Cooking up something new. Stay tuned!🧑🏼‍🍳🪄

10x Founder → Early Stage Investor. 
General Partner @ First Degree Capital.

We’re backers of brave beginnings:

Jan ‘26 Elio & Alex and Scalestack
Nov ‘25 Arnaud & Arthur and Sillage
Sep ‘25 Dmitry & Andrew and Graphio
Aug ‘25 David & Youngjae and Limelight
Jul ‘25 Gabriel & Edouard and Trampoline
Jun ‘25 Eldad & Bar and Winn
May ‘25 Dan, Robin & Leonard and Topo
Jan ‘25 Benjamin, Jean-Luc & Grégoire and Fullenrich 
Sep ‘24 Leopold & Walid and Alphalens
Sep ‘24 Paulius, Tomas, Irmantas & Justin and WhiteBridge (Sep ’24)
May ‘24 Simon & Pawel and NewNative / Lablab

We co-invest alongside great angels and co-investors such as Y Combinator, Insight Partners, Kima Ventures, Flex Capital, Alliance VC, AltaIR, Luminar, Skyfall, and more.

We 💜 AI-driven companies “changing the way we work” and take out the 🫏 work. 

If you’re building something ambitious in productivity, collaboration, or workflow automation — let’s talk.

DM us or send your deck to kaan@firstdegree.capital

Kaan Anit

💥 Proud to introduce our first investment of 2026!

Most enterprise GTM teams have an infrastructure problem.

→ Building and maintaining custom solutions, manually coordinating data vendors.
→ Often ending up with no ability to reliably write structured data back into the crm.
→ Which leads to lack of trust in data, decreased quality of campaigns and programs and a lot more.

That’s why we’re backing Scalestack!

🧩 What they’re building
Scalestack is building the Autonomous Revenue Engine for enterprise GTM teams.

Not a point solution.
Not an individual productivity tool.
Not another spreadsheet with AI.

But enterprise-native, agentic workflow infrastructure that unifies data, integrations, and AI agents into scalable, auditable systems of action.

Infrastructure first. Autonomy next.

💡 Why this matters
Companies like MongoDB, Redis, Astronomer, Typeform and many more, with large datasets and growing teams trust Scalestack for holistic hygiene, system-wide insights, managed via an agentic orchestration layer. Data and workflows that finally scale.

→ Org-level GTM
→ Compliance, governance, and auditability
→ Composable, agentic workflows that solve for Sales, Marketing, Product and Ops use cases at scale

For larger customers, this system fuels growth. And saves them from building and owning brittle systems themselves, freeing resources and guaranteeing long-term maintainability. 

👥 The founders
US-based founders with European roots. This was a team-led conviction.

Elio: repeat founder with two prior exits, former global lead behind the AWS Global Startup Program, MIT MBA
Alessandro (aka Alex): Alter built Scalestack v1 independently; owns product, engineering, and operations

Clear ownership.
Strong partner-in-crime dynamic.
Operators building for operators.

🤝 Backers
We’re joining a cap table that includes, among others, Forum Ventures, Ripple Ventures, Exor Ventures, Flyer One Ventures, @Criteria Venture Tech, BackFuture and Sentiero Ventures. 

The company is also supported by experienced operators and advisors including Isaac Babbs, Meghan Gill, and Andy Mowat.

🔭 Our take
We believe the future of revenue operations is agentic, autonomous, and infrastructure-driven.

Scalestack is building the foundation for that future, with an impressive customer and partner list already trusting that foundation.

If you'd like to know more check out their website www.scalestack.ai and happy to make an intro to the team too.

BTW:  if you're looking for Elio on the team picture, guess what? He's not there 🫣

#Scalestack #FirstDegree #BackersOfBraveBeginnings

Kaan Anit 🫧

JSESSIONID

li_at

Talks about #startups, #earlystage, #buildingteams, #accesstopeople, and #accesstocapital

Scalestack

MongoDB

Redis

Astronomer

Typeform

Co-Founder & CEO @ Scalestack | Autonomous Revenue Engine. Zero Duct Tape.

Co-Founder @ Scalestack AI: AI-powered Workflows at Enterprise Scale.

Forum Ventures

Ripple Ventures

Exor Ventures

Flyer One Ventures

BackFuture

Sentiero Ventures

M&A Advisor/Executive Advisor AI/Software/SaaS

I connect great people ↔︎ companies | 4x unicorn exec

Backing brave founders.

Thomas Hughes Ellis

After 25 years of starting things, this is what I know for sure.

I’m writing this from Koh Lanta, with a good friend, a bit of distance, and a rare pause.

And distance does something interesting: it strips away noise and leaves only patterns.

After 25 years of building companies, hiring thousands of people, sitting on both sides of the table as founder and investor, one thing is painfully clear:

Success is rarely about ideas.

It’s about:
- People you choose
- Timing you respect
- Access you earn
- And your ability to keep going when it gets uncomfortable

I’ve seen brilliant ideas fail because the team wasn’t ready.

I’ve seen average ideas win because the people were exceptional.

That’s why I believe:
People matter more than product.
Access matters more than capital.
Trust compounds faster than growth hacks.

This isn’t a hot take.
It’s just pattern recognition.

Back to work soon.
But some truths only surface when you slow down.

Curious if this matches your experience.

No alternative text description for this image

On Friday, the last day of January, we closed our second investment of 2026: Singulate 💪🏽

Most “AI personalization” in B2B is still lipstick on a spreadsheet.

First name.
Company name.
Maybe an industry token if you’re lucky.

That’s not personalization. That’s automation cosplay.
What actually breaks down for B2B teams isn’t creativity. It’s operations.

• Fragmented CRM data
• Manual segmentation
• QA hell at scale
• Teams maintaining hundreds of variants instead of shipping

That’s the real bottleneck.
This is why we back Dave, Nico and John and Singulate.

Singulate isn’t another AI copy tool.
It’s an AI-native marketing ops platform that sits on top of your CRM and campaign stack and handles the hard stuff:

→ Research
→ Segmentation
→ Validation
→ 1:1 personalization at scale

Without sacrificing speed, control, or brand consistency.

The proof is already there:

• ~400k emails analysed across active customers
• Up to 7× higher click rates vs basic personalization
• Workvivo (by Zoom) scaling lifecycle marketing 16×
• Teams moving from data to impact in minutes, not days
And the team behind it matters. A lot.

Singulate is founded by Dave Schools (Baltimore, US), Nicolas Klein (London, UK) and John O'Gara (Lisbon, Portugal).

They worked together at Hopin, helping scale the business from 0 to ~$100M ARR, building and operating GTM and infrastructure at real hypergrowth speed.

They didn’t study this problem.
They lived it.

The round is backed by a strong group, including Seedcamp, Bowery Capital, and founders and operators from companies like Indeed (Paul Forster), SaaStock, Tola, and TrackMaven.

What really clicked for us:

Singulate doesn’t sell AI magic.
It sells reliability.

As AI moves from experimentation to mission-critical GTM workflows, reliability, verification, and operational confidence become the real moat.

This is marketing ops rebuilt for the AI era.
Built by a global team.
For global teams.

Proud to back them as they scale 🚀

#FirstDegreeCapital #BackersOfBraveBeginnings #Singulate #MarketingOps #AIinB2B #FutureOfWork

Should all founders be fundraising?

I’ve been thinking about this while spending nearly 2 weeks in beautiful Thailand, about to head back to Amsterdam on Thursday.

Distance has a way of clarifying things.

I was actually reading a great post from Chris Tottman last week, which confirmed my thoughts. 

In my humble opinion, most founders shouldn’t be fundraising.

Not because founders aren’t smart.
Not because the ideas aren’t interesting.

But because fundraising doesn’t create clarity.
It amplifies whatever is already there.

If the team isn’t aligned, it shows.
If the story isn’t clear, it leaks.
If momentum is missing, investors sense it immediately.

Capital doesn’t fix fundamentals.
It exposes them.

I’ve seen founders spend months fundraising when the real work was:

- tightening decisions
- getting closer to customers
- building trust before slides

Sometimes the right move isn’t raising a round.

It’s slowing down long enough to get the basics right.

Curious… in your experience, does fundraising create momentum… or simply reveal it?

In 2025 everyone was talking about Artificial Intelligence.

Out of curiosity I checked what happened in tech the year I was born (1973)…

Turns out: almost everything we’re still building on today.

In one single year, the foundations were laid for the internet, mobile phones, personal computing, and automation.

A few highlights 👇

Networking
▶️ The first design of TCP/IP by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn — still the backbone of the internet today
▶️ Early experiments connecting different networks (ARPANET, radio, satellite). The idea of networks of networks was born.

Mobile
▶️ The first handheld mobile phone call, made in New York by Martin Cooper using a Motorola prototype.
The mobile era officially started.

Computing
▶️ Xerox PARC introduced the Alto: graphical interface, mouse, bitmapped screen.
The blueprint for every modern computer.

Data & automation
▶️ Launch of Lexis, one of the first large-scale online information systems
▶️ Barcode scanning enters supermarkets
▶️ The ATM moves from concept to reality

Robotics & infrastructure
▶️ The first full-scale humanoid robot (WABOT-1)
▶️ Practical fiber-optic cables make high-speed global communication possible

And even film
▶️ Westworld becomes the first movie to use digital image processing.

1973 wasn’t about apps.
It wasn’t about hype.

It was about foundations.

Some years define the next 50.
1973 was one of them.

Curious what happened the year you were born?
Drop it below 👇

👋 To everyone in the First Degree Capital community...

If you’re a marketing leader at a mid-cap or enterprise SaaS company, you’ll want to read the December round-up from David and his team at Limelight. 

It’s packed with sharp insights and very practical takeaways. ✍️👇

And if you haven’t tried Limelight yet, you probably should.
Yes, I’m biased (I’m a small investor), but I’d say the same even if I wasn’t.

So:

1️⃣ Have a read 👀
2️⃣ Visit 👉 www.limelighthq.com
3️⃣ Let the magic happen 🔥

#BackersOfBraveBeginnings 
#Limelight 
#FirstDegreeCapital

Founder of Limelight | B2B Influencer Marketplace

December Round-Up!! 
4 of our core metrics are DOWN 
😲 What happened?? Did we screw up?

Short answer: No.
More honest answer ↓

December was a deliberate slowdown.

Founders don’t like admitting this, but after a fundraise, the WORST thing you can do is sprint.

I learned that the hard way in a past company.

Hired too fast. 
Sold too fast. 
Ran too fast.

And then the pipes burst.

So in December, we audited and rebuilt our infrastructure.

(AKA: took an intentional pause).

And yes, the MoM numbers dipped:
📉 -41% transactions 
📉 -38% proposals sent 
📉 -57% creator applicants 
📉 -49% completed transactions

Why?
Part holiday season. 
Part intentional slowdown.

But despite all that?

MRR still GREW.
📈It's up +4.2%

We also finished the year with creator payments up 13x YoY 🤑

WHAT WENT WELL:

👍🏼 Built a real-time live customer health dashboard. Every account now has a health score out of 100 and a churn risk calculator based on product usage.

👍🏼 Optimised onboarding via AI agents. Activation friction is the silent killer of PLG - so we rebuilt it from scratch.

👍🏼 Redesigned our leads system to handle 100x demand (will create capacity to scale at mass in 2026).

👍🏼 Hired our Head of Customer Success. (They'll enhance the user journey: onboarding → adoption → retention → expansion).

WHAT’S STILL HARD:

👎🏼 Self-serve isn’t working at the level we need. So in Q1, the influencer product is moving fully sales-led, while Signals stays PLG.

👎🏼 Churn is still the biggest drag on growth. We grew most of the year without a formal CS function. But we've fixed that for 2026.

WHAT'S NEXT?

We doubled down on a simple belief:
You can’t build for creators unless you are one.

So this year, I'm going all in:

🎙️ Podcast launching in February 
📰 Beehiiv newsletter launching

If we're asking brands to trust creators, we have to live the motion ourselves.

OUR 2026 GOALS:

(Saying it here so I can’t back out).

• 10x customer lead exports 
• Triple ARR by Jan 2027 
• 3x our creator base 
• Churn to < 15% 
• 10x MAUs

Ambitious AF. I know 😎

December wasn't one for aggressive growth.

It was about slowing down and tightening the screws.

(I also wanted to give the team a chance to take a breather and FULLY enjoy time off work with their loved ones).

But now we’re PUMPED UP and ready to go!

The fun starts here.

Let’s build this SH*T 🔥🔥

P.S. What’s your focus for 2026???

Everyone is talking about AI steeling their job…

But there’s 10 things I found out in 2025 why AI can’t steal from my job 🤣

1.	Nodding seriously while having absolutely no idea what the founder just said.

2.	Saying “interesting” and meaning “this is not happening.”

3.	Backing someone because they “feel right” and only later finding reasons.

4.	Changing my mind after one good coffee and a bad night’s sleep.

5.	Trusting my gut, which has no data and terrible documentation.

6.	Asking for one more slide and still not reading it.

7.	Reading the room instead of the deck (the room is often wrong too).

8.	Taking a call at 22:41 to say “you’re not crazy, this is hard.”

9.	Being confidently wrong, then quietly updating the narrative.

10.	Caring too much while pretending it’s purely rational.

What do you think? 

#BackersOfBraveBeginnings
#FirstDegreeCapital
#AlwaysBeLearning
#NewIntoVentureCapital

“diamonds 💎 are built in high-pressure and it takes time to find them.”

To all the founders out there: keep building. 💪🏽

All credits to Carles Reina for this fantastic post! 👀⤵️

GTM @ ElevenLabs | Partner @ Baobab Ventures

Since I launched Baobab Ventures in late November, I've received +1,000 decks (in emails, Linkedin messages, through friends/VCs or Baobab's contact form). What I'm seeing is INSANE. It seems everyone is building AI Agents but this is not accurate. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐨𝐩-𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 & 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝. 

VCs say that there is too much capital chasing the best opportunities when, in fact, the startup ecosystem is expanding at a rate never seen before. Good reminder that diamonds 💎 are built in high-pressure and it takes time to find them. With so much competition and easier-than-ever to build products, pressure is piling up, and diamonds (aka startups) are popping.

Side note, I am still going through my last Linkedin messages - sorry!

This is what I call a killer monthly update 👀⤵️

Founder @ Limelight | B2B Influencer Marketplace with Social Listening Agents

Every month, I send an investor update to 150 people. My co-founder keeps telling me to stop.

“What’s the issue?” I asked.

He pointed at my laptop:

“You’re literally sending our investor update to founders building in the GTM tech space. They could copy us.”

He’s absolutely right.

I am 😂

On paper? It’s stupid. I get it.

My email includes...

📝 MoM performance 
📝 Wins + failures 
📝 Feature releases 
📝 Roadmap priorities 
📝 Customer stories

And yes, I include the actual numbers 🙃

I also send the email to:

→ CMOs, COOs & CEOs at B2B brands 
→ Heads of Growth, Sales & Partnerships 
→ People shaping the B2B creator economy 
→ Operators at LinkedIn, HubSpot, Webflow + more

My co-founder’s worry? Someone could use this against us.

Maybe.

But it's a risk I'm willing to take.

I believe secrecy slows you down, whereas familiarity builds gravity.

People don’t invest in strangers.

They back founders and companies whose trajectory they’ve watched unfold.

Month after month.

I WANT people to see:

• How we build
• How we think
• How fast we ship
• How we handle problems
• How we deliver for customers.

Could someone try to copy us? Of course.

Good luck to them.

But they can't copy-paste our journey.

And the upside of transparency massively outweighs the risk.

(At least in my eyes).

So for now, I’ll keep sending my monthly updates.

In fact, it's already scheduled to go out on Monday @ 8.30am to 150 ppl ⚡ 

P.S. Would YOU be this transparent? Or should someone confiscate my laptop?

"B2B influence is about to EXPLODE in 2026"

Great post, great insights from David Walsh 👀 ⤵️

THE 2026 B2B INFLUENCE FORECAST 📊📝 
(Based on REAL 1st party data!!!)

Bookmark. Save. Share ♻️

↓

B2B influence is about to EXPLODE in 2026.

We're seeing the shift happen in real time inside Limelight.

These trends are based on:

• $3,954,080 in brand-creator proposals 
• $1.4M creator payout across 244 campaigns 
• Companies like HubSpot, Webflow, Clay, Xero etc.

Here’s what’s ACTUALLY happening (and what’s coming next 👀):

1️⃣ Bundles replace one-off posts

Brands have stopped buying “content.” 
They’re buying OUTCOMES.

One brand-creator deal could include:

- 3x monthly LinkedIn posts
- Newsletter promo
- Podcast sponsor
- Webinar cameo
- Stage talk

It's MORE than just social influence.

The B2B creator is becoming a hybrid role: 
→ Educator + evangelist + operator.

2026 = the death of the “1 post for $X” era.

2️⃣ Micro-creators become a mainstream GTM channel

Brands used to test creators with ONE person.

Now? They’re testing 2–3 micro-creators (10-20k audience)… then scaling up to 10–15 once they see ROI.

Because niche creators deliver:
✔ tighter ICP 
✔ higher trust 
✔ more authentic content 
✔ better conversions

The ROI is frankly stupidly high.

2026 = the rise of “micro-creator fleets.”

3️⃣ Performance-based deals go mainstream

Creators are negotiating BONUSES tied to:

• Signups 
• Traffic volume 
• Demo bookings 
• Pipeline influenced 
• Revenue generated

2024 = "pay me per post" 
2025 = "pay me for reach" 
2026 = "pay me for performance."

The ROI is now EASY to measure (especially with the way we've built live, trackable metrics in Limelight).

4️⃣ Long-term retainers become the norm

Creators are turning 1 post into 12–18 month retainers by doing what agencies should be doing:

“Here’s what got high ROI”
“Here’s the new angle to test."
"Here's how we'll run this campaign."

They’re acting like:

→ Advisors 
→ Strategists 
→ Distribution engines

And brands LOVE it.

2026 = creators become an extension of the marketing team.

THE NET?

✔️ Creators are earning in more ways than ever.
✔️ Brands are getting better ROI than traditional channels.
✔️ And buyers get content that doesn’t feel like an ad.

2026 will be the year B2B creators go from “experiment” → core GTM function.

My team of experts, 40+ B2B advisors and I picked these 4 trends as we saw them exponentially grow in Q4!!!

We’re witnessing the birth of a new industry in real time.

P.S. Which trend do YOU think will dominate 2026? 👇

REPOST + SHARE!

I just finished reading a great report by Affinity (worth your time if you’re in private capital).

The headline:
2026 looks like a reopening year for fundraising and deal activity.
But only for firms that can prove how they create value.

A few things that stood out to me 👇

1️⃣ AI has moved from experiment to strategy.

AI is no longer a side project. The best firms are embedding it directly into their workflows (not to replace judgment, but to augment it. Think pattern recognition, faster research, better decisions).

Humans focus on relationships and conviction. AI does the heavy lifting.

2️⃣ Sourcing is still the real battlefield.

Deal flow remains the #1 priority.
More volume is coming, but competition is fierce. The winners are simplifying their stacks, consolidating data, and still going deep (not adding more tools, but getting smarter with fewer).

3️⃣ Fundraising optimism is back (expectations are higher.

LPs are opening up again, but they’re far more selective.

Track record alone isn’t enough anymore. You need clear, data-backed proof of how you source better, win access, and actually move the needle in your portfolio.

My takeaway for 2026:

Quality > quantity.
AI-augmented decision-making.
Fewer tools, better data.

And storytelling that’s grounded in evidence, not vibes.

All credits to Affinity for the work (sharp insights and very aligned with what I’m seeing on the ground).

Curious: how are you using AI today in your investing workflow?

Open article: Private capital predictions for 2026 by affinity.co

Founder of Startup Istanbul

Burak Büyükdemir is a well-known investor, startup ecosystem builder, author, and founder. He is the founder of Etohum, a leading accelerator and seed investor organization in Turkey, as well as the founder of Startup Istanbul and Startup Turkey. Through these programs, he has supported and invested in over 100 startups, providing training, mentorship, and seed investment to help them grow and develop. He is known for his work supporting the global startup ecosystem and has a strong global network of contacts in the startup world. In addition to his work with startups, Burak has also written a book about the founding stories of internet startups in Turkey and has served as a part-time lecturer at Istanbul Technical University and Bahcesehir University.

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