XYZ Venture Capital

Excited to finally be able to share what we have been working on!

I got to have a conversation with Chauncey Kerr Hamilton who is a General Partner at XYZ Venture Capital, a firm which was started with the thesis of backing Palantir Technologies alumni. I met Chauncey earlier in the year and had the chance to hang out a few times at Chapter office in NYC. I know founders who camp at their investor’s office, I don’t know many investors camping at their portfolio company’s offices. She explains how this helps her at her job, we discussed archetypes of venture capitalists and how to identify which one you are or what you are best suited to doing. We have been back and forth talking about live experiences and media for a few months now and I was particularly interested because she started her career doing special projects at WIRED in their prime when an index fund of the public companies on their cover could have made you your retirement money. Media and venture capital have always had an overlap, a ton of people with media backgrounds have become successful VCs or have been highly sought after. More recently we have seen people like Mario Gabriele (Generalist newsletter) joining Hummingbird VC, Mike Moritz is one of the OGs, another journalist who was at the helm of Sequoia. We talk about some of the transferrable lessons there in our conversation. Some of these Palantir alumni are past and upcoming guests of the show like Cobi B. (cofounder of Chapter, a $3B medicare and retirement company) and Ian Cinnamon (cofounder of Apex Space, a $2B satellite manufacturing platform) and having met them I can see why the thesis made sense especially given that Ross Fubini, founder of XYZ had been an advisor to Palantir in early days and has a special relationship with them. I had questions though about the thesis because the firm is now $1.2 billion under management and I am not sure there is an endless supply of top entrepreneurial talent at Palantir so we got intro discussing the evolution of the thesis and the role of networks in VC. In some way both of us started our career working in a Chief of Staff/Special Projects like role which wasn’t called that at the time. The upside of that is an incredible apprenticeship that acts as an incredible catalyst for your career. I asked her about her lessons from her time at First Round Capital where she got that apprenticeship and later co-running Dorm Room Fund as a young mom, flying around the country to college campuses. Having done that in my early twenties, I know how hard it is to build that network and also realize how it becomes a moat in the long term. We talk about building these unique founder networks at length and how she goes about it. Link to Full Episode in comments or go to We The Builders.

Today, Peregrine announced our Series D financing round of $250 million at a $6.8 billion valuation. I’m proud of what we have built at Peregrine and grateful to our customers, team, and investors for the trust and hard work that brought us to this moment. Peregrine exists because the people doing the hardest work in our communities are too often forced to do it with fragmented information across disconnected systems, and tools that were not built for the speed or complexity of the moments in which they operate. We have the privilege of building alongside public servants whose decisions carry real consequence. This work shapes us and teaches us that technology in high-stakes environments has to move at the speed of the work, while also remaining worthy of trust. That standard matters even more as AI becomes part of how important decisions are made. The future we are building is not about removing people from those decisions, but about giving them greater clarity and more context so they can act with confidence while remaining both accountable and firmly in control. State and local government remains foundational to Peregrine. It is where we learned what great technology for mission-critical work actually requires: trust, depth, reliability, and the flexibility to adapt to how people work. It will continue to remain a core focus for us as we help our customers deliver better outcomes for the communities they serve. Those same requirements are equally urgent across federal, enterprise, and international markets, where organizations are navigating complex operations across siloed information, demanding security requirements, and a new generation of technologies. This financing reflects the scale of that opportunity and the trust customers are placing in Peregrine to help them operate more effectively and responsibly. A special thank you to Fifth Down Capital, Sequoia Capital, O.G. Venture Partners, Goldcrest Capital, XYZ Venture Capital, and Jason Godfrey for your continued investment and support. To our customers: thank you for trusting us with work that matters. To our team: thank you for earning that trust every day. The future is bright, and we have so much left to build. Here’s our letter to customers and communities: https://lnkd.in/e_r5UFah And here's the story in Fortune: https://lnkd.in/eDZDM7fb

Excited to share that Plot raised a $10M round led by Camille Ricketts at XYZ Venture Capital and Dustin Moring at Mischief Ventures! We're grateful to have Alexis Ohanian Sr. and the team at Seven Seven Six 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣ continue to invest in Plot and excited to welcome Scott Stanford from ACME Capital. For the past 1.5 years, we've been building the video intelligence layer to understand what's actually happening in social video. Most of what people think, buy, eat, wear, and care about is showing up in videos now. Most of it never gets tagged. We had strong conviction early on that the world had moved to video but the tools used to understand consumers hadn't made that shift. What surprised us was how many different teams ended up needing the same underlying intelligence. → Community teams wanted to understand and engage their biggest fans. → Research teams wanted answers faster to hyper-specific questions. → Influencer teams wanted a better way to find creators, vet them, communicate, and track their ugc. Today Plot is used by teams at Visa, PepsiCo, Fenty Beauty, Benefit Cosmetics, Canva, Mastercard, CAVA, lululemon, Yahoo, TurboTax, Dutch Bros, and many others. ARR has grown 3.8x yoy. NRR is 132%. Almost all of that growth has come from inbound demand and word of mouth. I've spent my entire career in social. First at Apple, then running an agency, and now building Plot. For years, the conversation was about proving social mattered. What excites me now is what happens when social teams finally have infrastructure built specifically for them. The next chapter is about building the agentic layer on top of it. Software that can actually do the work. → An analyst that can answer questions across millions of videos. → A community manager that helps identify, measure, and engage your biggest advocates at scale. → An influencer marketer that can source creators, vet them, and handle the operational work that slows teams down. I've always believed the best technology gives people more time to focus on the part they're uniquely good at. For marketers, that's creativity. That's the Plot bar. Thank you to our customers, investors, and team for believing in what we're building. We’re hiring across the board!