Category Ventures Research
Investment Thesis
Category Ventures partners with founders building ambitious AI applications and enterprise software at the earliest stages. The firm was founded in December 2024 by Villi Iltchev, a longtime enterprise software investor and operator, to fill what he sees as a structural gap in early-stage venture: traditional seed funds are too small to write meaningful checks into pre-product-market-fit teams, while larger multi-stage firms pass on companies before they have traction. Category's stated focus areas are infrastructure, developer tools, applications, and artificial intelligence, with a strong emphasis on backing engineers, researchers, and scientists as founders rather than purely commercial operators.
Stage Focus
Category Ventures invests almost exclusively at pre-seed and seed. The firm positions itself as a founder's first institutional check, typically stepping in when a team has a working prototype or very early signal rather than requiring meaningful revenue.
Check Size
Typical investment range is $1.5M to $5M per company, consistent across multiple third-party sources (Crunchbase, PitchBook, and portfolio company funding announcements) and the firm's own site copy.
Lead Tendency
Category Ventures leads or co-leads the large majority of its disclosed rounds. It led Myriad's $7.8M seed, Soma Energy's $7M seed, and co-led (with A*) Antioch's $8.5M seed. This is consistent with the firm's self-description as a founder's primary institutional partner rather than a rider on syndicates.
Recent Activity
Category Fund I closed at $160M in December 2024, Category's debut vehicle, dedicated entirely to pre-seed and seed enterprise software and AI investing. The fund has been actively deploying since:
- HeyMilo (AI voice-agent recruiting): $2.2M seed, March 2025 (Canaan-led, Category participated)
- Myriad AI (AI compliance automation for regulated industries): $7.8M seed, September 2025, led by Category
- Mandel AI (AI supply-chain coordinator for manufacturers): $3.9M seed, March 2026, YC-backed, Category participated
- Soma Energy (AI data center power optimization): $7M seed, April 2026, led by Category
- Antioch (robotics/autonomy simulation platform): $8.5M seed at a $60M valuation, April 2026, co-led with A* Capital
Fund status: actively deploying.
Portfolio Highlights
Current disclosed portfolio spans eleven named companies plus five undisclosed stealth investments (reported spanning serverless computing, cloud emulators, subsurface AI, developer tools, and customer onboarding/migration). Named companies: Antioch (robotics simulation), CocoIndex (open-source data transformation framework for AI agents), HeyMilo (AI recruiting), Mandel (AI supply-chain coordination), MonetizeNow (quote-to-cash platform for B2B SaaS), Myriad (AI compliance), Nema (tooling for autonomous machines), Soma Energy (AI data center power), TensorScale (inference cloud for generative and world models), and The Interface (world model research lab).
Founder Villi Iltchev's personal investing track record prior to founding Category (via Salesforce corporate development, August Capital, and Two Sigma Ventures) includes early involvement with GitLab, HubSpot, MuleSoft, Gusto, Anaplan, Zapier, Airtable, Remote, Sendbird, and Glean — these are prior-career reference points for the team's pattern recognition, not Category Ventures fund investments, and are not counted in the firm's current portfolio.
Team
- Villi Iltchev, Founding Partner — ~20 years combining operating and investing roles. Previously Managing Director at Two Sigma Ventures (ran the SF office, SaaS/infra/dev tools focus), General Partner at August Capital, and held corporate development and investing roles at Salesforce (30+ M&A/investment transactions including HubSpot, Box, Gusto, MuleSoft), plus operating leadership at Box and Lifelock. Earlier career at HP and Merrill Lynch. MBA from Darden (UVA). Based in San Francisco.
- Çağla Kaymaz, Partner
- Shri Kolanukuduru, Partner
- Patty Smith, Partner & COO
- Ruta Savickaite, Chief of Staff
Team bios beyond Villi's are not published in detail on the firm's team page; only names and titles are listed.
Decision Process
Small partner-led team (three investing partners plus an operating partner/COO and chief of staff) suggests a partnership-style decision process rather than a solo-GP or large investment-committee structure.
Founder Preferences
Category explicitly targets engineers, researchers, and scientists as founders — technical builders working on ambitious AI applications, developer infrastructure, and enterprise software, rather than generalist commercial founders.
Geographic Focus
Headquartered in San Francisco. Portfolio is US-concentrated (NYC, SF Bay Area) with at least one international investment (Myriad, Prague/SF-based).