Q2 Update: Ensemble VC’s AGM features world-leading founders, Ensemble data breakthroughs

by Collin West

Hi all,

A couple weeks ago, we hosted our 2026 AGM at the Green Pastures property in South Austin. Two days of content spanned across a factory tour of Saronic, intimate dinners with founders and operators in the Ensemble network, and content featuring the most impactful industry trends for our portfolio and our investors.

Below you'll find a summary of the event. If you want to dive deeper, please reply to this note. We are gearing up for the launch of our next fund in the coming days, and are thankful to have so many partners on this next leg of our journey with us.

As a reminder, we started Ensemble with a single, unproven premise: that data on founders could complement traditional VC practices and find better investments at scale than networks and intuition alone.

And we were right. Our data platform and the network we've built around it have delivered:

• 400 million live data points ingested into our in-house software, helping our investors make better decisions faster.
• Top Decile and Top Quartile Fund Vintages (historic DPI multiple from early investments in Zoom and Groww, 50% of portfolio are billion-dollar companies)
• Portfolio companies spanning some of the most durable, difficult, and consequential problems of our time (Defense, AI, and biotech). These are the most impactful companies being built in America today.

Collin West kicks off the Ensemble 2026 AGM with a review of the firm's history.

Kicking off AGM on Saronic's Factory Floor

Most annual meetings start with a slide deck.

Ours started on a factory floor when we brought our limited partners to Saronic's manufacturing facility in Austin. There, they got to see autonomous surface vessels in production, a vertically integrated supply chain that didn't exist three years ago, and a space that looks less like a shipyard than like a blueprint for the next generation of American naval power.

What Saronic is building and how they're doing it never ceases to amaze us, though we've been investors since much earlier days, having made our original investment in their Series A. We've since invested in each subsequent round (with over $80M offered in co-invest), including the most recent $9.25B Series D led by Kleiner Perkins.

That was Tuesday evening. Here's what the next day brought.

Part 1: Critical Industries and the New Industrial Base

We designed our content for the day so that the morning belonged to the physical world - the infrastructure, the defense stack, and the question of what it actually looks like to rebuild the systems that everything else depends on.

Ben Fagan of CHAOS joined me on stage. The room got quiet fast.

CHAOS raised $510M this year at a $4.5B valuation - the fastest defense company to reach battlefield readiness since World War II. What Ben described wasn't just a single company, but a new industrial base being assembled in real time, by engineers who chose hard, consequential problems when they could have chosen comfortable ones. That shift isn't reversible.

Ensemble's very own Ian Heinrich then moderated a panel that pushed the conversation further with Daniel Bardenstein (CEO & Co-founder, Manifest) and Adam Johnson(CEO, Principal Mineral).

The through-line across the first half of our day: the physical systems the global economy depends on - energy, logistics, maritime infrastructure, critical materials - are being rebuilt. The talent, the capital, and the urgency are all converging. For the first time in a generation, the most ambitious engineers are building atoms, not pixels.

Ben Fagan sits with Collin West for a discussion of CHAOS's counter-UAS system.

Part 2: What AI Actually Makes Possible

The second half of our day opened with something we hadn't shown publicly before.

Gopi Sundaramurthy, our Head of Data Science, and Lilly Vernor, Data Scientist, pulled back the curtain on Ensemble's internal data platform - the infrastructure that makes 80% of our meetings happen before a company has started fundraising. By design, half our team is engineers and data scientists. We've built tools that keep our investment team intentionally lean and create a peer technical relationship with every founder we back. Not a Rolodex. Infrastructure.

Gopi walked through two revolutions in data science: the quantitative brain (structured data) and the language brain (unstructured data). The quantitative revolution took twenty years to move from academic research to enterprise deployment. The language revolution did it in four. For the first time, the 80% of enterprise data that has always been too messy, too human, too unstructured to be useful is now legible to machines. Every industry is already feeling that. Including venture capital.

To make it concrete, Lilly demoed Plaza - Ensemble's internal AI platform - live in the room. What the audience saw wasn't a prototype or a pitch. It was the actual tool our team uses every day to source founders, track talent migration, and stay ahead of markets that haven't formed yet. The point wasn't the software. It was the proof that Ensemble doesn't just invest in AI companies; we're practitioners ourselves, with a decade of building under our belts.

Data Scientist Lilly Vernor demonstrates Ensemble's newest products.

That was followed by Luke Arrigoni's presentation on Loti - the company building identity protection infrastructure for the generative AI era. The problem is new, the market is large, and it's the kind of foundational layer that didn't need to exist until now.

Then came the session that we've received tons of questions about. Aidan Gold, who leads Ensemble's pre-seed effort, moderated a panel of founders and early-stage builders that most investors haven't heard of yet:

• Juan Ebrath - CEO & Founder, Phase Labs
• Kavya Swaminathan - Co-founder & CEO, Kascaid

Juan Ebrath (Phase Labs) demonstrates the company's capabilities at Ensemble's AGM.

These folks and their peers in our earliest-stage cohort are doing incredible things:

• Real-time immune system monitoring.
• Human tissue regeneration.
• Next-generation vaccine creation.

Things that five years ago would have been filed under science fiction. They aren't anymore, thanks to the tailwinds of AI.

We can't wait to see what the rest of 2026 brings for Ensemble.

Onward and upwards,

Collin

For more information on Ensemble's AGM and investment partnerships, reply to this message or reach out directly to [email protected]

‍