #RSCMFounderFriday

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