Aviso Ventures Research
Investment Thesis
Aviso Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in enterprise software, with a stated focus on "Early Stage Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Data, AI." Its tagline, "We Know It, Because We've Done It," reflects the firm's operator-led model: both founding partners built and sold a cybersecurity company themselves, and the firm leans on that first-hand operating experience to evaluate and support founders in adjacent categories. The firm was founded in 2022-2023 by Andrew Peterson and Nick Galbreath, two former Etsy colleagues who had previously co-founded Signal Sciences, a web application security company acquired by Fastly in 2020 for roughly $825M.
Sector Focus
Aviso's portfolio skews heavily toward security:
- Cybersecurity: identity and access management, AI/agent security, supply-chain security, cloud and network security, threat intelligence
- Developer tools and infrastructure: Kubernetes platform engineering, build/CI infrastructure, cloud cost/ops tooling
- Data infrastructure: data sharing, data versioning, streaming/change-data-capture
- Applied AI: AI for sales, AI agent security and monitoring, ML tooling
The overwhelming majority of named portfolio companies are cybersecurity or AI-security plays, with a smaller cluster of devops/data infrastructure bets.
Stage Focus
Aviso invests at the earliest stages, primarily Pre-Seed and Seed, often as the first institutional check into a company. Certiv's $4.2M pre-seed round (2026) is representative of typical entry point.
Check Size
Exact check sizes are not publicly disclosed. Third-party trackers describe Aviso as writing "small early checks consistent with seed leads or co-leads," frequently investing alongside other early-stage funds (e.g., Founders Co-op, Fortson) rather than solely leading rounds.
Lead Tendency
Mixed: some rounds are led or co-led by Aviso, but the firm frequently appears as one of several early-stage co-investors rather than the sole lead.
Recent Activity
Aviso closed the first tranche of Fund II at $12.2M in September 2025, continuing its focus on early-stage cybersecurity, infrastructure, data, and AI investments. Recent portfolio activity includes the March 2026 pre-seed round for Certiv (AI agent runtime security) and continued investment into the DevOps/security portfolio (Proaction, mid-2026).
Portfolio Highlights
Aviso lists 40+ active portfolio companies on its site, spanning AI (1up, Dataspan, Dreadnode, Tern, Tracel), security (Authentik, Bowtie Works, Certiv, Cimento, Clairvoyant Intel, DevArmor, Impart Security, InstaSecure, Mallory, Nebulock, Nimble Security, Nucleus Security, RiskProfiler, SeeData, SpecterOps, Sublime Security, Surf Security, Ternion Security, VulnCheck), devops/infrastructure (Akuity, Depot, Platformr, RunWhen, Vesal, Zerowatch), and data (Bobsled, DagsHub, Epsio).
The firm highlights six notable exits: Nira (acquired by Dropbox, October 2024), Phylum (technology acquired by Veracode, January 2025), Protect AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, closed July 2025), Resourcely (acquired by Cursor/Anysphere), Select Dev, and SGNL (acquired by CrowdStrike for $740M, announced January 2026).
Team
- Andrew Peterson, Founding General Partner — Roughly 20 years leading product and go-to-market teams, including time at Google and Etsy. Co-founded Signal Sciences with Nick Galbreath in 2013; the company was acquired by Fastly in 2020. Stanford background. Based in Seattle.
- Nick Galbreath, Founding General Partner — Roughly 30 years in technical leadership, including CTO/COO roles at Signal Sciences. Track record includes multiple exits and IPOs across his career, along with patents and published work on fraud/anomaly detection technology.
The firm is a two-person GP partnership; no additional principals, associates, or venture partners are listed on the public site.
Decision Process
Small, two-GP partnership. Both founders share a common operating background (Signal Sciences), suggesting close, fast-moving joint decision-making typical of a small emerging-manager fund rather than a formal investment committee.
Founder Preferences
Aviso's stated positioning ("We Know It, Because We've Done It") signals a strong preference for technical, security- or infrastructure-native founders solving problems the partners have lived through operationally — particularly in application security, identity, and AI/agent security.
Geographic Focus
No explicit geographic restriction is stated, but the team is Seattle-based and several portfolio companies are Seattle/Pacific Northwest founded (e.g., Certiv), alongside a broader North American, US-centric portfolio.