Base10 Partners

Please join us in welcoming The Mobile-First Company to the Base10 portfolio with their $12M seed round. Thank you to Jérémy Goillot and the entire Mobile-First team for already being fantastic partners—that know how to make a splash! More on the fundraise in Axios - https://lnkd.in/gHVUwbET

🚀 We’re hiring a COO at bsport! bsport is a fast-scaling tech startup in the wellness & fitness industry, empowering studios and gyms to grow through a powerful all-in-one management and booking platform. We’re now 200+ team members, across 4 offices, with our HQ in Barcelona 🇪🇸 — and we’re just getting started. After closing our €30M Series B in January, led by Base10 Partners and Octopus Ventures, we’re scaling faster than ever — aiming to more than double in the next 18 months. We’re looking for a hands-on, analytical, and execution-driven COO with a proven track record in scaling operations to the next level. Someone who thrives in fast-paced environments, builds high-performing teams, and drives data-backed decisions with impact. If you’re passionate about building scalable systems, leading with purpose, and joining a young, ambitious, and energetic team, this might be your next big move. 💬 Let’s talk — or tag someone who’d be a great fit! https://lnkd.in/dJxmBuPN

Lexroom.ai, a startup specializing in artificial intelligence applied to the legal sector, has announced the closing of a €16 million round led by Silicon Valley venture capital fund Base10 Partners. In addition to Base10, also the Spanish fund Acurio Ventures participated to the investment which received also the confirmation of support from existing investors such as Entourage, Verve Ventures, and @Joe Zadeh, as well as support from View Different of Diego Piacentini. Giovannelli e Associati assisted Lexroom and its founding partners with a team led by partner Matteo Colombari and composed of senior associate Paola Cairoli and associates Filippo Camerada and Camilla Caliterna. Please use the following link for the press review: https://lnkd.in/dPFbTNHV

I asked the founder of a billion-dollar VC firm what he thought about forward-deployed engineering (FDE). He answered with his investment philosophy: “I back AI startups that get paid from the labor budget, not the AI budget.” At first, it sounded like a tangent until he explained the link: When a customer decides which budget to use, they also decide what they expect from you: AI budget = money for experiments. Customers buy a chance it might work. Labor budget = money that’s used to pay people. Customers buy results. And when they buy results, the bar rises. That’s where the FDE motion comes in. Instead of handing projects off to a separate delivery team, engineers themselves are deployed directly into the customer’s environment, inside their real workflows and data. You fix blockers fast, and ship until the outcome shows up in their numbers. Then you turn each working solution into software It’s like shifting from services to product without losing touch with the customer. Palantir popularized the FDE model in the 2010s by embedding engineers with customers to adapt Gotham and Foundry platforms to high-impact, mission critical use cases for the US government and major enterprises. The model works because implementing AI inside complex large organizations is harder than building traditional software. You can’t just ship code, you have to understand how the customer’s systems, processes, and people actually work. FDE teams help with this by sitting next to users, solving problems in real time, and turning those solutions into scalable products. As Adeyemi put it: “I don’t care if it’s AI, if you have monkeys typing, or whatever.” His point was simple: startups that succeed in traditional industries don’t sell experiments, they sell outcomes. They compete for operational or labor budgets, not for AI budgets. Ade recently led HappyRobot’s $40M Series B, contributing to a total of $62M raised from Base10, a16z, YC, and other top-tier partners. The company is now crushing logistics AI with its FDE model. To hear more about how exactly they are implementing it check the link in the comments:

I met a founder who was rejected by YC, pivoted completely, and now has 20x revenue growth with AI agents for logistics, an industry still running on paper and phone calls. Pablo Palafox grew up in Spain playing piano and sports, pushed by his older brother Javi who later became his co-founder and COO. They were 10 years apart in age but shared a vision for technology and business. They applied to YC twice. First time? Rejected at the interview. "Painful experience" Pablo told me. The second time they got in, but completely threw away their original computer vision idea on demo day. They discovered freight brokers drowning in manual processes, phone calls, emails, spreadsheets. Repetitive tasks nobody wanted to do but were mission-critical. Their first customer came through a Discord server. The CEO was skeptical: "You're telling me I have to pay $12,000 a year for you to try and build something?" That leap of faith transformed into massive growth. They've grown 20x in revenue since their Series A The key? Forward-deployed engineering Being physically on-site with customers. Understanding their pain points Being transparent about AI's limitations. "Expectation setting is so important," Pablo emphasized. "Underpromise and overdeliver." What's fascinating: customers initially marked HappyRobot as a "threat" in their SWOT analysis. A year later? They listed it as a "strength." Fun fact: Some employees even dressed as the AI agent for Halloween. Their implementation approach is hands-on. Pablo once hopped on a plane with zero notice to fix a customer issue in Atlanta. "If you send an engineer to a customer, the likelihood that they churn is almost zero." They've now raised $44M from Base10 Partners, a16z and Y Combinator to build what Pablo calls "the AI operating system" for logistics. Their vision: giving managers peace of mind "This is what happened today. I've already fixed these issues." Listen to the full history tomorrow, link in the comments.

Thank you to everyone who joined us and Quili Peña Martínez-Avial last week for our TECH WEEK by a16z event for SF Tech Week! Great conversations, great food, and great connections made. HappyRobot Jacob Suh Andreessen Horowitz