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Scale Venture Partners

USGBDEFRILCAOtherB2B SaaSAI/MLDevtoolsCybersecurityFintechHealthtechEnterprise

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Investment thesis

Scale Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on AI and B2B software, investing out of its $900M Fund VIII. The firm partners with companies that have signed their first customers and are making the journey from founder-led growth to a go-to-market machine — typically at $500K–$5M ARR — leading 80% of its Series A and Series B rounds with initial checks of $5M–$50M. The portfolio spans applications, DevTools and infrastructure, and security, with a conviction that the next decade will be defined by AI applied to how businesses actually work. Scale differentiates through a platform of operating resources: a community of senior operators (former CROs, CMOs, CFOs from companies like Zoom), GTM benchmarks built from 1,000+ startups across 10,000 quarters of real data, and a talent network — all designed to compress the scaling curve from $1M to $500M+ in revenue. The firm takes board seats, commits for years not rounds, and describes its approach as 'Founder-honest over Founder-friendly.'

Notable quotes

Just as the SaaS S-curve levels out, and Silicon Valley looks alone, sad and scared, along comes the AI curve. It's clearly going to take 10 or 20 years to finance the adoption of AI across the board in enterprise. Zoom out 10 years, no one's going to be building software without AI at the core.

Rory O'Driscoll · Crunchbase News — 'Inside Scale Venture Partners' Pivot From SaaS To AI' · 2024-10-29

We invest precisely in the middle. What we're looking for is early product market fit. We're no longer taking product risk but we like to take a lot of business risk. The typical Scale deal is doing one or two million dollars in trailing revenue — you've got that early customer traction, but you're a long way from a predictable, repeatable scalable model, and that's what we underwrite getting to.

Rory O'Driscoll · Scale Venture Partners Blog — 'A VC Explains the One Thing You Should Know About VCs: Their Investment Thesis'

To get VC to put money into your company, you need to show the minimum level of growth that typical venture investors require. If you aren't at that growth rate, you need to look at the level of cash you have on hand and make it last as long as possible.

Stacey Bishop · SaaStr — 'What Does it Take to Get to the Next Level of Funding After Series B'

Team

Alex Niehenke

Partner

AI/MLB2B SaaSCybersecurity

Andy Vitus

Partner

AI/MLDevtoolsEnterprise

Ariel Tseitlin

Partner

AI/MLB2B SaaSEnterprise

Jeremy Kaufmann

Partner

AI/MLHealthtechB2B SaaS

Rory O'Driscoll

Partner

AI/MLB2B SaaSEnterprise

Stacey Bishop

Partner

AI/MLB2B SaaSFintech

Recent investments

CompanyRoundSizeDate
Bland AISeries C$50m2026-06-16
ParaformSeries B2026-03-18
GC AISeries B$60m2025-11-06
CodeRabbitSeries B$60m2025-09-01
AbacumSeries B$53m2025-06-01
HubSpotSeries A
BoxSeries A
BILL (Bill.com)Series A
DocuSignSeries A
JFrogSeries A

Frequent co-investors

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