# Playground — True Ventures
> First to believe. True Ventures leads pre-seed and seed rounds; this is where True builds in the open.
## Who True Ventures is
First to believe. True Ventures leads pre-seed and seed rounds for founders shaping their product, defining their market, and building their team.
As published on [trueventures.com](https://trueventures.com):
- $4B committed capital
- 1,050+ founders
- 500+ companies
- 70 founders who chose True again
trueventures.ai is the Playground: where True builds in the open. Pitch our partners' AI at True AI Office Hours, walk through a 3D room of True companies, read True North, or come to a Scrappy Sessions demo night.
Everything here is public; nothing on this site is investment advice or an offer.
## True AI Office Hours
Founders pitch AI versions of True's partners and get structured feedback. A person starts each session themselves.
## Scrappy Sessions: demo nights at True
An open demo night for people building things, every other Tuesday at the True office in San Francisco, with a new theme each session.
Next: 2026-11-03 (nov 3), 5:30–7:00 pm Pacific — theme: bio × ai.
[Scrappy Sessions, for agents](https://www.trueventures.ai/scrappy.md) — dates, how a night goes, and the board of what visitors are building.
## True North
Our newsletter: ideas, what we're reading, and what True founders are building. Every edition can be rewritten for you by your LLM of choice (Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT).
- [Many take a lot](https://www.trueventures.ai/archive/2026-10-21) — 2026-10-21. Models compiled into chips, token budgets without a benchmark, Jon on abundance over scarcity, and what True founders are building.
- [Give AI a job worth doing](https://www.trueventures.ai/archive/2026-09-17) — 2026-09-17. What we’re taking from Connected Stack, what our fellows shipped, and the founders putting AI to work.
- [Your failure data is gold](https://www.trueventures.ai/archive/2026-08-04) — 2026-08-04. Failure data as moat, launch every month forever, PMF ceiling analysis, plus True's datalake goes live, Connected Stack returns, and what True founders are building.
- [Outcome-maxxing, judgment capture, and agent guardrails](https://www.trueventures.ai/archive/2026-06-23) — 2026-06-23. Outcome-maxxing token spend, pricing agents to the human not the seat, captured judgment as the moat, plus Connected Stack 2026 returns and what True founders are building.
- [The "Candle Mold" Thesis](https://www.trueventures.ai/archive/2026-05-14) — 2026-05-14. The mold is the asset, build for model change, your corpus is the moat, plus the LA accelerator recap and what True founders are building.
- [The attack surface is everywhere](https://www.trueventures.ai/archive/2026-04-13) — 2026-04-13. Your agent stack is an attack surface, stop helicopter parenting your agents, Physical AI's moat is data, and what True founders are building.
- [The AI-sniffing-AI loop](https://www.trueventures.ai/archive/2026-03-19) — 2026-03-19. AI Office Hours on Polsia, stop pricing on tokens, the AI-sniffing-AI loop, and what True founders are building.
- [Burn the tokens, and the Wabi Sabi of it all](https://www.trueventures.ai/archive/2026-03-02) — 2026-03-02. Handshake AI's $1B run, token spend as VO2 max, the Wabi Sabi of AI, and what True founders are building.
## True companies at play
On the page, each of these is a hand-drawn object you can pick up and toss around.
- [ICEYE](https://www.iceye.com/) — Radar satellites the size of a suitcase. Founders determined to put the whole planet in view.
- [Ring](https://ring.com/) — A doorbell with an app. Three people in our network vouched for Jamie after Shark Tank passed.
- [Sandbar](https://www.sandbar.com/) — A wearable for talking to AI. Founders imagining a future beyond the screen.
- [Fitbit](https://store.google.com/category/watches_trackers) — A pedometer. Nobody called it health yet.
- [Peloton](https://www.onepeloton.com/) — An exercise bike with a screen on it. Founders who saw a movement, not just a machine.
- [Blue Bottle Coffee](https://bluebottlecoffee.com/) — A coffee cart in Oakland. Early is not only technology.
- [Bear Flag Robotics](https://bearflagrobotics.com/) — Self-driving tractors. Founders who built robots for real work on real farms.
- [Deep Genomics](https://www.deepgenomics.com/) — Deep learning to read the genome. Our first AI investment.
- [Enveda](https://enveda.com/) — Medicinal plants, decoded with AI. A founder convinced nature held medicines the world was missing.
- [Basecamp Research](https://www.basecamp-research.com/) — DNA sequenced on an ice cap. Two founders turning nature's diversity into AI that designs medicines.
- [Bluesky](https://bsky.social/about/) — A social network built on a conviction that people, not platforms, should be in control.
- [Duo Security](https://duo.com/) — Two-factor login people didn't hate. Security as a product.
## The room
Through the door is [the room](https://www.trueventures.ai/room): a 3D space you walk around in, with an object for every company below plus the ones above. Click anything to meet the company.
- [Automattic](https://automattic.com/) — A blogging tool. The open web, before anyone called it that.
- [Avidbots](https://www.avidbots.com/) — Autonomous floor-scrubbing robots for large commercial spaces.
- [Hatch](https://www.hatch.co/) — Smart sleep devices that help people sleep better and build healthy sleep habits.
- [Bigscreen](https://bigscreenvr.com/) — Bigscreen Beyond 2, an ultralight 107-gram PC VR headset with micro-OLED displays and pancake optics.
- [Feno](https://feno.co/) — The Smartbrush, an AI-powered U-shaped toothbrush that cleans the whole mouth in 20 seconds.
- [Sofar](https://www.sofarocean.com/) — Real-time ocean data to reduce fuel costs, detect threats, and protect maritime assets at a global scale.
- [Kewazo](https://www.kewazo.com/) — LIFTBOT, a battery-powered robot that automates material lifting on construction and industrial sites.
- [Nexar](https://www.getnexar.com/) — A community-based AI dash cam and mobile app.
- [Aristotle](https://www.heyaristotle.com/) — Aristotle is a voice-based AI tutor that guides middle and high school students through 65+ subjects with Socratic questions and progress tracking for parents.
- [Atticus](https://www.atticus.com) — Atticus is a legal services platform that helps Americans seek and find help with disability and benefits.
- [Audos](https://audos.com/) — Audos helps everyday entrepreneurs launch AI-native businesses with AI copilots, go-to-market support, and funding in exchange for a revenue share, not equity.
- [Bible Chat](https://thebiblechat.com) — Bible Chat is an AI-powered Christian app for faith-based questions.
- [Casa](https://getcasa.com) — Casa is a home management membership that handles maintenance, repairs, and household tasks with handymen, a concierge team, automated care plans, and a digital home inventory.
- [Daydream](https://daydream.ing/) — Daydream is an AI shopping agent for fashion that turns plain-language or photo requests into personalized picks from thousands of brands.
- [Digg](https://di.gg/ai) — Digg is a news aggregator that ranks the most important stories of the day, starting with AI news.
- [Ditto](https://www.ditto.com) — Ditto syncs data peer to peer across mobile and edge devices so critical apps in retail, aviation, and defense keep working without internet.
- [Ernesta](https://www.ernesta.com) — Ernesta is a direct-to-consumer brand offering design-forward, custom-cut rugs.
- [Feroot](https://www.feroot.com/) — Feroot automates privacy, consent, and PCI DSS compliance for websites and mobile apps, protecting payment pages and user data from malicious scripts.
- [Gather](https://www.gatherhq.com/) — Gather is an AI-native market research platform for marketing teams.
- [Gridware](https://www.gridware.io/) — Gridware monitors potential power outage risk using remote telemetry and edge AI.
- [Handshake](https://joinhandshake.com/) — A career network for students employers overlooked. Now the largest, most trusted network for careers in the AI economy.
- [Hi Marley](https://www.himarley.com/) — Hi Marley is the intelligent communication platform for the insurance industry.
- [Kettle](https://ourkettle.com/) — Kettle is an underwriting platform to help provide wildfire insurance using AI and satellite data.
- [Madison Reed](https://www.madison-reed.com/) — Madison Reed is a hair color company that offers at-home hair color products and in-person hair coloring services.
- [Moderne](https://moderne.io/) — Moderne offers scalable automated source code refactoring for enterprises.
- [Nectar Social](https://www.nectarsocial.com/) — Nectar Social gives brands an AI system for social listening, community management, and automated customer engagement that turns social conversations into revenue.
- [Nixtla](https://www.nixtla.io) — Nixtla builds AI software for time series forecasting and anomaly detection.
- [PayNearMe](https://home.paynearme.com/) — PayNearMe helps businesses and government agencies accept and disburse cash, card, ACH, and mobile payments across lending, tolling, gaming, and mortgage servicing.
- [Polsia](https://polsia.com) — AI that runs a company. A founder betting that ambition matters more than headcount.
- [RadiantGraph](https://www.radiantgraph.com) — RadiantGraph uses AI voice agents and omnichannel outreach to help health plans reach at-risk members and close preventive care gaps.
- [Sailplane](https://www.sailplane.ai) — Sailplane builds AI agents that autonomously operate production infrastructure, including rack-scale hardware in AI data centers.
- [Solo.io](https://www.solo.io/) — Solo.io builds cloud connectivity and AI agent infrastructure, including Istio service mesh, API gateways, and a Kubernetes runtime and gateway for AI agents.
- [Splice](https://splice.com/) — Splice gives music producers royalty-free samples, plugins, and AI tools to make tracks, paying creators each time their sounds are used.
- [Tenkara](https://tenkara.ai/) — Tenkara automates back-office operations for process manufacturers.
- [The Nuclear Company](https://www.thenuclearcompany.com) — The Nuclear Company deploys fleet-scale nuclear power using standardized designs and AI, and services operating plants nationwide through its Powerhouse Resources division.
- [Tray.ai](https://tray.ai) — Tray.ai is an enterprise orchestration platform for building AI agents, governing MCP tools, and automating processes across 700+ applications.
- [Understory](https://understoryweather.com/) — Understory offers insurance built for the future, starting with open lot coverage that protects auto dealerships from severe weather.
- [Vers](https://vers.sh/) — Vers lets developers branch running virtual machines like code, exploring parallel paths from a shared state and keeping the one that works.
- [Concentrate](https://concentrate.ai/) — Concentrate is an LLM gateway that gives teams one API for hundreds of models, with routing, fallbacks, spend tracking, and governance built in.
- [Town](https://www.town.com/) — Town is an AI assistant that learns how you work, then drafts emails, manages to-dos, and runs recurring workflows in your own style.
- [Bolo AI](https://bolo.ai/) — Bolo AI builds an AI context layer for oil and gas, power, and utilities that plugs into existing systems to run agents for asset management, planning, and operations.
- [Paper Instruments](https://www.paperinstruments.com/) — Paper Instruments, formerly The LLM Data Company, builds open-source frontier models for knowledge work.
- [Vectorize](https://vectorize.io/) — Vectorize builds Hindsight, an open-source memory system that lets AI agents remember users, learn from mistakes, and improve over time.
- [Simple AI](https://www.usesimple.ai/) — Simple AI builds AI phone agents that handle inbound sales, customer support, and lead qualification calls for businesses.
- [TokenCompass](https://tokencompass.ai/) — TokenCompass tracks AI spending across providers like Claude, Codex, and Cursor and ties that spend to business impact across the company.
## Links