Each April, our global Behind Genius community gathers from across the world at our Annual Summit. This year, we had 60+ attendees from San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Waterloo, San Diego, Atlanta, Vancouver, Orlando, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and more.

At Behind Genius Ventures, we seek to back the best technical storytellers at their earliest chapters across the US & Canada. Since our beginnings in 2021, Behind Genius has backed 50+ companies including MoldCo, Coast, Hearth Display, and Break Sports across a $5M Fund I & $8.9M Fund II. At the 2025 Summit, we highlighted six portfolio founders, updates on Behind Genius Fund II launched last year, and our vision for the future.

Annual Summit Short Film

What started as a small gathering a few years ago has evolved into a vibrant annual tradition, seen here in our short film by Max Toshiro: 

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Portfolio Companies Highlighted

As a firm focused on technical storytellers, our annual summits focus mainly on highlighting company-building stories directly from our portfolio founders.

Six of our founders, from our very first investment in Fund I, Beacons, to one of our most recent in Fund II, Intermezzo, presented this year:

Beacons.AI: Next Generation Creator Infrastructure

David Zeng, cofounder and CTO of Beacons.AI, holds a PhD from Stanford & showcased how they’re powering the creator economy building better tools for digital entrepreneurs at Beacons.AI. 

Intermezzo: Global Payroll API

Kumar Ramanathan, cofounder and CTO of Intermezzo, held multiple roles across different business lines for over two decades at Intuit. He gave us a glimpse into the future of AI-driven payroll infrastructure at Intermezzo.

Statusphere: Scaling Influencer Campaigns

Kristen Wiley, CEO of Statusphere & a veteran CMO shared her journey scaling a creator marketplace that connects brands with authentic voices. 

Hostie: Voice AI for Resturaunts

Randall Hom, cofounder and CEO of Hostie. After nearly a decade as a product designer at Flexport and Instacart, he started a restaurant in SF called Back to Back. After a few successful years operating, he decided to take another leap by starting a tech company within the restaurant space called Hostie. Randall shared how they're applying AI to make restaurant and guest communication more reliable and hospitable.

Roots: Assumable Morgages

Lauren Lorraine Self, cofounder & CEO of Roots, discussed their recent new cities launched on Roots, a platform for assumable mortgages.

Hum.AI: Foundational Model for the Natural World

Thomas Storwick, cofounder & CTO of Hum.Ai (fka Coastal Carbon), demonstrated how they’re leveraging applied AI to build an AI model for general intelligence of the physical world. 

Updates & research from our team

• On the research front, our team member Chinwuba presented original insights from What It Takes, his quantitative deep dive on the last 100 $1B+ exits. Three statistics that stood out to our attendees:
  
  • Rivian's $66B IPO was the largest exit, which it still is!
  • Average revenue of companies that sold or IPO'd for $1B+ was $348M and median was $205M.
  • When we evaluated aggragate exit value & aggregate amount raised across different sectors, Cybersecurity had the highest average value creation ratio - for every one dollar invested, 24 dollars of exit value.

• On the community front, our team member Andy presented an update on our Partnerships Program. We announced this program at last year's annual summit, and we now offer $250k+ in benefits through leading partners like Stripe, Anthropic, AWS, Nvidia, Customer.io, GitHub, and many more.
• On the vision front, our founding partner Paige presented our learnings & her goals for the future of Behind Genius. Stay tuned for more!

Celebrating at Back to Back

After the summit, we ate dinner together at Randall Hom’s award-winning restaurant Back to Back. Thank you to Fondo & Arc for their generosity in sponsoring our celebration of another successful Behind Genius Annual Summit.

A Note of Gratitude

Thank you to our team, our LPs, our founders, Max Toshiro & Alexandra Stancheva for capturing the magic of our Annual Summit, and all the folks who helped us brainstorm and execute on this gathering.

Each year, our annual summit reminds us why we do what we do - embarking on the treasure hunt of identifying great technical storytellers, amplifying their stories, and bringing our community together. As we reflect on this year’s annual summit, we’re grateful for the continued trust of our LPs, the drive and energy of our portfolio founders, and the spirit of the broader Behind Genius community.

As Behind Genius continues to grow, we look forward to building, learning, and celebrating together with our community each April. 

If you're interested in joining us next year, please drop us a note at hello@behindgeniusventures.com.