nvp capital 2026 AGM Recap

We brought back the blazers! On October 20, the nvp capital team welcomed our LPs, founders, and partners to New York for our third annual general meeting. One thing has become increasingly clear: while the technologies we invest behind continue to evolve, our conviction in the founders transforming America's most essential industries has only grown stronger.

Our theme this year was simply Founders. While we do our best to provide all types of resources and assistance, they are the ones doing the actual building: hiring the team, shipping the product, winning the customer, one day at a time. On stage, we highlighted nine of our founders as they talked through market landscapes, challenges, and big, exciting wins. One message we heard again and again: conviction earned early, through real work and not groupthink, is what founders remember from early stage partners.

The market: more capital than ever, and no monopoly on winners

Dan opened with our market update. $413B was invested in the first half of 2026 alone, more than any prior full year, and it's concentrating fast. The top five firms raised ~65% of U.S. fund capital, and the top five companies took ~64% of dollars invested. Average seed rounds have grown 2.4x since 2020.

But at seed, no one owns the winners. Of the 259 new unicorns from 2023 to 2025, the best-covered seed investor backed just 3.5%. Access to the eventual winners at the earliest stages is still remarkably unconcentrated, and that's exactly where we play.

Inside nvp capital

When Vaughn took the mic, he wanted to talk about our why. One thing he shared: we get excited when people ask why on earth we backed a company, because that's usually when we're onto something.

That instinct goes back to 2020, during COVID, when we walked the docks at the Northeast's largest seaport and heard from healthcare and finance leaders about what was broken. Those conversations pointed us to the bedrock of America's GDP: healthcare, industrials and supply chain, and financial and business systems. The tools have evolved, from vertical software to applied AI and now physical AI and robotics, but our focus hasn't.

That focus runs through both of our funds. Our 2020 vintage Fund I laid the foundation for this strategy and is a top performer across key metrics. Fund II, launched in 2024, builds on those lessons with greater ownership, more concentrated investments and an increasing emphasis on experienced founders.

None of this happens without our team across New York and San Francisco, who bring investment and operating experience, sector expertise and increasingly sophisticated data capabilities to finding and supporting exceptional founders.

Vulcan Elements:

Dan first met John Maslin in 2023. At the time, John had completed his service as a U.S. Navy Supply Corps officer, managing materials for the nuclear carrier and submarine programs, and was finishing his MBA at Harvard Business School. He already had the idea for Vulcan Elements, and it was turning into a real company as he wrapped up school. John, now Co-Founder and CEO, joined Dan by video to share the journey, which you can watch here.

As John put it, "My view of the world is there are only three components that will define global trade over the next several decades, and those are semiconductors, batteries and rare earth magnets."

We agree. That's why we wrote Vulcan's very first check shortly after that initial meeting in 2023, when domestic magnet manufacturing was still a non-consensus bet. Today, Vulcan has a $1.4B partnership with the U.S. government to build a domestic rare earth magnet supply chain.

Lessons from repeat founders

Building a company once is hard enough. So why would anyone who has already built and exited do it all over again?

That was the question Vaughn put to our first panel. Between them, Josh Walsh, Skyler Shuford and Deon Nicholas have taken a company public (AdTheorent), built a supersonic jet company (Hermeus) and sold an AI company to Zendesk (Forethought). Today they're building BranchLab, Reaxiomatic and Espa.

Their answers came down to timing and unfinished business. Josh, whose last company rode the mobile wave, sees AI as a once-in-a-generation moment he can't sit out, and a chance to fix the mistakes he made the first time. Skyler joked that he once swore he'd never do it twice, then admitted he can't help running toward a problem he knows how to solve. Deon, who has been thinking about AI since he was 17, wants to go 100x bigger.

The more interesting question was what changes the second time. Vaughn asked whether there's something beautiful about the naivety of a first-time founder, the kind that doesn't know the odds are stacked against it. The panel didn't dismiss it. Sheer will got each of them through round one. But all three described the same shift: from luck to judgment.

For Josh, that shows up in decisions he once made on instinct: who to hire, whose money to take, how to land big customers faster. For Deon, it means recognizing that many of his first-time mistakes were really crises of confidence, like hiring a shiny executive when what he needed was to learn to sell. For Skyler, it comes down to reps. In defense, where sales cycles run for years and few founders get a second shot, experience is rare and underpriced. The first time, he ran at the wall until he found the cracks. This time, "I kind of just know the answer to the test." That's why Reaxiomatic is starting with a retrofit instead of a brand-new plane.

It's also why we've leaned into backing repeat founders, who make up a much larger share of Fund II than Fund I. And as this panel made clear, experienced founders are picky about who they build with. Each said they wanted partners who make their own call, not ones who follow the herd.

Project Golden Bear

nvp capital is institutionalizing its ability to identify exceptional founders. Skylar Dorosin used our first-ever live demo to show what that actually looks like.

Project Golden Bear started with a simple question: are the traits we look for in founders the ones that actually predict success? Working with our data science fellow Rohan, a Berkeley student, we analyzed thousands of founders and companies, compared those who succeeded with those who didn't, and turned our founder framework into signals we can measure.

Some of what we learned challenged our own assumptions. A few signals we leaned on told us less than we thought, while others we'd underweighted mattered more.

The tool is already earning its keep and it's an important part of how we're building an investment platform that combines experienced investor judgment with increasing sophistication.

Proof points in healthcare

Healthcare is where a lot of good ideas go to stall. Joseph Kitonga (Vitable) and Sahil Choudhry (Handspring Health) pushed through, and both have now raised multiple rounds of financing and are serving workers and families across the country.

They came to the problem from opposite directions. Joseph saw it in his mom's senior care business, whose hourly workers couldn't afford coverage. She became Vitable's first customer, and Vitable is now a national platform providing coverage for over 150k people and serving over 1,000 employers. Sahil saw it from the investor's seat at large health plans, watching mental health companies expand access without asking whether the care worked. Handspring, where we wrote the first check, is built around outcomes and closed its Series B this year.

Both companies sit squarely in our social determinants of health thesis, the same one behind Pair Team in Fund I. The people they serve, hourly workers priced out of coverage and kids whose mental health needs go untreated until they become crises, are too often treated as a cost to subsidize. We see a market. Tens of millions of Americans are underserved precisely because incumbents can't reach them profitably. The founders who close those gaps in access and distribution aren't running charities. They're building the next great healthcare companies.

AI meets the physical world

For decades, robots have been good at doing the same thing over and over in a controlled space. The founders on our final panel are building for what comes next: robots that work in messy, unpredictable environments, alongside people.

We came to this thesis a few years before it got hot, and Dan's conversation with Kanika Rajput (Monocle), Paola Peraza Calderon (Haptica) and Raj Patel (Human Archive) showed why. Each is solving a different missing piece. Raj's team is building the data, deploying capture hardware around the world to record how humans actually do physical work, because robotics, in his words, "is entering its deep learning era." Paola is building touch, the sense video can't provide. Cameras might get a robot most of the way there for a demo, she said, but replacing human labor means getting it right every time. Kanika is building the coordination layer, a "facility brain" that lets robots from different vendors share a floor with each other and with people.

What struck us was how contrarian these bets looked not long ago. When Human Archive raised just six months ago, many in robotics didn't believe human data would work at all. It was one of the most sought-after companies at its Y Combinator demo day, and investors still hesitated. Today, labs are buying that data by the millions of hours.

That's exactly where we want to be: early, before the consensus forms. The data, touch and coordination layers these teams are building will matter to every robot that leaves the lab, and the window to back the founders building them is narrow. It's why physical AI is the next chapter of our strategy, and why we'd rather be in the room while the rest of the market is still deciding whether to believe.

Thank you

Healthcare, industrials, financial services, physical AI: the industries differ, but the founders share something fundamental. They've earned an insight others don't have yet, and they're building on it before the rest of the world catches up.

Our job is to back them with conviction early, earn the opportunity to partner with those founders, and help them build enduring businesses.

To our LPs, founders, and partners, thank you for your continued trust. We know the best is yet to come!