VC Uncovered

Mercedes Bent - Premise

Mercedes Bent spent six years as a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, worked at the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis, and founded her own startup. Now she's building Premise, the early-stage VC firm she co-founded with Vanessa Larco, as a deliberate rejection of what venture capital has become. "We have become an index play," Mercedes said on VC Uncovered. "And I'm basically doing the anti of that." Premise focuses on pre-seed and seed investing in the AI ecosystem, small by design and deliberate by strategy. Mercedes believes the technology is real but the market is running ahead of itself. "We're in a hypey moment of AI, but in the grand scheme of things, this is such early innings. More akin to when mobile was coming out than it is to the end of the mobile cycle." She pointed to potential IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic as the likely correction point, when public market investors apply fundamentals-based scrutiny private markets have avoided. At the center of Premise's sourcing is Surreal, a community Mercedes started as a dinner series for engineers and AI researchers. The first gathering happened in her living room. It has since moved to art galleries, drawing over 5,200 applicants in the past year. Most attendees don't know there's a VC behind it. "The minute you're saying, hey, here's office hours for VCs, now people are posturing. I wanna get to know the real you." Mercedes also applies behavioral economics as both a diligence lens and personal discipline. She looks for founders who understand the emotional architecture of their product. On the personal side, she flags the risk of getting captured by a founder's energy and letting excitement override judgment. "I get so excited about founders sometimes on the very first meeting and I think it through and I'm like, well, it's a terrible deal. Maybe they're just good at talking." The training is to make sure the founder, product, market, and deal terms all earn conviction independently. Her bet is that firms built on relationship density rather than deal volume will survive cycles better. "I wanna see that whole journey with you. And have you naturally come to it." This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders, pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We're proud to have them as our sponsor. Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.

Haley Bryant - Hustle Fund

What does it mean to invest when moats are disappearing and anyone can build an MVP by 1 a.m.? That question sits at the center of this conversation with Haley Bryant, Partner at Hustle Fund, one of the earliest voices to appear in the VC Uncovered newsletter. Hustle Fund invests at the earliest stages, writing first checks into companies 50% of the time across B2B, fintech, and health tech. Haley is based in the DMV and has spent the past year expanding her focus into cybersecurity, dual-use technology, and energy, backed by capital awarded from Washington, D.C. The conversation opens on a theme that runs through everything: execution speed. Haley describes a founder she nearly passed on because he had no defensible moat. His response was direct. His only moat was execution velocity. She wrote the check. The business has been moving ever since, starting in fintech and expanding into physical AI. That outcome shapes how she approaches sourcing now, spending more time with teams over weeks to measure pace rather than evaluating a pitch deck as a static snapshot. Drew and Haley also dig into what "AI-first" actually looks like when evaluating companies. Drew's threshold is simple: are founders running out of AI credits multiple days a week? If they are, the behavior is there. The tools are the same for everyone. What separates founders is how obsessively they use them. On the fintech side, Drew makes the case that embedded fintech is no longer a wave, it has already passed. The opportunity now sits in the unsexy, deeply technical infrastructure layers that most investors never think to look for. He describes this as invisible fintech, businesses that do not look like fintech from the outside but are powered entirely by financial rails underneath. Haley connects this to her conviction in vertical AI, particularly businesses that can get into the flow of payments at the industry level. The two also discuss the consortium model, a strategy where early-stage founders partner with companies in adjacent spaces to create distribution leverage and show up to enterprise customers as a more complete solution rather than a point product. Haley closes on two areas she is actively backing. One is Fortify Education, a lending-as-a-service platform for trade schools helping more people access skilled trades at a time when the workforce gap is widening. The other is a satellite communications company building Twilio-style infrastructure for laser-based data transmission between satellites, a space she believes is deeply underserved given how much data will need to move as AI infrastructure expands into orbit. Speed round topics include Haley's side gig teaching SoulCycle, the case for the nine-minute nap, OpenAI Whisper as a daily AI tool, and a recommendation for "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," a book on curiosity that she says shaped how she approaches both investing and life. This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We're proud to have them as our sponsor. Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.

Bukie Adebo Umeano - Anthemis Group

The next wave of fintech may not look like fintech at all. Bukie Adebo Umeano, early-stage investor at Anthemis Group, has spent four years building an investment thesis around that idea. The firm calls it invisible finance: financial services so well-built that nobody notices they are there. No app to open, no form to fill out. Just a business owner making decisions while the banking, lending, and payments infrastructure adjusts automatically in the background. In this episode, Bukie breaks down financial services innovation in three waves. Wave one was digitization, moving from branches and phone calls to mobile interfaces. Wave two was embedded finance, putting financial products at the point of need inside existing business tools. Wave three, where Anthemis is writing checks now, is the version where financial services simply run in the background. "We don't think about our electricity, do we?" Bukie said. "You just walk into a room, you turn on the lights, you never think twice about the fact that the lights work." Before she was an investor, Bukie was a founder. That operator experience reshaped how she thinks about the VC-founder relationship. She explains why a VC who loved your pitch still passed, why go-to-market questions come earlier than founders expect, and why portfolio construction means great companies get turned down all the time. "There are so many great companies that we have not invested in, knowing they were great companies," she said. Bukie also gets into what actually qualifies as a moat, and why most claims to defensibility are overstated. The one she takes seriously is genuine network effects: "Why does having company A make it easier, better, or more likely for company B to also be part of this network?" She looks for reinforcing data loops and deep workflow integration, where a product embeds itself in the place users already work. At Anthemis, the early-stage fund focuses on pre-seed and seed companies in "high assurance" industries: financial services, healthcare, energy, and other heavily regulated categories. The infrastructure plays Bukie finds most compelling right now include core banking rebuilt with AI, data orchestration platforms, and coordination layer businesses that unify the growing stack of AI agents companies are already using. Bukie also shares how growing up as the second of four sisters shaped her thinking. "Be open to being incorrect," she said. "I learned that at a very young age." Her framework keeps returning to a counterintuitive place: the less visible the technology, the more interesting the investment. The question she keeps asking is not where the flashiest opportunity is, but where the work will still need to happen regardless of what the technology does next, and who is building the invisible infrastructure to support it. This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We're proud to have them as our sponsor. Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.

Nicole DeTommaso - Harlem Capital

What if the best venture opportunities are hiding in industries that software never touched? Nicole Tommaso, Principal at Harlem Capital, joined VC Uncovered to break down the firm's contrarian approach to early-stage investing. She explains why she believes AI is unlocking markets that were completely closed to venture just a decade ago. Harlem Capital backs underrepresented founders at the seed stage ($1M–$2.5M checks), but their edge isn't just who they back. It's how they think. Nicole explains why the firm evaluates a founder's childhood before their business plan, what a "high slope of learning" actually looks like, and why the most telling interview question is: what's the earliest entrepreneurial thing you remember doing? She also unpacks Harlem's biggest investment theme right now: leapfrogging legacy industries. Truckers, tradespeople, and small business owners never adopted software. But they're adopting AI. And that generational handoff from Boomers to Millennials is cracking open markets that venture capital couldn't touch before. Plus: why proprietary data is the last real moat, what metric is replacing ARR in the AI era, and the simple nighttime habit that keeps Nicole sharp in one of the most demanding jobs in venture. In this episode: * How Harlem Capital spots founders built to last * The "leapfrog" thesis and why legacy industries are the new frontier * What defensibility actually looks like when building costs near zero * Why Harlem isn't backing down on diversity, even as the industry pulls away This season is supported by SVB, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not investment, financial, or legal advice.

Atlas Berry (M1C)

Read the VC Uncovered profile: ⁠⁠https://www.vcuncovered.com/p/atlas-berry-m1c [https://www.vcuncovered.com/p/atlas-berry-m1c] In this podcast: Drew Glover talks to Atlas Berry from Mission One Capital (M1C) on the "physical AI" revolution and the industrial infrastructure required to power it. Atlas, the founder of M1C, explains that the U.S. power grid is facing a "comfort crisis," currently unable to meet the massive energy demands of AI. He positions M1C as a specialist partner focusing on three pillars: energy, industrial resilience, and earth systems. By prioritizing "behind the meter" power generation and Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), the firm aims to build a decentralized, resilient power landscape that can operate independently of the traditional, strained grid. The conversation takes a compelling turn as Atlas shares his transition from high-stakes investment banking in South African mines—where meetings required security sweeps for explosives—to managing the global footprint of Linkin Park. These high-pressure environments, coupled with early venture experience backing companies like Lyft and Snap, shaped his "performance protocol" for evaluating the next generation of industrial founders. The episode is particularly insightful when he discusses the "Misogi": an annual challenge with a 50% chance of failure designed to recalibrate a founder’s mental and physical endurance. Atlas argues that building in hard-tech is an endurance sport, requiring "battle-tested" individuals from military or elite engineering backgrounds. He cautions that in an infrastructure-heavy future, specialized VCs must act as more than just capital providers, serving as deep value-add partners for those solving tangible, world-scale problems. Sponsor: This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We’re proud to have them as our sponsor. Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.