GFT Ventures Q1 2025 Update
Welcome to the Q1 2025 newsletter from GFT Ventures! We hope you will benefit from our fund updates and portfolio company highlights, as well as our overall industry observations and thought leadership exchanges. Please feel free to share our newsletter with your colleagues and friends using the “Share” button at the bottom of this post. Any additional questions or comments may be directed to team@gft.vc. And you can always visit our GFT Ventures website to learn more about us.
GFT Ventures Fund I - Our Conviction in AI Ecosystem Growth Remains Strong
The landscape of artificial intelligence continues to undergo rapid and profound transformations as we move forward into 2025, with a myriad of recent developments serving to reinforce our long-held convictions about AI’s true potential. In particular, the innovations emerging at the foundation model layer continue to impress, especially the latest open-source developments from DeepSeek, which we believe will spur even faster adoption and even more growth within our industry. We firmly believe that we are still in the “early innings” of the biggest technology disruption we will see in our lifetimes, and fully expect to see more (and likely more rapid) foundation model innovations this calendar year, with a strong push toward even more advanced reasoning/inferencing models, multimodal AI, and ultimately agentic AI. Beyond that, developments in the area of Physical AI (i.e., robotics) are rapidly accelerating and especially interesting to us right now. We are particularly excited about our recent investment in Anywhere Robotics (featured below), which represents the third investment by the Fund in this domain.
As we look forward to the rest of 2025, we are filled with enthusiasm about our deal flow and the opportunities that lie ahead. Our extensive experience in AI and data science—two of the most transformative technological advancements of our generation—continues to provide us with unique insight and a competitive edge in what is rapidly becoming a more crowded market. And with approximately 50% of our committed capital remaining available for deployment, we feel extremely well situated to capitalize on the future investment opportunities we have within our pipeline.
With Gratitude,
Jeff Herbst and Jay Eum
Founding Managing Partners, GFT Ventures
Featured Portfolio Companies
GFT Ventures led Anyware Robotics’ Series Seed Plus round
What it does:
Anyware Robotics is a robotics company developing versatile, multi-purpose robots designed for heavy-duty industrial tasks. Its first application focuses on autonomous truck unloading, with future expansions planned for palletizing and machine tending. Their embodied AI solution is purpose-built for unstructured environments, tackling complex challenges such as scenario variability, collision-prone spaces, heavy-weight object handling, and real-time processing. The company’s first robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads boxes from containers and trucks more safely, cost-effectively, and reliably than human labor. Designed for easy deployment, Pixmo is the first heavy-payload mobile manipulator that operates without requiring infrastructure changes. The company’s whitepaper details how its technology maximizes throughput and reliability in truck and container unloading, reducing the need for human labor in physically demanding, injury-prone tasks.
Why we found it exciting:
Anyware Robotics was founded by a world-class robotics team with backgrounds from UC Berkeley, FANUC, and GreyOrange, along with experience at Amazon, Fetch Robotics, 6 River Systems, Otto Motors, SRI, Toyota Research Institute, and HAI Robotics. Collectively, the team holds 25 robotics patents, has received five IEEE Best Paper Finalist awards, and has published over 100 papers in leading academic and industry conferences. Additionally, Anyware Robotics has a strategic relationship with FANUC, providing the company with a unique execution and cost advantage. The company has successfully completed multiple pilot programs with top 3PL providers and leading retailers, with commercial deployments beginning in Q1 2025. We believe their technical expertise, proven execution, and bold product vision position them as an emerging leader in the industrial robotics market.
GFT Ventures participated in Daash Intelligence’s Series Seed round
What it does:
Daash is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that allows consumer brands to track and predict sales for every product on the shelf, including those in the long tail that are not covered by traditional research firms like Nielsen, Circana, etc. Daash provides its users with transparency into key metrics like units sold, average price, total sales, and sales trends among other features, thus empowering brands with instant insights to questions that were previously impossible to answer. The platform offers 4 modules: 1) Competitor Insight, which products drive the most revenue for each competitor; 2) Attributes, what and who is driving the most unit sales, down to the ingredient; 3) Financial, see how a given brand ranks against competitors at retail and DTC; and 4) Sales Trends, historical and projections on product-level performance.
Why we found it exciting:
Daash’s co-founding team—CEO Philip Smolin, CTO Justin Stewart, and CMO Melissa Munnerlyn—brings over 20 years of experience in building and managing market intelligence platforms, spanning both Fortune 500 brands and their previous startup, Cherry Pick AI. Through this experience, they gained unique insights into the consumer industry’s data challenges, recognizing that brands need directionally accurate data, rather than granular precision, to drive effective business decisions. This realization led to the development of Daash’s Prediction Grading Program, a proprietary data collection method where brands opt-in to share their proprietary data by providing “grades” on their sales, as calculated by the platform. This grading system establishes a continuous data feedback loop that, when combined with panel and public data, fuels a predictive AI platform for commerce intelligence. Ultimately, we’re excited about Daash’s potential to achieve total business task automation—empowering brands to track competitors and emerging threats, identify whitespace opportunities for new products and variants, and maximize revenue through optimized pricing and demand planning.
GFT Ventures in the Spotlight
Jay Eum attended K-Global Venture Capital Summit 2024 on behalf of GFT Ventures
Global Corporate Venturing (GCV) and South Korea’s Ministry of SMEs and Startups co-hosted the K-Global Venture Capital Summit in December 2024. As a key member of both the GCV Asia Council and GCV AI Council, GFT Ventures played a pivotal role in facilitating the event, with Jay Eum representing the Fund. The summit was a great success, bringing together over 50 corporate venture capital (CVC) firms from 13 countries.
Jeff Herbst served as a judge for the pitch competition at Women in AI Lunar New Year Gala
GFT Ventures sponsored the Women in AI Lunar New Year Gala, an annual flagship event celebrating female founders in AI. As part of the evening’s festivities, Jeff Herbst served as a judge for the pitch competition, highlighting the firm’s commitment to supporting women-led innovation in artificial intelligence.
GFT Ventures co-hosted CES dinner with SVB
GFT Ventures and SVB co-hosted a Deep Tech dinner at CES 2025, bringing together GFT LPs and advisors, co-investors from institutional funds and CVCs, as well as public sector officials. The evening fostered open dialogue on key topics, including the impact of tariffs, national security concerns, interest rates, and advancements in AI.
Jay Eum spoke at Hysta Conference
Jay Eum participated in a panel session titled “Views from the Venture Capital Industry Stalwarts.”
Jay Eum spoke at Tech Weekend San Francisco
Jay was a speaker at SF Tech Weekend hosted by Founders Village. In a fireside chat titled "Capital Talks: A VC's Guide to Your Next Raise", Jay and Dr. Kevin Hickerson, Nuclear Physicist and Founder of The Earthineering Company, advised founders on how to secure the next funding round for early stage startups.
Great update. Really cool to see all the advancements that are happening with robotics.