Boldstart Ventures

Ed Sim is the founder of boldstart ventures, a $1.1B AUM venture firm that invests at Inception—helping the bold start. Since 2010, boldstart has been the first check for technical founders building across cybersecurity, AI infrastructure, physical AI, agents, and the occasional wonderfully weird thing.

Notable investments and board roles include Snyk, Protect AI (Palo Alto Networks), Keycard, Kustomer (Meta), Superhuman (Grammarly), Tessl, Hypernative, Blockdaemon, Spectro Cloud, SecurityScorecard, and Front. The broader boldstart portfolio includes Clay, Generalist, and Topos Bio. Ed also co-founded MState with IBM, which backed Fireblocks at formation.

Named to the Forbes Midas Seed List multiple times and ranked #1 on Business Insider's Seed 100 in 2023 and 2024, Ed authors What's 🔥 in AI/Infra/VC (whatshot.vc), a widely read newsletter on enterprise tech and venture.

With more than 30 years of venture investing experience, Ed previously co-founded Dawntreader Ventures, where he led inception investments in Greenplum (EMC, later Pivotal IPO), GoToMeeting (Citrix), and LivePerson (IPO). He began his career at J.P. Morgan building quantitative trading models and learned sales by selling Cutco knives in college.

Harvard College, BA Economics. Four years D1 lacrosse.

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