Vermilion Cliffs Ventures
San Francisco, CA · Invests in US · Website
Check size
🔒 $•• – $••Thesis
The next generation of category-defining software won't be born in pitch decks — it'll be hacked together by technical founders who deeply understand the problem. We back developer tools, infrastructure, AI, and security at pre-seed and seed with hands-on GTM support.
Likely not a fit for
No consumer social, non-technical founding teams, or late-stage companies
How they invest
- Lead or follow
- Usually leads
- Typical decision
- ~2 weeks
- Warm intro
- Not required
- Involvement
- Advisor
- Fund status
- Actively deploying
- Decision process
- Solo GP
Partners & team
2 contacts on file
m•••@ve•••.fund
Sign up free to unlock contact →Portfolio
Argilla is a collaboration tool for AI engineers to build high-quality datasets, focusing on NLP and LLMs to improve data quality and model performance.
$24
Catio is building the world’s first AI copilot for tech architecture, providing visibility, data-driven recommendations, and expert guidance to optimize technology stacks and improve decision-making.
Clarify is an autonomous CRM designed for founder-led startups, integrating customer data from various platforms to streamline sales processes and enhance customer relationships.
Colimit provides AI-powered root cause analysis for continuous integration (CI) failures, helping engineering teams save time and maintain workflow by automatically fixing build issues and managing flaky tests.
Confident AI is the AI Quality platform that helps teams ship reliable AI applications. It provides evals in development to catch issues before deployment and observability in production to continuously monitor AI quality at scale.
CopilotKit provides an enterprise-ready frontend stack for integrating AI agents into applications, enabling seamless user-agent interactions through customizable SDKs and protocols.
Delight is an automated platform that helps businesses generate consistent revenue from existing customers by using AI to identify and re-engage them, creating personalized outreach and maximizing ROI.
East River Source Control is building high quality tooling to help you manage your most important asset: your code.
Fiveonefour provides a developer toolkit for analytical backends, aiming to simplify the data engineering process and enhance developer experiences in the data and analytics stack.
Formalstack is rethinking the computing stack for serverless applications, focusing on elastic, soundly isolated, and globally available execution. They leverage formal verification and compilers to build a new programming language and infrastructure for serverless networking.
Recent activity
- Feb 2026
Atomic
Seed · Co-Lead
- Feb 2026
Wallfacer
Seed · Participant
- Feb 2026
Cognee
Seed · Investor
- Jan 2024
Argilla
Seed · Lead
- Jan 2024
Sequin
Seed · Lead
- Jan 2024
Atomic
Pre-Seed · Lead
- Jan 2024
Staris
Pre-Seed · Lead
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures in the news
n24.com.tr
Lemma Secures $2.3M Pre-Seed to Fix Silent AI Agent Failures
24 days ago
The American Bazaar
Startup Lemma raises $2.3M to catch silent failures in AI agents
24 days ago
GlobeNewswire
$2.3M Pre-Seed for Lemma – Backed by Matrix, YC & OpenAI/xAI Operators to Fix "Silent" AI Agent Failures
24 days ago
Dealroom
Lemma raises $2.3M pre-seed to catch AI agents that fail silently
1 month ago
Vocal
Solo GP Ashley Smith Closes $25 Million Second Fund to Back Startups in AI Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, and Developer Tools
1 month ago
Межа. Новини України.
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures closed $25M Fund II to back AI infrastructure and cybersecurity startups
2 months ago
Межа. Новини України.
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures closed $25M Fund II to back AI infrastructure and cybersecurity startups
2 months ago
Межа. Новини України.
Pilot jumped from moving Cessna and died, student landed plane alone
2 months ago
TechCrunch
Solo GP Ashley Smith announces second $25M fund to back startups in AI, security and more
2 months ago
Zamin.uz
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures allocates $25 million for AI and security startups
2 months ago
AlleyWatch
The Weekly Notable Startup Funding Report: 6/29/26
2 months ago
AlleyWatch
The Weekly Notable Startup Funding Report: 5/11/26
3 months ago
Pulse 2.0
CopilotKit: $27 Million Series A Raised For Enterprise Agentic Frontend Stack
4 months ago
Fortune
How Screendoor became a key signal for emerging VC talent
10 months ago
Fortune
Vermillion Cliffs Ventures launches with $13 million debut fund
Feb 2025
Similar firms
Neo invests in college students and very young technologists via a communal mentorship network of several hundred engineers, founders, and advisors, offering non-dilutive grants and long-term pre-company mentorship. The fund is structured as a community rather than a traditional GP-centric fund structure.
Operates a Sage model where CEOs and serial founders embed as hands-on operators, sometimes interim leaders, hatch and prototype startups internally, and bring hundreds of millions in follow-on capital. The firm also hatches new companies internally by having partners identify opportunities, do research and prototyping, then match concepts with founders—functioning partially like a startup studio while running a traditional venture fund.
Research briefRead more
Add Vermilion Cliffs Ventures to your investor list
Sign up free to save investors, see partner contacts, and track your raise.
Sign up