500 Global

In 2013, 500 Global invested in an energetic, scrappy team from NYC with big dreams to build a marketplace for private company shares and help employees unlock liquidity - that team was EquityZen. As part of Batch 7 of our Flagship Accelerator, they spent long hours in the 500 office building, iterating, talking to customers. Fast forward 12 years: EquityZen has grown to > 800,000 users and completed over 50,000 transactions in nearly 500 private companies. 🚀 This week, EquityZen announced an agreement to be acquired by Morgan Stanley! Hear CEO and Co-Founder Atish Davda talk about the acquisition in this interview: https://lnkd.in/gAnPsxnp From the very beginning, EquityZen's vision was to bring private markets to the public and make wealth creation accessible to more people. With this partnership, they will now reach more investors and shareholders than ever before. People often ask me what qualities matter most for founders to succeed. It's a topic that’s been coming up a lot lately with other VCs too. (Spikiness!) Yes sure be spiky. But IMO the qualities that ultimately prevail are pure, unrelenting grit and resilience. Congrats Atish Davda Phil Haslett & Shriram Bhashyam on this incredible milestone. I'm so proud of what you've achieved, but 1000x prouder of your infinite grit and never giving up. You've come a long way since the Batch of Nemo and this photo from 222 Broadway. 🩵 🌎

Voice AI is attracting billions in funding and big expectations. The real question: is the technology ready to meet them? At the Startup Grind AI Summit, our Managing Partner Tony Wang shares that while the space is early and still imperfect, its potential is enormous — with “voice agents as a really good interim approach,” and a reminder that founders should already be thinking about how to evolve toward something more durable. The frontier for AI innovation is still wide open — and the builders exploring that edge today will define the next generation of how humans and technology communicate.

I learned from our discussion at #FII9 on how innovative financing helps scale climate-smart technologies in emerging markets. At Shell Foundation, we’ve seen how progress accelerates when different forms of capital work as a system — when public, private, and philanthropic investors share risk and align incentives. That's how we will raise incomes and lower emissions on a commercial basis across the globe. My thanks for the exchange with Astria Fataki of UNDP, Marlène Ngoyi of African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) and Courtney Powell of 500 Global, each a leader in this space. #FIIInstitute #ShellFoundation #BlendedFinance #ClimateTech #EmergingMarkets #Africa #Asia #InnovationForImpact

In 2013, 500 Global invested in an energetic, scrappy team from NYC with big dreams to build a marketplace for private company shares and help employees unlock liquidity - that team was EquityZen. As part of Batch 7 of our Flagship Accelerator, they spent long hours in the 500 office building, iterating, talking to customers. Fast forward 12 years: EquityZen has grown to > 800,000 users and completed over 50,000 transactions in nearly 500 private companies. 🚀 This week, EquityZen announced an agreement to be acquired by Morgan Stanley! Hear CEO and Co-Founder Atish Davda talk about the acquisition in this interview: https://lnkd.in/gAnPsxnp From the very beginning, EquityZen's vision was to bring private markets to the public and make wealth creation accessible to more people. With this partnership, they will now reach more investors and shareholders than ever before. People often ask me what qualities matter most for founders to succeed. It's a topic that’s been coming up a lot lately with other VCs too. (Spikiness!) Yes sure be spiky. But IMO the qualities that ultimately prevail are pure, unrelenting grit and resilience. Congrats Atish Davda Phil Haslett & Shriram Bhashyam on this incredible milestone. I'm so proud of what you've achieved, but 1000x prouder of your infinite grit and never giving up. You've come a long way since the Batch of Nemo and this photo from 222 Broadway. 🩵 🌎

We have raised $5M in seed funding to build universal data interpretation infrastructure for enterprises. Grateful to our investors who are backing this vision: 500 Global, Cisco Investments, CircleRock Capital, Databricks, Hat-Trick Capital, Hivemind Capital, Rain Capital, Rocketship.vc , SBI Holdings USA, Inc., and SmartGateVC. Here's what we're solving: enterprises have valuable operational data trapped in incompatible formats. Manufacturing facilities can't compare production metrics across plants. Security teams can't correlate threats across their infrastructure. AI models fail because training data is inconsistent. The costs are real: millions spent annually on custom integrations, months wasted per data source, and AI initiatives that stall because the data isn't usable. Fleak provides the translation layer between industrial systems and modern analytics platforms. We handle the semantic complexity so operational data, from factory sensors to security telemetry, can actually be used by downstream AI and analytics tools. This funding lets us expand across manufacturing, energy, transportation, and cybersecurity sectors where data quality is an operational requirement, not just a technical nice-to-have. Special thanks to our pre-seed investors Oakseed Ventures, Rain Capital, and XFactor Ventures who believed in us from the beginning, and to the early customers trusting us with their critical data flows. Just getting started.

Earlier this month, we wrapped up 500 Global’s Flagship Accelerator Batch 36 Demo Day, spotlighting 13 startups pushing the boundaries of innovation. All 13 are actively building AI-native products or integrating AI into their business models, showing just how deeply AI is now embedded in the startup DNA. These founders are addressing emerging challenges across areas such as AI security, developer productivity, and healthcare data privacy — proving that leveraging AI is no longer optional; it’s a competitive necessity. Throughout the program, founders joined a weekly AI exchange where they shared tools, techniques, and experiments that improved their KPIs in real time. With AI, months of iteration were compressed into weeks, enabling founders to reach product-market-fit quicker than ever before. Investor interest is also keeping pace. We’re seeing stronger conviction and higher commitments toward startups with AI at their core — a clear signal of where scalable, defensible innovation is headed next. ✨ Congratulations to Batch 36 for driving the next chapter of intelligent entrepreneurship. The future is being built right here. Mark Kim (ALLSALE | Ambassador Management Platform for D2C Brands) | Sed Fakoorian (AlphaZ) | Ari Choudhury (Arka Analytics) | Pine Sohn (CardMonster) | Bradford Crist (ChargeMate) | Ayin Vala (GenMD) | Lise Keeney (Goblins) | Tom Mahler, PhD (Oblix Inc) | Aayush Kumar (Opslyft) | Greg Tanaka (Prompt Driven) | Rangel Spasov (Saberstack) | Ronak Daga (UXMagic.AI) | Sherwin Farhang (XeroSec, Inc.) | Christine Tsai | Clayton Bryan | Jordan Sawadogo | Gregory Kamradt (ARC Prize Foundation) | Matthew Berman (Forward Future) #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfTech