Allied Venture Partners

Hello Partners,

As a current or prospective partner, this newsletter provides exclusive insights into our investment strategy, portfolio companies, and industry trends.

Thank you for your continued trust and support,

Matt Wilson

Founder & Managing Director | Allied Venture Partners

Not an LP? Click here to join the Allied Venture Partners syndicate.

Team Updates

• Our core team includes Steve, Melinda, Brendan, and Leia.

• The Allied Scout and Advisory programs continue to expand with several new members each week, providing quality, diversified deal flow from across Canada and the United States.

• If you know a great startup that we should meet, please introduce us!

New Deals

• Thank you to everyone who joined our recent investment in Clockout. You can read more about our thesis behind the opportunity here.

• We’re preparing to launch our next exciting deal. LPs can join the Allied syndicate for free and gain access to our dealflow here.

Portfolio News

• Blended Blue, the world’s first blended luxury tequila, is now available nationwide across the U.S. through its website. If you’re a tequila fan, you won’t be disappointed. The company also received an excellent feature in HiCork.

• Congratulations to Krishna and the Clockout team on closing an oversubscribed seed round. We’re thrilled to support them as they reimagine networking for Gen Z in the age of AI.

• RetinaLogik moved into a significantly larger new office last week, marking an exciting milestone in the company’s growth. Progress like this reflects the compounding efforts of a team that has been heads-down building, shipping, and earning deep trust with customers. We’re very proud to back them!

• Congrats to Jesse and the Intellectible team on another record month in June. We’re excited to see the momentum continue!

• Stanify also had a record month across both traction and revenue, onboarding a dozen new brands and expanding the team.

• I’m teaching a workshop on Valuation and Venture Financing at the University of Calgary on July 29 for students and startup founders preparing to fundraise. If you know a founder who could benefit, please share the registration page. Spots are limited, and it’s nearly full.

Industry Insights

The best venture investing looks almost boring: 90% watching, reading, waiting; and 10% pulling the trigger. Lately, I'm seeing the ratio inverted across the market, and the examples keep piling up.

Take the AI-native B2B SaaS founder I met recently, raising $5M at a $45M pre-money valuation with no product and no revenue. When I pushed on the valuation multiple, his answer was "we are pipeline capital efficient" (i.e., the financial model projected $15M ARR by year-end on $4M burn). Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned by believing in core business fundamentals, but that's not capital efficiency; it's a spreadsheet with a story attached.

A few doors down, I met another pre-revenue founder who was hiring sales executives before nailing their ICP and a repeatable GTM motion (i.e., outsourcing the one job only founders can do). Salespeople execute systems; they don't build them. Whenever I see a founder who doesn’t like talking to customers and prefers to outsource initial revenue generation, it’s a major red flag. Either the founder isn’t cut out to be a founder, or cash is too plentiful so they attempt to outsource.

Moreover, the froth isn't confined to just founders. I’m meeting an ongoing wave of first-time VC participants piling into late-stage secondaries, chasing easy liquidity and the promise of a quick 2-3x markup in 12-18 months, with little regard for valuation or deal mechanics. We've seen this movie before: when tourist capital shows up, brokers get rich, and everyone else learns the hard way that entry price and preference stacks aren’t just details; they're the whole game.

Thankfully, there's a genuine bright spot: hardware. After a decade of investors proclaiming "hardware is hard," space tech and humanoid robotics have made the category attractive again (thank you, Elon), with valuations holding for the first time in years. Nevertheless, such market windows don't stay open indefinitely (they never do), so hardware founders are wise to raise now and move quickly while sentiment is on their side.

My personal read: discipline on entry price and deal structure is the differentiator in a market rewarding neither. At Allied, this is where we continue to spend our diligence hours, and we look forward to sharing more exciting opportunities in the weeks ahead.

As a reminder, our Core Investment Values since Day 1:

Read our investment thesis one-pager, available here.

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Disclaimer: The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Individuals should consult their own professional advisors before making any investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.