Ben Orthlieb & Romain Serman / Blue Moon

Ben Orthlieb and Romain Serman are Co-Founders of Blue Moon Ventures, a seed fund that operates like a fintech company, sourcing deals through AI and making investment decisions with machine learning precision.

Ben and Romain met in San Francisco 10 years ago and bonded over what they thought was broken. “VCs, investors, mostly work at Blue Bottle Coffee, meeting with founders in real life and working on spreadsheets. We never stopped talking about the fact that probably the people who invest in tech should use a little bit of tech themselves to perform better.” Ben was deep in B2B SaaS and M&A at LinkedIn. Romain runs the US Office of the French Sovereign Fund, a 35B-AUM financial institution. They weren’t Ivy League MBAs with Tier 1 fund pedigrees.

Our conversation gets into how they built Agatha, their sourcing and screening algorithm that processes over 8,000 founding teams annually, screening them down to about 400 worth engaging with. Most established funds see a few hundred deals per year. Blue Moon systematically evaluates 20x that volume with an ouput score from 0 to 100 predicting the chances of raising a Series B.

The results: four years in, they’ve produced two unicorns from their 2021 vintage, and they’re tracking as a top 1-2% performing seed fund based on TVPI metrics.

We also talk about how they solved the value-add question. Most emerging managers struggle with helping 50+ companies without burning out. Blue Moon outsourced value-add services from day one. Executive coaching, sales coaching, CTO mentorship programs. It’s scalable because it’s systematized.

“Over the last 60 years, venture capital at an early stage was a function of time and network. The future is seed investing will not be a function of time and network anymore.”

Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts