Boldstart Ventures
Boldstart Ventures ("the inception fund") is an early-stage venture firm that has written first checks for technical founders since 2010, backing enterprise and developer-first companies at inception, often before a company exists. It writes first checks from $500K to $15M and currently organizes its portfolio around cybersecurity, AI infrastructure, physical AI, agents and "weird" frontier bets. Its public fund announcements include Boldstart IV and Opportunity I ($157M) and Boldstart V and Opportunity II ($230M). Notable inception investments include Snyk (backed 2015), Clay (2017), BigID, SecurityScorecard, Superhuman (acquired by Grammarly), Protect AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), CrewAI, Tessl, Keycard and Generalist AI. The firm is led by founder Ed Sim with general partner Eliot Durbin and partner Ellen Chisa, and publishes Ed Sim's "What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC" newsletter.
Boldstart Ventures has 88 portfolio companies tracked on the APIs.io network, of which 30 (34%) publish APIs indexed here. The remaining 22 are tracked as profiles without a published API on the network.
Its highest-rated API providers on the network are Snyk, Zuplo, Fireblocks, SecurityScorecard, Spectro Cloud.
Portfolio on the Network
Portfolio companies that publish APIs indexed on APIs.io, grouped by their API Evangelist rating. Exemplar and Strong are expanded by default.
Exemplar 4 Complete, well-documented, and agent-ready
Strong 8 Solid coverage with minor gaps
Developing 8 Usable, with meaningful gaps to close
Thin 3 Limited public surface area
Emerging 6 Early or largely undocumented
Minimal 1 Almost no public developer surface
Rest of Portfolio
36 further portfolio companies that don’t yet have a provider page on the network.
Scroll for all 36
Properties
Portfolio
Where the firm publishes its investments
Cohort brief
Auto-generatedThe 44 portfolio companies with APIs in the catalog, backed by Boldstart Ventures, scored on the Kin Score. Every figure below is computed from the catalog — nothing here is written.
| Facet | This cohort | Catalog | Difference | Scored |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Access Clarity | 42.2 | 26.5 | +15.7 | 44 |
| Contract Quality | 30.9 | 17.7 | +13.2 | 44 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 33.9 | 23.8 | +10.1 | 44 |
| Operational Transparency | 23.2 | 13.2 | +10 | 44 |
| Contract Governance | 11.2 | 7 | +4.2 | 44 |
| Discoverability | 60.1 | 58 | +2.1 | 44 |
A facet is averaged over the members that carry it, not over the whole cohort — the “Scored” column is that count. Averaging an absent facet as zero would score our own coverage gaps as the providers’ posture.
| Artifact | This cohort | Catalog | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| MCP server (any) | 30% | 15% | +15 |
| MCP server (first-party) | 30% | 13% | +17 |
| Agent Skills | 0% | 0% | 0 |
| OAuth scopes | 5% | 12% | -7 |
| Security | 100% | 98% | +2 |
| Arazzo workflows | 5% | 2% | +3 |
| Governance rules | 27% | 18% | +9 |
mcp_pct counts any mcp/ artifact including ones API Evangelist derived from the provider OpenAPI; mcp_first_party_pct counts only servers the provider publishes. Prefer the latter.
- 1 Snyk
- 2 Zuplo
- 3 Fireblocks
- 4 SecurityScorecard
- 5 Spectro Cloud
- 6 Clay
- 7 Liveblocks
- 8 dope.security
- 9 Agentuity
- 10 SmallStep
- 1 Clay {"score" => 60.5, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 2 Zuplo {"score" => 57.3, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 3 Common Paper {"score" => 51.1, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 4 Blockdaemon {"score" => 47.6, "band" => "agent-native"}
- 5 Snyk {"score" => 45.7, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 6 Grepr {"score" => 45.1, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 7 CrewAI Cloud {"score" => 39.6, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 8 tessl.io {"score" => 39.5, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 9 Fireblocks {"score" => 38, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 10 Amberdata {"score" => 35.3, "band" => "agent-ready"}
Coverage caveat. 35 of 44 scored members had under half their catalog-attributable points satisfied at all (catalog_earned / catalog_max < 0.5). They are INCLUDED in the mean above. A large share here means the cohort mean is partly a measurement of how far our enrichment reached, not only of how these providers publish.Generated from the catalog build of 2 November 2026, across 37080 providers, using the same computation served by the APIs.io cohort API. Briefs are published for rosters of 5 or more scored providers; below that a distribution is not meaningful.
Source (apis.yml)
Work with this as data
Every firm here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.