ex-founder (WePay, acquired by JPMorgan Chase), now Portfolio Manager of Robinhood Ventures II (RVII), giving retail investors access to early-stage venture.

Santa Cruz, CA
Joined October 2008
Congrats to the @useblacksmith team. I was sold on the them before I was sold on the business. Here was my follow-up after meeting the founders at YC: "Your backgrounds and dispositions are appealing enough that I'm tempted to bet on that alone." I’m so happy I did.
Replying to @sequoia
@sequoia is leading our Series C at a $1B valuation. We started Blacksmith in 2024 to make CI faster and less painful. In January we ran 5 million CI jobs a week. Today it's over 90 million and growing, and we’re still early.
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Rich Aberman retweeted
Introducing Voxel, a droid butler made by Tuesday Labs.
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1) Today we're announcing Atomwell, our state-of-the-art foundation model for predicting experimental outcomes, alongside scaling laws for molecular discovery. We trained models from 800M to 9B parameters on ~80M experimental measurements, and found clean scaling laws in both model size and data.
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Congrats guys. Super impressive and yet not at all surprising. I remember being awed by how thoughtfully you iterated through ideas at YC, and how inevitable you seemed as founders.
Today, I'm thrilled to announce Flai's $27M Series A, led by Base10, bringing our total funding to $33M This round also brings in some of the biggest names in automotive. With Toyota Ventures, Friedkin, and Findlay Automotive Group on board, we're now backed by the people who build, distribute, service, and sell cars. A year ago, we announced our seed round with one product: an AI that answers the phone for car dealerships. Today, Flai is the first AI-native CRM for automotive, built for both the sales floor and the service drive. Over the last year, @useflai has grown more than 20x, and we now work with over 20% of the top 50 dealer groups. Dealerships still run on software from another era. One of the industry's biggest vendors started before the car was even invented. Dealer teams are buried in disconnected tools, and their customers feel every gap. Flai changes that. On average, Flai generates ~$100K in additional monthly revenue for each dealership we work with. With this funding, we'll invest aggressively in product and engineering to build the system modern dealerships run on. I'm incredibly proud of our team and deeply grateful to our dealer partners for their trust in what we're building. The round was led by @Base10Partners, with participation from: @firstround @Toyota_Ventures @friedkingroup @ycombinator Findlay Automotive Group We're growing extremely fast and hiring across every team: engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. If you want to help rebuild how cars are sold and serviced, check out our careers page or reach out to me directly!
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Fun week. Today is the last day to request shares before the order book closes: robinhood.com/us/en/ventures…
Today is the last day to request shares of Robinhood Ventures Fund II and gain exposure to early-stage companies, including those within the Y Combinator ecosystem. Sign up before the order book closes: rbnhd.co/robinhood-ventures-…
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Rich Aberman retweeted
Today is the last day to request shares of Robinhood Ventures Fund II and gain exposure to early-stage companies, including those within the Y Combinator ecosystem. Sign up before the order book closes: rbnhd.co/robinhood-ventures-…
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Rich Aberman retweeted
What happens when retail investors get a seat at the earliest stages of company building? Robinhood Ventures Fund II is designed to provide exposure to a basket of tomorrow’s promising companies, including companies from the Y Combinator ecosystem.
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YC changed the course of my life. I joined @SPintoPeyronel, Aaron Epstein, and Brad Flora to discuss what makes YC a powerful environment for founders and how RVII can help more investors access the companies trying to build the future. youtu.be/478LhKpFif8
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