Can state-backed tech capital is fill the seed gap?

As I warned you at the outset, I got a slew of questions because I'm working on a few reported projects that it will intersect in your work.

So I'm going to roll through a bunch.

Let's start first.

Give me the read.

What are you seeing? We had the 2010s cheap money era, the rise of early stage software investing.

We saw chaotic pandemic years where everyone was throwing money and then all the interest rates changed all of that.

And then there was AI and then there was not.

So help me, where are you in seeing the deal flow at one of the country's most active early stage investors? What are you seeing in terms of deal flow at the moment?

Yeah, I can happily report that as of this quarter, we are seeing very robust deal flow.

This is the largest top of funnel.

So, you know, unvetted, but it's still a good signal.

Largest top of funnel since probably 2018, maybe 2019 timeframe.

Oh,

wow.

It's very robust, which is unexpected and a happy change from, I would say, last year, which was rather quiet.

I think What we saw was a lot of capital out there was taking a breath, kind of figuring out how AI impacts, you know, the whole compression of SAS.

So I think they've kind of figured it out, or at least some of the early stage investors have figured it out.

So with that additional support, obviously more companies come to the forefront.

And for us, you know, we need the matching investment.

So that's a critical factor for getting in top of funnel for us.

So all right, that's interesting.

Let me zoom in on that for a sec.

So I like that it's interesting to me that we had a big giant AI disruption.

Everyone's like, what does this mean? The other big macroeconomic story that we had technically followed closely around the country has been the surge of new firm creation around the country in the pandemic era, including high propensity businesses, those businesses that are most likely to employ people.

So those are not the sole