Conviction Partners is a venture firm purpose-built to serve AI-native, "Software 3.0" companies, founded by Sarah Guo with Mike Vernal as partner. It writes $1M to $25M checks, likes to invest early and is often the first investor, backing technical teams across AI infrastructure, models, agents, developer tools, security, healthcare, legal and robotics, including Baseten, Cognition, Harvey, Mistral, Sierra, HeyGen and OpenEvidence. It also runs the Embed grant program, the Commit fellowship, the Mixture of Experts recruiting event, and the No Priors and Good Company podcasts.
Firms are ranked by cumulative portfolio strength — how many highly-rated API companies they've backed, weighted by tier across composite quality and agent-readiness. The averages below are a secondary read on the typical company in the book.
Conviction has 22 portfolio companies tracked on the APIs.io network, of which 11 (50%) publish APIs indexed here. The remaining 9 are tracked as profiles without a published API on the network.
Its highest-rated API providers on the network are Keenable, Quadrillion, Listen Labs, HeyGen, Mistral.
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.
aid: conviction
name: Conviction
description: Conviction Partners is a venture firm purpose-built to serve AI-native,
"Software 3.0" companies, founded by Sarah Guo with Mike Vernal as partner. It writes
$1M to $25M checks, likes to invest early and is often the first investor, backing
technical teams across AI infrastructure, models, agents, developer tools, security,
healthcare, legal and robotics, including Baseten, Cognition, Harvey, Mistral, Sierra,
HeyGen and OpenEvidence. It also runs the Embed grant program, the Commit fellowship,
the Mixture of Experts recruiting event, and the No Priors and Good Company podcasts.
image: https://www.conviction.com/applogo.png
tags:
- Venture Capital
- Seed
- Series A
- Artificial Intelligence
- AI Infrastructure
- Developer Tools
- United States
created: '2026-10-18'
modified: '2026-10-18'
specificationVersion: '0.20'
url: https://www.conviction.com/apis.yml
x-type: venture-capital
x-category: Venture Capital
apis: []
common:
- type: Website
url: https://www.conviction.com/
- type: Portfolio
url: https://www.conviction.com/#portfolio
- type: Portfolio
url: portfolio/conviction-portfolio.yml
- type: Team
url: https://www.conviction.com/#people
- type: Team
url: team/conviction-team.yml
- type: InvestmentThesis
url: https://www.conviction.com/why-embed.html
- type: Blog
url: https://www.conviction.com/startups.html
title: Startup Ideas
- type: Podcast
url: https://open.spotify.com/show/0O65xhqvGVhpgdIrrdlEYk
title: No Priors
- type: Jobs
url: https://conviction.com/jobs
- type: Pitch
url: https://embed.conviction.com/
title: Embed grant program
- type: Twitter
url: https://x.com/saranormous
title: Sarah Guo (founder)
- type: Features
name: Fund Facts
data:
Stage: Early; often the first investor
TypicalCheck: $1M to $25M
Sectors: AI-native / Software 3.0
sources:
- https://www.conviction.com/
updated: '2026-10-18'
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
email: info@apisjson.org
- FN: Conviction
url: https://www.conviction.com/
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