Vermilion Cliffs Ventures
Venture capitalActively deployingNew York · Pre-Seed–Seed · 2 people tracked
Investment thesis
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures invests early in technical founders who are rebuilding the development stack for the agent era. Operator-founded and led by investors with hands-on go-to-market and product-led growth experience at leading developer companies, the fund backs early-stage, category-defining products in AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools. Beyond capital, Vermilion offers practical, founder-first support to help builders scale from the earliest days of their business.
Source: firm website, verified Aug 3, 2026.
Team · 2 people
from the firm's website.jpeg)
What they invest in
from 26 of 30 portfolio companiesDeveloper Tools ×21AI & Machine Learning ×20SaaS ×9Enterprise Software ×8Data & Infrastructure ×6Cloud Computing ×4Deep Tech ×3Cybersecurity ×2
HQs:United States×11
Who they back
founder profiles across 15 portfolio companiesFounding team size:solo founder×62 founders×63 founders×24+ founders×1
Where their founders studiedfrom 17 founders with education data
Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management ×2The Wharton School ×2University of Southern California ×2
Where their founders worked beforefrom 18 founders with career history
Carnegie Mellon University ×3Apple ×2LavaLab ×2Neo ×2Nike ×2SpaceX ×2
Accelerator rootsportfolio companies that came through a program
Investments · 30 tracked
founders shown can be your intro pathBy year:2025 · 22024 · 12023 · 25 dated
Cognee provides a memory layer for AI coding agents and other AI applications, capturing context and turning it into graph-based memory that agents can recall across sessions.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper Tools
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Argilla develops open-source, data-centric software for building and improving AI and NLP models, with a focus on human feedback and data quality.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsCarpesa, Valencia
Francisco de Asis Aranda Montes(Executive Officer, Director)Daniel Vila Suero(Executive Officer, Director, Promoter)Daniel Vila(CEO)inPaco Aranda(CTO)inJames Alcorn(Director)Paco Nathan(Director)
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsAbstraction CapitalCriteria Venture TechEniac VenturesSAV (Scale Asia Ventures)Zetta Venture Partners
Atomic is a distributed, agent-native alternative to Git that manages source code at the primitive level, adding semantic call graphs, code search, intents, attestations, and provenance through a single CLI.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsSaaS
Lee Faus(CEO & Founder)
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsMadrona Venture GroupSlow Ventures
Boston, US
Guy Eisenkot(Founder)
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsDisruptive AIFusion VCAFG Partners
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Catio (Archie AI) provides an "Architecture IDE" that turns business goals and constraints into system-aligned architecture decisions, plans, and execution-ready specs, grounded in a team's live system.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwarePalo Alto, US
Boris Bogatin(Executive Officer, Director, Promoter)in
BoardRaju Rishi(Director)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsEniac VenturesPender VenturesRRE VenturesRTP GlobalSilicon Badia
Clarify is an AI-native CRM for B2B startups that uses agents to handle prospecting, lead qualification, follow-ups, and other revenue workflows.
AI & Machine LearningSaaSSales Tech
Patrick Thompson(Founder)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsAscend Venture CapitalFikaRecall CapitalAscendESSENCEGradient Ventures
Colimit offers a coding agent for formal spec-driven development, guiding users to write formal specifications without prior experience, check specs for logical bugs, and generate code by combining compilers with LLMs.
AI & Machine LearningDeep TechDeveloper ToolsBrooklyn, US
Larry Wayne Diehl, Jr.(Executive Officer, Director)
BoardJesse Robbins(Director)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsHeavybit
Confident AI is a platform for evaluating, monitoring, and governing AI systems in production.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareSan Francisco, US
Jeffrey Ip(CEO & Cofounder)inKritin Vongthongsri(Co-Founder)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsY CombinatorJanuary CapitalLiquid VenturesRebel Fund
East River Source Control builds source control and code management tooling focused on code review and tracking how a codebase evolves, positioning source control as infrastructure for developers.
Developer ToolsSaaS
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Fiveonefour builds tooling focused on agent experience (AX), helping developers ship software that AI agents can use effectively.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsSaaSPortland, US
Timote Gelinas Delisle(Executive Officer, Director, Promoter)Chris Crane(Founder)inNicolas Joseph(Founder)inChristopher M Crane(Director)
BoardNan Li(Director)
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsFlybridge Capital PartnersDimension CapitalRidge VenturesStage 2 Capital
Formal Technology is building a new computing stack aimed at elastic, isolated, and globally available serverless execution, using formal verification and compilers.
Cloud ComputingDeep TechDeveloper Tools
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Freeplay provides a platform for software product development teams to build and maintain generative AI products using best practices in experimentation, iteration, and data management.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsEnterprise Software
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsNext Frontier CapitalPreston-Werner VenturesRenegade Partners
GenSX is a TypeScript framework and serverless platform for building AI agents and workflows using plain functions, with built-in infrastructure, observability, and tracing.
AI & Machine LearningCloud ComputingDeveloper Tools
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Osmosis is a reinforcement fine-tuning platform that provides reinforcement learning infrastructure to help developers build and deploy AI agents that improve from experience.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsEnterprise Software
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsMatteo Franceschetti
Hyper provides AI-generated meeting summaries that turn long discussions into concise recaps highlighting key decisions and open questions, including AI transcription of calls.
AI & Machine LearningFuture of WorkSaaS
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsEniac VenturesGreatPoint VenturesK5 GlobalRipple VenturesTusk Venture PartnersVSC Ventures
Keycard provides access control and identity management for AI agents, resolving a composite identity (user, device, agent, task) and issuing short-lived, least-privilege credentials scoped to each task when an agent requests access to tools, APIs, and data.
AI & Machine LearningCybersecurityDeveloper Tools
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsModern TechnicalTapestry VCAcrew CapitalAndreessen Horowitzboldstart venturesEssence Venture Capital
Lemma provides production monitoring and observability for AI agents, surfacing failures, aggregating issues, and enabling quick resolution through integrated alerts and context-sharing tools.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareSan Francisco, US
Jerry Zhang(Founder)inCole Gawin(Founder)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsY CombinatorGreycroftHomebrewIndex Ventures
Mach9 builds automated feature-extraction software for transportation, telecom, and construction industries, enabling rapid extraction and mapping of large-scale infrastructure projects.
AI & Machine LearningConstruction TechData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareSan Francisco, US
Alexander Baikovitz(Founder)inHaowen Shi(Founder)inMichael Mong(Cofounder)Zachary Sussman(Cofounder)
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsY CombinatorQuiet Capital
Number Zero is an open R&D organization building software for efficient distributed systems, including iroh, a toolkit for building distributed applications.
Data & InfrastructureDeep TechDeveloper ToolsBrooklyn, US
Brendan O'Brien(Executive Officer, Director, Promoter)
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsEx/Ante
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsVela PartnersEssence Venture Capital
Red Barn Robotics develops autonomous weeding robots for farms to eliminate intra-row weeds without human intervention, reducing labor costs and protecting soil health.
Advanced ManufacturingAgTechHardwareRoboticsSeattle, US
Adam Iseman(Founder)inIlya Kelner(Founder)inAlex Neff(Founder)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsRegion CuatroY Combinator
Sequin is an open-source Postgres change data capture tool, distributed as a Docker container, that streams database changes in real time to destinations like Kafka, Redis, SQS, GCP Pub/Sub, Elasticsearch, and webhooks with exactly-once processing and strict ordering.
Cloud ComputingData & InfrastructureDeveloper Tools
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsParadigm
Staris is a continuous application security validation platform that uses AI to simulate attacker behavior, prove which vulnerabilities are actually exploitable in running applications, and ship PR-ready code-level patches with each finding.
AI & Machine LearningCybersecurityDeveloper Tools
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
StarSling builds AI-native continuous integration for GitHub Actions, providing fast runners and agents that analyze workflows, logs, and telemetry to automatically open pull requests optimizing CI pipelines.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareSaaSSan Francisco, US
Yonas Beshawred(Co-founder & CEO)inDaniel Worku(Co-founder & CTO)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsY CombinatorOutset CapitalTranspose Platform Management
Sutro provides a backend infrastructure platform that enables developers to define and deploy production-grade backends through a domain-specific language called SLang.
Cloud ComputingDeveloper Tools
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Tadata is an AI agent platform that integrates into Slack to automate research and repetitive work by connecting to business tools like CRM, marketing, and ops systems.
AI & Machine LearningEnterprise SoftwareSaaS
Tori Seidenstein(Founder)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsGreatPoint VenturesRackhouse Venture Management Lp
CopilotKit provides an open-source framework and protocol (AG-UI) for developers to build and embed AI agents with rich, interactive user interfaces directly into applications, including web, Slack, and Teams.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsSaaSIssaquah, US
Atai Barkai(CEO)inUli Barkai(Founder)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investors97212 VenturesAbstraction CapitalDeep Acrefresh.fundGlilot Capital PartnersSignalFire+1 more
Tillion is an AI assistant for legal contract work that analyzes agreements to summarize documents, identify risks and red-flag clauses, compare contracts, and suggest alternative language.
AI & Machine LearningLegalTechSaaS
Lior Romano(Founder)inBarak Naveh(Founder)in
PartnerAshley Smith· solo GP
Co-investorsKindred CapitalUpWestSelah Ventures
Exits · 1
IPOs and acquisitions across the tracked portfolio<UNKNOWN>acq. by Hugging Face
Portfolio news
latest coverage across their companiesSutro · marketbeat.com · Aug 18, 2026
Atomic · thesaasnews.com · Aug 7, 2026
Gulp · morningstar.com · Aug 4, 2026
Clarify · geekwire.com · Jul 21, 2026
StarSling · ycombinator.com · Jun 29, 2026
Sequin · themenopausecharity.org · May 18, 2026
Mach9 · ycombinator.com · Mar 30, 2026
Lemma · ycombinator.com · Nov 5, 2025
Frequently asked questions
- How many investments has Vermilion Cliffs Ventures made?
- Vermilion Cliffs Ventures has 30 tracked investments, 1 of which have exited via acquisition or IPO, including 2 dated in the last 24 months.
- What stage does Vermilion Cliffs Ventures invest at?
- Vermilion Cliffs Ventures invests at the Pre-Seed, Seed stages.
- What is Vermilion Cliffs Ventures's typical check size?
- Vermilion Cliffs Ventures typically writes checks of $200K – $500K.
- What sectors does Vermilion Cliffs Ventures focus on?
- Vermilion Cliffs Ventures focuses on AI & Machine Learning, Cybersecurity, Data & Infrastructure, Developer Tools.
- Where is Vermilion Cliffs Ventures located?
- Vermilion Cliffs Ventures is headquartered in New York, US.
- Who does Vermilion Cliffs Ventures co-invest with?
- Vermilion Cliffs Ventures most often shares deals with Y Combinator, Abstraction Capital, Eniac Ventures, among 35 tracked co-investors.
Media · Podcasts & interviews
featuring the team#29 Ashley Smith, GP & Founder, Vermilion Cliffs Ventures
Zight · Ashley Smith
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