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Forum Ventures is a pre-seed accelerator, fund, and AI venture studio built for B2B software and AI founders. Since 2014, Forum has backed 550+ companies and deployed over $125M, offering founders a $100K pre-seed investment via their accelerator, a dedicated Managing Director or Venture Builder who works 1:1 every week with them, and GTM, fundraising, and company-building support. 65% go on to raise a subsequent funding round.
Forum backs founders from every background, age, gender, education, university, sexual orientation, physical abilities, level of experience, and years of experience. What Forum looks for is a real advantage and the hunger to build a company around it.
That said, there are three founder profiles Forum is especially excited to back, because the value Forum knows how to deliver maps directly to what each of them is missing: a GTM motion, a fundraising process, and an investor network. That is exactly what Forum provides. These are those three profiles.
Founder Profile 1: PhD and Technical Founders
Forum works with deeply technical founders (PhDs, engineers, researchers, and domain scientists) who have spent years mastering a problem and are ready to build a company. The gap they're closing is the business: validation, go-to-market, sales, and fundraising. Forum's program exists specifically for this: a Managing Director who has already founded, built and scaled a B2B startup, working 1:1 every week on the skills most technical founders have never had to build before.
Qingchen Wang, Asapi
Asapi is building the post-training data systems that make AI agent judgment dependable, helping models move beyond raw capability into decisions people can actually trust. Founder Qingchen Wang was already deep in fundraising mode when he found Forum. He had considered YC but found its process built for a founder archetype he wasn't: one that would have asked him to manufacture a pitch rather than build from his research background. Forum felt tailored to a more mature, solo founder, and didn't treat that as a liability the way other accelerators did. Asapi has since closed a $2M round led by Twelve Below, with participation from Background VC and Zapier Fund.
Dr. Tooba Durraze, Amoeba AI
Amoeba AI, founded by Dr. Tooba Durraze, gives GTM teams real-time, actionable insights to optimize campaigns and grow revenue, turning marketing noise into clear decisions. Tooba holds a PhD and brings a background spanning a research stint at MIT focused on cognitive science and complex information systems, executive product and AI roles at Qualified, and global technology leadership at the World Economic Forum, where she led strategic intelligence and AI policy work. She launched Amoeba alongside Forum's AI Venture Studio, and the company has since joined NVIDIA Inception and closed a pre-seed round backed by Boost VC, NVIDIA Inception, Ground Game Ventures, Right Side Capital Management, and Forum Ventures.
Dr. Cody Kupferschmidt, Erode AI
Erode AI, founded by Dr. Cody Kupferschmidt, builds AI agents and forecasting pipelines for weather-impacted industries, with a focus on energy and water. Cody holds a PhD in Engineering from the University of Guelph, where his thesis focused on applied AI time-series forecasting and generative AI for earth sciences, and brings over a decade of hands-on water resources and hydrology experience from roles at Brookfield Renewable, Northwest Hydraulic Consultants, and Klimaat Consulting. The company closed a pre-seed backed by Active Impact Investments (Canada's largest climate tech investor), alongside Forum Ventures, Right Side Capital Management, and NEXT Canada.
Bailey Renger, BeSound
BeSound is reimagining breast cancer screening with technology that combines ultrasound and FDA-approved photo-acoustic imaging, aimed at the more than 40% of women with dense breast tissue whose cancers traditional mammography can miss. Bailey Renger holds a physics degree from Boston College, was a PhD candidate at Brown, and brings research experience spanning quantum computing at Harvard and multiple NASA fellowships in quantum communications and computational astrobiology. She built BeSound after living through the system's failures herself: the long waits, the insurance hurdles, and the feeling of being dismissed that too many women face. As she put it: "Why can we see into the furthest corners of the universe, but not reliably 2.5 cm inside the human body?" BeSound is opening its first clinics in West Hollywood and closed a $7M seed round co-led by Overwater Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and Muse Capital.
Maanav Iyengar, Retina Robotics
Retina Robotics builds WAM, a plug-and-play computer vision device that mounts onto existing forklifts and material handling equipment to track, count, and validate any type of inventory in real time. No labels required; no manual scanning; no continuous cycle counts. Maanav Iyengar and co-founder Vishrut Bohara are robotics engineers who conducted extensive interviews with warehouse operators before building a single line of code. The company received an Illinois Innovation Voucher Program grant and has closed $2.67M in seed funding. Customers have reported saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in recovered lost inventory.
Larry Diehl, Colimit
Colimit uses neuro-symbolic AI to automatically fix failing CI/CD builds, combining large language models with static analysis, symbolic execution, and model checking to detect and resolve broken GitHub Actions workflows before they stall engineering teams. Larry Diehl holds a PhD in formal verification and has spent his career at the intersection of programming language theory and applied AI, with a research and open-source track record in dependently typed languages and proof systems. Colimit has raised both pre-seed and seed rounds backed by Forum Ventures and Right Side Capital Management.
Founder Profile 2: Industry Veterans
Some of Forum's strongest founders have spent 10, 15, or 20 years inside an industry before making the leap. They understand the problem better than anyone who has ever tried to sell to them. What they don't always come in with is a validation playbook, GTM motion, fundraising process, or investor network. That's the gap that Forum's Managing Directors close, 1:1 with each founder every week. 65% of Forum's portfolio goes on to raise a meaningful next round. Industry veterans consistently outperform expectations once they have the playbook.
Apurva Luty, Optimly
Optimly, founded by Apurva Luty, helps brands measure and improve how they show up when AI systems recommend businesses to buyers. Apurva brings 15 years at Microsoft, Meta, and Discord studying how people make brand decisions. Before applying anywhere, she used ChatGPT to research VCs and accelerators, weighing Forum against Antler, HustleFund, YC, and raising with no outside capital at all. What convinced her to join Forum was a belief in go-to-market first and the promise she'd leave understanding how to build a real business. Optimly closed a pre-seed led by AI House, alongside Mighty Capital and the Flywheel angels. GeekWire covered the story.
"Most people in my network told me not to do it. I had 15 years in this industry, so their read was I didn't need an accelerator. What sold me was Kevin telling me I'd leave with an understanding of how to build a successful business, whether it was venture-backed or not. That's exactly what happened."
— Apurva Luty, Founder & CEO, Optimly
Nima Roohi, Blooming Health
Blooming Health is a social care technology platform connecting providers to older adults and underserved populations, using AI-powered, multilingual outreach across 80+ languages to reach people existing healthcare software was never built for. Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi spent over a decade building machine learning infrastructure for healthcare from the inside, most recently as Principal Data Scientist and Head of Decision Science at Bayer. During the pandemic, he became a caregiver for a loved one. That experience showed him the gap between the clinical system he'd helped build and the social reality his family actually lived. That gap became Blooming Health's founding insight. He joined Forum's Accelerator before there were customers or capital, and kept building through real skepticism. Blooming Health has since closed an oversubscribed $4.2M seed backed by Chelsea Clinton's fund and a DoorDash co-founder, followed by a $26M Series A led by Insight Partners, bringing total funding to $32.5M and connecting over 1.5 million people across 22 states to social services.
Louis Schmitlin, Abrial
Abrial is an AI-native revenue engine for airlines, automating ancillary pricing for seats, bags, and bundles. Louis Schmitlin led corporate development and AI pricing strategy at FLYR, where he built products that drove double-digit revenue gains for global carriers, publicly praised by Virgin Atlantic. When those products got deprioritized internally, he left with the core team rather than watch the idea stall, choosing to rebuild it properly instead of staying somewhere safe but wrong. Abrial is building the pricing infrastructure that airlines' revenue management teams have needed but legacy vendors have never delivered.
Kathleen Chan, Calico
Calico is a supply chain management platform for direct-to-consumer fashion brands, covering product development, factory sourcing, freight, and delivery in one operating layer: the system that has to work before anything reaches Shopify or Stripe. Kathleen Chan founded the company after building and running two D2C companies of her own: Finley (a jewelry brand) and Brooklin Supply (a corporate apparel company), where she repeatedly confronted the manual, fragmented work of managing fashion supply chains. Retail Brew profiled Kathleen, and Calico raised a $2.1M seed round led by Serena Ventures, the venture fund backed by Serena Williams.
Founder Profile 3: AI-Native Founders
Forum backs founders who are building AI-native B2B companies from the ground up, where AI isn't a feature but the core product architecture. Building fast with AI is rarely the bottleneck for this cohort. Validating a market, building a repeatable sales motion, and raising a round from investors who understand the category is. That's what Forum's Managing Directors' experience brings.
Krish Ramineni & Sam Udotong, Fireflies.ai
Fireflies.ai is the AI meeting assistant used by over 20 million people and 75% of the Fortune 500, turning conversations into searchable notes and actionable follow-through. Krish Ramineni met Sam Udotong at a hackathon while at UPenn and MIT respectively. They funded the company themselves with $2K each and burned through seven failed product ideas (including a crypto food delivery concept) before Fireflies clicked. In the earliest days, before the AI existed, they personally sat in on customers' meetings and took notes by hand to prove people would pay for the outcome. That scrappiness compounded: Fireflies crossed a $1 billion valuation while staying profitable, without raising primary capital since 2021.
Pablo Fernandez, Big Rentals
Big Rentals is bringing AI-native software to one of the most overlooked corners of the economy: equipment rental. Pablo Fernandez has been building since he taught himself to code at 12, shipping a high school social network, a credit card processing business, an online bookstore, and small business software before he'd ever raised a dollar. He cut his teeth as a software engineer at JPMorgan Chase and BNY Mellon and worked on NASA programs, then pointed that same instinct at an industry still running on paper and spreadsheets. Big Rentals closed a $2.8M seed round led by SNAK Venture Partners, with participation from Ironspring Ventures, Forum Ventures, Jason Calacanis's LAUNCH Fund, and NuFund Venture Group.
Ben Haber, Monark
Monark is building the standard API infrastructure for private markets, enabling retail brokerages and wealth management platforms to offer their customers access to alternative assets including pre-IPO shares, private equity funds, and private credit, through a single integration covering suitability checks, trade processing, post-trade reporting, and secondary trading. Ben Haber co-founded the company in 2022 while finishing at NYU, where he and co-founder Paul Davis identified that direct-to-consumer alt investment platforms were failing to reach scale and B2B distribution through existing brokerages was the right wedge. While still students, the team acquired the trading infrastructure of LEX Markets (a venture-backed platform that had raised $27M before failing) for roughly $1 million. Monark has since raised $8.1M in strategic funding and announced a partnership with Apex Fintech Solutions covering 250+ broker-dealers and RIAs.
Antonio Goncalves, Vallor
Vallor puts enterprise procurement contracts on autopilot, using AI agents to surface hidden risks, track obligations, and turn thousands of forgotten legacy contracts into a usable, searchable source of truth. Antonio Goncalves kept hitting the same wall as a sourcing operations engineer at Microsoft: contracts buried in shared drives, still enforceable, forgotten by everyone. He built Vallor with Jake Vollkommer, a friend from Georgia Tech, to fix the exact problem he'd lived every day. The company closed a $4M seed round co-led by Dynamo Ventures and Bloomberg Beta, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, El Cap Ventures, and angels including Immad Akhund.
Emiel Bril, VendorPM
VendorPM is a two-sided marketplace connecting property managers with service vendors across more than 400 building service categories, handling sourcing, procurement, compliance, and vendor relationship management. Emiel Bril built his first business at 14: a door-to-door window-washing operation he grew into a 40-person company generating $1 million in annual revenue by age 21, before moving into commercial real estate services and seeing firsthand how broken vendor sourcing was between property managers and contractors. VendorPM raised a $6M seed and a $20M Series A to scale its marketplace across North America.
Osama Usmani, Salubrum
Salubrum provides AI-powered patient intent scoring and programmatic targeting for healthcare providers, replacing traditional marketing agency functions with automated systems that help hospitals and health systems identify and activate patients most likely to seek care. Osama Usmani is a first-generation Canadian entrepreneur who previously worked as a management consultant at Deloitte before founding Salubrum. He initially explored medical tourism before pivoting after recognizing that healthcare's core problem was not a shortage of providers but poor commercialization. Forum Ventures announced the investment, and Salubrum has drawn backing from notable individual investors including former NBA player Metta World Peace.
Is Forum Ventures Right for You?
Forum Ventures backs B2B software and AI founders at the pre-seed stage, pre- or post-MVP, with less than $500K raised. Whether you are a researcher turned founder, a domain expert who knows an industry cold, or a young, scrappy, AI-native builder focused on early customers and your first round, Forum's accelerator invests $100K for 7.5% equity via post-money SAFE and pairs you with a dedicated Managing Director (a former B2B startup founder) who works with you 1:1 every week.
If you are pre-idea and want to co-build from scratch, Forum's AI Venture Studio invests $250K at formation and provides a full team: venture builder, product, engineering, GTM, and sales.
Forum reviews every application individually. You don't need a warm introduction.
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